Musical Imitation in Medieval Europe (1110-1300)

The project will study the cultural interrelations between sacred music and lay vernacular lyric by uncovering and analysing the melodic imitations that occur between the two repertoires.

The research will focus on lyric, music, and manuscript sources produced in France and Occitania from the beginning of the 11th to the end of the 13th century, with the aim of understanding to what extent troubadour and trouvère poetry (which was always accompanied by music) depended on the Latin ecclesiastical cultural humus, its forms and its techniques.

Imitation and memory were constitutive aspects of artistic creation in the Middle Ages, which was more often driven by an attraction for an established tradition rather than the perceived need for innovation.

The project will exploit digital technologies available and develop new computational perspectives to analyse large corpora of liturgical and vernacular music in order detect concordances between melodies, with the aim of assessing the intertextual, literary and ideological implications of musical reuse.

With this goal, the researcher will create a sophisticated searching tool able to detect similarities in melodic sequences which will take into account musicological principals as well as the variability inherent to the process of manuscript copy.

A secondment period at McGill will enable the fellow to use Optical Music Recognition to enlarge the dataset of encoded melodies at an unprecedented speed and accuracy. This is expected to substantially increase the discovery of musical correspondences.

The research will enhance our understanding of the dialectic between imitation and creation in the Middle Ages, and contribute to define the osmotic, yet conflicting, relationship between lay and religious culture and their creative environments throughout the later middle ages.