modern comparison

Let's be clear, I love Father John Misty. But that does not change the fact that he is an artist for whom the word 'authentic' in quotation marks was made. From creating the persona of the 'LA hippie priest' in Father John Misty to draping every performance of his songs with layers of irony, Josh Tillman is extremely concerned with what it means to make authentic pop in modern times.

Putting Taylor Swift, a popular country music artist, and the renounced trobaritz together may not seem obvious. When considering the themes within the Comtessa’ de Dia’s lyric number 33, they are also extremely prevalent in country music today. At first, my plan was to perform a piece of the Comtessa’s lyric set in a contemporary context. I was going to write a musical where the themes explored in the Comtessa’s lyrics formed the plot. However, instead I decided to use clips of contempory performance to illustrate the action of the lyric for me.

Big Sean's "Control", particularly the verse of Kendrick Lamar[Bridge: Kendrick Lamar]Miscellaneous minds are never explainin' their mindsDevilish grin for my alias aliens to respondPeddlin' sin, thinkin' maybe when you get old you realizeI'm not gonna fold or demise(I don't smoke crack, motherfucker I sell it!)Bitch, everything I rap is a quarter piece to your melonSo if you have a relapse, just relax and pop in my discDon't pop me no fucking pill, I'mma a pop you and give you this[Verse 2: Kendrick Lamar]Tell Flex to drop a bomb on this sh

Statement of intent:  I tried to transcribe with contemporary songs the tension contained in the genre of the alba: the longing, the timeless parenthesis and the parting; the strong delimitation between the night world and the day world, the triangular structure between the lovers and the gaita, the illegitimacy of the lover's true love and their opposition to society.

In "The Pastness of the Present and the Presence of the Past," Taruskin argues that the twentieth-century impulse towards "authenticity" arose from a modernist trend towards impersonal abstraction whereas what he terms "vitality" was largely left by the wayside.

As in the dialogue songs, all the action of this scene of When Harry met Sally is conveyed through words. 

While the vida of la Comtessa de Dia does not say much, we know from her forthright cansos that she was a strong woman who believed in the female right to declare her love. She often sung of romantic longing and sensuous desire, "reclaiming and reconverting the role of love's marytr" (Bruckner et. al. xxx). La Comtessa de Dia is, in fact, the most famous and influential trobairitz of her time. A feminist and revolutionary, she assumes the typical male role in the song; she demands the power in the relationship.

In my creative project, I set out to show that the troubadours of today were not all that different than the troubadours of the Occitan. While the troubadours of the Occitan varied greatly in their styles, rhetoric, and topics I found that, for the most part, they adhere to three main guidelines.

<a href="Off-site">http://stanford.edu/group/troubadours/projects/pkozey/">Off-site project here</a>
What could be further apart than Poitiers in 1071 and Brooklyn in 1969? A lot, it turns out. The distance—in language, time, and place—is vast, sure, but both moments gave birth to figures with much more in common than might be expected...