The full title of the Carmina Burana is Carmina Burana: Cantiones profan\u00e6 cantoribus et choris cantand\u00e6 comitanibus instrumentis atque imaginibus magicis<\/i>, which means \u201cSongs of Beuern, Secular songs for singers and choruses to be sung together with instruments and magic images.\u201d By just reading the title, you might not guess that its poetry was written by 11th-century monks and clergymen. The subject matter is almost appalling when you think of the context in which it was written. It ranges from taking the Queen of England to bed, to being a goose in an oven, slowly burning and dying. To write this paper, I\u2019m looking for evidence of two things: That the spirit in which the text was written mirrors that of the Reformation 400 years later (rebellious sentiments against hypocrisy and contradiction in the Catholic church), and that Carl Orff attempts to reconcile its secularity by setting the text to music\u00a0in a manner that manages to allow the work to be seen in a religious light once again.<\/p>\n
The convenient thing about this subject is that most of my \u201cresearch\u201d will be analysis on my part\u2014of the text and of Orff\u2019s setting. I\u2019ve yet to find a reputable source of scholarly writing on this subject either online or in the music library, and I\u2019m not really sure what kind of information is out there on this subject. I bet I\u2019ll find writing on the different languages used in the work; the poems are in Medieval Latin, Germanic Latin, Middle-High German, Old French, Proven\u00e7al, and some of the pieces are even \u201cmacaronic\u201d (made of macaroni)(jk), meaning they are a jumble of different languages. To me, the use of the vernacular in these poems is a dead-ringer for what happened during the Reformation.<\/p>\n
I think that my best course of action with regard to analyzing the music will be to use the infrequent religious references in the text as guide points to focus on. The most well known reference is in the penultimate piece of the work, Blanziflor et Helena<\/i>. The \u201cchorus\u201d has convinced the female main character (soprano soloist) to fall in love, and this piece is a glorious congratulation. Blanziflor<\/i> comes from the French Blanchefleur<\/i>, a word meaning \u201cwhite flower\u201d and also being a common representation of the Virgin Mary. The chorus compares the soprano\u2019s beauty to Mary and Helen of Troy, hailing her with the explosive first line: Ave formosissima!<\/i> (Behold the most lovely).<\/p>\n
The research has been slow so far, but the more I do, the more I become convinced that my thesis actually has some ground to stand on, which isn\u2019t something I can say for every paper I\u2019ve written.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The full title of the Carmina Burana is Carmina Burana: Cantiones profan\u00e6 cantoribus et choris cantand\u00e6 comitanibus instrumentis atque imaginibus magicis, which means \u201cSongs of Beuern, Secular songs for singers and choruses to be sung together with instruments and magic … Continue reading