Friday, 9 July 2021, 11.00-12.30, Room 219
Musicology and its actors. The CIMM: A meeting place (15 mins.) | Gisèle Clément (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier)
The International Center for Medieval Music (CIMM, Montpellier), linked to the Center for Medieval Studies of Montpellier (CEMM, EA 4583), articulates the musicological issues of medieval music with the question of live performance. It implements an interprofessional approach which considers musicology in three ways:
– Musicology in action: at the intersection between research and performativity, it is the subject of an experience for everyone, musician, musicologist, luthier, spectator, student. For each of these actors, the act finds a reality through what constitutes it in its relationship to the musical object.
– A musicology in dialogue: it is the subject of a sharing of expertise. Musicological research is built from the skills of the musicologist, the musician and the luthier towards a complex problematization integrating questions of sound, playing, organology and the study of sources.
– A musicology in partnership: it is the subject of collaboration and the sharing of resources in an economic and political context which places this music in contemporary cultural and artistic news.
The deployment of a musicology by the three dimensions of the act (the experienced), the dialogue (the sharing) and the partnership (the collaboration), articulated with the spaces of research (university), transmission (CIMM and Conservatoire), instrumental (violin making), production and distribution (live performance and mediation) allows a renewal of the university musicological approach.
De l’inertie des formes fixes à l’écriture libre. Structures des chansons françaises dans la “génération de 1528” (15 mins.) | Luc J. M. Vallat (University of Bern)
Since the end of the fifteenth century, poetry and (consequently) music liberate themselves from medieval formes fixes to gain other forms of expression, under the influence of humanist exchanges. As from the 1520s, a new generation of French composers substitutes the last representatives of the end of the Middle Ages, thus definitively propelling Europe’s musical life in the Renaissance. Diverse genres surface, sometimes partly linked with previous forms or – on the contrary – completely independent. Whereas some research (Dobbins, Ouvrard, Perkins, etc.) have already partially illustrated the huge variety of structures that appear within this repertoire, the topic regarding form and its influences remains scarcely present in scientific literature. The permeability of these compositions (which display other forms, genres, national and international influences as well as socio- cultural dynamics) has been left unexplored so far. This represents a considerable historiographical gap (nay a distortion) within one of the most outstanding repertoires of occidental music.
This project thus seeks to study types of formal construction in chansons of French expression during this period by conducting a broad analysis (particularly oriented toward musical sources). The latter will enable the determination of the formal effects of a production – doubtlessly multiple and unfixed – deeply bound to a socio-cultural factor. This is particularly true of the parts of musical protagonists (composers, editors, audience, lords, etc.) in the development of the repertoire.
Nymphes des Bois – Josquin’s Musical Genealogy (concert-lecture, 40 mins.) | Guy G. James (The Gesualdo Six) & Jeannette Jones (College of the Holy Cross, Boston)
The Gesualdo Six proposes a lecture-recital of the musical world inhabited by Josquin around 1500. Josquin’s own Nymphes des bois offers a starting point for understanding the contours of this world. A conversation between ensemble member Guy James and musicologist Jeannette D. Jones will explore the relationship between the poetic world of Molinet’s poem that provides the text for Josquin’s piece and the musical world that informs it. As Jones’s research has demonstrated, the rhetorical frame of genealogy outlined in poems by Jean Molinet, Guillaume Cretin, and others presents us with a powerful tool to understand the relationships between musicians in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Inspired by the legacy sketched in Josquin’s Nymphes des bois, Gesualdo Six presents a concert that features not only Josquin’s piece, but also works by composers including Dufay, Busnois, Binchois, Ockeghem, Agricola, Verbonnet, Prioris, Gaspar, Brumel, de la Rue, Compere, Gombert and Jachet. The format of both the performance and conversation will be a pre-recorded video. Guy James, Owain Park, and Jeannette Jones are happy to be available via zoom for a live Q&A session subsequent to the video presentation.
