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This chapter explores the sound of medieval Paris as a sonic backdrop to the motet. It takes three case studies of representations of the city dating from the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century: the Vie de Saint-Denis manuscript; Guillot de Paris’s Dit des rues de Paris; Guillaume de Villeneuve’s Crieries de Paris. While previous scholars have focused on the visual representation of the city, this chapter listens to their conjuring of sound. It argues that the hubbub of the marketplace, urban clatter, and sacred chant provide an audible foil to the hubbub of the polytextual motet.

Street cries had long defined the ambiance of Paris in the nineteenth century. From the Middle Ages through to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, street cries were used by hawkers to publicize announcements or news and to sell merchandise of all kinds. Each trade had a distinctive cry, a combination of words and a characteristic tune, such that buyers could identify each peddler by a sound marker. The peddling sounds of the streets constituted shared memories that evoked childhood and fostered a sense of place for Parisians. A nostalgic longing for better days combined with the antiquarian's interest in Old Paris also motivated efforts to document and preserve traces of sounds perceived as having survived through the ages, but now at risk of disappearing. This chapter traces street criers' functions as noisemakers, place-makers, and “sound souvenirs,” in the musical, graphic, and textual traditions of the Cris de Paris.

Street Songs, based on the Clarendon Lectures for 2016, is about the use made by poets and novelists of street songs and cries. Karlin begins with the London street-vendor’s cry of ‘Cherry-ripe!’, as it occurs in poems from the sixteenth to the twentieth century: the ‘Cries of London’ (and Paris) exemplify the fascination of this urban art to writers of every period. Focusing on nineteenth and early twentieth-century writers, the book traces the theme in works by William Wordsworth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Walt Whitman, George Gissing, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust. As well as street cries, these writers incorporate ballads, folk-songs, religious and political songs, and songs of their own invention into crucial scenes, and the singers themselves range from a one-legged beggar in Dublin to a famous painter in fifteenth-century Florence. The book concludes with the beautiful and unlikely ‘song’ of a knife-grinder’s wheel. Throughout the book Karlin emphasizes the rich complexity of his subject. The street singer may be figured as an urban Orpheus, enchanting the crowd and possessed of magical powers of healing and redemption; but the barbaric din of the modern city is never far away, and the poet who identifies with Orpheus may also dread his fate. And the fugitive, transient nature of song offers writers a challenge to their more structured art. Overheard in fragments, teasing, ungraspable, the street song may be ‘captured’ by a literary work but is never, finally, tamed.

This chapter discusses the onset of the Great Depression and the rise of the singing commercial or radio jingle. It begins by discussing the precursors of the radio jingle: street cries, sales pitches in verse, and sheet music advertising. It then explores the emergence of the radio jingle before World War II. The chapter also describes some popular jingles that were recorded during this period.