The midway assessment is organised in two parts, and starts with a two-hour public seminar, followed by a closed meeting.
The purpose of the midway assessment is to evaluate the progress of the PhD project at a point when it is still possible to make small or more substantial changes.
Programme:
15:15 - 15:40 Welcome, and Presentation by Candidate James Tomlinson
15:45 - 16:45 Comments by, and discussion with Peter M. Lefferts
16:45 - 17:00 Plenary discussion with the public
Following the public event, there will be a closed meeting between the candidate, invited opponent, and supervisors (17:00 - 17:30).
Summary:
The overwhelming majority of extant multi-voice music from late medieval England survives as parchment fragments from larger collections of music now lost. When musical sources became obsolete, they were often dismembered, and their parchment reused in the bindings of otherwise unrelated books. Any textual references to their places of origin were typically destroyed in this process, which means that the origins and early histories of music books are not well understood.
My PhD research takes individual sources as starting points for investigation. I analyse how they were written and physically assembled to better understand how, where, and why multi-voiced music was composed, recorded, and disseminated in late medieval England.
For the mid-way evaluation, I will present an early fourteenth-century manuscript containing multi-voice music, now in Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College MS 512/543. Engagement with the musical contents of this source has hitherto been selective, precluding deeper understanding of the book’s complex history and music’s place and significance within it. I offer a wholesale reassessment of this musical source. I recontextualise it, positing a chronology for its compilation and repositioning its musical contents within broader historical narratives. I argue that Cgc 512/543 is an important example of an informal collection curated by a named individual, John Rudham, in a time from which records of individual musicians and their activities seldom survive. The manuscript’s other contents, moreover, strongly suggest its origin in a university context in the first decades of the fourteenth century. There is otherwise an almost complete lack of evidence for the presence of polyphony at English universities from their foundations up to c. 1400. Cgc 512/543 therefore offers a new perspective on the circulation of music in early fourteenth-century England, challenging the accepted pre-eminence of monasteries in the cultivation and transmission of multi-voice music in this period.