Polyphonic Singing and Communities of Music Writing in Medieval Britain and Ireland, c. 1150 to c. 1350

Introduction

BROKENSONG examines polyphonic singing in medieval Britain and Ireland during a transformative period of western music history, c. 1150-1350, when written books devoted to polyphony begin to proliferate. Using methodologies from musicology, music analysis, medieval and manuscript studies, practice-based research, and digital humanities, BROKENSONG aims to answer the principal research question: What does it mean for a culture to write its music down?

Investigating the Act of Writing Down Music

BROKENSONG investigates what this act of ‘writing-down’ meant to and for musical communities. The insular sources extant from this period—just over a hundred mostly fragmentary sources—hint at stories of music practice and creation different from those suggested by the highly curated continental anthologies of polyphony that survive from continental Europe, and around which the history of western music was constructed.

Understanding Fragmentary Sources

These are mostly broken books transmitting broken songs: yet BROKENSONG proposes that in-depth study of them will provide a breakthrough on fundamental questions regarding processes of and contexts for artistic creation in the later Middle Ages.

Addressing Style and Anonymity

Tackling the issue of style head-on, BROKENSONG uses it to address the problem of anonymity in medieval cultural products. It develops an innovative methodology for understanding the relationships between cultural products that lack extra-musical evidence for associating them to specific individuals, communities, or regions.

Work Packages

Three intersecting work packages are designed to:

1. Reconstruct the fragmentary material artifacts.
2. Develop historical understandings of music and community.
3. Analyze communities of musical style through a combination of practice-based and computational approaches.

Revealing Layered Interactions

BROKENSONG reveals the layered interactions between individual creativity, communal ritual activities, institutional agendas, and the written medium of music notation—with its particular techniques, limitations, and possibilities—and the realization of those artifacts into sound, then and now.