Facing the Music of Medieval England University of Huddersfield 21–22 March 2015 In association with the Centre for Music, Gender and Identity Generously supported by Early English Church Music, the Royal Musical Association, and the Plainsong and Medieval Music Society 1 Welcome to the University of Huddersfield We are excited to welcome you all to this conference on the music of medieval England. Technical support is available from our technical assistants, who will be on hand from 9.15am and present at sessions: Scott Dunn 07854 411719 Daniel Robinson 07958 228295 Refreshments: Teas and coffees are served in the Creative Arts Building atrium Lunch is not provided, but there are some good options close by: • Coffee Kabin (opposite the Creative Arts Building) They sell excellent coffees and a wide range of delicious food to eat in or take away, including sandwiches and the best chocolate brownies money can buy). • Rhubarb (opposite the Creative Arts Building) is a large but welcoming pub that serves a wide range of decent food, including pizza, paninis, jacket potates, and pasta. • Queenies Coffee Shop (coffee, amazing cakes, http://www.thelbt.org/Queenies-­‐
Coffee-­‐Shop?q=Queenies-­‐Coffee-­‐Shop Dinner Saturday’s recommended dinner venue is Med One, a Lebanese restaurant in town (http://www.med-­‐one.co.uk), and the registration form will ask if you’d like to book a place for this meal. You may alternatively like to explore Huddersfield’s excellent curry houses, such as Nawaab or Thai Saikon (both near to train station). After dinner, why not try Huddersfield’s superb pubs to sample local ales? Rat and Ratchet: http://www.ossett-­‐brewery.co.uk/pubs/rat-­‐and-­‐ratchet-­‐huddersfield The Sportsman http://www.undertheviaduct.com/ Accommodation We recommend: • Premier Inn Central Huddersfield (next door to university) St Andrews Road, Huddersfield HD1 6SB www.premierinn.com/en/hotels/HD16SB • Central Lodge (walkable, between train station and university) 11 / 15 Beast Market, Huddersfield HD1 1QF http://www.centrallodge.com/ • Cambridge Hotel (20-­‐minute stroll into the conference) 4 Clare Hill, Huddersfield HD1 5BS http://www.thecambridgehotel.com/ • Cedar Court Hotel (driving only) Ainley Top, Junction 24 M62, Huddersfield HD3 3RH These and other hotel options can be searched on Trip Advisor: http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Hotels-­‐g190748-­‐Huddersfield_West_Yorkshire_England-­‐
Hotels.html 2 Abstracts (in alphabetical order by author) Margaret Bent: What next? Avenues for New Work on English Music Dr Margaret Bent will present an informal survey of the state of scholarship on medieval English music, identifying opportunities for new research and areas that are deserving of greater attention. Her paper will be followed by a general discussion in which the audience will be encouraged to outline their own priorities, ideas and thoughts as to the future of work on this repertoire. Samantha Blickhan: Notation, Transmission and Collection: Influences on the Collection of Insular Song in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries The existing song repertoire from twelfth-­‐ and thirteenth-­‐century Britain is almost entirely contained within miscellany manuscripts. As Helen Deeming has noted, there are no existing musical sources from Britain in the thirteenth century that are dedicated entirely to non-­‐liturgical music.1 Out of the 115 existing songs found in miscellany manuscripts, the largest group of these songs to eventually be collected within the same manuscript is the group of sixteen concordances found in Cambridge University Library, Add. 710, the Dublin Troper, which has been dated to c.1360. Comparing each of these sixteen songs in their miscellany and liturgical contexts not only facilitates consideration of the process of song transmission in Britain and Ireland, but also allows for a closer examination of insular song notation. By comparing the notation of the versions in miscellany sources to the notation of later versions collected in a liturgical context, we can begin to build a more complete picture of the influence that both scribal practice and the manuscripts themselves had on the collection of notated song. John Caldwell: Understanding the Medieval Psalter The paper will consider the types of Psalter current in the middle ages and the ways in which Psalters were organized. It will go on to consider the structure of the Offices and the specific ways in which Psalters facilitated their performance. Finally it will address some issues of performance practice in the singing of psalms within the Office, and the nature of the evidence for this. Lisa Colton: Putting the plainchant in polyphony: making and remaking Ave miles celestis curie / Ave rex patrone patrie / T. Ave rex gentis In 1984, Peter M. Lefferts argued that ‘the [English] motet texts offer virtually no opportunity for the kinds of interpretive analysis that musicology has seen so successfully applied to the rich, figurative language of 14th-­‐century isorhythmic 1
Helen Deeming, ‘Isolated Jottings? The Compilation, Preparation, and Use of Song Sources from Thirteenth-­‐Century Britain’, Journal of the Alamire Foundation 6 (2014), 139. 3 motets and grandes ballades, whose political, often polemical texts can usually be associated to definite historical circumstances’.2 Scholarship on English polyphony has indeed traditionally focused on matters of genre, notation, provenance, and musical / textual structure. In the last 20 years, there have been significant developments in the analysis of French motets c.1250–1400, revealing the subtle and inventive ways in which music and text were designed to interrelate on and off the page, and it seems timely to revisit English repertoire in the light of it. Is English polyphony really as bland as one might expect? This paper will present some work in progress on the four-­‐part motet in honour of St Edmund, King and Martyr, Ave miles celestis curie / Ave rex patrone patrie / T. Ave rex gentis / T. Ave rex gentis, focusing on: 1. Relationships between genre conventions and the way in which this motet is presented in its only source (Oxford, Bodleian Library e museo 7, Bury St Edmunds, 14th century) 2. The presentation of the cantus firmus, and its relationship with duplum and triplum Through consideration of these areas it might be possible to reach a fuller understanding of this unusual piece, one that challenges our knowledge of the composition and performance motets and, I hope, serves counterbalance perceptions that English composers took little interest in the subtleties of text/music interconnections. James Cook: Three-­‐Voice-­‐Textures in the Mid-­‐Fifteenth-­‐Century English Mass Cycle Much has been written in recent years about characterising the texture of the three-­‐
voice mass in the fifteenth century. Much of this has focussed on the changing role of the contratenor. Andrew Kirkman’s comprehensive outline of voice ranges can usefully be applied to both the differentiation of national style and chronological changes in textures. This differentiation can be brought into even sharper focus when considered alongside the presence of pre-­‐existent material and with due consideration to its ambitus. An understanding of the texture of the three-­‐voice mass in terms of vocal range only tells half the story, however. As Margaret Bent has shown, the relative ranges of voices has little or no bearing on their contrapuntal function. This is not to suggest that an investigation of relative range within a texture is not useful, simply that it does not encompass the entirety of the composer’s concerns. A consideration of grammatical function, alongside range, and taking into account the nature of any pre-­‐existent material which might be present allows, for a more detailed categorisation of three-­‐voice mass cycles from this period. This categorisation may help to clarify a broad chronology for these works and may also give important information regarding provenance and perhaps even authorship. 2
Peter M. Lefferts ‘Text and Context in the Fourteenth-­‐Century English Motet.’ L’ars nova italiana del trecento 6 (1984), 169–192, at p. 171. 4 Helen Deeming: Musical and notational enigmas in sequences for English and universal saints This paper considers the problematic transmission of three unique sequences in British sources from the thirteenth century. In 'Recitemus per hec festa' (for St Kyneburga), a knot of misplaced and absent clefs must be disentangled to make musical sense of the melody, and similar problems beset 'Dulci voce mente munda' (for St Gregory). In 'Ante thronum regentis omnia', the text is enigmatic with regard to the dedicatee (whether St Thomas the Apostle or St Thomas Becket), while the notation is a solitary example of apparently mensurally notated monophonic song from British sources of this period. This paper considers the range of notational, musical and textual enigmas presented by these three pieces, in the light of broader questions of transmission of songs in British sources. Elina G. Hamilton: What Did they Read? Getting to Grips with the Sources for 14th-­‐
century English Music Theory After naming numerous authorities of theory including Boethius, Isidore, Guido, Franco, Vitry, and ‘Enchiriadis’ (mistakenly as an author, not as the title of a treatise), the anonymous author of De origine et effectu musicae revealed defeat–he could not remember the names of the many other authorities–and thus ends his extensive list. Contrarily, Willelmus, author of Breviarium regulare musicae, boasts of having read and investigated all authorities, validating his own position as an authentic informant. In many ways, the vast amount of information recounted in these treatises must have been overwhelming to those who read them, not dissimilar to the amount of data we inevitably must shift through today. For some time now, it has been possible to study music theory of medieval England through several different mediums. Editions are available in book form and include informative introductions, careful cross-­‐referencing, and clarification of faulty Latin passages. Theoretical texts have been made accessible on the Internet through Theasaurus Musicarum Latinum (TML). Though containing only the textual portions within these editions, TML has made a new level of cross referencing and textual analysis possible, especially in the modern world which is driven by Google search engines. Despite these platforms, however, it remains cumbersome to perceive a grand narrative of who read what, what authorities were considered important, or for what reasons certain texts were favored over others. This paper experiments with presenting data through graphs and diagrams to comprehend the extent of knowledge transmitted in fourteenth-­‐century England. A new method of analyzing information through visualization will give focus to the highly complex texts, making them comprehensible in a way which offers a different perspective to the intellectual milieu of speculative music. Andrew Kirkman (title to be confirmed) 5 Louise McInnes: New Ways of Exploring Old Genres: Mixed Methodologies and the Neglected Medieval English Carol This paper will examine the late medieval English carol, an important indigenous musical form that is abundant in a number of sources from the late fourteenth to the early sixteenth century, both with and without extant musical notation. The carol has been somewhat neglected in terms of recent, detailed, published research, therefore this paper will address the reasons for its neglect, and reveal how approaching such a genre with a combination of new and traditional methodologies, one can facilitate a broader understanding of the genre, an approach that, as this paper will demonstrate, would lend itself to the study of other musical forms of the medieval period. Carols with musical notation have been favoured by musicologists in previous research; this paper however will also explore the value of including those carols without extant musical notation in this new approach to their study; thus producing a fuller picture of the carol than that of previous musicological studies. Elizabeth Nyikos: The Worcester Fragments – A History It has been over a hundred years since the first mention of the ‘Worcester Fragments’, that rather disorganized collection of some sixty-­‐odd fragmentary folios and bifolios of English medieval polyphony, appeared in print. Yet many questions of original format, scribal identification and use from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries and beyond still remain unanswered, while the relationship between the various surviving fragments – now held between the Worcester Cathedral Library, the London British Library and the Oxford Bodleian Library – has yet to be thoroughly untangled. This paper focuses on the history of the Worcester Fragments, from the scribes, notators and limners in the first two layers of composition, to the fragments’ reuse, first by fifteenth-­‐century scribes, and later by Renaissance binders and twentieth-­‐century musicologists. In particular, the use of new UV photographs and digital image manipulation will help to uncover previously indecipherable text and music and to shed light on the remarkable production, use and afterlife of the largest surviving collection of English polyphony between the Winchester Troper and Old Hall Manuscript. Monica Roundy: Covers and Versions: Translating Medieval Song in Arundel 248 The well-­‐documented and contentious—now as then—cultural interactions between the British Isles and the continent in the thirteenth century can be difficult to identify in surviving musical sources. Music manuscripts from the continent include many concordances and among them intriguing variants, while music copied in sources of English provenance famously seems different, having distinctive stylistic referents, notational approaches, and codicological tendencies, and showing comparatively few concordances, even when the fragmentary state of the sources is taken into consideration. 6 The collection of songs copied in Latin, English, and Anglo-­‐Norman in the manuscript British Library, Arundel 248 offers a welcome glimpse of cultural interaction, featuring musical versions of songs transmitted in continental sources along with linguistic adaptations. Though complicated by the trilingual milieu in which the educated, wealthy persons who would have commissioned and used such a manuscript would have lived, the music collection of Arundel 248 offers us a potential sonic instantiation of the rich cultural entanglement so extensively documented in other spheres. Philip Weller (title to be confirmed) Magnus Williamson, The Petre Gradual Rediscovered Thought lost or sold abroad for many decades, the Petre Gradual was known only by way of a bundle of photostats, British Library Facs. Suppl. VIII.(16). In fact this important medieval service book has recently been found within Newcastle University's Robinson Library. Originally copied in the fourteenth century, it is of interest to musicologists on account of two later sets of additions: mensural settings of the Mass Ordinary, both monophonic and polyphonic, copied around 1460; and a short series of texts among the endpapers, copied in the later sixteenth century, that reflect the Gradual's post-­‐Reformation afterlife within the household of Sir William Petre and his son John, Catholic recusant and friend of the composer William Byrd. Peter Wright: A New Attribution to Dunstaple? Abstract to be confirmed. 7 Programme (All paper sessions will be held on the ground floor of the Creative Arts Building, CAMG/01 i-­‐Pads will be available – please send anything you’d like participants to be able to see (e.g. source images, editions, scans) to Lisa at [email protected] for a digital conference pack. This will not be available online or to non-­‐delegates.) Saturday 21 March 9.30am Registration 10.15am Welcome 10.30 – 12.00 Session 1: Insular song in the 13th and 14th centuries Samantha Blickhan “Notation, Transmission and Collection: Influences on the Collection of Insular Song in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries” Lisa Colton “Putting the plainchant in polyphony: making and remaking Ave miles celestis curie / Ave rex patrone patrie / T. Ave rex gentis” Elizabeth Nyikos “The Worcester Fragments: A History” 12.00 – 1.15 Lunch 1.15–3.30pm Session 2: Reconsidering sources Magnus Williamson “The Petre Gradual Rediscovered” John Caldwell, “Understanding the Medieval Psalter” 10 mins to check technology is still working! 2.30pm Monica Roundy (Google hangouts): “Covers and Versions: Translating Medieval Song in Arundel 248” 3pm Elina Hamilton (Google hangouts) Elina G. Hamilton: “What Did they Read? Getting to Grips with the Sources for 14th-­‐century English Music Theory” 3.30pm Tea & coffee break 4 – 5pm Session 3: Keynote lecture and discussion Margaret Bent “What next? Avenues for new work on English music” 5pm Wine reception 6.30pm Dinner at Med One (pre-­‐booking essential, see registration form) 8 Sunday 22 March (Please note that there may be some small adjustments to be made to timings on the Sunday, but that the conference will definitely close no later than 2pm. The train station is 10-­‐15 minutes away on foot, so we recommend you book trains any time after 2.30pm. A secure room is available to store luggage on the morning at the university Creative Arts Building.) 9.30am Registration 10.00 – 11.00am Session 1: Song in British Sources (Chair: Lisa Colton) Helen Deeming “Musical and notational enigmas in sequences for English and universal saints” Louise McInnes “New Ways of Exploring Old Genres: mixed methodologies and the neglected medieval English carol” 11.00 – 11.15 Coffee 11.15 – 12.15 Session 2: 15th-­‐century Sacred Music (Chair: tbc) James Cook “Three-­‐Voice-­‐Textures in the Mid-­‐Fifteenth-­‐Century English Mass Cycle” Peter Wright “A new attribution to Dunstaple?” 12.15-­‐12.30 Biscuits 12.30 – 2.00pm Session 3: Medieval English Music in Performance (Chair: Helen Deeming) Andrew Kirkman and Philip Weller: “Reconstruction as Concept and Praxis” “Facing the Music with Audiences: Programming, Performance, Presentation” 2pm Conference close 9