Project description
Exploring mediaeval polyphonic singing in Britain and Ireland
Recently, historical sources have revealed polyphonic singing communities in the Middle Ages in Britain and Ireland, shedding light on a singing style that thrived from approximately 1150 to 1350. Even though there was an increase in the production of books dedicated to polyphony during that era, the available evidence mainly consists of over a hundred fragmentary sources. The ERC-funded BROKENSONG project aims to explore the significance of transcribing musical content for the musical communities of that time. The project will employ a multifaceted approach, drawing on methodologies from musicology, music analysis, medieval and manuscript studies, practice-based research, and digital humanities. It seeks to unravel the intricate connections that existed between cultural creations, communities, and regions.
Objective
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 begin to proliferate. Using methodologies from musicology, music analysis, medieval and manuscript studies, practice-based research, and digital humanities, BROKENSONG aims to answer the principal research question: What does it mean for a culture to write its music down?
BROKENSONG investigates what this act of ‘writing-down’ meant to and for musical communities. 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 constructed. These are mostly broken books transmitting broken songs: yet BROKENSONG proposes that in-depth study of them will provide a breakthrough on fundamental questions regarding processes of and contexts for artistic creation in the later Middle Ages. Tackling the issue of style head-on, BROKENSONG uses it to address the problem of anonymity in medieval cultural products, and develops an innovative methodology for understanding the relationships between cultural products that lack extra-musical evidence for associating them to specific individuals, communities, or regions. Three intersecting work packages reconstruct the fragmentary material artifacts, develop historical understandings of music and community, and analyse communities of musical style through a combination of practice-based and computational approaches. BROKENSONG reveals the layered interactions between individual creativity, communal ritual activities, institutional agendas, and the written medium of music notation—with its particular techniques, limitations, and possibilities—and the realization of those artefacts into sound, then and now.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) ERC-2022-COG
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W23 Maynooth
Ireland
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