Microtones According to Augustine. Neumes, Semiotics and Rhetoric in Romano-Frankish Chant

Leo Lousberg (Utrecht University)

Exploring possibilities to explain five enigmatic symbols in an eleventh-century Tonary from Dijon, kept in Montpellier (H159), I stumbled over a non-melodic frame of references for their systematic functional explanation. The signs, representing sounds, were triggered by TEXTUAL meanings, not by melodic contexts of some kind.The sounds, here microtones, are triggered – without exception – by text elements with rhetorical relevance as I will demonstrate; by affect, logic and/or loci.
Microtones appear to be just one of many tools the elite of medieval auctores applied in order to create some kind of otherness around a (diatonic, possibly isorhythmic) core, the othernesses signaling the presence of rhetorical relevance in the text. Dozens of manuscripts in NW Europe, chronicles and treatises appear to confirm the existence of this tradition as a widespread, long term phenomenon.

In my presentation, I will explain my analysis and its results in more depth. Subsequently, I will address a range of possible implications for reading and performing liturgical texts and musics in medieval (Iberian) sources.

Manoscritti e notazioni musicali italiche nell’alto medioevo

Giovanni Varelli (Magdalen College – Faculty of Music, University of Oxford)

When it comes to the writing of music in the Italic peninsula during the high Middle Ages, there is still a great deal of confusion among musical palaeographers as to how to distinguish between different scripts, their geographical distribution, and their names (e.g. the abuse of the term ‘Beneventan’, or the fictitious ‘North Italian’). Rather than being a mere discussion on terminology, this lecture aims to raise awareness of the rich variety of music scripts in the Regnum Italicum, and of how their study may shed light on the circulation of manuscripts and singers in the Carolingian and Ottonian periods.

The lectures will be delivered respectively in English and Italian.

Leo Lousberg (Maastricht 1950) graduated in urban planning and construction economics, both at Amsterdam University in 1975. After an international career in construction and institutional real estate investment he received his MA degrees in Musicology and Medieval Studies from Utrecht University in 2013, both cum laude. In 2014, Lousberg won the Utrecht History Price. In his doctoral thesis (September 2018), focusing on Gregorian chant up to c1250, Lousberg demonstrates that the one and only function of microtones is to highlight words with rhetorical relevance. A range of melodic “othernesses” appear to have similar if not identical functions.

Giovanni Varelli is Prize Fellow in Music at Magdalen College, Oxford. After completing his BA in Musicology at the University of Pavia, Giovanni Varelli studied at Royal Holloway, University of London, and completed his PhD at Cambridge University with a dissertation on the earliest surviving music manuscripts from the north-Italian abbey of Nonantola. In addition to musicological research, he worked for the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music, the British Library Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts, and for the Universities of Padova and Bolzano/Bozen. Giovanni is currently working on musical notations in early-mediaeval Italy, focusing in particular on cognitive processes in the development of music writing and on the influence of the contemporary political and ecclesiastical context on music book production.

Second series of Interdisciplinary Research Seminars

Manuscritos em Diálogo

The interdisciplinary research seminars Manuscritos em Diálogo are jointly organized by the CESEM and the IEM . These seminars are envisioned as didactic events devoted to spread useful information on how to tackle the study and description of different kinds of medieval manuscripts, mainly Iberian. The seminars aim to create bridges among scholars from different areas and promote dialogue between them.

Scholars gathered together for the first series of seminars Manuscritos em Diálogo in the 2018 spring semester at the FCSH-NOVA University of Lisbon. Papers dealt with issues related to plainchant and manuscript copy, Eastern and Western liturgies, conservation and restoration of medieval manuscripts, and musical iconography.

The new series of seminars will be held monthly from September 2018 to January 2019. Papers will be delivered in Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and English. All events are free and open to the public.

The research seminars Manuscritos em Diálogo are organized by Elsa De Luca and Alicia Miguelez.

DOWNLOAD THE PROGRAMME HERE