Songs at the Docks: Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc and Musical Entanglements in Seventeenth-Century Marseille

Abstract

ABSTRACT Building on recent musicological research that emphasizes the mobility of songs, this article investigates Marseille as a site of cultural encounter and highlights the musical presence of enslaved galley rowers and translators in the city. It focuses on several descriptions of music-making in southern France by the French antiquarian Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc and his efforts to find materials on Ottoman and Persian music for the music theorist Marin Mersenne. Utilizing the constant influx of goods and people into the city, Peiresc relied on mercantile networks to obtain transcriptions of songs and music theoretical texts, engaging various informers and translators from the eastern Mediterranean. Focusing on a transcription of a single song that has been lost, the article traces the song’s connections to cultures of collection, cultural translation, and transcription, with singing constituting a central site in which to negotiate and perform otherness.