The decades around 1400 can be described as a time of crises. Not only was Europe devastated by plague and war, but Christianity feared the coming of a papal Antichrist: between 1378 and 1417, the Western Church was divided between two – at times even three – competing popes.
In her dissertation, Johanna-Pauline Thöne investigates papal polyphony – sophisticated multi-voiced music that was composed specifically in honour of the rival popes. Thöne demonstrates that this papal music provided a versatile means of engaging with and responding to current events.
By examining a corpus of around thirty compositions associated with the papacy, Thöne shows that (1) competing papal courts pursued different strategies of constructing legitimacy through music (2) the schism turned the Low Countries into a unique meeting place of opposing political agendas, resulting in a cross-fertilisation of normally distant musical cultures and a joint manuscript transmission of different polyphonic repertories (3) musical compositions were reworked and adjusted for propagandistic needs and (4) political propaganda worked hand in hand with apocalyptic thought, thus reflecting the beliefs and concerns of all classes of society. In sum, this thesis shows how the papal schism was performed through polyphony, and also how polyphony performed the papal schism.
Johanna-Pauline Thöne successfully defended her dissertation on March 7 2024.
Trial lecture
Designated topic: "Contrafacture: poetics, politics, compositional process."
Evaluation committee
- Associate Professor Anne Stone, CUNY Graduate Center (first opponent)
- Associate Professor Christian Leitmeir, University of Oxford (second opponent)
- Associate Professor Judith Irmela Haug, University of Oslo (committee administrator)
Chair of the defence
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Head of Department at the Department for Musicology Zafer Özgen, University of Oslo
Supervisors
- Professor Catherine Anne Bradley, University of Oslo
- Professor Elizabeth Eva Leach, University of Oxford