Seeing the title Seized by Sweet Desire and then putting on the disc and hearing Notre Dame organum is not the problem here. The boundary between secular and sacred in the Middle Ages was porous in the extreme, and the music to which the Notre Dame style gave birth sometimes even had a mixture of secular and sacred texts. Even the fairly raunchy female trouvère songs included here don't automatically place the music in a realm different from the religious pieces. Nor is it much of an issue that Denmark's all-female vocal ...
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Seeing the title Seized by Sweet Desire and then putting on the disc and hearing Notre Dame organum is not the problem here. The boundary between secular and sacred in the Middle Ages was porous in the extreme, and the music to which the Notre Dame style gave birth sometimes even had a mixture of secular and sacred texts. Even the fairly raunchy female trouvère songs included here don't automatically place the music in a realm different from the religious pieces. Nor is it much of an issue that Denmark's all-female vocal group Musica Ficta, under male director Bo Holten, sings music from Notre Dame cathedral, where polyphony certainly would have been sung by males. Even if the soaring lines of Notre Dame organum are tied more than most music to a specific place, the music does, as Holten points out, make a refreshing impression with women's voices, and the music of medieval convents is still an unknown enough territory that it's hard to say whether nuns might have known about it or experimented with...
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