Sean Curran
I have research interests in many facets of the cultural, compositional, and material history of music and of literature, in continental western Europe and in England, from the eleventh century to the fifteenth. My published work to date has addressed topics ranging from the codicology and palaeography of music manuscripts, to the analysis and literary criticism of medieval songs, through new approaches to musical and literary cognition and aesthetics in the later middle ages.
Several projects are currently in progress. They include a monograph on music and devotion in later medieval England; an essay on music in Chaucer; and an article on the new ideas about musical notation that were articulated in songs of the thirteenth century (and how their articulated perspectives are tendentious and historically unreliable). A goal in the longer range is another monograph, entitled _Voices from the Archive: Old Music and the Motet ca.1300_. The book considers compositional and music-theoretical responses to the archive of ageing vernacular and polyphonic music that was left to the early fourteenth century by the vast changes in documentary culture witnessed in the thirteenth.
Several projects are currently in progress. They include a monograph on music and devotion in later medieval England; an essay on music in Chaucer; and an article on the new ideas about musical notation that were articulated in songs of the thirteenth century (and how their articulated perspectives are tendentious and historically unreliable). A goal in the longer range is another monograph, entitled _Voices from the Archive: Old Music and the Motet ca.1300_. The book considers compositional and music-theoretical responses to the archive of ageing vernacular and polyphonic music that was left to the early fourteenth century by the vast changes in documentary culture witnessed in the thirteenth.
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The final sections of the article analyse the musicopoetic games of the motet Dame de valour (71) / Dame vostre douz regart (72) / MANERE (M5). Similarly to the St. Emmeram theorist, the piece self-consciously highlights the difficulty and worth of close listening (a theme inspired by its tenor’s scriptural source), and does so with a hocket that marks a complementarity of breaking and integration, of a formal sort, several decades before Lambertus and St. Emmeram would reflect on the hocket’s dual character theoretically. The motet poses artfully some of the same questions about the audibility of form that preoccupy modern scholarship. These voices from the thirteenth century might remind us that ethical debates about correct listening are much older than current disciplinary concerns. But recognising the longevity of the debates does not force us to agree with old positions.
PhD Dissertation
A new paleographical assessment of La Clayette’s notation uncovers a broadly consistent set of procedures for notating rhythm, and reveals nuances of rhythmic style not previously identified in published editions of the repertory. Telling paleographical details suggest the book sustained a performance practice in which a single musical reader coached other singers live from the manuscript. This is akin to the practice advocated by La Clayette‘s literary works, in which a reader would perform the texts aloud for his audience; though the musical version of the practice incorporated the literature’s auditors as singing participants. The only skill required to sing these pieces was the willingness to be taught how. I suggest that the value of singing the motets lay in their ability to produce devotional mental images in ways continuous with the literary texts, and to script a performer’s response to them in ways the literary texts could not. Several of the motets engage the memory of ribald vernacular songs, then rewrite that memory devotionally through Latin contrafacture. Thus the pieces offered a devotional training in interpretation itself, one that was contingent upon their musical difficulty, and which cast devotion as a practice adopted by choice and through labor. In later stages of the manuscript’s life, its compilers unfolded some of the music’s other interpretative possibilities through literary choices that did not fit the volume’s first devotional frame. The unruliness of La Clayette’s final form betrays changing interpretations of its musical contents over time, and puts pressure on scholarly assumptions about how material texts must anchor the interpretation of music and literature.
Finally, through an analysis of a single motet from the La Clayette manuscript (Par une matinee [807] / Mellis stilla [808] / ALLELUIA [unidentified]), conducted in dialogue with a paleographical study of each of its fifteen manuscript witnesses, we see how composers could articulate from within motets new ideas about the social domain of music writing in ways that left a lasting legacy to the fourteenth century. I argue that a musicopoetic gambit in the French triplum satirically represents the overheard (but newly composed) song of a shepherdess and her lover as unwritable, and therefore irrational. But its satire is doubly undone, first in that the notational “house style” of La Clayette renders it illegible except through precisely the kinds of oral practices to which it would claim superiority as an written composition; and second, in that the Latin motetus against which the French voice was composed was known far more widely, as a popular sung prayer that did not need writing to endure. While the triplum’s style would assert the distinction of the notation in which it was written (in a manner resembling the tendentious, roughly contemporaneous social commentary of Johannes de Grocheio), Mellis stilla suggests that the reach of music writing had limits that did not match the more widespread ability to sing in polyphony. Beyond the written testimony, vernacular polyphony in a style so similar to the motet as sometimes to be indistinguishable from it thrived in ways the triplum’s composer probably would not have encouraged, but which our historiographies should now acknowledge.
The final sections of the article analyse the musicopoetic games of the motet Dame de valour (71) / Dame vostre douz regart (72) / MANERE (M5). Similarly to the St. Emmeram theorist, the piece self-consciously highlights the difficulty and worth of close listening (a theme inspired by its tenor’s scriptural source), and does so with a hocket that marks a complementarity of breaking and integration, of a formal sort, several decades before Lambertus and St. Emmeram would reflect on the hocket’s dual character theoretically. The motet poses artfully some of the same questions about the audibility of form that preoccupy modern scholarship. These voices from the thirteenth century might remind us that ethical debates about correct listening are much older than current disciplinary concerns. But recognising the longevity of the debates does not force us to agree with old positions.
A new paleographical assessment of La Clayette’s notation uncovers a broadly consistent set of procedures for notating rhythm, and reveals nuances of rhythmic style not previously identified in published editions of the repertory. Telling paleographical details suggest the book sustained a performance practice in which a single musical reader coached other singers live from the manuscript. This is akin to the practice advocated by La Clayette‘s literary works, in which a reader would perform the texts aloud for his audience; though the musical version of the practice incorporated the literature’s auditors as singing participants. The only skill required to sing these pieces was the willingness to be taught how. I suggest that the value of singing the motets lay in their ability to produce devotional mental images in ways continuous with the literary texts, and to script a performer’s response to them in ways the literary texts could not. Several of the motets engage the memory of ribald vernacular songs, then rewrite that memory devotionally through Latin contrafacture. Thus the pieces offered a devotional training in interpretation itself, one that was contingent upon their musical difficulty, and which cast devotion as a practice adopted by choice and through labor. In later stages of the manuscript’s life, its compilers unfolded some of the music’s other interpretative possibilities through literary choices that did not fit the volume’s first devotional frame. The unruliness of La Clayette’s final form betrays changing interpretations of its musical contents over time, and puts pressure on scholarly assumptions about how material texts must anchor the interpretation of music and literature.
Finally, through an analysis of a single motet from the La Clayette manuscript (Par une matinee [807] / Mellis stilla [808] / ALLELUIA [unidentified]), conducted in dialogue with a paleographical study of each of its fifteen manuscript witnesses, we see how composers could articulate from within motets new ideas about the social domain of music writing in ways that left a lasting legacy to the fourteenth century. I argue that a musicopoetic gambit in the French triplum satirically represents the overheard (but newly composed) song of a shepherdess and her lover as unwritable, and therefore irrational. But its satire is doubly undone, first in that the notational “house style” of La Clayette renders it illegible except through precisely the kinds of oral practices to which it would claim superiority as an written composition; and second, in that the Latin motetus against which the French voice was composed was known far more widely, as a popular sung prayer that did not need writing to endure. While the triplum’s style would assert the distinction of the notation in which it was written (in a manner resembling the tendentious, roughly contemporaneous social commentary of Johannes de Grocheio), Mellis stilla suggests that the reach of music writing had limits that did not match the more widespread ability to sing in polyphony. Beyond the written testimony, vernacular polyphony in a style so similar to the motet as sometimes to be indistinguishable from it thrived in ways the triplum’s composer probably would not have encouraged, but which our historiographies should now acknowledge.