Some insights into late medieval music notation

~ Jason Stoessel ~ 4 Comments

As 2012 draws to a close, it pleases me to learn that the journal Early Music has published my article examining an anonymous late fourteenth-century song, Aÿ, mare, amice mi care. This Latin rondeau was discovered among an odd assortment of music fragments by Mark Everist just a few years ago but until now has not been satisfactorily transcribed nor its notation discussed. Thanks to the generosity of Oxford University Press, I am able to provide readers of my blog with a free-access URL to my article for their personal use only. The details of the article are as follows:

Jason Stoessel, ‘Revisiting Ay, mare, amice mi care: insights into late medieval music notation’, Early Music 40/3 (2012): 455-468. doi: 10.1093/em/cas101. Free access links: PDF or HTML.

Continue reading “Some insights into late medieval music notation” →

Redemption and the “Missa L’Ardant desir”

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Recently I have been thinking again about the Missa L’Ardant desir, an anonymous polyphonic mass that was at the centre of a previous piece of research on the use of unusual signs in fifteenth-century music notation. The remarkable Confiteor from the Credo of this mass is but one of a number of distinctive features in this mass. Like many polyphonic settings of the Ordinary of the Mass from the middle of the fifteenth century (or slightly later, perhaps the 1460s, in the case of the Missa L’Ardant desir) this setting repeatedly uses a preexistent tune, mostly in the Tenor, throughout its settings of the five items of the Ordinary of the Mass, the Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus and Agnus dei. This preexistent tune, called the cantus firmus meaning ‘the fixed song’, could be drawn from either a liturgical chant (a chant sung in the Mass or the Holy Office) or a secular song, both courtly and also popular street songs. In the case of the L’Ardant desir melody, there is no surviving court song that corresponds to the L’Ardant desir text incipit or melody used in the Mass, although the tenor survives in two settings (nos. 133 and 134) from the Buxheimer Organ Book, a mid-fifteenth century book of early organ or keyboard tablature now in the Bavarian Library at Munich. Continue reading “Redemption and the “Missa L’Ardant desir”” →

Book review: Citation, Intertextuality and Memory

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Readers of this blog might be interested in a recent review I was asked to write for the Medieval Review,  an online endeavour that publishes reviews on recent books in medieval studies including music.

TMR 12.08.04, Plumley, ed., Citation, Intertextuality and Memory in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Jason Stoessel) Continue reading “Book review: Citation, Intertextuality and Memory” →

Armchair philology – Musical treasures from the Austrian National Library

~ Jason Stoessel ~ 11 Comments

Philology—the study of early texts, their meaning and how they have been passed down through the ages—has has traditionally consisted of researchers chasing after books and manuscripts scattered throughout libraries and archives. I use the adverb “traditionally” with some irony since for some time now researchers have done much of their work sitting at a desk (or occasionally in an armchair) pouring over facsimiles, photographic images on 35 millimetre microfilm, and increasingly digital images on a computer’s screen, of original sources. Researchers are spending less time with the original manuscripts. Although it is important that archivists maintain access to the original sources, it is also important that these sources are conserved for future generations. There are many music manuscripts that have been the subject of intense scrutiny over the last century, and between their handling by scholars and sometimes fraught attempts at conservation by their owners, the condition and legibility of these sources has noticeably declined. Though I am inclined to give examples, I won’t because that would give the impression that I am censuring particular individuals, libraries or archives. The reality is that time has simply taken its toll on these books.

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Recording Review: Le Ray au soleil

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Le Ray au soleil: Musica alla corte pavese dei Visconti (1360-1402)
La Fonte Musica, Michele Pasotti, dir. ORF « Alte Musik » SACD 3124 [SACD hybrid], 2011.

Although I don’t intend to make it a regular habit, this month I have decided to review a recent recording of medieval songs from around the year 1400. Late last year, Michele Pasotti kindly sent me a copy of the first CD issued by his ensemble la fonte musica, “Le Ray au soleil” (The Ray of the Sun). As other writing projects have been cleared out of the way, I am now in a position to return this favour in one of the few ways I can and provide a brief review on this recording. Naturally, I write without fear or favour, as a musicologist who has engaged in and taught critical listening for several years, and someone who is fairly familiar with recordings of this late medieval music from the last thirty years or so. Continue reading “Recording Review: Le Ray au soleil” →

Towards a new taxonomy of medieval music writing? Part 1

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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” →

A new composition by Denis Le Grant?

~ Jason Stoessel ~ 2 Comments

A new colour digitisation of a fascinating musical fragment from the last quarter of the 14th century has provided new evidence for assigning another composition to one of that century’s most famous, but today little known, composers. The fragment is found in the the western manuscripts collection in Bibliothèque Nationale de France (hereafter BNF), under the shelf number NAF 23190. Music historians often refer to this manuscript as the Trémoïlle manuscript—reflecting the fact that it was owned by the Duchess of Trémoïlle prior to its donation to the the BNF—or simply Trém. BNF staff uploaded Trém’s digitisation on the Gallica website on Monday, 9 January 2012. All that remains of what must have been a grand music manuscript is a bifolium, a two-page leaf that contains an index of the lost manuscript’s content and the notation of four motets (some incomplete). While the notated compositions are important, what has interested researchers most is the index that seems to name some motets, liturgical music and songs still known today and also contains several unknown works (see Droz & Thibault 1926; Bent 1990). One of the interesting things (there are several more discussed in Bent 1990) about the index is that two different names were added in front of two settings of the Credo from the Mass. For the second Credo the name “sortes” appears. It has been generally assumed that this is a reference to the same composer (whose name is sometimes given as “sortis”) and his popular Credo “de Rege” that was used in both the so-called Toulouse and Barcelona polyphonic settings of the Mass. It was previously thought that the name given for the first Credo was “decus”. However, the BNF’s splendid online colour reproduction has revealed that the name is in fact “denis”. Continue reading “A new composition by Denis Le Grant?” →

Powering music and emotion research

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From 30 November to 2 December 2011 I had the pleasure of attending the 34th National Conference of the Musicological Society of Australia that was held conjointly with the 2nd International Conference on Music and Emotions in Perth, Australia. (Unfortunately I was unable to stay for the last day of the conference due to some problems with rebooking my flight.) The following remarks are not intended to be representative of the conference. Nor are they comprehensive. Instead they represent a selection of my own responses to and recollections of various papers and discussions that I witnessed or was a part of during the conference. Continue reading “Powering music and emotion research” →

Music and Rhetoric at Padua

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It’s been a while since my last post but I have no intention of adopting what is now an almost stereotypical attitude of apologetic resignation. I’ve been otherwise busy. Instead I intend to remedy my inattention with a slightly longer posting than usual! The last few months of research have been occupied with the question of emotion and music in preparation for the forthcoming joint conference of the Musicological Society of Australia and the International Conference on Music and Emotion entitled the Power of Music to be held in Perth, Australia, 30 November to 3 December 2011. After heading off in several directions including constructivist theories of emotion, psychological theories of emotion and the philosophy of emotion – the last of which proved to exude an irresistible attraction that nonetheless was leading me off in the “wrong direction” – my research arrived at both a surprising but in some ways not unexpected position that has blossomed into a conference paper and promises to be an avenue of further enquiry. Most of what follows isn’t in my paper, but serves to preface some interesting details. Continue reading “Music and Rhetoric at Padua” →

Unusual signs and Angevin politics

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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” →