Lecture-Recital with Sarah Kay: “Ecologies and Scale: Breath, Voice, and Spectacle in Medieval Song”

A Lecture-Recital with Sarah Kay– Professor, Department of French Literature, Thought and Culture and Author of Medieval Song from Aristotle to Opera (forthcoming) and Christopher Preston Thompson– voice and medieval harp, and artistic director of the companion website to Medieval Song from Aristotle to Opera.

The sound of light in the dawn sky, breathed by the breath of beasts, cosmic in its range and siren-like in its perils—Sarah Kay reimagines the songs of the medieval period as works that are as much desired and imagined as they are sung and heard. Rather than situating them in their immediate historical context, Kay fruitfully traces crosscurrents between them and both earlier poetry and later opera. Her analysis turns on the diversity of song, understood in terms of breath, voice, the constellations, the animal soul, and life itself. Kay also argues for thinking of medieval songs, and the manuscripts that transmit them, as multimedia, quasi-operatic performances. These ideas, explored in her forthcoming bookMedieval Song from Aristotle to Opera, are presented by Kay in this lecture and realized by musician Christopher Preston Thompson.