2 - Refrains and the Time of Song

Summary

Chapter 2 is concerned with how the calendrically oriented refrain song repertoire outlined in Chapter 1 plays out in the moment of performance; namely, how singers and listeners might have understood songs and refrains as a form of religious narrative and how the refrain interacts with the experience of narrative time in performance. Chapter 2 considers the temporality of strophic Latin song itself and ways in which the refrain interacts with the linearity and circularity of poetic and musical time both separately and together. Songs that most compellingly bring together the experience of calendrical time with the musical and poetic experience of time in song are narrative works that paraphrase or retell familiar biblical and hagiographic stories, the focus of a series of case studies in Chapter 2. The case studies in this chapter These case studies, which showcase songs about the Nativity, the Resurrection, and saints’ lives (specifically those of St. Katherine and St. Nicholas), emphasize how the refrain operates within the devotional temporalities articulated in each individual work, at times interjecting or interrupting, and at other times integrating musically, poetically, and grammatically into the narrative flow.