Title: In Pieces: Introducing the BROKENSONG Project
Abstract:
The research project ‘Polyphonic Singing and Communities of Music Writing in Medieval Britain and Ireland, c. 1150 to c. 1350’ (BROKENSONG), funded by a 5-year European Research Council Consolidator Grant, is based in the Department of Music at Maynooth University. BROKENSONG examines polyphonic singing in medieval Britain and Ireland during a transformative period of western music history, c. 1150-1350, when written books devoted to polyphony began to proliferate across Europe. BROKENSONG aims to answer the principal research question: What does it mean for a culture to write its music down? The insular sources extant from this period—just over a hundred mostly fragmentary sources—hint at stories of music practice and creation different from those suggested by the highly curated continental anthologies of polyphony that survive from continental Europe, and around which the history of western music was written. The insular sources are mostly broken books transmitting broken songs: yet BROKENSONG proposes that its in-depth study of these fragmentary and damaged manuscripts will provide a breakthrough on fundamental questions regarding the relationship between music’s material culture—its books and its technologies of music writing—and processes of music creation in the later Middle Ages. Three intersecting phases of the project reconstruct the fragmentary material artifacts and analyze communities of musical style through a combination of practice-based and computational approaches, in order to reconstruct a lost vibrant musical culture and contextualize these remnants of music writing and practice within specific music communities.
Short biography:
KAREN DESMOND is Professor of Music at Maynooth University. Her research as a historical and digital musicologist delves into the aesthetics, theories, and technologies that underpinned medieval music-making. She is currently the Principal Investigator for a five-year ERC-funded project titled BROKENSONG that examines polyphonic singing and written culture in late medieval Britain and Ireland. Her monograph on the French Ars nova, Music and the Moderni, 1300–1350 (Cambridge University Press, 2018) won the AMS 2019 Lewis Lockwood Award.