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John Romey
Assistant Professor of Music
School of Music
John Romey
Assistant Professor of Music
School of Music
Dr. John Romey is a specialist of early modern French music, culture, politics, and spectacle; of South American colonial and indigenous musics; and of historical bowed bass instruments, instrumental technology, and historical performance practices. His research has been supported by a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, the Holmes/D’Accone American Musicological Society Travel Grant for travel and research in the history of opera, and the American Musicological Society’s M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet Travel Grant. In the summer of 2019, he served as a short-term post-doctoral fellow at Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, Germany, during which time he presented guest lectures at the Universität Detmold/Paderborn, the Universität Leipzig, and the Institut für Musikforschung, Julius-Maximilians-Universität in Würzburg. From December 2021 to January 2022, he served as a Herzog-Ernst-Fellowship-Programme Fellow at the Gotha Research Centre in Germany.
His current book project, titled “The Tools of Gods and Beggars: Song As Cultural Mediator in Early Modern Paris,” examines the interplay between song and social rank in early modern France. Individuals participating in distinct but interconnected traditions composed new texts to popular songs, known as vaudevilles, and parodied airs from contemporary spectacles, especially from the Opéra. This research presents new perspectives on how cultural events, from civil wars to an operatic premiere, injected society with new shared artifacts that Parisians manipulated to forge novel expressions of self and agency. His analysis demonstrates that the performance of a staged spectacle constituted only a small portion of its social significance in seventeenth-century Paris because spectacles, especially operas, were interactive events that engendered countless subsequent performative acts. It illuminates the roles played by song across different social groups, from blind beggar-musicians on the Pont-Neuf (the “new bridge” that became a central gathering space and hub for oral and written communication) to fashionable elites at the Parisian salons and the court and their servants. Through an analysis of material and performative culture in this period, he offers insight into how songs served as a tool of cultural mediation as they traversed social rank and were performed in diverse spaces.
He has published an article on street songs and ephemera produced during the Fronde in Early Modern French Studies, an article on the contribution of Parisian spoken theaters to the tradition of street song in The Journal of Musicology, and an article about sonic warfare during the French Wars of Religion in the Yale Journal of Music & Religion (https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/yjmr/vol9/iss1/5/). He also has an article about interactive song games based on operatic quotation and parody forthcoming in the Cambridge Opera Journal and a chapter about literary salons and musical conversations forthcoming in A History of Women and Musical Salons, edited by Rebecca Cypess and Jacky Avila (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). He has further published a book chapter about court airs performed in French streets in Tanz Musik Transfer (Leipzig University Press) and the entry on “Popular Song in the Age of Louis XIV” for Oxford Bibliographies in Music.
Trained in historically informed performance at Case Western Reserve University, Dr. Romey is an expert on the history of the Viennese Violone and performs professionally on violones and viols of all sizes. He has published the entry on the “Double Bass” for Oxford Bibliographies in Music and is under contract to contribute new articles about the double bass and the violone for Grove Music Online. In collaboration with John Pringle, renowned luthier and restorer of historic string instruments, he has created a performance-based research project that will reconstruct a consort of French Renaissance viols (https://thefrenchconsortproject.com). While grounded in scholarship, this project will culminate in the creation of experiential learning components for students in the music history classroom. The French Consort Project has received financial support from the Viola da Gamba Society of America and Purdue Fort Wayne's Center for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching (CELT).
His current book project, titled “The Tools of Gods and Beggars: Song As Cultural Mediator in Early Modern Paris,” examines the interplay between song and social rank in early modern France. Individuals participating in distinct but interconnected traditions composed new texts to popular songs, known as vaudevilles, and parodied airs from contemporary spectacles, especially from the Opéra. This research presents new perspectives on how cultural events, from civil wars to an operatic premiere, injected society with new shared artifacts that Parisians manipulated to forge novel expressions of self and agency. His analysis demonstrates that the performance of a staged spectacle constituted only a small portion of its social significance in seventeenth-century Paris because spectacles, especially operas, were interactive events that engendered countless subsequent performative acts. It illuminates the roles played by song across different social groups, from blind beggar-musicians on the Pont-Neuf (the “new bridge” that became a central gathering space and hub for oral and written communication) to fashionable elites at the Parisian salons and the court and their servants. Through an analysis of material and performative culture in this period, he offers insight into how songs served as a tool of cultural mediation as they traversed social rank and were performed in diverse spaces.
He has published an article on street songs and ephemera produced during the Fronde in Early Modern French Studies, an article on the contribution of Parisian spoken theaters to the tradition of street song in The Journal of Musicology, and an article about sonic warfare during the French Wars of Religion in the Yale Journal of Music & Religion (https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/yjmr/vol9/iss1/5/). He also has an article about interactive song games based on operatic quotation and parody forthcoming in the Cambridge Opera Journal and a chapter about literary salons and musical conversations forthcoming in A History of Women and Musical Salons, edited by Rebecca Cypess and Jacky Avila (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). He has further published a book chapter about court airs performed in French streets in Tanz Musik Transfer (Leipzig University Press) and the entry on “Popular Song in the Age of Louis XIV” for Oxford Bibliographies in Music.
Trained in historically informed performance at Case Western Reserve University, Dr. Romey is an expert on the history of the Viennese Violone and performs professionally on violones and viols of all sizes. He has published the entry on the “Double Bass” for Oxford Bibliographies in Music and is under contract to contribute new articles about the double bass and the violone for Grove Music Online. In collaboration with John Pringle, renowned luthier and restorer of historic string instruments, he has created a performance-based research project that will reconstruct a consort of French Renaissance viols (https://thefrenchconsortproject.com). While grounded in scholarship, this project will culminate in the creation of experiential learning components for students in the music history classroom. The French Consort Project has received financial support from the Viola da Gamba Society of America and Purdue Fort Wayne's Center for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching (CELT).