The Courtesan's Arts

Bonnie Gordon

McIntire Department of Music faculty member Bonnie Gordon was the recipient of a prestigious award this November.  Her most recent publication, The Courtesan's Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives (Oxford University Press, 2006), received the inaugural Ruth A. Solie Award for outstanding collection of essays at the most recent meeting of the American Musicological Society (AMS). 
 
The Courtesan’s Arts examines the elusive and often misunderstood figure of the courtesan in a wide variety of historical and geographical contexts, from seventeenth century China to early modern Italy to present-day India. Throughout the book, courtesans are presented as keepers of their cultures, learning and passing on the arts of music, dance, and poetry. This is the first major interdisciplinary and cross cultural work on the courtesan, a phenomenon Gordon describes as cross-cultural, trans-historical, and “very relevant” today: “Courtesan cultures still exist . . . [they’re] very important for thinking about issues of gender and power and the history of sex, [and] also the history of mercantile capitalism and the business of the human body as a product, and as a kind of capital.”
 
Editors of academic essay collections are faced with the daunting tasks of identifying experts on a topic and making their different contributions work together as a book. Gordon and her co-editor Martha Feldman had the added challenge of studying women from different times and places who, as a group, possess a staggering array of artistic skills. To address this multifaceted topic, the editors enlisted help not only from fellow musicologists, but scholars from fields they were less familiar with. “We worked with historians, sinologists, anthropologists, and scholars who work with many languages,” she says. “We tried to find the best person in every field.”  The authors are a combination of prominent senior scholars and graduate students. “It's a project that speaks to a variety of different audiences . . . and truly promotes the kind of growth of interdisciplinarity that people talk about so much but don't really do.”
 
Rather than simply writing an introduction that would tie a group of disparate essays together after the fact, Gordon and Feldman wanted their contributors to be “working through the project together.” So they arranged a conference to serve as a working session for creating the collection. The coeditors raised money through grants to ensure that participants had funding to attend the conference, which was hosted by the University of Chicago's Franke Institute for the Humanities and the Newberry Library.  The authors delivered papers, had discussions and round tables, and shared their writing with one another.  This preliminary meeting, in addition to Gordon and Feldman’s careful editing of manuscripts, helps make The Courtesan’s Arts a cohesive and focused collection. Gordon and Feldman also created the book’s accompanying CD of musical examples. They commissioned recordings, arranged for copyright permission, and had the CD professionally mastered. “It was a huge endeavor,” she recalls, but “so much of this music is unrecorded and unperformed that we wanted people to have a way to listen.”
 
Receiving the outstanding essay collection award from the AMS was particularly satisfying for Gordon because of its namesake, Ruth Solie. The award was created to honor Solie’s pioneering work in the book Musicology and Difference, which Gordon describes as “one of the best essay collections I've ever read.” Gordon speaks highly of Solie as both a mentor and a scholar: “She's always been incredibly supportive of me, and she's such a figure for women in musicology and the study of women in music . . . She's one of the musicologists I respect the most.” It seems apt that the first Solie award should be given to a book about women’s contributions to the arts edited by two female scholars.  Gordon says, “I thought it was a really nice moment women of different places brought together.  We were very thrilled.  It was much sweeter than another award would have been.”
 
Much of Gordon’s other research focuses on singing in early modern Europe, in particular the voices of women and castrati. Her first book, Monteverdi’s Unruly Women (2004), discusses female performers, receivers, and subjects (lyrical or theatrical) of Claudio Monteverdi’s music.  One especially innovative feature of this book is Gordon’s consultation of contemporary medical texts, in addition to singing treatises and other sources commonly referred to by scholars of early music. She considers not just what singing sounded like, but what it looked and felt like for performers and listeners given early modern understanding of human anatomy.  How did performers and listeners imagine sound was produced?  Was the voice considered a wind instrument?  A string instrument?  Where in the human body was sound thought to emanate from?  How did these conceptions of anatomy affect how the voice was produced and received? "I've been most interested in the sensory effects of music, the way it affects people, and the way that music has affected people in history,” Gordon says of her work., “I'm deeply committed to history, to the distant past." She draws our attention to the physicality of singing, and recovers lost or overlooked contributions of women to the arts.
 
Since coming to the University of Virginia from SUNY Stony Brook in the spring of 2007, Gordon has been impressed with the quality of her new students. Her undergraduate course “Women in Music” attracted seniors from the Music Department and the Studies in Women and Gender program. "The undergraduates were great,” Gordon recalls, “They did all their work and we had really good discussions.” She also offered a graduate seminar on the castrato, leading students through many primary sources, including sixteenth century medical and singing treatises. “I wanted to use the castrati as a way to discuss the importance of history and the importance of primary documents.  And to show that it's fun!"
 
Gordon is on leave this year on a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship. Her current projects include a book on castrati and an article on Edward Lowinsky’s Secret Chromatic Art and its relationship to his exile from Nazi Germany as well as the formation of American Musicology.  She looks forward to resuming her teaching duties in Fall 2008, when she will take over the popular undergraduate course “Introduction to Music Literature,” and offer a graduate seminar on music and technology from a historical perspective.