This paper focuses on the musical discourse of nostalgia evidenced in the songs of Dana International, an Israeli transsexual singer who took First Prize in the 1998 Eurovision Song Contest. It is organised around several songs featuring various compositional strategies, beginning with remakes of older songs and leading into new ones. Through quotation of music and/or lyrics, and the alteration and departure from the original, Dana premiers, transforms and renews songs in a way unique to her: she forces the audience to rethink what is natural and what is historically constructed, blurs distinctions between the sexes, past and present, the national and international, and draws on nostalgia as a powerful device to unsettle and question received truths. Her songs often mock and parody the masculinist, nationalist myths of mainstream Israeli culture, exposing the ideology of its artefacts. By promoting various types of blending, Dana challenges the notion of fixed borders. Despite the musical surface of popular song, which sounds international and without specific identity, the deep structures of these songs are in fact very much about complex questions of identity.
The tenor occupies a special role in vernacular motets of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries: not only does it underpin the melodies of the upper voices contrapuntally, it also provides intellectual and interpretative undergirding for the texts of these pieces. The biblical or liturgical context of a tenor, drawing on well-understood exegetical and literary traditions, often facilitates an allegorical reading of the upper voices, and vice versa. Because of the foundational nature of the tenor within the Ars nova motet in particular, the identification of the exact musico-liturgical sources of this voice, where possible, is of special significance. While the origins of most of Machaut's twenty-one Latin tenors have been identified, the tenor of one work, Motet 5 (Aucune gent/Qui plus aimme/ T. Fiat voluntas tua, hereafter M5), is alleged to have a most unusual source. I offer new observations about the tenor of M5 that emphasise certain compositional procedures congruent with Machaut's practice in writing his motets and may tie together the various secular and sacred references in the piece.
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