For the past month or two I have been writing a grant proposal for a detailed study of late medieval music writing (or notation). Beside the obvious aim of attempting to secure funding for future research, grant writing is often a useful for focusing one’s ideas about research and also identifying those fundamental problems that lay at the heart of one’s field. Here I reflect on one of those problems. Continue reading “Towards a new taxonomy of medieval music writing? Part 1”
Category: Music Palaeography
Unusual signs and Angevin politics
In early 2006 I sent a draft piece examining some unusual examples of notation in some polyphonic songs from around 1400 to colleagues Yolanda Plumley and Anne Stone. To my pleasant surprise, Plumley and Stone invited me to contribute to their collection of essays on the famous Chantilly Codex. Most of the chapters in this collection originated at a conference held in mid September 2001 at Tours, France. It was much to my disappointment that I wasn’t able to attend this conference. On the other hand, a three-month sojourn earlier in the year researching in various European libraries had consumed most of my energy, resources and the patience of those I had to leave behind in Australia. Continue reading “Unusual signs and Angevin politics”
‘Looking Back’ in 2010
In August last year my long-gestated article on a curious case of notational complexity from the last quarter of the fifteenth century was published in Music & Letters. Almost a decade ago, Rex Eakins brought to my attention a fascinating piece of musical notation in a early choirbook from the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel (the manuscript is now in the Apostolic Library at the Vatican). Continue reading “‘Looking Back’ in 2010”
Jason Stoessel's Research Blog 