Early music is rife with puzzles that intrigue and perplex. From cryptic canons and illustrated scores to the simultaneous declamation of multiple texts, composers, poets, and scribes crafted works that obscure meaning through complex symbolism, drawing upon a vast body of esoteric cultural knowledge. The unique intermediality of early music demands diverse methodologies to study and/or perform a single musical work, affording countless opportunities to productively advance interdisciplinary scholarship.
This roundtable newly interrogates the symbolism and intermediality of early music that has inspired musicologists—notably Anne Walters Robertson—to probe beneath indecipherable surfaces in search of elusive ideas, imagery, and meanings. Lawrence Earp tests the limits of symbolism in a motet fragment attributed to Philippe de Vitry that is saturated with juxtapositions, asking, to what extent is the theme of opposites obscure or obvious? Similarly, Michael Anderson considers how modern analytical methods conceal solutions to familiar problems, prioritizing the imagery of the unconventional model for Pierre de la Rue’s Credo L’amour du moy that unlocks the interplay between sacred and secular elements. The last three speakers focus on the interpretive potential of religious contextualization. Examining the intersecting spatial and musical symbolism of processions in the Birgittine Abbey at Vadstena, Michelle Urberg emphasizes the complementarity of church design, ritual, and saintly visions. Studying eighteenth-century Mexico City Cathedral, Dawn De Rycke embraces the cultural complexity of a newly composed hymn melody for the Feast of the Five Wounds of Jesus through the interplay of intertexts linking Eucharistic devotion to Spanish identity. In a concluding reflection on the role of religion in the toolbox of early music research, M. Jennifer Bloxam explores the methodological implications of incorporating religious ideas and practices into musical analysis through the lens of the newly discovered cantus firmus of Jacob Barbireau’s only extant motet, Osculetur me.
Supported by the versatile and innovative methodologies of these contributions, this roundtable aims to foreground the unique potential of early music scholarship to advance interdisciplinarity by uncovering increasingly diverse networks of cultural meaning.