Description
Mr. Fonronce sang the bass part. Or so his music books would suggest: the Bodleian Library conserves four printed and two manuscript song collections attesting to his ownership and his vocal range. Their contents bespeak the musical taste of the average successful Huguenot exile—a mix of psalms in French and the trendiest opera arias, both French and Italian. All date to the 1690s, and whereas the music prints originated in Amsterdam in the early part of the decade, the manuscripts were copied in London in or after 1696. Thus we may assume that Fonronce, like so many others, found refuge in England.Beyond informing us of Fonronce’s singing capabilities, these sources also bear the marks of his exile. My particular focus is Fonronce’s copy of the psalm paraphrases of Antoine Godeau, set to music by Jacques Gouy. Originally published in Paris in 1650, this reedition was printed in Amsterdam in 1691 by the Blaeu firm, under contract to Savoyard Catholic—and bass singer—Victor Amedée Le Chevallier. Fonronce’s bass book is wrapped in the blue paper for which the Dutch Republic was famous. And pasted on the front of the wrapper is a hand-colored woodcut of a parrot (labeled “Parrot”).
Fonronce’s paratextual parrot provides insight into a world on the move, where sailors’ clothing became paper wrappers, where things, animals, and people traveled across oceans, and where Frenchmen learned to speak English. Despite all of these displacements, I argue, a core of identity remained the same through a process I describe as transposition. In my reading, the parrot serves as a reminder that psalms should be sung from the heart—and the heart was unchanging. Tracing the transpositions embodied in Fonronce’s book, I thus provide a more nuanced account of the sonic memory of the Refuge as it resounded across Europe and beyond.
| Period | 26 Oct 2018 |
|---|---|
| Event title | Repenser le Refuge: Nouvelles perspectives pour l’étude de du protestantisme francophone aux Provinces-Unies à l’époque moderne |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Leiden, NetherlandsShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |