Nested Polyphonies: Stratification and Organicism in 15th-Century Chansonniers

CREMS Seminar

The spatial arrangement of musical notation, poetic texts, illuminated initials, and decorated borders in fifteenth-century chansonniers suggests a conceptual interconnectedness among these elements in the minds of their compilers, or at least an intention that such connections would be made by later readers. Partly as a result of a historic dependence on critical editions, which encourage readers to prioritize only certain aspects, less attention has been paid to the ways in which a multifaceted reading might work. 

            This paper asks whether a piece of music is ever independent of its material presentation. If a song found in one kind of book is copied into a very different one, is it still the same song? The question touches on a number of recent debates in scholarship on the history of the book, relating to the fixity (or otherwise) of text, the social environments inhabited by readers, and the hermeneutics of material culture. Renaissance chansons had an unusually peripatetic existence, their high rate of concordance making them a particularly fruitful genre through which to explore this issue.

Refreshments available 15 minutes before the start