Music and Cats / Book of Abstracts - Catalog - Page 22
Abstracts
Panel 5: Historical Perspectives
15:25 – 15:40
Cat Songs and Singing
Cats in the Seventeenth
Century
Katherine Butler /Northumbria University, UK
In the early modern period, the cat occupied an
ambiguous and shifting position in culture. Cats
were
simultaneously
connected
with
the
supernatural world of devils and witches, as well
as the bestiality of nature in their sexuality,
physicality
as
fighters
and
cruelty
as
(play)hunters, yet also anthropomorphized as
having human-like characteristics of language,
laws, and society. The killing or torturing of cats
as festivity was still a recurrent practice across
Europe and yet cats were also increasingly
becoming companions and objects of affections for
the social elite.
In seventeenth-century Europe, music became a
site where these contradictory notions of the cat
and its relationship with people were explored. At
the one end of the spectrum, the imaginary
instrument of the cat piano fantasized the control
of the cats’ voices via physical abuse for human
entertainment. At the other pole, Dutch and
Flemish painters such as Jan van Kessel, Cornelis
Saftleven and Teniers the Younger depicted cat
choirs, performing human polyphony in the form
of canons, and creating their own mouse-based
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notation systems, reminiscent of the secretive
society and spying nature of the felines in
Baldwin’s Beware the Cat (1561). In the
mid-ground, English composers such as
William Lawes and Michael Wise composed
recreational cat songs (‘The Cats, as Other
Creatures Do” and “A Catch on Cats at
Midnight”) that not only drew paralleled the
lives and desires of humans and cats, but
invited humans to give voice to the thoughts
and sounds of cats.
Probing and challenging the distinctions
between human and bestial behaviours,
cruelty and morality, natural and rational
music, bodily physicality and rational
intellect, seventeenth-century intertwinings
of cats and music are revealing as to early
modern anxieties about both the liminality of
the part-wild, part-domesticated feline, and
the capacity for humans to maintain their
God-given superiority, exceptionalism, and
dominion over animals.
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Louis Wain
