To Chant in a Vale of Tears - Professor Christopher Page

According to one early-medieval author, ‘there are many who are moved by the sweetness of singing to bewail their sins, and who are readily brought to tears by the sweet sounds of a singer’. A thousand years later, Hector Berlioz tells how a musician was so moved during the performance of an opera that ‘two streams of tears burst violently from his eyes, and he wept so hard that I was compelled to lead him out of the hall’. Tears and music have a long history together, but a show of tears means different things at different times. The purpose of this lecture is to explore the nature of a lachrymose response in the medieval experience of music.
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