PMMS Newsletter 1/2010
Dear Members,
The first 2010 newsletter from the Plainsong and Medieval Music Society brings to you many exiting announcements: first of all our very own PMMS conference (with annual general meeting) which will take place in Cambridge in just under two weeks´ time, then several conferences supported or sponsored by PMMS, an overview of the forthcoming PMM journal, calls-for-papers, as well as news of research grants received by colleagues and early-music projects, brand-new facsimile editions and concerts. We also plan to make much of this information available online on our website, www.plainsong.org.uk.
* Conference: Annual Conference of PMMS, Cambridge, 13 March 2010
* Conference: ‘Off the Staves´, Bangor, 26-27 March 2010
* Conference: The Wollaton Antiphonal, Nottingham, 8 May 2010
* Conference: Medieval and Renaissance Music Conference, Royal Holloway, 5-8 July 2010
* Journal: forthcoming issue of Plainsong and Medieval Music
* CFP: Music for the Office and Its Sources in the Low Countries, Antwerp, 21-24 August 2010
* CFP: CANTO APERTO Plainchant Festival, Sint-Truiden (B), 21-23 September 2012
* Conference: The British Museum Citole, London, 4-5 November 2010
* Funding for Chant Projects in Bristol
* AHRC Award for DIAMM
* Claude Palisca Award for Margaret Bent
* New Facsimile Editions from DIAMM
* Concert: The Sixteen, London, 3 April 2010
If you would like to distribute information about anything relating to chant and early music, for example a conference, workshop, concert, or exhibition, or if you want to share an exiting weblink or any other information, please send an email to newsletter@plainsong.org.uk. As the newsletter is sent out twice a year, in spring and autumn, we ask you to submit your news if possible by February or August for publication in the spring and autumn newsletters respectively. If you would prefer not to receive this newsletter, simply unsubscribe by sending a message to the same email address.
So scroll down and enjoy!
With best wishes,
Barbara Eichner, Newsletter Editor
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Annual Conference of the Plainsong and Medieval Music Society, Cambridge, 13 March 2010
The annual conference of the Plainsong and Medieval Music Society will take place on Saturday, 13 March 2010, in Cambridge. This year´s conference particularly showcases research done by current graduate students, with papers from Eduardo Aubert, Catherine Bradley and Sean Curran, as well as shorter presentations. A roundtable with Elizabeth Eva Leach (Oxford), Nicolas Bell (British Library) and Helen Deeming (Royal Holloway) will highlight “Careers in Medieval Music’. For a detailed programme and timetable (including suggestions for accommodation), please refer to the PMMS website (www.plainsong.org.uk); for any questions please contact Sam Barrett (Cambridge): sjb59@cam.ac.uk. The Annual General Meeting of PMMS will take place before the actual conference and starts at 10am.
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‘Off the Staves´, Bangor, 26-27 March 2010
PMMS is delighted to join the AHRC in supporting the postgraduate conference ‘Off the Staves: Writing About Music Before and After Conventional Notation´, hosted at Bangor University on 26-27 March, 2010. The conference hopes to break new ground in a widely significant, yet little discussed topic concerning music notation from its earliest stages of development and experimental graphic scores of the twentieth century. What similarities might the two eras have in developing new methods of notation and what will shape music notation of the future? The conference invites Jane Alden and James Saunders as keynote speakers and will include a dozen papers on topics ranging from performance practice of both old and new notations to problems of notation encountered by composers today. Workshops by Le Basile and Painting Music will explore the practice of music notation. Through bringing together performers, composers, and musicologists, the conference hopes to redress common misunderstandings surrounding musical notation.
For registration and more information, visit www.offthestaves.co.uk.
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The Wollaton Antiphonal – Conference, Exhibition, Concert, Nottingham, 8 May 2010
The celebrated Wollaton Antiphonal, a large, generously laid-out and richly illuminated noted antiphonal of the early fifteenth century (ca. 1430), has been painstakingly conserved over recent years. This long process of conservation is nearing completion, and the renewed splendour of the manuscript will be displayed in the context of an exhibition of the medieval manuscripts from the Wollaton Library Collection. To celebrate this event, and in order to project new views of the Antiphonal as well as to diffuse new information about it, grounded in the most recent research, a one-day conference and an evening concert have been organised, to be hosted in the Music Department, University of Nottingham, on Saturday 8 May 2010.
The conference is delighted to welcome Matthew Cheung Salisbury (Worcester College, Oxford), Nicolas Bell (British Library), Dorothy Johnston (Head of Manuscripts and Special Collections), and Philip Weller (University of Nottingham). Questions of making, ownership, provenance, conservation, liturgical use, adaptation, context, and musical content will all be addressed. The event will be jointly presented by Manuscripts and Special Collections, the Plainsong and Medieval Music Society, and the Department of Music, and will be introduced by Dorothy Johnston and Thorlac Turville-Petre.
In the evening there will be a concert of English polyphonic music of the fifteenth century, sung by the internationally renowned Binchois Consort. The richly varied programme will include the ‘Quem malignus spiritus´ mass and sections of the John of Bridlington Office, as well as a group of English pieces displaying a range of pre-Reformation styles. The selection of music has been devised to illustrate in sound the period of time from the manuscript´s original making to its subsequent arrival in St Leonard´s Church, Wollaton, in the later fifteenth century.
The conference will take place during the day (11am-3.30pm), leaving ample time for viewing the exhibition. The concert at Lakeside Arts Centre will begin at 7.30pm, finishing at approximately 9.20pm. There will be a pre-concert talk with Andrew Kirkman (Director of the Binchois Consort) and Philip Weller at 6.45pm. Attendance at the conference will cost £8 (£5 concession), and the concert £12 (£9 concession). A combined ticket (Conference and Concert) is also available - £17 (£12 concession). Booking: Lakeside Arts Centre, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD. Box Office: 0115 846 7777 Book online: www.lakesidearts.org.uk (The Lakeside Arts Centre is located beside the lake in University Park, and has public parking as well as extensive refreshment facilities.)
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Medieval and Renaissance Music Conference, Royal Holloway, 5-8 July 2010
Registration for this year´s Med-Ren, to be held at Royal Holloway, University of London from 5th to 8th July, has now opened. Please see the conference website for further details: www.medrenconference.org. The Plainsong and Medieval Music Society will host a joint reception with Cambridge University Press during the Med-Ren – a great opportunity to meet friends and colleagues over a glass of wine.
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Plainsong & Medieval Music
Plainsong & Medieval Music begins the new decade with an issue that represents many facets of our vibrant field. Volume 19, no.1 will appear online and in print form in April, and contains articles by Neil Moran, James Vincent Maiello and Michael Alan Anderson. The first compares Roman, Beneventan and Frankish chant traditions, the second charts the circumstances leading to the creation of new choirbooks in Pistoia in the twelfth century, and the latter analyses thirteenth-century polyphonic settings of the Ave Maria. Jerome F. Weber´s discography of recent chant recordings is supplemented this year with a list of addenda and corrigenda to other important discographies published by Fr Weber in recent years. Reviews of two major publications on liquescence (by Dirk van Betteray) and on tonal consciousness (by Fiona McAlpine) are also included.
The editors, Helen Deeming and James Borders, and reviews editor Nicolas Bell, are always happy to receive enquiries from members of the Society relating to the journal; their contact details may be found inside each issue and on the journal´s website http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=PMM.
As Helen Deeming is stepping down as PMM editor later this year, Christian Thomas Leitmeir will take over her role.
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CFP: Music for the Office and Its Sources in the Low Countries (1050-1550), Antwerp, 21-24 August 2010
The office is the most substantial portion of the liturgy, and has incited medieval and Renaissance composers to contribute to its musical splendour for at least half a millennium. In all types of communities and services, whether of monastic, cathedral, or courtly signature, the office formed a crucial part of their musical culture. Because the Low Countries knew an unprecedented variety of communities and institutions, the contexts in which the office was celebrated in the region were equally varied. Indeed, the wealth of sources for the office from the Low Countries has led many scholars to study selected aspects of the celebration of the office in the region, such as prose or versified historiae, tropes and prosulas, motets composed for Vespers and Salve services, and ‘paraliturgical´ pieces.
This conference sets out to explore the variety of the extant repertory and its sources, by bringing together new research into the music for the office in, or related to, the Low Countries (understood to include Northern France and the Meuse-Rhineland), and studying plainchant as well as polyphony and their interrelations.
Scholars and performers studying chant and/or polyphony from analytical, historical, liturgical, or interdisciplinary perspectives are invited to send proposals of no longer than 350 words to pieter.mannaerts@arts.kuleuven.be before 1 April, 2010 (note the extended deadline!). Notification of acceptance will be given by 1 May, 2010. The final conference program will be published around April 1, 2010, on the website of the Alamire Foundation (www.arts.kuleuven.be/alamire). The program committee is currently being composed, and will be announced within the coming weeks. All IMS-languages may be used (English, French, German, Italian, Spanish); the principal conference language will be English.
The conference, supported by the International Musicological Society Study Group “Cantus Planus’, will take place during the yearly festival Laus Polyphoniae (Flanders Festival Antwerp), and in close collaboration with the festival program. Participants will have a unique opportunity of hearing concerts related to the conference theme, which will thus include both chant and polyphony from Low Countries sources. A selection of conference papers will be published in the internationally peer-reviewed Journal of the Alamire Foundation in 2012.
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Call for Propsals: CANTO APERTO Plainchant Festival: Chant from the Rhine and Mosan Lands, Sint-Truiden (B), 21-23 September 2012
In 2012, the first CANTO APERTO Plainchant Festival will be organized in the city of Sint-Truiden, Belgium. This new, bi-annual festival aims at exploring the rich history of plainchant and its performance practices from the 7th century until today. The 2012 edition focuses on the chant traditions and repertory of the Mosan Area and the Rhineland in the 12th and 13th centuries.
We invite ensembles of young (semi)professionals to contact us with (general) concert program concepts or (specific) proposals related to the theme of the 2012 edition. Ensembles interested in collaboration with the festival but with no previous experience related to the Rhine-Meuse repertory are also invited to express their interest and to send their applications. Musicological advice and guidance towards relevant sources can be provided by CANTO APERTO. Similarly, musicologists and other scholars studying the Mosan and Rhineland of the 12th and 13th centuries are invited to collaborate with the festival as well.
Program proposals may relate to one or more of the five strands outlined below. Applications should include a curriculum of the ensemble, at least one letter of recommendation, and one recent recording. Proposals and applications (by preference in English, but proposals in other languages are also accepted) should be sent to Bart De Vos (bart.devos@musica.be) before May 31, 2010. Please contact Pieter Mannaerts (pieter.mannaerts@arts.kuleuven.be) with musicological questions.
Proposed strands:
1. A Network of Cities (Aachen, Cologne, Liège, Tongeren, Maastricht). 2. Rhine and Meuse: transport and transmission. 3. Keepers of the Carolingian Heritage.4. A Promised Land for Orders and Communities. 5. A Land of Saints
More details on these strands and a longer concept text on CANTO APERTO can be found on the websites of Musica (www.musica.be), Resonant (www.muzikaalerfgoed.be), and the Alamire Foundation (www.arts.kuleuven.be/alamire) .
The festival themes of the next editions will be Chant in the Romantic Era (2014), Chant in the Baroque Period (2016), Carolingian Chant (2018), and Chant of the Renaissance (2020).
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Conference: The British Museum Citole, London, 4-5 November 2010
The British Museum will be hosting a symposium on the unique medieval citole in its collection on November 4-5, 2010. This symposium, entitled “The British Museum Citole: New Perspectives,’ promises to be an exciting event allowing scientists, scholars, and musicians to share recent work relating to this remarkable instrument. This symposium, while focusing on the citole as a unique medieval musical instrument and the important Elizabethan modifications made to it, will also consider the artefact as an exceptional work of decorative art, as well as the wider musical, historical, artistic and social contexts relating to it.
In addition to the core event of the citole symposium, other related events are being planned to coincide with it. These events may include: one or more concerts featuring citoles, a medieval instrument study day at the IMR, a small iconography session at the British Library, and a walking tour of London highlighting important citole and musical sites. Additionally, the Greenwich Early Music Festival is likely to take place the following weekend, November 12-14. For further information, visit http://www.trombamarina.com/Citole_Symposium_Nov_2010.html
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Funding for Chant Projects in Bristol
Our PMMS member Emma Hornby has recently been awarded with funding from the AHRC/ESRC, and a Philip Leverhulme Prize. The “Religion and Society’ programme of the AHRC/ESRC awarded a Small Grant of £95,000 (Religion and Society programme) for a collaborative project with Rebecca Maloy (University of Colorado at Boulder) on Old Hispanic chant. This project entails analysing some of the formulaic Old Hispanic chants sung during Lent (the threni, some Lenten laudes, and the Easter Vigil canticles), and combining this with work on the role of biblical exegesis in the choice and treatment of liturgical text. Gaining a sense of the musical grammar and textual aesthetic of these formulaic chants enables us to explore the way in which they relate not only to their Gregorian equivalents but also to the cognate chants found in the local traditions of Rome, Milan and Benevento. The AHRC grant is enabling Rebecca Maloy and Emma Hornby to produce a collaborative monograph in 2009-10, as well as funding a series of lecture-recitals and workshops with the Bristol University Music Department Schola cantorum, bringing this medieval sound world and its historical and theological context alive to audiences of early music enthusiasts, school and college pupils, the academic community, and the general public in Bristol and beyond.
In 2009, for the first time, music was one of the subject areas included in the call for nominations for the prestigious Philip Leverhulme prizes, and Emma Hornby was one of the prize winners. The prize fund of £70,000 over three years will be used for purposes related to the advancement of Emma's research, performing or practice-based activities; she intends to use it in 2010-2013 to support the development of a major collaborative project on the Old Hispanic responsory tradition.
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AHRC Award for DIAMM
The Digital Image Archive is pleased to announce receipt of a new award from the AHRC that will allow us to continue building our manuscript database and acquire more images of manuscripts with an upgraded single-shot camera of 65 Megapixels to capture smaller sources. The 144 Mpx scanning back is still used for larger sources or very detailed work. The DIAMM team and equipment are available for consultancy work for other projects, and can travel worldwide to visit archives and collections.
The website remains a free resource, and this new grant will help us to enhance and expand our content. The delivery system will be undergoing a major upgrade in 2010 that will provide users with much more complex search options, and will allow us to show inventory information for all our manuscripts. We are still in the process of compiling much of that information, and if PMMS members have inventories of MSS that they would be prepared to contribute, or other information such as manuscript descriptions or bibliography, all this information will be gratefully received and acknowledged when it appears online.
For further information, please contact Julia Craig-McFeely, DIAMM Co-Director and project manager, www.diamm.ac.uk
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Claude Palisca Award for Margaret Bent
Our long-standing member and now a Vice-President of PMMS, Margaret Bent, one of Britain´s most eminent musicologists (awarded a CBE for her scholarly distinction last year), has won the prestigious 2009 Claude Palisca Award for her study, Bologna Q15: the Making and Remaking of a Musical Manuscript. The unanimous choice of a committee appointed by the American Musicology Society, her work has been described by one of its members as ‘an exemplar of “regal musicology’ that will forever set a benchmark for facsimile editions´.
Bologna Q15 consists of an anthology of early fifteenth-century polyphonic music, compiled in Padua in the early 1420s and Vicenza in the early 1430s and all copied by a single scribe between 1420 and 1435. Acquired by Padre Martini in 1757, and one of the great treasures of his library in Bologna, it is the single most important manuscript for early fifteenth-century music in Europe, containing 323 compositions by fifty composers, including native Italians and composers from the north who were sought after and made their careers in Italy. It is our only source for much music by such major composers as Dufay, Zacara, Ciconia and Guillaume du Fay.
Prefacing the facsimile (photographed in colour when it was disbound and with some illegible pages digitally restored) is a magisterial essay of 383 folio-sized pages covering the history of the manuscript, its structure and chronology, the circumstances surrounding its various re-copyings and revisions and so on. This is fruit of some thirty years´ painstaking research and, in its field, is a scholarly achievement of the very highest order.
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New Facsimile Editions from DIAMM
1. Eton College Library, MS 178 with an introduction by Magnus Williamson
One of the most iconic of music manuscripts, the Eton Choirbook is of unique importance, both in its own right as a cultural artefact and as a source of English choral polyphony composed during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Had it perished, along with so many other (less fortunate) pre-Reformation music manuscripts, our knowledge of a critical moment in the history of English music would have been immensely diminished. Ever since it was first copied for use in the college chapel in the early 1500s, the choirbook has been continuously in the possession of Eton College. Several composers whose works were included in it had close associations with the college, not least Robert Wylkynson, who served as the college´s informator choristarum from 1500. Other composers represented include Banastre, Browne, Cornyshe, Davy, Fawkyner, Fayrfax, Hygons, Lambe and Turges. Most of its original contents (67 out of a total of 93 pieces) were votive antiphons, or devotional motets of prayer and praise, sung each evening to the Virgin Mary, the college´s dedicatee. The Salve ceremony, familiar to worshippers throughout Catholic Europe, lay at the heart of Eton College´s raison d´être as a chantry college: the Eton Choirbook is an eloquent witness to this flowering of devotional culture on the eve of the Reformation. The manuscript is also a work of consummate artistry, copied by an experienced scribe on large vellum leaves, and illuminated by a professional limner. Even in its in-complete state (nearly half of its original 224 leaves have been lost), the Eton Choirbook is the undoubted queen of early Tudor music manuscripts.
260 pp full colour + 60 pp introduction, indexes etc. Format: 427 x 306 mm (reduced from 590 x 420 mm) Full colour facsimile on heavy matt art paper, hard bound.
Standard buckram binding £180; Full-leather £250
Published by DIAMM (University of Oxford) www.diamm.ac.uk
2. The Dow Partbooks, Christ Church Library Mus. 984-988, with an introduction by John Milsom
Robert Dow´s partbooks, copied in Oxford around 1580, rank among the most beautiful of all Tudor music manuscripts, and are also an important and authoritative source for the works they contain. Conceived with both singers and instrumentalists in mind, they contain a varied repertory suitable for voices and viols, including Latin-texted motets, English-texted anthems and consort songs, and a selection of In nomines and textless chansons, scored mainly for five-voice texture. Featured composers include William Byrd, Thomas Tallis, Robert White, Robert Parsons, Philip van Wilder and Alfonso Ferrabosco Sr. Dow was a trained calligrapher, and his exquisite penmanship, executed in black ink on printed red staves, is unusually accurate and easy to read.
6 vols (5 full colour, 200pp; 1 text introduction, indexes etc.; on heavy matt art paper).
Full size reproduction (170 x 240 mm), soft bound in hard slipcover.
Published by DIAMM (University of Oxford) www.diamm.ac.uk in collaboration with the Viola da Gamba Society www.vdgs.org.uk
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Concert: The Sixteen, London, 3 April 2010
On Saturday 3 April, The Sixteen presents ‘Gothic Revolution´ as part of the three-concert series Sacred Music at Southbank Centre. The three concerts chart the development of Western sacred music over consecutive evenings and ‘Gothic Revolution´ begins the journey with an investigation of the very early development from simple plainchant to the glorious world of polyphony. The concert features the music of Léonin and Pérotin, concentrating on the most famous of all mediaeval music manuscripts, the Magnus Liber. The concerts combine live performance with film footage from the BBC series ‘Sacred Music´ which first aired on BBC Four in 2008. This acclaimed series returns to BBC Four from Friday 12 March and continues to follow the development of sacred music featuring Brahms and Bruckner through to contemporary composers MacMillan and Tavener.
Tickets for Sacred Music at Southbank Centre: 0871 663 2500 or www.southbankcentre.co.uk