MUSLIVE Performance Workshop and Performance Two, 'Performance' (October, 2024): New editions and translations of French songs, Arabic poems and Latin charters

This is the first items relating to the second MUSLIVE Performance Workshop, hosted in the Music Department at King’s College London, October 28-30th, 2024 (with a preparatory workshop day in August, 2024) and two public performances at Temple Church as part of the Temple Music Foundation programme on recording 31st October, 2024 (6.30 and 8.30). The performance brought together a first phase of research in the project undertaken by the project's team: Emma Dillon, Alice Hicklin, Betty Rosen and Geneviève Young. This reflected early exploratory research on the networks of songs, poetry and people in the period of the project, centred around trouvère songs, but engaging with Arabic poetic networks contemporaneous with the songs and song makers, and considering, too, the production of Latin charters (as performed entities) within the networks of the trouvères.

The team collectively identified texts that formed part of a 'mediterranean ensemble' (Betty Rosen's phrase), namely songs, poems and charters that would have been part of a performance cultures practiced c. 1180-1240, in geographical areas and amongst social groups that in some cases coincided. Together, the texts represent a preliminary 'soundscape' of performed texts. These texts formed the basis of workshops and consultations with scholars and performers through May to October, 2024. And were the foundation of the team's first production of research-as-practice, in the form of a workshop and performance in October, 2024.

The present texts are the basis of the programme and workshops linked to the performances at Temple Church, 31st October, 2024: Consolations of Song: Music and Poetry in the Medieval Mediterranean. They were in all cases newly translated by team members, in some cases also edited for the first time, and formed the basis of performances by both individual team members in the programme, and by singers Paul Bentley-Angell, Hannah Ely and Rebekah Jones, members of the project's partner group, Siglo de Oro, directed by the project Musical Director, Patrick Allies. This submission contains the individual texts and translations and in one case musical edition, assigning individual credit and responsibility and copyright as relevant. These texts were also part of the performance 'memento' programme (deposited separately), gifted to audience members at the end of each performance. Note that in some cases, texts previously licensed through KORDS were also presented as part of the performance (noted below).

Programme items by individual MUSLIVE scholars

Items previously edited & translated by Emma Dillon

Hugues III d’Oisy (d. 1191), En l’an que chevalier sont, trouvère song

Gace Brulé (c.1160-1213), Quant flors et glais et verdure s’esloigne, trouvère song

Gace Brulé (to Odin), En dous tans et en bone eure, trouvère song

Gui, Châtelain de Coucy (d. 1203), La douce voiz du louseignol, trouvère song

See: Dillon, Emma (2024). MUSLIVE Performance Workshop One 'Foundations' (February, 2024): 2. Song scores, texts, translations. King's College London. Dataset. https://doi.org/10.18742/26152738.v1

Item prepared by Geneviève Young, text and translation; with musical edition by Emma Dillon

• Anon, Amis, amis, trop me lassiez en estrange païs!, French refrain song (13^th century)

Items prepared by Betty Rosen, Arabic transliteration and English translation

• Najm al-Dīn ibn Siwār al-Dimashqī (1206-1278), a Ghazal and a Mukhammas that reworks the Ghazal

Ghazal: Makānuka min sirri al-fu’ādi makīnu

Mukhammas: Widāduka ‘indī mā ḥayaytu maṣūnu

Items prepared by Alice Hicklin, translations of two Latin charters

• Latin charter, a confirmation by Nivelon, bishop of Soissons, of donations made by members of the Coucy family to the monastery of Ourscamp (1186)
• Latin charter, a grant by Willam Marshal, Second Earl of Pembroke, to the Cathedral Church of Saint Paul [1215x1219]

A further item in the programme was presented by Dr. Mohamed Ahmed (Trinity College, Dublin), an edition and translation of an anonymous poem discovered in the Cairo Genizah, Cambridge University Library, T-S NS 289.91 (not reproduced here, but accessible through Dr. Ahmed's ERC-funded project, Arabic Poetry in the Cairo Genizah).