Karen Desmond
Karen Desmond is Associate Professor of Music at Brandeis University. Desmond was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Harvard in the Spring of 2018, and a Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall and Visiting Scholar at the Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge in the Spring of 2019. She has also taught and/or held research fellowships at University College Cork, the University of Cologne, and McGill University. Her monograph Music and the moderni, 1300-1350: The ars nova in Theory and Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2018) challenges prevailing accounts of the ars nova. External awards include an NEH Research Fellowship (2014), an SSHRC Banting Fellowship (2014-16), and an NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant (2019-20). She has begun writing her second monograph, tentatively titled Torso: Understanding the Polyphony of Late Medieval England from its Fragmentary Remains. Other book projects include her translation of Lambert’s Ars musica, edited by Christian Meyer (Ashgate, 2015) and The Montpellier Codex: The final fascicle, a collection of essays co-edited with Catherine Bradley (The Boydell Press, 2018). Desmond has published articles in the premier journals of her field including Early Music, Early Music History, Musica disciplina, and Plainsong and Medieval Music, and was co-editor for two journal special issues: one on the fourteenth-century composer, Philippe de Vitry (in Early Music), and one on the fourteenth-century astronomer and music theorist, Jean des Murs (in Erudition and the Republic of Letters). Online work includes a website of late medieval motets digitally encoded in mensural notation (http://www.measuringpolyphony.org) and a digital edition of an ars nova treatise (http://www.arsmusicae.org) . She has recently been appointed chair of the American Musicological Society’s Board Committee on Technology for a three-year term, and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Musicology.
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KEYWORDS: medieval motets, sonority, digital musicology, Montpellier Codex, Roman de Fauvel, Ivrea Codex
ABSTRACT: In balades 27 and 38, Machaut likens the wounds suffered by the lover to those that result from the poisons of deadly beasts. He invokes animal imagery to depict the beloved and her behaviour: she encloses within her being monstrous beasts that repel and repulse the lover, causing him grievous bodily harm. In the course of both balades the deadly beasts transform into various allegorical characters that are personifications of secular vices. One of these characters, Refusal (‘Refus’), emerges as central. Machaut personifies the lady's rejection of the lover's advances (which he makes through words/music) as the courtly vice Refusal. In Balade 27, it is her sense organs that enact this refusal: her ears cannot hear him, her mouth rejects him, and her Look kills him. I explore the resonances of Machaut's sadistic and animalistic lady in two spheres: the courtly, where the obvious antecedents for Machaut's imagery are the courtly bestiaries; and the sacred, where parallels between Refusal and the deadly sins of pride and envy can be detected, as suggested by my interpretation of these two balades and some of Machaut's motets, and the links I set forth between these sins, vices, and the senses that partake in them.
ABSTRACT: Early Ars nova theory sources present a complex web of interdependencies. Apart from the more substantial texts of Jehan des Murs and Marchetto da Padova, there are a number of sources containing short texts that appear to emanate from the orbit of Philippe de Vitry. Vitry’s role as the author of a definitive written text, however, is now regarded as doubtful, with the hypothesis favored that the extant sources are but remnants of an oral teaching tradition possibly originating with Vitry. We can study these ‘Vitrian’ texts today through editions published in various edited volumes, in journal articles dating from 1908, 1929 and 1958, and in the nineteenth-century Scriptores edition of Edmond de Coussemaker. The differing presentation formats, and specific editorial policies and accessibility issues, however, have served to obfuscate attempts at the analysis and interpretation of these texts.
While HTML versions of many medieval theory texts are available online (TML, Lexicon musicum Latinum), technologies available today could better present the relationships between these texts. In this paper, I demonstrate how these technologies might realize the potential of truly ‘hyper-textual’ editions that would reflect the fluidity and variance that characterize medieval texts. As a proof of concept, I have prepared a digital edition, following the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), of one important early Ars nova text (incipit ‘Omni desideranti notitiam’). This is the first modern edition of this text, which is extant in three Italian sources dating from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. My analysis of Omni desideranti notitiam demonstrates that Jacobus de Montibus used it, in his Speculum musicae, as a primary authority for the Vitrian tradition (in a written version), as did other fourteenth-century theorists. I reconsider the importance of this text within the early Ars nova, and I extrapolate on the advantages of presenting all the Ars nova texts online. Modern readers of a digital editions, using hypertext, could mimic the intertextual and indeed hypertextual experience existent within the medieval work (whether text or music), whose web of reference and allusion becomes apparent those in on the ‘game.’
and modern times. The opening chapters of this early eleventh-century treatise deal with traditional subjects of medieval theory-the monochord, the consonances, the modes - and the final chapters herald the subject that will dominate music treatises of the later medieval period, namely organum. In the midst of this, chapter 15, a discussion of melodic aesthetic principles, with no real precedents or consequents in medieval theory, appears highly original. The sometimes ambiguous
language that Guido employs in this chapter has prompted varying interpretations, many of which have been made without consideration of the context of Guido's remarks.
In this article I am primarily concerned with the sources of Guido's vocabulary, but also with the analogies that Guido draws, whether implicitly or explicitly, between music and the arts of the trivium, specifically grammar and rhetoric. These connections will throw light on problematic passages in this chapter, particularly the opening three paragraphs, and will clarify the position of Guido's outlined precepts in the composition-analysis-performance spectrum that, to modern readers, is seemingly implied. To aid my interpretation, I have drawn on the medieval commentaries that discuss this chapter, and specifically on those written in the second half of the eleventh century. I have accepted as a basic premise that these authors, writing probably not more than a generation after Guido, had a better understanding of his terminology than we do today and can only enlighten us in the interpretation of this chapter.
Dissertation
Books
This book provides the first in-depth exploration of the contents and contexts of the Montpellier Codex's final fascicle. It explores the manuscript's production, dating, function, and notation, offering close-readings of individual works, which illuminate compositionally progressive features of the repertoire as well as its interactions with existing musical and poetic traditions, from a variety of perspectives: thirteenth- and fourteenth-century music, art history, and manuscript culture.
Contributors: Rebecca A. Baltzer, Edward Breen, Sean Curran, Rachel Davies, Margaret Dobby, Mark Everist, Anna Kathryn Grau, Solomon Guhl-Miller, Oliver Huck, Anne Ibos-Augé, Eva M. Maschke, David Maw, Dolores Pesce, Alison Stones, Mary E. Wolinski
Book Reviews
KEYWORDS: medieval motets, sonority, digital musicology, Montpellier Codex, Roman de Fauvel, Ivrea Codex
ABSTRACT: In balades 27 and 38, Machaut likens the wounds suffered by the lover to those that result from the poisons of deadly beasts. He invokes animal imagery to depict the beloved and her behaviour: she encloses within her being monstrous beasts that repel and repulse the lover, causing him grievous bodily harm. In the course of both balades the deadly beasts transform into various allegorical characters that are personifications of secular vices. One of these characters, Refusal (‘Refus’), emerges as central. Machaut personifies the lady's rejection of the lover's advances (which he makes through words/music) as the courtly vice Refusal. In Balade 27, it is her sense organs that enact this refusal: her ears cannot hear him, her mouth rejects him, and her Look kills him. I explore the resonances of Machaut's sadistic and animalistic lady in two spheres: the courtly, where the obvious antecedents for Machaut's imagery are the courtly bestiaries; and the sacred, where parallels between Refusal and the deadly sins of pride and envy can be detected, as suggested by my interpretation of these two balades and some of Machaut's motets, and the links I set forth between these sins, vices, and the senses that partake in them.
ABSTRACT: Early Ars nova theory sources present a complex web of interdependencies. Apart from the more substantial texts of Jehan des Murs and Marchetto da Padova, there are a number of sources containing short texts that appear to emanate from the orbit of Philippe de Vitry. Vitry’s role as the author of a definitive written text, however, is now regarded as doubtful, with the hypothesis favored that the extant sources are but remnants of an oral teaching tradition possibly originating with Vitry. We can study these ‘Vitrian’ texts today through editions published in various edited volumes, in journal articles dating from 1908, 1929 and 1958, and in the nineteenth-century Scriptores edition of Edmond de Coussemaker. The differing presentation formats, and specific editorial policies and accessibility issues, however, have served to obfuscate attempts at the analysis and interpretation of these texts.
While HTML versions of many medieval theory texts are available online (TML, Lexicon musicum Latinum), technologies available today could better present the relationships between these texts. In this paper, I demonstrate how these technologies might realize the potential of truly ‘hyper-textual’ editions that would reflect the fluidity and variance that characterize medieval texts. As a proof of concept, I have prepared a digital edition, following the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), of one important early Ars nova text (incipit ‘Omni desideranti notitiam’). This is the first modern edition of this text, which is extant in three Italian sources dating from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. My analysis of Omni desideranti notitiam demonstrates that Jacobus de Montibus used it, in his Speculum musicae, as a primary authority for the Vitrian tradition (in a written version), as did other fourteenth-century theorists. I reconsider the importance of this text within the early Ars nova, and I extrapolate on the advantages of presenting all the Ars nova texts online. Modern readers of a digital editions, using hypertext, could mimic the intertextual and indeed hypertextual experience existent within the medieval work (whether text or music), whose web of reference and allusion becomes apparent those in on the ‘game.’
and modern times. The opening chapters of this early eleventh-century treatise deal with traditional subjects of medieval theory-the monochord, the consonances, the modes - and the final chapters herald the subject that will dominate music treatises of the later medieval period, namely organum. In the midst of this, chapter 15, a discussion of melodic aesthetic principles, with no real precedents or consequents in medieval theory, appears highly original. The sometimes ambiguous
language that Guido employs in this chapter has prompted varying interpretations, many of which have been made without consideration of the context of Guido's remarks.
In this article I am primarily concerned with the sources of Guido's vocabulary, but also with the analogies that Guido draws, whether implicitly or explicitly, between music and the arts of the trivium, specifically grammar and rhetoric. These connections will throw light on problematic passages in this chapter, particularly the opening three paragraphs, and will clarify the position of Guido's outlined precepts in the composition-analysis-performance spectrum that, to modern readers, is seemingly implied. To aid my interpretation, I have drawn on the medieval commentaries that discuss this chapter, and specifically on those written in the second half of the eleventh century. I have accepted as a basic premise that these authors, writing probably not more than a generation after Guido, had a better understanding of his terminology than we do today and can only enlighten us in the interpretation of this chapter.
This book provides the first in-depth exploration of the contents and contexts of the Montpellier Codex's final fascicle. It explores the manuscript's production, dating, function, and notation, offering close-readings of individual works, which illuminate compositionally progressive features of the repertoire as well as its interactions with existing musical and poetic traditions, from a variety of perspectives: thirteenth- and fourteenth-century music, art history, and manuscript culture.
Contributors: Rebecca A. Baltzer, Edward Breen, Sean Curran, Rachel Davies, Margaret Dobby, Mark Everist, Anna Kathryn Grau, Solomon Guhl-Miller, Oliver Huck, Anne Ibos-Augé, Eva M. Maschke, David Maw, Dolores Pesce, Alison Stones, Mary E. Wolinski
Conference Report by Amy Williamson, ‘Montpellier in Oxford’, Early Music 42 (2014), pp. 502-503 (link to report given below).
The first metaphysical debate concerned the unity of form within being. The question was whether there existed a single form within man (Aquinas, Godfrey of Fontaines), or whether a plurality of forms existed simultaneously within one being (John Duns Scotus). A related debate looked at how qualities were understood to change: the plurality-of-forms proponents outlined a theory of change known as the additive theory while the unity-of-form adherents rejected this additive theory of change, believing that it assumed characteristics of qualities that were really only predicable of quantities, and proposed an alternative theory known as the succession-of-forms theory. While the references within the more well-known Book 7 of Speculum musicae to these debates are somewhat oblique, Jacobus makes specific and detailed references to them within chapters of Book 1 and Book 4. I analyze these passages within the context of the Quodlibets by Godfrey, Walter Burley’s De intensione et remissione formarum and the Ordinatio of Duns Scotus. This analysis will show Jacobus clearly advocating the unity-of-form position, and a close reading of the Notitia in this context will show how Muris developed his new systemization for mensural notation based on the Scotist position (which was further developed by John Dumbleton) that a plurality of forms may exist within one being, and that qualities change through addition or subtraction of degrees. For Muris, there is but one species of tempus, and within this one species there is a plurality of accidental forms, which are measured along one dimension. There are not different species of times, just greater and lesser times. The individual notes are individuated by the quantity of their matter, and whether parts are added or taken away from this individuating quantity of matter. Jacobus, on the other hand, holds onto the traditional explanation of the mensural system, conceptualized as a Porphyrian tree (like the arbor of Johannes de Burgundia) of the different species and sub-species of note values, each being distinct in their name, definition and essence, and each having an indivisible unity of form."