Kirsten Yri
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 1410169 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Kirsten Yri |
| NOMBRES | Kirsten |
| APELLIDO | Yri |
| FIRMA | YRI K |
| AFILIACIONES | Wilfrid Laurier University |
| ORCID | 0009-0008-8977-8906 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 39 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 1 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 5 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 34 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2006 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 1 |
A Retrospective Celebration of Kronos Quartet's Early Music (Lachrymæ Antiquæ)
Kronos Quartet’s 1997 Early Music (Lachrymæ Antiquæ) was an unusual album for a string quartet dedicated to contemporary music. The release included arrangements of medieval and Renaissance works by Guillaume de Machaut, John Dowland, Henry Purcell, and others alongside twentieth-century composers such as Arvo Pärt, John Cage, and Alfred Schnittke, whose sounds bore some resemblance to early music. Besides expanding quartet repertoire to centurie…
Soldiers and Censors: Verdi’s Medieval Imagination
From his very first opera Oberto, conte di San Bonifacio (1839) to his last, Falstaff (1893), Giuseppe Verdi set many of his works in the Middle Ages. These operas were written over a period of more than fifty years and show the traces of Verdi’s changes in style, interests, and status within the profession; they also confirm the persistent interest on the Middle Ages in Italy through the nineteenth century. This essay aims to show some of the as…
Medievalism and Rued Langgaard’s Romantic Image of Queen Dagmar
Rued Langgaard’s organ piece, Fantasy on “Queen Dagmar Lies Sick in Ribe,” was written in 1942 for a festal service in Ribe Cathedral in connection with the opening of a newly renovated archeological site of a medieval royal castle outside of Ribe where, according to popular traditions, the Danish queen Dagmar had died in 1212. Although Langgaard based his work on a traditional melody for a medieval ballad, his Fantasy does not use medieval compo…
Medievalisms in Early Nineteenth-Century German Musical Thought
The concept of medievalism contains within it an element of the imaginative, and many early nineteenth-century musical and artistic works that draw on the medievalist aesthetic have a fanciful, storytelling quality. The early nineteenth century, however, was also a time in which music and music-related scholarship and criticism on the era that is now considered medieval developed at an accelerating pace. This essay will consider the writings of t…
Medievalism and Identity Construction in Pagan Folk Music
European interest in its pagan or pre-Christian past has grown and flourished over the past two centuries, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s theorization of an ancient, polytheistic nature-based folk religion in the eighteenth century to the iconic 1973 horror film The Wicker Man and its failed 2006 remake. As popular interest has grown around this topic, so too have various groups claiming the heritage of medieval pagan Europe. These modern Pagans fa…
Richard Wagner’s Medieval Visions
This contribution will focus on three aspects of Wagner’s medievalism: the historic medievalism of Tannhäuser and Lohengrin , set in a recognizable historical framework but also invoking the aura of the Middle Ages through marvel and miracle; the mythical medievalism of the Ring cycle where Nordic myth displaces the more familiar sphere of the medieval Nibelungenlied ; and finally the civic medievalism of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg where a me…
Hucbald’s Fifths and Vaughan Williams’s Mass: The New Medieval in Britain between the Wars
In a Musical Times review of a 1923 performance of Vaughan Williams’s Mass in G minor in Birmingham, H. C. Colles made the comment that “there hasn’t been so many parallel fifths since Hucbald.” This is just one blatant medievalist moment in a review that firmly places the Mass within a tangled web of historical images and associations. Colles’s description of the Mass evokes historicism by utilizing imagery related to the medieval cathedral and …
Tolling Bells and Otherworldly Voices: Joan of Arc’s Sonic World in the Early Twentieth Century
The early twentieth century saw an explosion in musical works dedicated to Joan of Arc, fueled in part by the saint’s canonization in 1920 and the five-hundred-year anniversary of her martyrdom in 1931. Rising national fervor and French aesthetic battles of the 1930s and 1940s further contributed to French composers’ interest in composing so-called johannique music. As composers attempted to portray the mysterious medieval world Joan inhabited, t…
Re-sounding Carl Theodor Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc
Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 silent film La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc is one of the most famous films about the medieval period, and its status as a classic, together with its loss to fire and subsequent rediscovery, has attracted various musical commentaries. Dreyer, later in life, pondered the idea of a historically appropriate score, thereby showing his commitment to historical research, but he did so at a time when the performance of such reperto…
“Ramble On”: Medievalism as a Nostalgic Practice in Led Zeppelin’s Use of J. R. R. Tolkien
Although first published in 1954, the cultural impact of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings arguably began in earnest only during the late 1960s and early 1970s. As Terrence Malley explained in 1972, Tolkien’s writings seemed “particularly relevant in our own age of anti-heroes, in this time when we can readily identify with the small and the apparently powerless.” This chapter considers the role of The Lord of the Rings in the music of Led Zeppelin…
Hope against Fate or Fata Morgana? Music and Mythopoiesis in Boorman’s Excalibur
This essay examines Excalibur , John Boorman’s 1981 recreation of Arthurian legend, through the lens of music. The chapter argues that the music evokes an intertextual discourse by contextualizing the film within the register of the mythic medieval. On the one hand, the original cues provided by Trevor Jones evoke this register by using semiotic gestures and textures that are commonly associated with filmic tropes. The preexisting music, on the o…
Evil Medieval: Chant and the New Dark Spirituality of Vietnam-Era Film in America
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, a noticeable shift occurred in the plots and soundtracks of narrative film in the United States. The genre of horror came to occupy a leading position among new releases ( Rosemary’s Baby , 1968; The Devils , 1971; The Exorcist , 1973; The Omen , 1976), accompanied by music that would invert the signification of the church’s most sacred spiritual heritage: Latin became the language of the devil and chant his…
Romantic Medievalist Nationalism in Schumann’s Genoveva, Then and Now
Prior to Richard Wagner’s dominance of the German operatic scene in the second half of the nineteenth century, a healthy competition to establish a distinctively Germanic tradition of grand opera occupied the minds and activities of several prominent composers. In seeking to establish their own operatic tradition, a number of German composers looked to the Middle Ages for their source material. Schumann’s Genoveva represents an important contribu…
Medievalism and Antiromanticism in Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana
This chapter traces Orff’s musical medievalism along several trajectories. Against the backdrop of “official” medievalism espoused under Wilhelmine Germany and under the National Socialists, the chapter examines the influence of medieval organum and paraphony on Orff’s compositional idiom. It also distinguishes this influence from a form of medievalism that can be described as style , where sacred medieval musical forms are imitated for their ass…
The Postmodern Troubadour
The twenty-first century, barely two decades old, has already seen the production of two highly acclaimed modernist operas about troubadours, Kaija Saariaho and Amin Maalouf’s L’amour de loin (2000) and Written on Skin (2012), by George Benjamin and librettist Martin Crimp. The troubadour has been invoked repeatedly in Western culture as a nostalgic figure representing an idealized past and purity of poetic expression, a kind of anti-Pierrot. The…
Disciplining Guinevere: Courtly Love and the Arthurian Tradition from Henry Purcell to Donovan Leitch
Portrayals of noblewomen and the courtly love ideal are familiar themes in medieval songs and romances. This essay challenges the legitimacy of these themes, tracing an archeology of courtly love as a scholarly and cultural construct: a medievalism in and of itself, with origins in the nineteenth century. Using the Arthurian tradition as a case study, the essay explores reinterpretations of medieval portrayals of love in postmedieval cultures fro…
The Return of Ars subtilior?: Rhythmic Complexity in the Chantilly Codex and in Selected Twentieth-Century Works
This chapter explores different medieval techniques of organizing rhythmic parameters to illuminate the ancestry of many purportedly novel techniques popularized in later twentieth-century works. Three categories of structural medievalism—evocation, adaptation, and assimilation—delineate the types of organizing parameters used by composers separated in time by six centuries. The process of defining this far-reaching ancestry unfolds in the contex…
Faith, Fear, Silence, and Music in Ingmar Bergman’s Medieval Vision of The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring
This chapter examines medievalism, music, and sound effects in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) and The Virgin Spring (1960). As with his later work, Bergman uses music and sound in The Virgin Spring and The Seventh Seal in powerfully unsettling ways. He and Swedish composer Erik Nordgren (1913–1992) aimed for stylized medieval tunes alongside more modern and even jarringly anachronistic scoring. Bergman’s idiosyncratic approach to mediev…
Miserere: Arvo Pärt and the Medieval Present
Compositions by Arvo Pärt have been frequently described as alluding to medieval compositional practices and sound. Miserere (1989, revised 1992)—a work for soloists, chorus, and instrumental ensemble that sets Psalm 50/51 and the thirteenth-century Dies irae hymn—makes a useful case study of his engagement with medievalism, particularly its aesthetic, theological, and reception-based dimensions. Over a period of three decades, Miserere has been …
Medieval Folk in the Revivals of David Munrow
This article explores the close relationship between medievalism, orientalism, and folk music in the work of early music revival pioneer David Munrow, director of the Early Music Consort of London from 1968 to 1976. The focus of this study is his last television work Ancestral Voices , a BBC series exploring myths and legends surrounding early instruments and tracing those associations through history. It also examines other popular genres preval…
Fantasy Medievalism and Screen Media
This chapter focuses on fantasy medievalism on screen and its connection to genres of music that may be seen as equally medievalist in origin and aesthetic: progressive rock, heavy metal, and folk. It gives an overview of the medievalist features of the genres before discussing how they are used in a range of fantasy screen media from Legend to Highlander and Game of Thrones to The Witcher . There has been a historical move from the representatio…
Medievalism and Regionalist Identity in Lalo’s Le Roi d’Ys
Édouard Lalo’s opera Le Roi d’Ys was one of the earliest manifestations of French musical regionalism to find success on a major Parisian stage. Subtitled légende bretonne , Lalo’s work was set in medieval Brittany, using Breton folk melodies and a conflation of Christian and Celtic legends, intentionally sidestepping the conformist portfolio of fairy tales and grand-operatic French history at the Opéra and the Opéra Comique. Concordant with goal…
The Many Musical Medievalisms of Disney
This essay argues that the Disney Company is one of today’s main purveyors of medievalism. The idea of Disney as a force for medievalism may strike some academic readers as odd, given the still common view of medievalism as a primarily academic phenomenon. Rather, as argued in the first part of this essay, medievalism is a widespread cultural phenomenon, originating in the sixteenth century, out of which academic medievalism emerged in the eighte…
Liszt’s Medievalist Modernism
The essay investigates the diverse strategies through which Liszt appropriated elements of medieval music for his own compositions. The obvious focus is on the composer’s religious works, some of which provocatively distance themselves from the standard musical language of nineteenth-century church compositions in an effort to return to earlier styles more directly derived from Gregorian chant. While Liszt’s interest in these older styles may pri…
“What England Has Done for a Thousand Years”: Medievalism in Christmas Lessons and Carols Services
This chapter uses medievalism as a critical framework for examining the modern appeal of Christmas Lessons and Carols services. Although the first such service took place in 1880, it has been suggested that it is a form of worship that dates back to the Middle Ages. First, the history of Lessons and Carols services is traced. Then, the service at King’s College, Cambridge, is examined in depth as a case study. It is argued that Lessons and Carols…
Corvus Corax: Medieval Rock, the Minstrel, and Cosmopolitanism as Anti-Nationalism
This article explores the German band Corvus Corax and their reinterpretion of the Middle Ages as a creative answer to Germany's problematic history of nationalism. Invoking the community ideals and ideological values of the 1960s and 1970s, which, in the context of the GDR took on even more significance, Corvus Corax borrowed 'authentic' medieval texts and melodies, rendering them in acoustic arrangements inspired by medieval performance practic…
Noah Greenberg and the New York Pro Musica: Medievalism and the Cultural Front
Research Article| December 01 2006 Noah Greenberg and the New York Pro Musica: Medievalism and the Cultural Front Kirsten Yri Kirsten Yri Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Music (2006) 24 (4): 421–444. https://doi.org/10.2307/25046050 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Kirsten Yri; Noah Greenberg and the New York Pro Musica: Medievalism and the Cultur…
Black Sabbath Purgatus: Medievalizing heavy metal
Corvus Corax: Medieval Rock, the Minstrel, and Cosmopolitanism as Anti-Nationalism
This article explores the German band Corvus Corax and their reinterpretion of the Middle Ages as a creative answer to Germany's problematic history of nationalism. Invoking the community ideals and ideological values of the 1960s and 1970s, which, in the context of the GDR took on even more significance, Corvus Corax borrowed 'authentic' medieval texts and melodies, rendering them in acoustic arrangements inspired by medieval performance practic…
Soldiers and Censors: Verdi’s Medieval Imagination
From his very first opera Oberto, conte di San Bonifacio (1839) to his last, Falstaff (1893), Giuseppe Verdi set many of his works in the Middle Ages. These operas were written over a period of more than fifty years and show the traces of Verdi’s changes in style, interests, and status within the profession; they also confirm the persistent interest on the Middle Ages in Italy through the nineteenth century. This essay aims to show some of the as…
Medievalism and Rued Langgaard’s Romantic Image of Queen Dagmar
Rued Langgaard’s organ piece, Fantasy on “Queen Dagmar Lies Sick in Ribe,” was written in 1942 for a festal service in Ribe Cathedral in connection with the opening of a newly renovated archeological site of a medieval royal castle outside of Ribe where, according to popular traditions, the Danish queen Dagmar had died in 1212. Although Langgaard based his work on a traditional melody for a medieval ballad, his Fantasy does not use medieval compo…
Medievalisms in Early Nineteenth-Century German Musical Thought
The concept of medievalism contains within it an element of the imaginative, and many early nineteenth-century musical and artistic works that draw on the medievalist aesthetic have a fanciful, storytelling quality. The early nineteenth century, however, was also a time in which music and music-related scholarship and criticism on the era that is now considered medieval developed at an accelerating pace. This essay will consider the writings of t…
Medievalism and Identity Construction in Pagan Folk Music
European interest in its pagan or pre-Christian past has grown and flourished over the past two centuries, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s theorization of an ancient, polytheistic nature-based folk religion in the eighteenth century to the iconic 1973 horror film The Wicker Man and its failed 2006 remake. As popular interest has grown around this topic, so too have various groups claiming the heritage of medieval pagan Europe. These modern Pagans fa…
Richard Wagner’s Medieval Visions
This contribution will focus on three aspects of Wagner’s medievalism: the historic medievalism of Tannhäuser and Lohengrin , set in a recognizable historical framework but also invoking the aura of the Middle Ages through marvel and miracle; the mythical medievalism of the Ring cycle where Nordic myth displaces the more familiar sphere of the medieval Nibelungenlied ; and finally the civic medievalism of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg where a me…
Hucbald’s Fifths and Vaughan Williams’s Mass: The New Medieval in Britain between the Wars
In a Musical Times review of a 1923 performance of Vaughan Williams’s Mass in G minor in Birmingham, H. C. Colles made the comment that “there hasn’t been so many parallel fifths since Hucbald.” This is just one blatant medievalist moment in a review that firmly places the Mass within a tangled web of historical images and associations. Colles’s description of the Mass evokes historicism by utilizing imagery related to the medieval cathedral and …
Tolling Bells and Otherworldly Voices: Joan of Arc’s Sonic World in the Early Twentieth Century
The early twentieth century saw an explosion in musical works dedicated to Joan of Arc, fueled in part by the saint’s canonization in 1920 and the five-hundred-year anniversary of her martyrdom in 1931. Rising national fervor and French aesthetic battles of the 1930s and 1940s further contributed to French composers’ interest in composing so-called johannique music. As composers attempted to portray the mysterious medieval world Joan inhabited, t…
Re-sounding Carl Theodor Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc
Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 silent film La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc is one of the most famous films about the medieval period, and its status as a classic, together with its loss to fire and subsequent rediscovery, has attracted various musical commentaries. Dreyer, later in life, pondered the idea of a historically appropriate score, thereby showing his commitment to historical research, but he did so at a time when the performance of such reperto…
“Ramble On”: Medievalism as a Nostalgic Practice in Led Zeppelin’s Use of J. R. R. Tolkien
Although first published in 1954, the cultural impact of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings arguably began in earnest only during the late 1960s and early 1970s. As Terrence Malley explained in 1972, Tolkien’s writings seemed “particularly relevant in our own age of anti-heroes, in this time when we can readily identify with the small and the apparently powerless.” This chapter considers the role of The Lord of the Rings in the music of Led Zeppelin…
Hope against Fate or Fata Morgana? Music and Mythopoiesis in Boorman’s Excalibur
This essay examines Excalibur , John Boorman’s 1981 recreation of Arthurian legend, through the lens of music. The chapter argues that the music evokes an intertextual discourse by contextualizing the film within the register of the mythic medieval. On the one hand, the original cues provided by Trevor Jones evoke this register by using semiotic gestures and textures that are commonly associated with filmic tropes. The preexisting music, on the o…
Evil Medieval: Chant and the New Dark Spirituality of Vietnam-Era Film in America
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, a noticeable shift occurred in the plots and soundtracks of narrative film in the United States. The genre of horror came to occupy a leading position among new releases ( Rosemary’s Baby , 1968; The Devils , 1971; The Exorcist , 1973; The Omen , 1976), accompanied by music that would invert the signification of the church’s most sacred spiritual heritage: Latin became the language of the devil and chant his…
Romantic Medievalist Nationalism in Schumann’s Genoveva, Then and Now
Prior to Richard Wagner’s dominance of the German operatic scene in the second half of the nineteenth century, a healthy competition to establish a distinctively Germanic tradition of grand opera occupied the minds and activities of several prominent composers. In seeking to establish their own operatic tradition, a number of German composers looked to the Middle Ages for their source material. Schumann’s Genoveva represents an important contribu…
Medievalism and Antiromanticism in Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana
This chapter traces Orff’s musical medievalism along several trajectories. Against the backdrop of “official” medievalism espoused under Wilhelmine Germany and under the National Socialists, the chapter examines the influence of medieval organum and paraphony on Orff’s compositional idiom. It also distinguishes this influence from a form of medievalism that can be described as style , where sacred medieval musical forms are imitated for their ass…
The Postmodern Troubadour
The twenty-first century, barely two decades old, has already seen the production of two highly acclaimed modernist operas about troubadours, Kaija Saariaho and Amin Maalouf’s L’amour de loin (2000) and Written on Skin (2012), by George Benjamin and librettist Martin Crimp. The troubadour has been invoked repeatedly in Western culture as a nostalgic figure representing an idealized past and purity of poetic expression, a kind of anti-Pierrot. The…
Disciplining Guinevere: Courtly Love and the Arthurian Tradition from Henry Purcell to Donovan Leitch
Portrayals of noblewomen and the courtly love ideal are familiar themes in medieval songs and romances. This essay challenges the legitimacy of these themes, tracing an archeology of courtly love as a scholarly and cultural construct: a medievalism in and of itself, with origins in the nineteenth century. Using the Arthurian tradition as a case study, the essay explores reinterpretations of medieval portrayals of love in postmedieval cultures fro…
The Return of Ars subtilior?: Rhythmic Complexity in the Chantilly Codex and in Selected Twentieth-Century Works
This chapter explores different medieval techniques of organizing rhythmic parameters to illuminate the ancestry of many purportedly novel techniques popularized in later twentieth-century works. Three categories of structural medievalism—evocation, adaptation, and assimilation—delineate the types of organizing parameters used by composers separated in time by six centuries. The process of defining this far-reaching ancestry unfolds in the contex…
Faith, Fear, Silence, and Music in Ingmar Bergman’s Medieval Vision of The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring
This chapter examines medievalism, music, and sound effects in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) and The Virgin Spring (1960). As with his later work, Bergman uses music and sound in The Virgin Spring and The Seventh Seal in powerfully unsettling ways. He and Swedish composer Erik Nordgren (1913–1992) aimed for stylized medieval tunes alongside more modern and even jarringly anachronistic scoring. Bergman’s idiosyncratic approach to mediev…
Miserere: Arvo Pärt and the Medieval Present
Compositions by Arvo Pärt have been frequently described as alluding to medieval compositional practices and sound. Miserere (1989, revised 1992)—a work for soloists, chorus, and instrumental ensemble that sets Psalm 50/51 and the thirteenth-century Dies irae hymn—makes a useful case study of his engagement with medievalism, particularly its aesthetic, theological, and reception-based dimensions. Over a period of three decades, Miserere has been …
Medieval Folk in the Revivals of David Munrow
This article explores the close relationship between medievalism, orientalism, and folk music in the work of early music revival pioneer David Munrow, director of the Early Music Consort of London from 1968 to 1976. The focus of this study is his last television work Ancestral Voices , a BBC series exploring myths and legends surrounding early instruments and tracing those associations through history. It also examines other popular genres preval…
Fantasy Medievalism and Screen Media
This chapter focuses on fantasy medievalism on screen and its connection to genres of music that may be seen as equally medievalist in origin and aesthetic: progressive rock, heavy metal, and folk. It gives an overview of the medievalist features of the genres before discussing how they are used in a range of fantasy screen media from Legend to Highlander and Game of Thrones to The Witcher . There has been a historical move from the representatio…
Medievalism and Regionalist Identity in Lalo’s Le Roi d’Ys
Édouard Lalo’s opera Le Roi d’Ys was one of the earliest manifestations of French musical regionalism to find success on a major Parisian stage. Subtitled légende bretonne , Lalo’s work was set in medieval Brittany, using Breton folk melodies and a conflation of Christian and Celtic legends, intentionally sidestepping the conformist portfolio of fairy tales and grand-operatic French history at the Opéra and the Opéra Comique. Concordant with goal…
The Many Musical Medievalisms of Disney
This essay argues that the Disney Company is one of today’s main purveyors of medievalism. The idea of Disney as a force for medievalism may strike some academic readers as odd, given the still common view of medievalism as a primarily academic phenomenon. Rather, as argued in the first part of this essay, medievalism is a widespread cultural phenomenon, originating in the sixteenth century, out of which academic medievalism emerged in the eighte…
Art (37 obras) · Literature (36 obras) · History (33 obras) · Middle Ages (23 obras) · Art history (21 obras) · Medievalism (19 obras) · Musicology and Musical Analysis (18 obras) · Musical (17 obras) · Ancient history (16 obras) · Philosophy (15 obras)