The objective of this first workshop organized in partnership with the MFO, Sorbonne University and Columbia University is to discuss possible future collaborations (scholarly and technical) in the field of digital medieval musicology.
The workshop is part of a future project, Mnémomed @ Sorbonne University, which focuses on the notion of “unwritten music” in the medieval Mediterranean world (covering the period from the fall of the Roman Empire through the fifteenth century). Taking an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approach, we will seek to define, analyze and interpret musical information drawn from data outside the scope of the traditional notated score.
Mnémomed will develop a broad-based analysis encompassing all dimensions of music – theory, performance, and transmission – to reach a better understanding of phenomena that may appear disconnected in contemporary historiographical analysis.
While it may seem difficult, if not impossible, to give a definition of the notion of “unwritten” aspects of music, it is this central idea that we wish to circumscribe and study. By “unwritten” music we mean all information related to sound and music production that does not appear in a musical score. It is therefore an essential episteme for the knowledge of repertoires that have come down to us, for interpretations and (re) productions, and also for our understanding of repertoires that were not notated in the medieval Mediterranean world (music in the oral tradition).
Some examples are the information in images on how instruments are held, playing techniques, and organological features; textual descriptions of singing styles; and the indications of musicians’ gestures and movements found in non-musical literature, such as poetry and prescriptive texts (eg, customaries and ordinals).
The challenges of this project are 1. to identify the data on unwritten aspects of music; 2. to understand it globally in the medieval world (and therefore in several languages and cultural contexts including Latin, Hebrew, Greek, Arabic, and the Romance languages); and 3. to make connections and recognize similarities, so as to draw an objective picture of musical evolution in Europe and around the Mediterranean.
More information and details:
www.mfo.cnrs.fr/calendar/workshop-medieval-digital-musicology
