After a bit of a break from blogging, I’m pleased to note the publication a new piece that I wrote about vocal stereotypes and epistemologies of song in the late middle ages, with particular reference to Italian musical culture. “Howling like wolves, bleating like lambs: Singers and discourse of animality in the late middle ages” marks a new thread of scholarship for me in which I have become increasing interested in the ways that song is represented in the late middle ages. By this I mean how the practice of singing and the singing voice is described and conceptualised by contemporary writers, and indeed how composers make use of these ideas and attitudes in their compositions. My curiosity was sparked by a reference to the singing voices of the Mongols in the travel writings of a thirteenth-century author. (This line of enquiry has also lead to other fields of investigation, discussed briefly here.) This lead me to consider how other authors described the voices of singers of particular nations in often unflattering ways. (I intentionally steered clear of more “generic” descriptions that have been discussed by other scholars in great detail.) Well, from there I dug deeper into various epistemologies of song and poetry—principally in an Italian and humanist context—to reveal the depth of attitudes to singing voices from the thirteenth- to mid-sixteenth century, with a particular emphasis on the way that some poets sometimes described themselves as animals or even used an anthropomorphised animal voice as a poetic voice in their poetry. This led me to reconsider a few of the most puzzling songs from the mid-fourteenth century created by Italian composers, most likely around Florence. A good dose of Dante was also in order: this foray into Dante scholarship was both thrilling but also intimidating. In short, this is big picture scholarship that tries to map some ideas about the singing voice in the late middle ages (which I take as late as c.1550), although it ends by discussing some very particular musical works from the fourteenth century. Continue reading “Vocal stereotypes in the late middle ages”
Category: Scholarship
Digital Humanities and Medieval Music
Last week (19–21 March 2014) I attended the 2nd Digital Humanities Australasia Conference “Expanding Horizons” at the University of Western Australia, Perth (Australia). The content of the conference certainly expanded my horizons, demonstrating the current vibrancy of the digital humanities (DH) in Australia. Between the torrent of “show and tell” presentations about new and existing DH projects, fascinating but geeky information about metadata standards, data conservation and database design, there were interesting papers concerning including Anthony F. Beavers’s keynote on Computational Philosophy and digital humanities as an more efficient extension of existing research methodologies and tools, and Toby Burrows on what I would call the epistemic foundations of current approaches in digital humanities in earlier philosophy, mathematics and socio-economic history. Music research had a modest but healthy representation at the conference, with one entire session devoted to “Music” (in which we presented) and several other papers on music and closely related topics scattered through out the program. Continue reading “Digital Humanities and Medieval Music”
Where did the Caron Website go?
From the end of the 2004 to mid 2006, I developed with Dr Rex Eakins a website devoted to the music of the often under-appreciated fifteenth-century composer Caron (musicologists still aren’t absolute sure whether the composer’s first name was Firminus or Philippe, although a recent discovery by Rob C. Wegman firmly favours the former). With a recent update to the University of New England’s content management systems, to our surprise the Caron Website vanished, possibly due to it antiquated HTML format.
Despair not gentle reader. There are plans to resurrect and update the Caron Website in the near future. However, anyone who misses our synthesised recordings of Caron’s music and editions of his music, the entire site has been archived on archive.org.
Of course, there have been some significant recordings of Caron’s music since we embarked upon our website. The Sound and Fury‘s recordings of most of Caron’s works is the most notable, although we would not claim that our website had anything to do with this.
The Illuminator of Mod A
At last my article on the illuminator of the important early fifteenth-century music manuscript Modena, Biblioteca Estense Universitaria, ms. α.M.5.24, also known as Mod A has been published in the Journal of Musicology. I am little proud of this article since it is the result of several years of research and makes what I think is an important contribution to music history’s understanding of this manuscript, well at least part of it. I’m also humbled by the fact it benefited from considerably from comments and insightful reviews for several scholars. This article is by no means the end of the story when it comes to Mod A, its illuminator and this manuscript’s origin. Instead I hope that it will provoke other scholars to revisit this manuscript and indeed my conclusions. The reference and abstract for the article is as follows:
Stoessel, Jason. “Arms, a Saint and Inperial Sedendo fra più stelle: The Illuminator of Mod A.” Journal of Musicology 31/1 (2014): 1–42.
Scholars have proposed Milan, Pisa and/or Bologna as possible locations for the copying of the inner gatherings (II–IV) of the manuscript Modena, Biblioteca Estense Universitaria, α.M.5.24 (Mod A) and have argued that some of the compositions might have originated in the circle of Archbishop of Milan Pietro Filargo. Yet evidence based on Mod A’s repertory and the scant biographies of its composers is insufficient for determining the manuscript’s origin. To solve this problem, I look at Mod A as a cultural artifact, attributing its illumination to the Master of 1411, an illuminator active in Bologna from 1404 to 1411, or to his assistant, both associated with the manuscript workshop of the Olivetan abbey of San Michele in Bosco, on the outskirts of medieval Bologna. The Master of 1411 might have been Giacomo da Padova, an illuminator documented there between 1407 and 1409. Iconographical analysis shows that the illuminator of Mod A possessed considerable knowledge of Paduan culture before the fall of the ruling Carrara family in 1405. This knowledge is apparent in his use of an astrological allusion to Carrara heraldry in his decoration of the song Inperial sedendo. His illumination of a Gloria by Egardus with the figure of Saint Anthony of Padua implies a familiarity with Padua’s musical institutions. Mod A may have been illuminated when the papal entourage of John XXIII visited San Michele in Bosco in the fall of 1410, although further compositions were added after the illuminator had finished his work. This conclusion invites scholars to consider afresh the social context that might have fostered the compilation of the repertory in the inner gatherings of Mod A.
The University of California Press has granted me permission to post a copy of my article on my personal website. Click here to download a copy of this article strictly for your own personal study. (Warning: links to an 8 MB PDF.) Any further use or redistribution of this file is not permitted.
![Saint Anthony of Padua Reading by Cosimo Tura [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](https://jjstoessel.blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/cosmc3a8_tura_-_st_anthony_of_padua_reading_-_wga23151.jpg?w=656)
Scribes and Editors at Work and at Play
Last month I was very pleased to receive an offprint of a chapter of mine that develops and expands on a paper that I originally gave at the Early Music Editing: Principles, Techniques, and Future Directions conference held in Utrecht, 3-5 July, 2008. The abstract of the original paper read:
This paper seeks to establish a prima facie case for a new edition of the repertoire of music from the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century which is today referred to as the music of the ars subtilior. Although most of this body of compositions has been published in monumental editions in the 1970s and 1980s, these editions leave much to be desired both as sources of further scholarly enquiry and also as editions to be used for performance. This paper will detail some of the existing problems of published editions (including misreadings, errors, incomplete realisations) and how they might be avoided in a future edition using new technologies. In particular it will focus on cases within the scribal record of the ars subtilior that embody significant variants, including erasures representing scribal revision and/or scribal alteration of notational process. The emerging paradigms embodied by new technologies offer significant opportunities to move beyond Lachmannian and Bédierian theories of text criticism to principles of editing which preserve multiple local variants and empowers readers with a choice of readings.
Howling and Barking in Oxford
The last few months have been a flurry of activity and travel during which I was visitor at the University of Oxford. As I race towards Rome at 250 kilometres per hour on a Frecciarossa train on the last leg of my travels in Europe with Christmas just around the corner, I find myself reflecting on my time as International Research Visitor in the Balzan Programme in Musicology “Towards a Global History of Music”. After he received the Balzan Prize for his service to Musicology in 2012, Reinhard Strohm established the Balzan Programme in Musicology, 2013 to 2016. The goal of this excellent project, whose nature is global in scope, is to bring together mid-career music historians working on topics that will contribute to the research question of how might musicology in the 21st century move towards a global history of music. The discipline of musicology has been traditionally Eurocentric in its orientation, although there are many notable histories of musics of other peoples of the world written by Europeans or those from a European-based culture. Even as I write these words, I am struck by the difficulty with which I might begin to describe music history outside or—more importantly—in concert with European music. The very fact that I have resorted to the adjective “other” hints at some of the difficulties. Continue reading “Howling and Barking in Oxford”
Italian Benedictine Polyphonists c.1400
Two weeks ago I attended and presented a paper at the “Sources of Identity: Makers, Owners and Users of Music Sources before 1600” conference that Lisa Colton and Tim Shephard convened at the University of Sheffield, 4-6 October 2013. I’d just hopped off a long-haul international flight from Australia and had made my way north to Sheffield using England’s rather slow and not cheap train system, so my memory of the first day was a bit patchy. Continue reading “Italian Benedictine Polyphonists c.1400”
Johannes Ciconia’s “Merçe o morte” (with a free transcription)
Johannes Ciconia’s Merçe o morte is an extraordinary example of early fifteenth-century song. Several features set it apart, including the repetition of affective words using short melodic motifs, its extremely economical use of musical material, and indeed its immediate appeal to many listeners today. Continue reading “Johannes Ciconia’s “Merçe o morte” (with a free transcription)”
Barbarian Voices: The Role of Song in Encounters between European and Asian Cultures
I have been fortunate enough to have been offered and to have accepted a prestigious International Research Visitorship in the Balzan Programme in Musicology “Towards a Global History of Music” led by Professor Reinhard Strohm. I will be joining Professor Strohm at The University of Oxford for the last few months of this year to undertake a project looking at “The role of the singing voice and concepts of song in encounters between Latin, Persian and Mongol cultures during the time of the Mongol Empire, 1206–1368”. My interest in this area of research has grown over the last year or two after I discovered some interesting accounts of thirteenth-century Mongol singing made by Franciscan and Dominican missionaries. Rather than dismiss their unfavourable judgements of Mongol singing as statements made out of prejudice or ignorance, I set about deconstructing these statements by looking at how Latins from the West also described each other singing “badly”. I found some interesting parallels, and these will be published soon in a leading journal in Medieval Studies (yay! my first article for medievalists in general!). Although these early accounts only reveal small pieces of information about Mongol culture in the thirteenth century, they shed considerable light on how Latins who are not music theorists thought about music. Continue reading “Barbarian Voices: The Role of Song in Encounters between European and Asian Cultures”
Late Medieval Notational Identity
Earlier in the month, my paper “The Notational Identity of Late Medieval Composers and Their Scribes” was read at the Medieval and Renaissance Music Conference at the Centro Studi sull’Ars Nova Italiana del Trecento, Certaldo (Italy) as part of a Panel session convened by Karen Cook (Assistant Professor, University of Hartford) on “Theory and Notational Practice(s) in the Fourteenth Century”. Unfortunately I was unable to attend the conference to deliver the paper in person, and I am most grateful to Karen Cook for volunteering to read it in my absence. I was, however, able to answer questions “remotely” over Skype after the reading of my paper, a novel if not “exhilarating” experience. Continue reading “Late Medieval Notational Identity”
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