Saagar Asnani is a graduate student in Musicology and Medieval Studies. He focuses particularly on the regions of France, Italy, Occitania, and Catalonia. He works mainly with the relationship between language and music, as his research bridges sociohistorical linguistics with musicology. Saagar earned his MA from UC Berkeley in 2022, and BA in Music, French and Biology from University of Pennsylvania.
How did you decide to pursue a graduate degree in Berkeley’s Department of Music? Is there any advice that you have for undergraduates, who are interested in pursuing graduate school?
I had a kind of circuitous route to graduate school. I thought I wanted to pursue medical school for most of my childhood and for all of my undergrad. I applied for medical school, took the MCAT, and I realized my heart wasn’t really in it after the first cycle when I got waitlisted everywhere. At that time, I did some thinking. Backtracking a little bit to undergrad at UPenn, where I majored in Biology, Music and French: I realized that my classes which made me happy, and for which I would be interested to wake up and go to class the next day, were my music history classes, my French language classes – Medieval French literature was one of my favorites classes of all of undergrad. I actually wrote my senior thesis on Medieval French music. So I thought, “Maybe the fact that I’ve been envying all of the PhD students around me for pursuing their passions and doing what they love everyday – maybe that’s a sign. Maybe I should try to become one of them.” And so, I applied to graduate school after one gap year, and it worked out really well, so I came to Berkeley.
What made me want to do something like Musicology, which is a very particular field? As a choice for graduate school, I was between something like: Do I want to apply to a French department and do literature, or do I want to apply to a Music department and focus on music? Music was the thing I found that I was most passionate about. I play viola, I play chamber music, orchestra music, I had a performance nearly every weekend during undergrad, and so I found that this was very integrated into my daily lifestyle. There’s also the fact that I wrote my honor’s thesis on a 14th century composer – Guillame de Mauchat. I found that, if I applied to a French department, I would be focusing on the literary or linguistic aspect of things exclusively, whereas, if I am in the Music department, I can still focus on that stuff, but I can think about it through the lens of how we hear it. I take Musicology in the broadest sense to be the study of humanly created sounds, whether that be the sound of language or the sound of music. I use that as my guiding principle of my dissertation project, which is at the intersection of linguistics and musicology. I’m talking about a bunch of 13th century music, and thinking about how the language, the spelling, the word-choice, all played into the creation of these pieces of music, and the manuscripts that contained them. So that’s why I chose to enter the Musicology Department. But also, fun fact: I don’t think I learned what the word ‘musicology’ meant until I was a third-year in college. So this is not saying that I grew up as a child saying, “I want to be a Musicologist when I grow up.” You fall into it, kind of more by accident than by choice.
As an undergraduate, you majored in Music, French, and Biology. Describe your experience with such an interdisciplinary course load. I think that we often view STEM and Humanities as two completely separate spheres, but I was wondering if there were ways in which your majors influenced or informed each other?
For one, the idea that the humanities and STEM are separate domains is a very false notion. You need one to think about the other. In STEM, you learn things like the scientific method; you learn how to run experiments and trials without bias or by changing one variable at a time; we know exactly how to pinpoint what is the difference from one experiment to the other; we learn how to put things together without changing the matter that went into it. You learn these principles about our world that seem very abstract when you take them outside of the physical bounds of the chemicals, or the mathematics of what you’re doing in the physics problem. But they teach you about the world in a way that I think is really essential to understanding how humans interact with each other, how humans interact with the spaces we find ourselves in, how we interact with the world, and nature around us. So, in that particular sense in science leading back to the humanities, when you’re trying to think about something like language change over time, you need the scientific method to be able to see where things change, and to see what you think will happen and how you see it playing out.
On the other hand, in science, you need the humanities. I just saw a video which kind of blew my mind. It was a video of an established researcher talking about language learning and bilingualism. She said that ”At this time, we see no significant advantage to being trilingual as opposed to being bilingual.” The point of what she was saying there was that being bilingual allows you to have greater cognitive function, because you’re exercising parts of your brain that don’t work if you’re just thinking of everything in one language all the time. In that case, being trilingual has no advantage. But, when people read things, they’re not likely to think about it only in that context in which it first appeared. They’ll extract that sentence and say, “we have AI. We have Google Translate. We don’t need to be trilingual; bilingual is enough to be intelligent people.” It’s such a flawed statement on so many levels and in so many ways. Being trilingual certainly has benefits, even on the very surface level, you have a whole new culture to interact with. But, to that purely scientific mind, that’s not really a consideration. And so that’s where I see the issue in this divide between the sciences and the humanities.
Certain things do not enter into the conversation of a scientific experiment, because they’re not variables. Because they’re not variables, and not a part of the controlled experiment, the result that comes out seems very myopic, very narrow-minded and narrow-focused. It can only be applicable to one small place and situation. Learning to read the scientific method and what it’s actually trying to tell you allows you to be a better and more informed citizen of the world, even if you’re not going to be thinking about cognitive function every day of your life. You also see this in studies of music. A study might say that if you listen to classical music as a child, you’ll have better cognitive function, or if you learn an instrument you’ll have better mathematic scores. Sure, maybe there is some correlation. But why classical music? Why not a ballad from the 1980s? What choices are you making and why are you making these choices? Sometimes you’ll have scientists who collaborate with humanists, or specialists in the field, and then you’ll get a more nuanced picture coming out of it. But without that collaboration, you may have someone who is operating on a hobby-level, with music: they played the violin in school, and they like XYZ composers, and so they’re going to write a study featuring those three composers. The opacity of the scientific process doesn’t allow you to see into what goes into that person’s mind when they set these variables. And so sometimes, you come out with a result that you question: Why is this the result in the first place? I’ve found that we need to dissolve this artificial boundary between the sciences and the humanities, at least on the level of educating our future generations, because we need both in order to survive.
Can you tell us a bit about your current research?
My current project is looking at 13th century manuscripts of French music. In the Middle Ages, you had a bunch of different languages in which music was written. One would be, of course, Latin, and that tended to be Church music, or music written for important people, because Latin was an educated intelligentsia language. It was the language of the Church, it was the language of the clergy; your education would happen in Latin. Then, in France in particular – and by France I mean the confines of what is modern-day France, and what became the Kingdom of France in the 13th century – at that point in time, in the 12th and 13th century, it was the area which spoke what turned into French, so the Languedoc region of Northern France and the Languedoc regions, or the Occitan-speaking regions in Southwestern France. In Southwestern France there was a tradition of courtly love which was called Troubadour poetry – Troubadour courtly lyric. It was special because it was one of the first European Medieval vernacular poetic traditions that was educated and elegant. It was almost always about love between a knight, a lord, a lady, sometimes between even different social classes, but between the 12th and 14th century, tales of courtly love were all over courtly poetry. It shows up later in Dante, and it’s a very important part of European culture from this time period. So the manuscripts of music that I’m looking at from the 13th century kind of picked up on this topic of courtly love.
The genre of music that I’m looking at is called the motet. And the motet is really weird for a bunch of reasons. The first is that some are written in Latin, but a large majority of them are written in French, or some even in Occitan. This is a vernacular musical poetic genre, which means that you can answer a couple of questions about the French language, rather than the history of the Latin language. So it’s something which allows you to think about the vernacular. But the motet itself as a genre is something that not anyone would listen to on a daily basis anymore, because it has two to three different texts that are sung at the same time. Now what does that mean? Imagine you have one person singing the equivalent of “Joy to the World,” the next person is singing, “We Wish You A Merry Christmas,” and the third person is singing, “Happy Birthday,” all at the same time. How do you understand a word of what’s being sung? There’s of course moments when the two will sing the same word, or even certain vowels or syllables that will line up across texts.
But beyond that, the genre of the motet itself is kind of always in flux and change, from the earliest motet in the 13th century, and of course the genre of the motet continues, but it changes drastically by the end of the 14th century. This two-century time period is where the motet has a very hybrid, very text-heavy (in the sense that it relies on the poetic nature of the text) – as a musical and poetic creation at this time period the motet is very fun and interesting to explore, whether it’s from your classic literary lens – what happens when we put two poems together, and have them read at the same time? What kind of connections can you trace from that? So there’s a lot of scholarship on the different ways we can analyze these poems, and think about the text and how that operates in this larger context of courtly love, and then you also have scholars who have written about the change from courtly love in the 13th century being written about and by people who were engaged themselves in courtly love – so troubadours who were themselves aristocrats – versus by the end of the 13th century, you have courtly love poetry being written by clerics, who are very highly educated, and have learned all of this material, but their day-to-day lives would include things like being a banker, or a bureaucrat – they’re not going to be hiding behind someone’s window and engaging in adulterous affairs.
But one thing that hasn’t been so thoroughly explored, and what I am trying to explore is: if you look at manuscripts from across France, and manuscripts that contain these motets – what’s fun is that manuscript A and manuscript B will often contain some of the same motets. So you have a set canon of motets that appear across different manuscripts. But they each have different spellings of different words, or in some cases, they have different words. The general scholarly consensus on this has been that manuscript culture is not as fixed as print culture, and so, scribes in part A of a country will write according to certain conventions, and just the fact of copying and transmission causes changes, whether or not they’re intentional. And I question this premise a little bit, in that, the way that the scholarly community has tended to be educated on Medieval France has been using one monolithic idea of Old French. But, before the 14th century, people all over France spoke different dialects. In the 13th and 14th centuries, there is no evidence that one of these dialects was more culturally significant than the other. We tend to base our idea of Medieval French on the Parisian dialect. To say that this dialect is our standard, for editing and for thinking about the primacy of each of these texts, is to me a bit of a fallacy.
I’d be interested to hear more about methodology, since musicology is a discipline I’m not very familiar with.
What I am trying to think about, by looking at every manuscript that I can get my hands on and cataloging these textual differences, I am asking: How can we arrive at a more nuanced understanding of the role that dialect played in these manuscripts? Did certain pieces get composed, not in Parisian French, but in Picard, in Walloon, in a different dialect? Does a manuscript that has a lot of influence over a particular dialect – can that end up being our most authoritative source on a particular piece of music, and in that case, what does that mean about the origins of that piece? Another scholarly assumption about this genre is that it has been a largely Parisian phenomenon – that it was created in Paris, and tended to be composed by people in and around Paris. So, the question is: Does that assumption hold, after looking at all these different dialectical and linguistic differences across these manuscripts? Are there pieces which seem to originate from outside of Paris, and not enter the Parisian sphere until much later in their life span of transmission? That’s kind of the basic gist of my dissertation as it stands.
How does this information help people who are outside of musicology, who are not interested in this genre? There’s a couple outlets for that. One is, of course, if you’re an historian of the French language, you want as many sources as you can to tell you about how it was spoken at any given moment, to have a rich set of source text, that also – because of musical notation – tell you more about pronunciation, in how words were broken down, or where syllabic breaks happen. And then, on the other hand, you probably have heard about all the controversy around standard language, in that a standard language does not ever exist. But we have something called the Academie Francais which tells us: this is the correct way to speak the French language. That has its own history dating back to the 17th century. But what if you suddenly realized that the texts we take to be canonical – the standard forming texts of French – they themselves have no standard. So if we implode that assumption, can we be more accepting of linguistic variation in our day-to-day lives? People come speaking a language with different accents, with different variations, with different word choices. In the French education system there’s a whole backlash against using the word wesh, which is a loan word from Arabic, although that word has become so common in the vocabulary of a large number of people, it’s kind of looked down upon as being “not-French” and is constantly corrected in the French education system. But that itself is a form of discrimination against a set of people, who tend to fall within a certain demographic. So linguistic correction can be a form of discrimination.
The implications for this project – even though we’re talking about 800 years ago – I’m hoping that it can help us think a little bit more with an open-mind about things that are happening today. And on the other hand we have AI, which is a language-based model: How are we going to deal with the fact that standard language doesn’t exist, but to create AI we need to input a standard language? It’s a total paradox that is at the base of everything that we’re doing today. It might feel like this project is far off into the distant past – who really cares about how people spoke 1,000 years ago – but I’d say that we have a lot more to care about than that.
I was interested to hear more about the languages you’ve learned over the course of the time you’ve done your research, and if you have any advice for language-learning?
I grew up in a bilingual household, speaking English and Hindi, because my parents are from India. Then, when I was in school, I learned French and majored in French in college. While I was in college, I brought that up to a level where I really felt I could say confidently, “I’m fluent in French.” And then when I was an undergrad I also had to delve into Medieval French. Though it’s the same language, it’s also very different. It’s more different than Shakespeare’s English to modern English – there’s quite a lot of different words, and there’s a different grammatical structure, so you kind of have to sit down and learn it as if it’s another language. Then, in undergrad, I also learned Korean because I was and still am very interested in K-dramas, and K-pop. I actually taught a class last summer, on a lot of songs – from Medieval French, going all the way to K-pop. We talked about songs in every language possible; I think we covered at least 20 languages of lyrics in the course. I’ll speak about that more in a second.
I learned Latin when I came to Berkeley, through the basic Latin sequence. I learned Catalan through the “Catalan for Romance Language Speakers,” course taught at Berkeley. It’s a great course, so I would highly recommend it. The instructor is great. I learned Catalan because I wanted to learn Occitan, but there was only Catalan, and that was sort of my in-road to being able to read a lot of the Troubadour poetry, without reference to someone else’s translation.
Another thing I do a lot is translating poetry, and translating lyrics. It’s as a hobby, but sometimes I have a couple of translations published. There was a poetry translation magazine at UPenn called Double Speak that I was pretty actively involved in. Every time I do my research, I use my own translation – that’s kind of my methodological principle. I don’t rely on someone else’s translation. I will use it to help my own translation, but translations age very quickly – you can write a translation that’s very up-to-the-times of a very esoteric text today, and in five years, that text will seem very out-dated. So there’s that problem, and then there’s also the fact that translation is a very opaque process. Are you translating in order to get the words exactly the same, or are you translating for getting the feeling the same, or keeping the sound the same? A translator has to choose between these three and sometimes four considerations. And so, personally, I find that when I’m translating for content I care about the words more than how it sounds and how it feels. But not everyone has the same objective in mind. You have to be careful about the context for which you are translating. But I’ve found that going back to the source-text as much as possible is actually very enlightening for any kind of research on that particular text.
From Catalan, I learned Italian, and then German. My German is probably my weakest – I visited Germany this past summer, and was very quickly found out to be a non-native German speaker. But in Italian, I think I was able to fool people for long enough in my day-to-day interactions. So, yes, my German is probably my weakest.
I think that’s it: English, French, Hindi, Catalan, Latin, Italian, German. That’s my language-learning journey so far, and of course I hope to study more languages when I get some time. Maybe after I finish my dissertation, I’ll pick up something completely out-of-left-field.
[Read more about Saagar’s language journey and advice here!]
Are there ways in which your hobbies and interests outside of academia influence your academic work?
Of course one of my biggest hobbies is playing the viola. I still play in UC Berkeley’s Symphony Orchestra, and I actually have my viola with me in Paris. Hopefully I find somewhere to play. But that has been, for my entire academic career, a way for me to kind of disconnect from everything that I’m doing. Even though I’m technically a musicologist and writing about music is my bread-and-butter, playing it isn’t. Playing it is a completely different modality of engaging. I find that to be a way for me to kind of plug out from the world, and reset, and be ready to plug back in the next day, in order to do whatever I need to do.
In terms of other hobbies: five years ago, I would have said that I love reading. That’s what made me into an academic in the first place. But when you have to read for a living, it becomes a little bit harder to read for enjoyment. I actually haven’t read very many novels since I got to graduate school. It’s a shame, but my bread-and-butter now is reading and being critical of other peoples’ writing, so I can give it a break for some time while I read academic articles.
I love cooking. I don’t know if that’s a hobby, but I do enjoy putting up a giant feast for whoever comes by. Do I see any connection between that and my work? I mean, cooking can be a way to interact with other cultures, with which you are not familiar. It can be a way to understand, also, the mindset of a particular culture. When you look at Indian cuisine, which is so full of spices, it doesn’t have to be hot-spicy. The idea is that you’re putting together all these different flavors that combine to create a composite whole. That can be telling of a larger tendency in Indian culture, which is packed with so many different peoples, but who themselves identify as Indian or South-Asian in general, and thinking about themselves as a cohesive culture. In French cooking, there’s an emphasis on each and every ingredient’s intrinsic qualities. If you cook a carrot, that carrot has its own taste, and you want to reveal the taste of that carrot through your cooking – you don’t want to hide it with other ingredients. That’s very antithetical to Indian cooking. So there’s this idea of individuality which is baked into the French egalitarian idea of liberty. So, the French individual versus the Indian collective is baked into both the culture and also the cuisine.
For me the take-away is that no matter how mundane your hobbies may be, or how disconnected from your professional life: if you think deeply about things, you can find a way to poeticize it in a way that might give motivation or inspiration to do something. It might help you think about things in a way that you hadn’t before.
I’ve also been wanting to mention that class, because that did come out of my hobbies as well. I really do love listening to K-pop, and I grew up listening to Bollywood love songs, and of course Italian music has so many good songs, even from the 1950’s and before. The only tying thread between the music I selected for my course was not genre, place, country, but the fact that we’re talking about love in some way, shape, or form. That allowed us to talk about some really deep topics, like the role of language in the setting of a song, whether someone thinks about language for its sound or for its semantic meaning, or we even got to talking about gender studies. One thing we talked about with K-pop was the idea of boy-groups and girl-groups, which are construed as hyper-masculine or hyper-feminine, but they broach norms of hetero-normativity in ways that are not really conducive. You can engage with it even if you’re from a different place. The fact that we’re able to talk about, in the same classroom, Medieval French music and Korean pop music from the 21st century, and still be able to find connecting threads, was very impressive. I let the students bring the discussions back at me: it was more discussion based than lecture based. So the fact that my students were able to do that synthetic-based thinking made me really happy.
And we’ve mentioned AI, so I was wondering how you’ve seen AI thus far impacting your scholarship, and how you think it will impact the future generations of scholars?
In terms of a direct impact on my scholarship, I haven’t seen anything yet. I work in such a niche field, so there’s very few texts that have been fed into AI that can help me personally. That doesn’t mean that it can’t be a tool for writing. I personally have a fluency in the English language, but for someone who’s coming from a different country, whose main language is, say, Chinese, and they want to write an English-language paper, AI can be a huge help in trying to help them land their work in journals outside of Chinese-speaking areas. That can be one really great way that we’re opening the doors of scholarly divides across countries. Another way is if you’re reading a paper in a language you’re not very familiar with, you could feed it into AI and say, “Can you summarize this for me?” AI is generally quite good at summarizing information. It’s harder to say that actual research could be done with AI, at this stage of its development, because the way it’s built is not really based on giving you factual information. It’s kind of going back and forth with the conversion of words and ideas into symbols, and I’m not a computer person so I can’t explain it beyond that, but the fact that when you ask something like, “How many r’s are in a strawberry?” because of the way it feeds information back and forth, it will tell you two and not three. I find that can be a very big trap: if you’re trying to find factual information, you might get 80% factual information, but because you’re equally unaware about what is correct as AI, you cannot vet what information is correct.
So don’t use AI for fact-searching because it’s not quite there yet. But if you want to use AI for synthesis, translation, re-wording – that’s a place where it can become very useful in this stage.
Going to the larger implications of where this could lead: large database cataloging digital humanities is something that can be very useful in the study of music which thinks about Medieval French dialects, because there has not been a very comprehensive catalog study of French dialects apart from the Old French, which is Parisian, and one or two other dialects. So something like that can be very helpful, and can allow scholars to look at, say, two different versions of texts at the same time. Making manuscripts more accessible is a place where the digital humanities can intervene. But I don’t see AI revamping or significantly changing what I’m currently doing.
Finally, what book would you recommend to everyone reading this interview?
I’m in Paris, and on the plane to Paris I read a quite heart-touching book. It was a very quick and easy read, but it also made me bawl my eyes out on the plane. It’s called The Paris Daughter by Kristen Harmel. It’s about an American expat in Paris during World War II, and is about some of the trials and tribulations she goes through. I would recommend it.