All Souls Seminars in Medieval and Renaissance Music

This long-running series of seminars, convened by Dr Margaret Bent, considers all aspects of medieval and renaissance music. It runs on Zoom in Michaelmas and Hilary Terms and generally attracts a large international audience. Usually, a presenter speaks for around 30 minutes and then engages with invited discussants for another half an hour. The floor is then open for questions and lively general discussion. Each term’s seminars are announced in advance on this page and attendees are asked to register via the button below. 

For each seminar, those who have registered will receive an email with the Zoom invitation and any further materials a couple of days before the seminar. If you have questions, please send an email to Joseph Mason, who is dealing with the practicalities of holding these seminars via Zoom.

Margaret Bent (Convener, All Souls College)

Joseph W. Mason (New College)

Michaelmas Term 2024

Thursday 31 October, 5pm–7pm GMT

Presenters: A. Zayaruznaya (Yale University) and Andrew Wathey (The National Archives and Northumbria University)  

Title: Philippe de Vitry (31 October 1291 – 9 June 1361)

Discussion moderated by Lawrence Earp (University of Wisconsin, Madison)

Philippe de Vitry, composer, poet, bishop, and correspondent of Petrarch, remains a pivotal but imperfectly understood figure in the cultural and musical history of the fourteenth century.  No contemporary was praised so often nor from so many quarters: yet the terms in which we view him, his work, impact and reputation are shifting.  Coinciding with his 733rd birthday, this seminar juxtaposes the perspectives and approaches adopted by two forthcoming books on Vitry, a figure whom it is hard to capture in a single study.  Following brief presentations on each of these studies by A. Zayaruznaya and Andrew Wathey, themes of common interest will be explored in discussion with Lawrence Earp, as will a number of conundra that continue to complicate and animate Vitry studies, including: historiography, biography, and his treatment in different disciplines; personal approaches to the subject; the span of Vitry’s intellectual universe; his role in fourteenth-century musical innovations; patronage and place; broad chronologies, and Vitry’s origins and early years.

Thursday 21 November, 5pm–7pm GMT

Presenter: Lucia Marchi (University of Trento)

Title: The long life of the Trecento repertory

Discussants: Blake Wilson (Dickinson College, PA) and Lachlan Hughes (Trinity College, Cambridge)

In 1461, the manuscript Chantilly, Bibliothèque du Musée Condé, 564 was donated by Francesco d’Altobianco degli Alberti to the three daughters – aged 9 to 14 – of the Florentine banker Tommaso Spinelli. The gift of a seemingly outdated manuscript of complex polyphonic music to young girls (and not to a professional musician, as had happened with the Squarcialupi codex) seems surprising, and raises the question of how long the Trecento repertory could have survived into the next century.

A new source contains a long capitolo ternario about the seven joys of the Virgin Mary, written by the Dominican theology master Simone d’Angelo dei Bocci da Siena (1438-1509). The poem is dated 1486 and is dedicated to a lady of the Sienese aristocracy, Madonna Perna degli Ugurgieri, for her spiritual instruction.

Towards the end of the poem, the description of the Assumption into heaven is particularly musical, mirroring the classic late-medieval iconography of angels playing instruments and singing around the Virgin. In the tradition of the quodlibet or incatenatura, the verses are built around a series of quotations of musical incipits. In this paper, I propose an identification of many of them (hoping also to gather suggestions from my audience!). The results provide a view on the repertory known to the Sienese upper classes at the end of the 15th century. The presence of many Trecento pieces testifies that – similarly to the Spinelli a few years before – an aristocratic lady such as Madonna Perna was ready to catch the musical references to a dated, but still familiar repertory among the theological subtleties of the poem

Thursday 5 December, 5pm–7pm GMT

Presenter: Michael Scott Asato Cuthbert (Independent scholar)

Title: A.I., Similarity, and Search in Medieval Music: New Methodologies and Source Identifications

Discussants: Theodor Dumitrescu (Independent scholar), Margaret Bent and others, including David Fallows, Paweł Gancarczyk, Richard Dudas

In a series of pre-pandemic talks I introduced a new database and computational tools for identifying concordances in late medieval music: EMMSAP, the Electronic Medieval Music Score Archive Project.  When I last spoke at Oxford in 2015 I had discovered 13 concordances through EMMSAP; by the last presentations before Covid there were 34.

After a brief recap of previous findings (especially those not yet published), I will present 22 new connections made using digital tools, including the first identifications of pieces on slate and of new quotations within the Turin/Cyprus codex.  The talk will also expand on the various computational methods and encodings that have been successful in making new identifications (quick encodings, brute force, human directed, and “old-style” A.I.) and those that have not (detailed “musicological” encodings, indexed and automated search, and newer A.I. such as deep learning and GPTs).  To get the most from digital tools, the talk will also advocate for a new role in musicological publication: the encoding-discoverer far outside her or his realm of expertise.