BROKENSONG

Polyphonic Singing and Communities of Music Writing in Medieval Britain and Ireland, c.1150-c.1350

BROKENSONG is a five-year research project funded by a two-million-euro European Research Council Consolidator Grant (ERC, BROKENSONG, grant number 101088317, PI: Prof. Karen Desmond) and based at Maynooth University, Ireland, from 2023 to 2028.

We are affiliated with the Department of Music and the Arts and Humanities Institute.

Image of an early fourteenth-century manuscript fragment from Arbroath, Scotland, featuring a three-voice Alleluya setting © Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel

BROKENSONG examines polyphonic singing in medieval Britain and Ireland during a transformative period of western music history, when written books devoted to polyphony begin to proliferate.

Using methodologies from musicology, music analysis, medieval and manuscript studies, practice-based research, and digital humanities, BROKENSONG aims to answer the principal research question:

What does it mean for a culture to write its music down?

BROKENSONG investigates what this act of ‘writing-down’ meant to and for musical communities. The insular sources extant from this period—just over a hundred mostly fragmentary sources—hint at stories of music practice and creation different from those suggested by the highly curated continental anthologies of polyphony that survive from continental Europe, and around which the history of western music was constructed.

Tackling the issue of style head-on, BROKENSONG uses it to address the problem of anonymity in medieval cultural products, and develops an innovative methodology for understanding the relationships between cultural products that lack extra-musical evidence for associating them to specific individuals, communities, or regions.

The Project

BROKENSONG aims to reconstruct the fragmentary material artefacts, develop historical understandings of music and community, and analyse communities of musical style through a combination of practice-based and computational approaches. The project reveals the layered interactions between individual creativity, communal ritual activities, institutional agendas, and the written medium of music notation—with its particular techniques, limitations, and possibilities—and the realization of those artefacts into sound, then and now.