Project description
Carolingian musical creativity hidden in the margins
Around 1 000 little-studied musical marginalia appear in the blank spaces of early medieval Latin non-musical manuscripts. Added to flyleaves, margins and blank pages, these annotations offer rare insight into chant composition and transmission in the 9th and 10th centuries. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the MARGICANTUS project identifies nearly 200 early examples of ‘tropes’ and ‘sequences’ – liturgical genres rooted in the Carolingian world. Copied with varying degrees of formality, these fragments reveal evolving plainchant repertories, stylistic tensions and innovative uses of notation. Combining traditional musicology and philology with digital tools, MARGICANTUS recovers some of the earliest layers of Western musical creativity – preserved not in formal chant books but in the overlooked margins of non-musical texts.
Objective
Largely overlooked, if not entirely unknown, about a thousand musical marginalia lie in the empty spaces of Latin non-musical manuscripts of the early Middle Ages, where they are unlikely to come to the attention of music scholars. These marginalia, which I have for the first time systematically identified and newly described during my previous postdoctoral appointment, have the potential to bring us much closer to the composition, expansion and dissemination of new repertories and chants in the 9th and 10th centuries. Appearing in unpredictable places—empty flyleaves, blank spaces, lateral margins—in manuscripts of all sorts and written by individuals of all levels of competence, they provide invaluable and potentially transformative insight into the period before the well-known and calligraphic books of music of the late 10th and 11th centuries (i.e. larger notated antiphoners and graduals, and the newly-devised formats of tropers and sequentiaries).
From this body of a thousand marginalia, “MARGICANTUS: Tropes and Sequences in the Margins of non-Musical Carolingian Manuscripts, circa 800 – 1000” isolates a corpus of almost two hundred 9th- and 10th-century entries of tropes and sequences, two genres whose origin can be safely tied to the early 9th-century Carolingian world. These sketches, trials, and individual marginal items expand our understanding of plainchant chronology, repertory and transmission, tensions between local and imported styles of chant, the uses of musical notation, and the extent and urgency with which in Carolingian times newer music embellished older liturgical practices. Blending classic methods of musicology and philology with current computer-based analysis and data management, MARGICANTUS sheds new light on the history of tropes and sequences, and therefore of Carolingian music. By doing so, it recovers some of the earliest layers of Western musical creativity in their full complexity, beginning from the margins.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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This project's classification has been human-validated.
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.
This project's classification has been human-validated.
Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
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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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
MAIN PROGRAMME
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2024-PF-01
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CB2 1TN CAMBRIDGE
United Kingdom
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