Lost & Found: Traces of Early Music

An International Colloquium on Fragmentology

Cascais, Portugal | 19-22 July 2023

The purpose of the Lost&Found project has been to reconstruct and study incomplete sets of musical sources and their historical contexts with the aim of investing them with significance beyond their condition as fragmentary cultural artefacts. Surviving musical-liturgical fragments are often the oldest, if not the only, material traces of local liturgical uses and rituals, and processes of transmission and reception of textual and chant repertories; they can also be sources of rare chants and formularies, and provide links between extant complete or nearly complete sources.

Fragments are not only the remnants of former entire codices. They also represent the vestiges of the circumstances that determined their making. Thus, to study sets of musical-liturgical fragments with the same provenance over an extended chronological timeframe is indeed to investigate and reconstruct their broader synchronic and diachronic contexts. Fragments can improve knowledge of a given liturgical use, reveal the origins of texts, formularies, chants and systems of notating them, and point to the web of connections between central and lateral traditions, and processes of continuity and change.

Much in the same way, to reconstruct missing parts of polyphonic works is to recreate a whole context, as well as being a learning process in itself. Through comprehensive analysis both of the extant parts and of comparable complete works that will inform the process of reconstruction, in-depth stylistic and technical understanding of the repertory at hand may be developed. Moreover, as an act of recreation, this may generate competing versions of the same work in a way that is comparable to differing interpretations in actual performance. Thus, besides having a didactic potential, reconstruction enables the music to be resurrected for rendition and historical consideration.