The SoundMe project investigates the genesis and early development of the concept of ‘music of the past’ in 13^th-century Paris associated with newly invented technologies of writing musical time. It also traces the deliberate deployment of older music in the service of various political and religious agendas across Europe in a series of case studies ranging chronologically from the 14^th to the 16^th century. The project’s scholars are supported in their efforts by Associate Partners who will be available for experimental performance-based forms of research at various moments in the project. The ensembles will also be instrumental in disseminating the research to the general public. For further information, please go to www.soundme.eu or watch the project video channel on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCc5vmAcyYYEHCj4smJGkNQA

• Dr. Ulrike Hascher-Burger (Utrecht University)
• Dr. Frieda van der Heijden (Utrecht University)
• Manon Louviot (Utrecht University)
• Dr. Ruxandra Marinescu (Utrecht University)
• Prof. Dr. Susan Rankin (University of Cambridge)
• Adam Mathias (University of Cambridge)
• Dr. Lenka Hlavkova (Charles University Prague)
• Dr. David Eben (Charles University Prague)
• Dr. Jan Ciglbauer (Charles University Prague)
• Dr. Pawel Gancarczyk (Polish Academy of Sciences Warsaw)
• Dr. Antonio Chemotti (Polish Academy of Sciences Warsaw)
• Bartlomiej Gembicki (Polish Academy of Sciences Warsaw)
• Prof. Dr. Inga Mai Groote (University of Zurich)
• Christine Roth (University of Zurich)
• Anonymous 3 (Cambridge)
• Ensemble Bastarda (Warsaw)
• Ensemble La Morra (Basel)
• Ensemble Trigon (Leiden)
• Scholar Gregoriana Pragensis (Prague)
• Soundspace/Spacesound (Prague)

This dissertation offers new insights into the ways in which a highly centralised organisation at the end of Middle Ages, the Congregation of Windesheim, implemented its ideals concerning liturgical and spiritual practices.

The study first examines the Windesheim regulations in detail. Religious women did not have equal say in managing their monasteries compared to their male counterparts. However, this inequality was not so much established to lessen women’s authority, but to accommodate their perceived weaker nature, so as to enable religious women to maximise their virtue and thereby reach salvation on behalf of everyone on Earth.

In a next step, the dissertation investigates the use of space in the Windesheim context. It focuses on processions, a practice strictly regulated in female monasteries following the Windesheim regulations. Even though the physical act of processing was prohibited, in Windesheim spirituality, the singing of the processional chants was seen as the crucial element in actualising the processional liturgy.  This challenges established views according to which space is inevitably the most central element in processing.

Finally, the author demonstrates that the concern for good singing in Windesheim monasteries is replete with spiritual and political agendas. This invites us to reconsider conventional readings of texts describing the quality of monastic voices in late-medieval sources. Combined with a discussion on the highly codified vision of space developed by the Congregation of Windesheim, the rich material on singing voices presented in Controlling Space, Disciplining Voice deepens our knowledge of the place of music in medieval societies.

• Manon Louviot

Late medieval European court cultures have traditionally been studied from a mono-disciplinary and national(ist) perspective. This focus has obscured much of the interplay of cultural performances that informed “courtly life”. Recent research has begun to reverse this, focusing on issues such as the tensions between orality, writing, and performance; the sociocultural dimensions of making and owning manuscripts (musical and otherwise); the interstices between musical, literary and visual texts and political, social and religious rituals; and the impact of gender, kinship, and social status on the genesis and transmission of culture and music. These “new medievalist” studies have significantly enhanced our understanding of the cultural meanings of singing, listening, and sound in late medieval times. Taking a decisive step further, MALMECC, for the first time, systematically explores late medieval (c. 1280-1450) court cultures and their music synoptically across Europe. England, the Low Countries, Avignon, Bohemia, south-eastern Germany/Salzburg, Savoy, Iberia, and Cyprus have been selected for study as each was a vibrant site of cultural production but has been relatively neglected due to prevailing discursive formations favouring “centres” like Paris and Florence. Linking these courts in a large-scale comparative study focused on the role of music in courtly life but embedded within a multidisciplinary framework encompassing all the arts as well as politics and religion reveals the complex ecology of late medieval performances of noblesse in unheard-of depth while at the same time throwing the unique qualities of each court into distinct relief. The project applies an innovative research paradigm that develops a trans-disciplinary and post-national(ist), “relational” approach to the study of music in late-medieval court cultures. In doing so it integrates all late medieval arts and re-constitutes the fullness of their potential meanings. For further information, please visit the project website: malmecc.eu

• Martha Buckley (Project Manager)
• University of Oxford
• 2016-19
• Dr. David Catalunya (Post-doctoral Researcher)
• University of Oxford
• 2019-22
• Dr. Christophe Masson (Post-doctoral Researcher)
• University of Oxford
• 2017-19; currently Chercheur qualifié du FNRS at Université de Liège
• Dr. Grantley McDonald (Post-doctoral Researcher)
• University of Oxford
• 2019-21
• Dr. David Murray (Post-doctoral Researcher)
• University of Oxford
• 2016-19; currently Post-doctoral Researcher at Utrecht University
• Claire Selby (Programme Manager)
• University of Oxford
• 2019-22
• Dr. Laura Slater (Post-doctoral Researcher)
• University of Oxford
• 2016-19; currently Lecturer in the History of Medieval Art and Fellow of Peterhouse at University of Cambridge
• Dr. Uri Smilansky (Post-doctoral Researcher)
• University of Oxford
• 2019-22

This dissertation investigates the life and works of the Amersfoort musician Joannes Tollius (ca. 1555 - ca. 1620) and the impact of the Reformation on music life in the Low Countries.

• Simon Groot

A series of six exploratory research seminars.

• prof. dr. Koen Ottenheym

The northern Low Countries in the later Middle Ages were ruled by important noble families who contributed considerably to the political, social, and cultural exchanges across Europe at the time. Sharing social and cultural practices as well as family ties with the top echelon of European aristocracy including the rulers of France, England, and the Empire, they maintained a lively cultural scene in Holland, too. In my research project, I will focus on a specific moment in the cultural environment of the courts in the northern Low Countries, the second half of the long fourteenth century (c. 1350-1420), taking into consideration secular and sacred music, visual art, as well as poetic and narrative texts. In doing so, a group of parchment fragments kept at the university libraries of Amsterdam, Leiden, and Utrecht which bears witness to significant musical activity in the northern Low Countries in the later Middle Ages will take central stage. The variety of genres and their multilingualism (French, Middle Dutch, and Latin texts) point to a lively cultural activity at a court in the Dutch-speaking region of Europe, making the court of Holland at The Hague a prime candidate for the provenance of the fragments. Despite occasional research on the music and its context, the fragment complex and the cultural landscape of the fourteenth and early fifteenth century in which the music was developed, performed, and distributed have not yet been subject to any comprehensive study by musicologists. This research project will be the first to study the full scope of music and texts contained in the fragments by way of newest philological, digital, and archival research techniques, thereby (re-)assessing their likely provenance and date as well as their cultural background on a transnational scale. This will provide important new information about the cultural dynamics at work in both the northern Low Countries and late medieval Europe, and for the first time ever fully chart and highlight the important musical heritage of the northern Low Countries in the decades before and around 1400.

• Eliane Fankhauser M.A.

Music is a performance art and exists within and through performance. This implies that music is not a thing but a series of dynamic and related occurrences. My central question is how we, as musicologists, might be able to study such a constellation of occurrences of ongoing becoming. In order to tackle this question, I use, first and foremost, the problem articulated by Harvard musicologist Carolyn Abbate in her 2004 essay “Music—Drastic or Gnostic?” as my point of entry. Abbate points out that musicologists are unable fully to capture the dynamic realities of music-as-performance in thought or language, because one cannot simultaneously be present as performers and simultaneously conceptualise intellectually the process of performing and everything that accompanies it. In order to find a possible solution to Abbate’s problem, I read her argumentation against the insights of physicist and feminist theorist Karen Barad. Barad starts from the assumption that matter and meaning are inherently tied together, and that all being is inseparable from the dynamics of becoming. She argues that everything emerges from within and through occurrences called “intra-actions” —relatings through and within which all forms of being continuously are coming into existence in their specificity, including “us”. Barad thus invites us to study music not in terms of pre-given elements and structures, but to study the dynamics of intra-actions that produce specific music and knowledge.

• dr. J Pranger

The process of recording music introduced profound changes into music culture in general that musicology is only beginning to address systematically in recent years; in the case of Persia, recording , among other elements, influenced instruments, musical forms, performing styles and the social life of musicians. It is clear at present, at least to a certain extent, where and when recordings were made (generating a full bibliographical record remains work-in-progress), and we know that the venues of music-making changed dramatically in those years (for example, coffeehouses came to use record players instead of having live musicians play). What is required now is to clarify how the formative influence exerted by the recording process spread from the recording studio to the music (repertoire, instruments, style), the musicians (their social position, ranking, gender), and to society (venues, tastes) through the increased use of mechanically reproducible music. Thus, it may be argued that the recording process was a turning point in the evolution of Persian musical culture, at least certainly in urban settings.

• prof. dr. Emile Wennekes

• Dr. Eckhard Neubauer
• Prof. Anthony Seeger

The interpolated version of the French allegorical satire, the Roman de Fauvel, transmitted in manuscript Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds français 146 (produced in Paris ca. 1317), targets the corruption within the French royal court in the last years of the rule of King Philip IV of France (r. 1285–1314) and during the troubled succession that followed in 1315 and 1316. It does so by telling the story of the lustful and evil horse Fauvel, who becomes king of France at the will of Fortune. Its unique music collection received a prominent position in musicology for decades as the most important musical repertoire of early fourteenth-century France. However, the four French lais that this source contains have attracted scarce scholarly attention although they represent the only surviving examples from the early fourteenth century of this highly complex musical and poetic form. Previous scholarship considered these songs as nothing more than a transitional stage in the history of the lyric lai with music, which starts with the troubadours and the trouvères and culminates in the oeuvre of Guillaume de Machaut (ca. 1300–1377). Contrary to this view, this dissertation argues that the lais in the Roman de Fauvel not only are extremely sophisticated, but also play a fundamental role, previously unrecognized, in the design of the Roman de Fauvel.

Part One (chapters 1 and 2) examines the multi-layered relationships between the four lais as a group and the text, music, and images in Book II of the Roman de Fauvel. These chapters show how the lais appear at key moments in the plot. Of all four lais, the first and the last come across as the most impressive and intricate monophonic compositions in the entire manuscript. 

Part Two consists of three chapters designed as case studies. Chapter 3 interprets the key narrative section describing Fauvel and his excessively decorated palace. Fauvel’s palace is presented as a symbolic space displaying the triumph of deceit. Among the wall decorations, songs about fraud are notated with “false” (chromatically inflected) music. This textual detail is carefully realized in the first lai (Talant que j’ai d’obeir) discussed in chapter 4. Performed by Fauvel himself in his first attempt to impress Fortune to accept his marriage proposal, this composition is exceptional in the way it undermines Fauvel’s declaration of love by means of a pyrotechnical accumulation of textual and musical effects. Chapter 5 analyzes the final lai in the story, the Lay des Hellequines. This lai debates the merits of love and advocates temperance and loyalty. Challenging the earlier interpretation that this composition serves only as a lyric suspension in the plot, chapter 5 argues that the debate conceals an important political message directed to the newly crowned Philip V and his wife at the time when dynastic continuity was in grave danger. This view is supported by the unusual use of the lofty dodecasyllable (alexandrine), which was typical for didactic texts.

• dr. Ruxandra Marinescu

The CMME Project represents a systematized plan to introduce modern computing capabilities into the study of medieval and Renaissance music. Structured around a web-based public interface and software suite, the CMME will offer the first high-quality digital publication system for early music. The ""dynamic"" editions of the CMME move beyond the physical limitations of traditional printed editions in numerous aspects: they can be configured visually by individual users to offer different styles of transcription; automated searching, indexing, and statistical analysis can be performed on the musical data with unprecedented elegance and ease; publication errors can be corrected immediately. Conceptually, the CMME integrates current ideas about pre-modern textualities: the numerous variant versions typical of pre-modern music are no longer reduced to a single authorial text - an unavoidable necessity imposed by the format of a traditional, printed edition.

• drs. Marnix van Berchum