Exchange Talk: Art, Time and Place - Jane Alden

Professor Alden explores the nose as an organ of satire from medieval fabliaux to Scratch Music of the 1970s.

This seminar will outline a proboscidean history of music, from medieval fabliaux through ballads and music hall songs, via Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera The Nose, certain drawings in Scratch Music (1972), and Michael Nyman’s ‘Nose-List Song’, to tease out the musical signification of the nose as an organ of satire. Using the medieval to illuminate the modern, Jane Alden focuses on musical graphics in two time periods that witnessed profound shifts in

the technologies of writing and media distribution—the fifteenth century, with the advent of the printing press, and the later twentieth century, with its communications innovations.

Jane Alden is a musicologist, singer, and conductor with expertise in scribal cultures, manuscript studies, and performance contexts. Professor of Music and Medieval Studies at Wesleyan University, Alden’s publications include the monograph Songs, Scribes, and Society: The History and Reception of the Loire Valley Chansonniers (OUP, 2010) and the collaborative CD-book Ma dame, tresgente et belle (Bayard, 2024). Her current book project, Visual Echoes: The Experimental Notation of Musical Objects Across Time, explores the conceptual flux of inscribing music. Alden is the founder and director of the Vocal Constructivists, a London-based experimental group that specialises in performing experimental scores.