Gary Tomlinson, Annenberg Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, will give a free public lecture titled “Montaigne's Cannibals' Songs” on Thursday, May 7, at 7:30 p.m. at Union College's Nott Memorial.
Montaigne's “Of Cannibals,” perhaps the most famous of his essays, features with extraordinary prominence the singing of the Brazilian Tupi Indians who are its subject. Few accounts, however, have attended to this aspect of the essay. Tomlinson's lecture will examine the Tupi singing in “Of Cannibals” in an effort, first, to understand the roles Europeans could imagine for song in the New World and, second, to tease out of Montaigne's text a set of different functions of song, arguably closer to the outlines we can reconstruct of Tupi society.
Tomlinson's research and writing focus is on Renaissance and early Baroque music (especially Italian); opera; theories concerning music historiography and anthropology; and music in the New World before and after European contact. He is the author of Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance (1989 Deems Taylor Award); Italian Secular Song 1606-1636; Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others; and The New Strunk Source Readings in Music History: The Renaissance. His article, “Madrigal, Monody, and Monteverdi's via naturale alla immitatione,” was given the American Musicological Society's Alfred Einstein award. His book, Ghosts in the Voice: Opera and the Chancing Self, 1600-1900, is in press.
Awarded a MacArthur Prize fellowship for 1988-93, Professor Tomlinson has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and from the NEH. He was the Danziger Lecturer at the University of Chicago and Housewright Eminent Visiting Scholar at Florida State University. He currently serves on the advisory board of the Center for Black Music Research, and is a former board member of the American Musicological Society and the Renaissance Society of America. He was a visiting professor at Duke and Princeton, and a seminar director at the Folger Shakespeare library.
The 16-sided Nott Memorial is located at the center of campus and parking is available on campus and on nearby side streets.
For more information, call 388-6131.