Rachel May Golden
ADDRESS
College of Music
235 Natalie L. Haslam Music Center
Knoxville, TN 37996-4040
Phone
Rachel May Golden
Area Coordinator & Professor of Musicology
Rachel May Golden is Professor of Musicology in the College of Music. She was inaugural chair of the interdisciplinary program in Women, Gender, and Sexuality and is a former co-chair of the Medieval and Renaissance interdisciplinary program. She is also affiliate faculty in Religious Studies.
Her research embraces experiential and cultural aspects of medieval music of the twelfth century, including issues of monastic devotion, the cult of the Virgin Mary, songs of the Crusades, gendered expression, socio-religious politics and worldviews, and words-music relationships. She also works in contemporary music, where her research addresses opera, oratorio, and film; intersections among music, drama, and text; multimedia and technology; gender, identity, and performativity. Her current project explores how particular uses of pre-existing pop and rock songs in early-twentieth-first-century horror films express post-9/11 disorientations and anxieties. She has been an American Council of Learned of Societies Fellow and an NEH Summer Scholar.
Her teaching and advising reflect her expertise in these various areas, including topics pertaining to medieval and Renaissance western music; twentieth-century musics; voice and opera; gender, sexuality, and music; performance studies and performance art; music and identity, music and politics, and music and religion.
Education
PhD, Musicology – University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2000)
MFA, Musicology – Brandeis University (1996)
BA, Mathematics – Cornell University (1992)
Research & Creative Endeavors
Books
- Mapping Medieval Identities in Occitanian Crusade Song. Oxford University Press, 2020.
- In medieval Occitania (southern France), troubadours and monastic creators fostered a vibrant musical culture. In response to the early Crusade campaigns of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Christians of the region turned to producing monophonic, poetic song, encompassing both secular and sacred genres. This book demonstrates the profound impact the Crusades had on two seemingly discrete musical-poetic practices: the Latin, sacred Aquitanian versus, associated with Christian devotion, and the vernacular troubadour lyric, associated with courtly love. I investigate how such Crusade songs distinctively arose out of their geographic environments, asserting shifting regional identities and worldviews and exploring devotional practices and religious beliefs. Further, I reveal how these songs reflect both the outer world and interior lives, and often their conjunction, giving shape and expression to concerns with the Occitanian homeland, spatial aspects of the Crusades, and newly emerging positions within socio-political history.
- See https://global.oup.com/academic/product/mapping-medieval-identities-in-occitanian-crusade-song-9780190948610?cc=us&lang=en&
- Gender and Voice in Medieval French Literature and Song, co-edited by Rachel May Golden and Katherine Kong. University Press of Florida, 2021. https://upf.com/book.asp?id=9780813069036
- This volume interprets the voices of medieval French and Occitan literature, lyric, and song as articulations of gendered identities. As medieval texts were often voiced—that is, either read or sung aloud—voice is a central rubric for understanding the performance, transmission, and reception of textual and musical work across varied genres. Voice also functions on a diegetic and symbolic level: as an instrument for asserting authority and agency, voice profoundly inscribes texts with meaning and signification, articulating subjective positions, facilitating dialogue, and enacting silence. This collection reads and listens to selected medieval French texts and musical works, and includes literary, musical, and historiographical analysis for an interdisciplinary readership. Construing gender broadly, our essays include feminist readings, investigations of masculinity, queer theory, and intersectional approaches.
- See https://upf.com/book.asp?id=9780813069036
Representative Articles and Essays
- “Gendered Grief, Temporality, and Reinvention in Two Northern Crusade Songs,” in Gender and Voice in Medieval French Literature and Song, co-edited by Rachel May Golden and Katherine Kong (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2021), 121-150.
- “Beyond this Mist: Uncovering Material Multiplicities in Amis, amis,” in Female-Voice Song in the Middle Ages, edited by Anna Kathryn Grau and Lisa Colton, Companions to the Musical Culture of Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming 2021).
- “Across Divides: Aquitaine’s New Song & London BL, Add. 36881,” Chapter 3 of Manuscripts and Medieval Song: Inscription, Performance, Context, edited by Helen Deeming and Elizabeth Eva Leach (Cambridge University Press, 2015).
- “Polyphonies of Sound and Space: Motet, Montage, Voices of Light, and La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc.” Musical Quarterly 9, no. 2 (Summer 2013): 296-330.
- “Music and Pilgrimage.” In Encyclopedia of Medieval Pilgrimage, ed. Larissa Taylor, et. al., 463–468. Leiden: Brill, 2009.
- “Two Paths to Daniel’s Mountain: Poetic-Musical Unity in Aquitanian Versus.” Journal of Musicology 23, no. 4 (Fall 2006): 620–646.
- “Striking Ornaments: Complexities of Sense and Song in Aquitanian Versus.” Music & Letters 84, no. 4 (November 2003): 527–556.
- “‘As Were We Born Today’: Characterization and Transformation in Samuel Barber’s Vanessa.” Opera Quarterly 17, no. 2 (Spring 2001): 235–249.