Medieval Song Network

Dear colleagues,

During the last six years I have worked on a web project, The Copenhagen Chansonnier and the ‘Loire Valley’ chansonniers. An open access project. Its first stage is now completed and can be accessed at:

http://chansonniers.pwch.dk/

The web site contains new editions of all the polyphonic songs in the French 15th century chansonnier in The Royal Library, Copenhagen, MS Thott 291 8° (the so-called Copenhagen chansonnier). Each song is here edited as a ‘performance on paper’ according to the manuscript, and all the concordances in the related ‘Loire Valley’ chansonniers are edited in a similar way. Each song is accompanied by a list of sources, an edition of the poem(s), incl. English translation, links to online facsimile editions, and extensive comments on sources, texts and music. The site further contains detailed descriptions of the five chansonniers and proposes hypotheses concerning their genesis and dating; the latter is summarized in the introduction, which also discusses the principles of the edition.

Furthermore, the site offers supplementary materials, which serve to support the investigation of the repertory. They comprise articles and editions concerning the composers Gilles Mureau (complete works), Philippe Basiron (complete chansons) and Fede alias Jean Sohier, about the French music manuscript Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana, Ms. 2794, about chansons notated in ‘clefless notation’, etc.

With the hope that a few members of the community of musicologists will find some items of interest on the site,

I send my best wishes to all

Peter Woetmann Christoffersen
Emeritus associate professor, dr.phil.
Department of Arts and Cultural Studies,
Musicology Section
University of Copenhagen
Karen Blixensvej 1
DK-2300 Copenhagen S
Denmark

Homepage: www.pwch.dk

A brief note and analysis of the relationship between the rondel from Guillaume de Machaut's Fonteinne Amoureuse and the ballade Loange 17 ("Ou pais ou ma dame maint").

This three-day event at the British Academy on 21–23 June 2012, organized by Raluca Radulescu (Bangor University: r.radulescu@bangor.ac.uk) and Margaret Connolly (University of St Andrews; mc29@st-andrews.ac.uk), brought together medievalists from different linguistic areas including Middle English, Middle Welsh, Anglo-Norman, Middle Scots and Medieval Irish with the purpose of investigating vernacular manuscript miscellanies from the period 1300–1550. There were three plenary sessions, twenty-one papers and a round-table discussion. Between them these addressed four key concerns: terminology; accessibility; editing; reception and use. Attention was also given to tracing interactions between literary and non-literary texts in miscellanies, and to evidence of exchange between different communities, including dialogue across various political borders. In the first plenary session Wendy Scase (University of Birmingham) spoke about the dangers of labelling volumes as ‘miscellanies’ using as a particular example British Library Additional 37787; she argued that the term ‘miscellany’ which has commonly been applied to this manuscript has misled scholars into making assumptions about its provenance and circumstances of production. In the second plenary session Ad Putter (University of Bristol) discussed multilingual miscellanies, focusing on those which combine a mixture of English and French texts, particularly of the romance and lyric genres. In the third plenary session Ceridwen Lloyd Morgan (Bangor University and Cardiff University) discussed Welsh miscellanies, arguing that from the later medieval period multi-text codices were far more common than single-text manuscripts, and showing that multilingualism was common in surviving volumes from Wales and the Marches. These plenaries and the seven paper sessions between them provoked much vibrant discussion, particularly on the vexed topic of definitions: a request for a more accurate use of terms such as ‘commonplace book’ was voiced by Andrew Taylor. Another topic which provoked much debate was how to make miscellany volumes available to a wider readership (including students and non-specialists): the merits and feasibility of editing the ‘whole book’ rather than individual texts, and the benefits of producing digitized facsimiles or editions, were issues that arose several times during discussion.

Ensemble Leones' second album (director: Marc Lewon) was published with NAXOS this year in January and is dedicated to the earliest surviving fragment of Neidhart songs with melodies (the "Frankfurt Neidhart-Fragment", c1300) - arguably even amongst the earliest transmission of minnesang music. It is the world-premiere recording of the complete contents of this source, containing 6 (partly fragmentary) Neidhart songs with a song by Walther von der Vogelweide and one by the "Tugendhafte Schreiber" thrown into the bargain.
The NAXOS website also provides the liner notes as well as a free PDF download of all sung texts with modern German and English translations.
About the CD.

International conference, Bruges, 25-27 April 2013

Organised by Musea Brugge, the Dutch Royal Library The Hague and Radboud University Nijmegen
In the frame of the exhibition, ‘The Gruuthuse manuscript’, March 22nd – June 23rd, 2013, Bruges, Bruggemuseum-Gruuthuse, in collaboration with the Dutch Royal Library The Hague and Radboud University
 
The Gruuthuse manuscript was compiled in Bruges around 1396-1408. It is a highlight in Middle-Dutch literature as well as being an important source of information about late-medieval urban culture in the Netherlands. In addition to prayers and poems the manuscript includes the oldest known collection of songs with a musical notation in the Low Countries: songs of courtly and uncourtly love, songs of fellowship and religious songs or hymns. The manuscript largely owes its reputation to this unique and large collection of songs. Lodewijk van Gruuthuse (c. 1427-1492), a counsellor of the Dukes of Burgundy and a bibliophile, (may have possibly) owned the manuscript, which remained in private hands for several centuries. It was included in the collection of the Dutch Royal Library The Hague (NL) in 2007.
The Gruuthuse manuscript is the starting point and the main theme of an exhibition at the Bruggemuseum-Gruuthuse. After a brief introduction about the manuscript (who owned it, its discovery, its content, and its
reception) and the city of Bruges c. 1400 the exhibition goes on to examine a number of themes broached by the manuscript: music, love, art, fellowship and devotion. The conference will reprise these themes as the starting point for an international and multidisciplinary approach to (urban) culture in North-western Europe in the early fifteenth century.
A number of plenary sessions will start with a multidisciplinary examination of the (cultural) space in which compilations such as the Gruuthuse manuscript existed, of the technical study of the manuscript and its results for the various disciplines and of music and literature around 1400. Parallel sessions will then elaborate on specific aspects of the aforementioned disciplines. New insights in terms of history, art history, literature and musicology will be explained and developed during this conference.
Call for papers
The organisers are launching a call for papers for the parallel sessions. Speakers shall have 20 minutes for their lecture, followed by a 10-minute discussion with the participants. Proposals in the form of a summary
of max. 250 words should reach inge.geysen@brugge.be at the latest by May 25th, 2012. The proposal shall also mention the speaker’s name, discipline and affiliation as well as the language in which the lecture shall
be given. The conference language is Dutch but lectures may also be given in French, English or German. The conference committee shall notify its decision at the latest on June 30th, 2012.
 
The lecture shall be included in a conference publication to which all participants can subscribe upon registration.
Speakers at the parallel sessions shall be offered the dinner on the opening evening and the conference publication free of charge
 
Conference committee:
Conference committee
• Prof. Dr. Jos Koldeweij, Radboud University Nijmegen (NL)
• Dr. Ad Leerintveld, Dutch Royal Library, The Hague (NL)
• Dr. Nele Gabriëls, Alamire Foundation – K.U. Leuven (B)
• Dr. Pieter Mannaerts, Alamire Foundation – K.U. Leuven (B)
• Prof. Dr. Johan Oosterman, Radboud University Nijmegen (NL)
• Dr. Manfred Sellink, Director Musea Brugge (B)
• Ludo Vandamme, Historic Fund Public Library Bruges (B)
• Prof. Dr. Frank Willaert, University of Antwerp (B)
• Inge Geysen, Bruggemuseum, Bruges (B)
• Eva Tahon, Bruggemuseum, Bruges (B)
• Katelijne Vertongen, Bruggemuseum, Bruges (B)
 
Organisers:
 
• Jos Koldeweij, Radboud University Nijmegen
• Ad Leerintveld, Dutch Royal Library, The Hague
 
 More information? Mail inge.geysen@brugge.be

Ontologies of Medieval Song (OoMS)
 
 
The materials of medieval song are multiply fragmented and distributed, and research in this field often consists in the painstaking reconstruction of networks of relationship that are regularly obscured both by the nature of the songs' preservation, and by the disciplinary boundaries of the modern academy. Ruptures permeate the field: for instance, song texts very often survive in written form separated from their musical settings, texts and melodies borrowed freely from pre-existing poetic and musical materials but may now display no hint of such relationships, and the shared origins of songs may be obscured by the accidents of scribal and manuscript circulation from place to place. Many songs survive in fragmentary and variable form, very frequently preserved not in dedicated songbooks but as isolated exceptions, separated from their performance and compositional contexts. Moreover, research in the field is carried out separately by scholars of literature and of music, and related research in still more disciplines (such as manuscript studies, art history, liturgy and sermon studies, dialectology and so on) very often produces results of value to the scholar of medieval song. Such a situation is ripe not only for interdisciplinary collaboration, but especially for computer-driven research methodologies, that present the capacity for multi-modal and cross-platform strategies for the search, analysis and annotation of information.    
 
The aim of this project is to generate a computer-based environment to support the distributed annotation, exploration, and search of medieval songs. It will take the form of an open-architecture hub, drawing its data – by means of semantic web technologies – from the many different datasets already in existence, and presenting the scholar with the possibility (for the first time) of deploying specially-designed computational algorithms for analysing large quantities of data in textual, audio and visual media.
 
This exciting and ambitious project will be run from UCL (Departments of English and Computer Science) and RHUL (Music). We envisage three full-time doctoral or post-doctoral Research Assistants, from Literature, Music and Computer Science respectively, to work as a team but also independently on their own research. We invite expressions of interest from any suitable candidates and ask them to get in touch. The specific aims of the project will naturally depend on individual applicants and their skills and interests, so we would like to instigate conversations about possible research ideas and aims in the near future.
 
Please get in touch with either Professor Ardis Butterfield (a.butterfield@ucl.ac.uk), Dr Helen Deeming (Helen.Deeming@rhul.ac.uk) or Dr Nicolas Gold (n.gold@ucl.ac.uk).
 

This research working group for 2011-2012 is sponsored by the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto. The group will explore cultural contacts in the medieval and early modern world through an examination of the musical instrument variously known as al-ud, le lut, alaude, the lutte. >>Travels of the Lute.

Les fantaisies de Josquin - The Instrumental Music of Josquin Desprez
The first CD-publication by Ensemble Leones (director: Marc Lewon) has just been released on the Christophorus label. It features instrumental compositions by Josquin Desprez as well as the world premiere recording of Arvo Pärt's composition "Sei gelobt, du Baum" ("Be praised, oh tree"). Information on the CD, the tracklist, as well as unpublished trivia see under this link: About the CD

Klankbord– Newsletter for Ancient and Medieval Music, no. 10, has been published: www.klankbordsite.nl

On Saturday March 26th the annual Plainsong and Medieval Music Society conference was held at the Barber Institute in Birmingham, hosted by Mary O’Neill. The symposium, entitled ‘From Text to Performance: Medieval Vernacular Song in the 21st Century’, brought together performers, musicologists, and textual scholars. John Potter outlined the possibilities and challenges facing singers of medieval music today and Benjamin Bagby explored the reconstruction of performances of medieval texts, singing excerpts from Beowulf, accompanying himself on a six-stringed harp. Peter Ricketts offered some philological insights on Occitan poetry while Mary O’Neill surveyed musical issues in Old French, Occitan, and Galican-Portugese song. There were also two papers focused principally on polyphony: Ian Rumbold discussed the creation of sacred contrafacta for secular polyphony in the St Emmeram Codex and Uri Smilansky highlighted the aural and expressive effect of complex technical procedures in ars subtilior motets.

 I attach a pdf of a flyer from Cornell University Press for my 2011 book on Guillaume de Machaut. The flyer offers a 20% discount if you enter the code CAU6 on the form. Details about the book can be found at  www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf

Video of a lecture given in Cambridge on 11 Feb 2011. Includes discussion of the song of the sirens, liturgical chant, and Machaut's songs. Click here to link to this resource.

On Wednesday 19th January, Helen Deeming and Margaret Connolly presented papers in Newcastle's Medieval and Early Modern Studies series. Both papers concerned manuscripts as witnesses to medieval devotional practices: Helen explored a thirteenth-century pastoral miscellany in which 15 songs are preserved, and Margaret discussed a fifteenth-century Middle English dream-vision, in which psalms and prayers are interpolated. Our hosts, Magnus Williamson (Music) and Henrike Lähnemann (German), as well as the members of the audience, shared useful perspectives drawn from late medieval English and German manuscripts. Henrike's work charting vernacular song in medieval Germany is described here, and descriptions of various Newcastle projects involving textual editing, including Magnus's plans for online digital editions of early English church music can be found here.

A recording of Professor Ardis Butterfield's inaugural lecture, 'The Origins of English Song', is now available through iTunes, by clicking on this link.