Loves Refrain

A magical Time Travel Romance, inspired by the cult classic, Somewhere In Time, sweeps readers from 1947 and beyond. Present Day, Katherine ‘Kat’ Monroe, a celebrated jazz singer, is just ending her first national tour when she meets an elderly stranger who gifts her a locket with a mysterious message tucked inside. Through a series of events, Kat stumbles upon a strange portal in the theater and is suddenly transported to the postwar community of her beloved town…1947. Kat is thrust into the intrigues of a world that threatens her career and may break her heart. Navigating her way amid risk, passion, and jealousy, she learns her only chance of understanding what has happened lies in Phillip Gordon, a handsome young pianist. What begins in curiosity becomes an urgent need. Kat finds herself torn between two very different versions of Phillip, in two contrasting worlds, one of whom will have to die before the other can fully live again. Love’s Refrain is Book One in The Stardust Duet - a melodic tale about a man’s devotion, the woman tempting fate to save him, and a bond that transcends time itself.

Drew Dawes’s life revolves around fantasy. She’s the geeky owner of a comic book store, cosplays at conventions, and loves her superheroes. Her life is a million miles away from the one her parents envisioned for her as a musical prodigy. They expected fame, fortune, and headlining the stages in Nashville. Drew never wanted the life they forced onto her as a child, and their deaths changed her world forever. Since then, the songs in Drew’s heart are silent. Wren Banderas has her career planned out in minute detail. Becoming head chef at a very popular restaurant is just another step closer to her biggest dream: a restaurant bearing her own name. Her star is rising, yet self-doubt plagues her. Drew and Wren couldn’t be more different, but each still carries wounds from the past. Falling in love was never part of the plan, but they just need each other to heal and make their dreams come true.

A survey of the use of the refrain in thirteenth and fourteenth-century French music and poetry, showing how it was skilfully deployed to assert the validity of the vernacular. The relationship between song quotation and the elevation of French as a literary language that could challenge the cultural authority of Latin is the focus of this book. It approaches this phenomenon through a close examination of the refrain, a short phrase of music and text quoted intertextually across thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century musical and poetic genres. The author draws on a wide range of case studies, from motets, trouvère song, plays, romance, vernacular translations, and proverb collections, to show that medieval composers quoted refrains as vernacular auctoritates; she argues that their appropriation of scholastic, Latinate writing techniques workedto authorize Old French music and poetry as media suitable for the transmission of knowledge. Beginning with an exploration of the quasi-scholastic usage of refrains in anonymous and less familiar clerical contexts, the book goeson to articulate a new framework for understanding the emergence of the first two named authors of vernacular polyphonic music, the cleric-trouvères Adam de la Halle and Guillaume de Machaut. It shows how, by blending their craftwith the writing practices of the universities, composers could use refrain quotation to assert their status as authors with a new self-consciousness, and to position works in the vernacular as worthy of study and interpretation. Jennifer Saltzstein is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Oklahoma.