Conference Agenda

In October 2022, conservators at a former cardinal’s palace in Villeneuve-lez-Avignon – the Livrée de la Thurroye – revealed that a half-timbered partition probably erected in the 1360s, at the time Guy de Boulogne was in residence, contains graffiti of two musical works with French texts. They are two complete three-voice rondeaux, both unica. The two texts, Ains mal pour bien se tu vues bien avoir (Render evil for good, if you want to prosper), and Pour bien faire m’est mal rendu (For doing good I’m repaid with evil), both eight-line rondeaux, are clearly complementary, and are formatted in the manner of a modern edition, unlike hitherto known medieval sources of rondeaux, which separate the residual text from the presentation of the refrain. The style of the two musical settings is also complementary, probably the work of a single composer or a single cohesive group of musicians.

While the texts and the cantus voice in each case were probably devised elsewhere and brought to the wall, the degree of musical revision seen in the two lower voices argues that polyphonic composition was worked out on the wall itself, perhaps by a composer or lead singer improvising and refining ongoing work as it was repeatedly rehearsed aurally. Most dramatically, the B-section of the tenor of the first rondeau has three, sometimes four or more versions chaotically overlaid, all scratched into the plaster. Only one of the readings fits with the contratenor, which accordingly was composed after the tenor was found to be satisfactory.

An approximate date of composition remains a question; the rondeaux may be understood in terms of the style shortly postdating Machaut, or alternatively in terms of a simpler style of the 1420s. An inscription entered after the second rondeau, giving the name Johanis Vinus de Castro Sancti Johanis, is dated 6 March 1422, but the script does not match the hand that entered the texts set to music, and thus may have nothing to do with the date of the composition of the rondeaux. The nature of the counterpoint is perplexing, certainly in fifteenth-century terms, essentially avoiding directed cadences until the very end of each work.

The paper will discuss issues of compositional process (the graffiti provide the earliest surviving evidence for the composition of late-medieval polyphonic chansons), notation (some aspects are unique to this source), and dating (musical style vis-à-vis comparands).

The Renaissance imitation (or parody) mass has long been subject to technical analysis, but it still remains ripe with potential for intertextual and experiential interpretation. Building on centuries of exegetical musical borrowing practices in the Catholic liturgy, the imitation mass incorporates familiar polyphonic material to add referential specificity to the mass ordinary’s unchanging text. These connections lived not just on the page, but in the brains, bodies, and shared cultural knowledge of the people who sang them.

Tomás Luis de Victoria’s idiosyncratic career and compositional process make his masses, and how they were experienced, worthy of special interpretive consideration. Writing during the last quarter of the sixteenth century, Victoria self-published his works and distributed them to his wide network of Catholic dignitaries and institutions. He repeatedly returned to his own meticulously-crafted motets, reprinting them multiple times and using them as the models for almost all of his imitation masses. Victoria reworked his models in unexpected ways, incorporating their most recognizable material at carefully chosen points in the mass to create intertextual resonances that highlight specific theological elements for his intended audience: singers steeped in the liturgy, familiar with the model, and primed to detect connections between them.

My talk explores how Victoria used his self-borrowed imitation masses to reinforce Catholic doctrine and community during the Counter-Reformation. Building on scholarship that addresses musical borrowing in Renaissance sacred polyphony (Eichner 2018; Elias 2016; Crook 1994) and self-borrowing across Victoria’s works (Rees 2019; Cramer 2001), I employ digital tools from the CRIM Project (Citations: the Renaissance Imitation Mass) and score analysis to investigate Victoria’s eleven self-borrowed imitation masses. After a brief overview of where and how borrowed material is generally deployed, I focus on two mass-model pairs, O quam gloriosum est Regnum (model 1572; mass 1583) and Salve Regina a 8 (model 1576; mass 1592), which hold particular thematic weight. I interpret my findings within the frameworks of cognitive history (Anderson 2015, 2019; Dasgupta 2021) and music cognition (Cox 2016; Margulis 2013), considering the underlying embodied mechanisms of memory that Victoria’s self-borrowing activates to enhance singers’ engagement with liturgy and theology.

In the first decades of the twentieth century Peter Bohn, an organist, music teacher, and chant scholar in Trier, assembled a collection of hundreds of fragmented pages from medieval musical and liturgical manuscripts. In doing so he helped preserve, and re-value, evidence of chant traditions that had long since been discarded as more valuable for their parchment than for their musical content. Yet much had been lost in the intervening centuries—and would continue to be lost, since Bohn himself did not document exactly when or how his collection came to be.
This paper charts the life of one of Bohn’s medieval musical manuscripts: its creation, destruction, dispersal, and (partial) reassembly as Item 23b in Bohn’s collection. The twenty-four folios from a monastic antiphoner that Bohn assembled, though now heavily damaged, were the product of a fine musical scriptorium of the early thirteenth century, where German-style tonary letters met tidy square neumes and distinctive decorated initials. In the fifteenth century, the expansion of the community’s library overrode the need for a now centuries-old chant book, and the book was disassembled, page by page, for use as bindings. From there, the pages were dispersed along with the books they bound, became disassembled a second time, and ultimately made their way to Bohn’s collection. In examining these steps, I not only contribute toward the partial reconstruction of an otherwise lost musical source from medieval Trier, localizing it to the Benedictine monastery of Saint Matthias, but also demonstrate how retracing the work of late medieval binderies, centuries of librarians, and modern collectors helps accomplish this reconstruction work, and gives insight into what survived and how.