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

Principal Investigator: Professor Karen Desmond

To a great extent, historians of medieval cultures must learn to cope with a lot of loss. Humans through the ages endeavour to leave their mark on the world, yet inevitably time and events exact destruction on the material remnants of human activity. Studying medieval music entails dealing with significant loss, the most fundamental of which is that, unlike visual art, sculpture, or architecture, music is not a spatial art, but is rather a time-based art. In reality, music exists for only that portion of time in which it is performed, and then it is no more, except in memory. In addition to this fundamental challenge, many of the material artefacts that document musical culture, including books with music notation, especially from medieval Britian and Ireland, now exist in a fragmentary and damaged state. The ERC-funded BROKENSONG project (2023-2028) focuses on these material artefacts— manuscripts with music notation—and how musicians used them, in order to study the impact of music writing on musical communities in Britain and Ireland in the later Middle Ages, over the course of two centuries, from about 1150 to 1350. It examines polyphonic singing in medieval Britain and Ireland during a transformative period of western music history, c. 1150-1350, when written books devoted to polyphony began to proliferate across Europe, and aims to answer the principal research question: What does it mean for a culture to write its music down? The project employs imaging techniques to recover content from the damaged fragments, and develops a methodology for understanding the relationships between music compositions and repertoires that lack extra-musical evidence for associating them to specific individuals, communities, or regions. BROKENSONG will uncover how the music and the written artefacts cluster according to features of musical style, notation, and music-text relationships. Understanding the relationships and similarities that exist between compositions is key to constructing repertorial groupings that reveal the exchange of musical ideas between musical communities.