Late breaking information

MUSICOLOGY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM

23/05/2019

The Laws of Performance

Colloquium Musicology
Rebekah Ahrendt, Universiteit Utrecht

Thursday 6 June 2019, 15:30-17:00
Nieuwe Doelenstraat 16, room 3.01

This colloquium is a preview of a new project Rebekah Arendt is developing, “The Laws of Performance.” This project builds on prior research she carried out on performance, migration, and international relations. Concentrating on the long eighteenth century, she explore the historical labor migration of a specific group--musical performers—in order to begin to answer questions about the free movement of labor (including enforcement of foreign contracts), the construction of citizenship, and the (moral) principles of public policy.
Her primary thesis is that a shared European legal foundation—the ius commune based on Roman and canon law—enabled performer mobility and the establishment of durable performing institutions. The transposibility of legal norms provided a common understanding of entitlements and obligations across Continental Europe, shaping the foundation of opera companies, theater troupes, and orchestral ensembles. However, local ordinances and case law overlaying the ius commune could create confusion or frustration for mobile populations that, like performing troupes, depended on the good will of local authorities. Moreover, performers faced moral objections due to social mores regarding their profession and to the fact that they often maintained no permanent residence (unlike merchants, for example).
To date, performance studies writ large has primarily considered law in terms of intellectual property rights or institutional organization, or as evidence for who was employed where, how, and at what time, particularly in studies of the early modern period. Ahrendt proposes reading legal documents from a different angle: for what they can tell us about the gradual, historical integration of performers and their ensembles into the urban landscape. In this, I respond to recent calls for recognizing law and the legal as cultural constructions, as dependent upon and constructive of place as any other aspect of cultural geography. I intend not merely to show that law partakes of culture or that culture refracts law, but to demonstrate that they are mutually constitutive. For example, legal agreements helped constitute the urban opera house, its inhabitants, and even its repertoire. Only through these agreements could the opera house become a site of performance and a feature of urban geography. In other words, it was through legal documents—themselves negotiated through acts of performance—that opera became a legitimized space. And opera in turn helped shape law: it caused cities to rethink urban planning projects, to regulate performance spaces, to legislate the identities of (foreign) performers in relationship to natural citizens, to reform tax laws to accommodate mobile populations and sporadic performance.
Ahrendt’s colloquium will focus on the establishment of opera in the Dutch Republic. How an opera house ended up on the early modern map of The Hague (and not of Amsterdam!) is a tale of urban renewal and spatial reorganization in line with many such accounts of opera’s participation in civic life. But it is also a story of how opera and law interacted, of how savvy entrepreneurs worked within (and on the margins of) a legal system. Drawing on an extraordinarily long paper trail created by an opera company around 1700, she examines the unique governmental and juridical structures of The Hague and their interaction with the institution of opera. From obtaining permission and funding to hiring a theater and performers, the company’s participation in the town’s legal geographies transformed what was essentially outsider space into a signifier of prestige, a provider of social welfare, and a successfully redeveloped theatrical center.

Rebekah Ahrendt is Associate Professor of Musicology in the Department of Media and Culture Studies. Prior to joining Utrecht’s faculty, she was Assistant Professor in the Yale University Department of Music and a Mellon Postdoctoral Scholar in the Humanities at the Center for the Humanities at Tufts University. A specialist in music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Ahrendt’s work centers on the importance of mobility—whether through migration, exchange, or long-distance actor networks—in the construction of identity. Her current monograph project illuminates the musical networks maintained by the refugees, exiles, and migrants who traversed the landscape of the Dutch Republic. Much of her recent scholarship has focused on music and international relations, including the co-edited book Music and Diplomacy from the Early Modern Era to the Present (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Ahrendt is also a co-director of the international research project Signed, Sealed, & Undelivered, which has garnered worldwide media attention since its formal launch in November 2015. A graduate of the Royal Conservatory, The Hague, Ahrendt continues to perform and record on the viola da gamba.