Papers by Sean Curran
_The Sound of Writing_, ed. Christopher Cannon and Steven Justice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), 2003
Arras fragment Lost (copy in private collection viewed and catalogued by Friedrich Ludwig in 1906... more Arras fragment Lost (copy in private collection viewed and catalogued by Friedrich Ludwig in 1906) almost the entirety of the BnF's fonds latin) were consulted. Both the notices and the images of DD volumes 2 and 3 may be consulted online:
Early Music History, 2017
Though recent discoveries have improved our understanding of big, melismatic hockets from the l... more Though recent discoveries have improved our understanding of big, melismatic hockets from the late thirteenth century, there remains a pervasive uncertainty as to how hockets should be defined and identified on the small scale at which they characteristically manifest in thirteenth-century motets. In revisiting the mensural theorists up to Franco of Cologne, it was found that only Franco defines hockets as multi-voice phenomena: earlier texts define the hocket at the level of a single perfection, and as it reveals itself in the breaking of a single performing voice. Under a revised definition, 138 motet texts that use hockets have been identified in the Ars antiqua repertory. It was also found that another way of hearing the hocket, compatible with the first, is implied by Lambertus and pursued at length by the St. Emmeram Anonymous. These writers acknowledge but depart from the consensus that the hocket is sonically fragmented, also hearing it as a promise of the coordination achievable when musical time is measured. For St. Emmeram especially, the hocket has a dual character: its sonic fragmentation is contrived through integrated planning. To hear hockets inte- gratively is difficult, and requires an effort of will that for this theorist has moral stakes.
The final sections of the article analyse the musicopoetic games of the motet Dame de valour (71) / Dame vostre douz regart (72) / MANERE (M5). Similarly to the St. Emmeram theorist, the piece self-consciously highlights the difficulty and worth of close listening (a theme inspired by its tenor’s scriptural source), and does so with a hocket that marks a complementarity of breaking and integration, of a formal sort, several decades before Lambertus and St. Emmeram would reflect on the hocket’s dual character theoretically. The motet poses artfully some of the same questions about the audibility of form that preoccupy modern scholarship. These voices from the thirteenth century might remind us that ethical debates about correct listening are much older than current disciplinary concerns. But recognising the longevity of the debates does not force us to agree with old positions.
a s h g a t e . c o m a s h g a t e . c o m a s h g a t e . c o m a s h g a t e . c o m a s h g a... more a s h g a t e . c o m a s h g a t e . c o m a s h g a t e . c o m a s h g a t e . c o m a s h g a t e . c o m a s h g a t e . c o m a s h g a t e . c o m a s h g a t e .
The updated directory of sources in Van der Werf 1989 still more clearly articulates this liturgi... more The updated directory of sources in Van der Werf 1989 still more clearly articulates this liturgical conception. 9 Busse Berger 2005, 9-44 gives a detailed historiographical critique of Ludwig's work. 10 For a more detailed account of F-Pn n.a.f.13521's place in scholarship, see Curran 2013a, 219-25 and Curran 2013b, 1-12. The manuscript was apparently 'rediscovered' by Albi Rosenthal. See Rosenthal 2000, 2-4. 11 The eighteenth-century history of the manuscript is told by Solente 1953, 226-8. Sainte-Palaye's copy survives, and the literary portions are now F-Pn Moreau 1715-1719. 12 This volume is F-Pa 6361, this quotation at f.1r.
Previous commentators have maligned the La Clayette manuscript as a source of Ars Antiqua motets ... more Previous commentators have maligned the La Clayette manuscript as a source of Ars Antiqua motets on three grounds: that its layout is not arranged for use in performance; that its notation is unsophisticated in its use of mensural forms; and that it is heavy with errors. This article offers a palaeographical account of the music fascicle and its methods of production, arguing that its layout was tailored to match the manuscript's literary portions, and was designed first by a text scribe specialising in the vernacular, which accounts for many of the supposed problems. The article describes the notator's 'house style' and his means of dealing with the text scribe's frequent errors, suggesting he was largely successful in transmitting usable musical readings. All this provides an opportunity to think through the historical possibilities for literate interaction with written polyphony in the thirteenth century. It is suggested that La Clayette was understood by its users as a tool with which a single reader could teach other, perhaps non-literate people to sing polytextual pieces.
PhD Dissertation by Sean Curran
The “La Clayette” manuscript (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, nouv. acq. fr. 13521) is l... more The “La Clayette” manuscript (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, nouv. acq. fr. 13521) is large codex of 419 folios, unique among surviving books of thirteenth-century polyphony for combining a substantial fascicle of motets (some 55 in total, over 22 folios) with an otherwise entirely non-musical collection of literary works. Those texts are all in Old French, almost all devotional or didactic in tone. They are vernacular literary materials of precisely the kind read by or to the lay devout, circulated and consumed ever more enthusiastically in the decades after the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, and used in the cultivation of lay piety. The book has been granted a position in the canon of thirteenth-century polyphonic anthologies only to the extent that its music is considered to have originated separately from its remaining leaves. This dissertation begins with a codicological study of the manuscript, which demonstrates that the music was collected into it for the earliest of three identifiable bindings, probably before the death of Louis IX in 1270. The motets may be considered a cornerstone of the book’s didactic project. I argue that the techniques of fascicular construction used to build the codex betray a hopeful uncertainty about where and when written polyphony might be encountered and copied in the vernacular book trade. That uncertainty contrasts with restrictive scholarly conceptions of the motet’s social purview; and it is the manuscript’s implications for a social history of thirteenth-century polyphony that I set out to explore.
A new paleographical assessment of La Clayette’s notation uncovers a broadly consistent set of procedures for notating rhythm, and reveals nuances of rhythmic style not previously identified in published editions of the repertory. Telling paleographical details suggest the book sustained a performance practice in which a single musical reader coached other singers live from the manuscript. This is akin to the practice advocated by La Clayette‘s literary works, in which a reader would perform the texts aloud for his audience; though the musical version of the practice incorporated the literature’s auditors as singing participants. The only skill required to sing these pieces was the willingness to be taught how. I suggest that the value of singing the motets lay in their ability to produce devotional mental images in ways continuous with the literary texts, and to script a performer’s response to them in ways the literary texts could not. Several of the motets engage the memory of ribald vernacular songs, then rewrite that memory devotionally through Latin contrafacture. Thus the pieces offered a devotional training in interpretation itself, one that was contingent upon their musical difficulty, and which cast devotion as a practice adopted by choice and through labor. In later stages of the manuscript’s life, its compilers unfolded some of the music’s other interpretative possibilities through literary choices that did not fit the volume’s first devotional frame. The unruliness of La Clayette’s final form betrays changing interpretations of its musical contents over time, and puts pressure on scholarly assumptions about how material texts must anchor the interpretation of music and literature.
Finally, through an analysis of a single motet from the La Clayette manuscript (Par une matinee [807] / Mellis stilla [808] / ALLELUIA [unidentified]), conducted in dialogue with a paleographical study of each of its fifteen manuscript witnesses, we see how composers could articulate from within motets new ideas about the social domain of music writing in ways that left a lasting legacy to the fourteenth century. I argue that a musicopoetic gambit in the French triplum satirically represents the overheard (but newly composed) song of a shepherdess and her lover as unwritable, and therefore irrational. But its satire is doubly undone, first in that the notational “house style” of La Clayette renders it illegible except through precisely the kinds of oral practices to which it would claim superiority as an written composition; and second, in that the Latin motetus against which the French voice was composed was known far more widely, as a popular sung prayer that did not need writing to endure. While the triplum’s style would assert the distinction of the notation in which it was written (in a manner resembling the tendentious, roughly contemporaneous social commentary of Johannes de Grocheio), Mellis stilla suggests that the reach of music writing had limits that did not match the more widespread ability to sing in polyphony. Beyond the written testimony, vernacular polyphony in a style so similar to the motet as sometimes to be indistinguishable from it thrived in ways the triplum’s composer probably would not have encouraged, but which our historiographies should now acknowledge.
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Papers by Sean Curran
The final sections of the article analyse the musicopoetic games of the motet Dame de valour (71) / Dame vostre douz regart (72) / MANERE (M5). Similarly to the St. Emmeram theorist, the piece self-consciously highlights the difficulty and worth of close listening (a theme inspired by its tenor’s scriptural source), and does so with a hocket that marks a complementarity of breaking and integration, of a formal sort, several decades before Lambertus and St. Emmeram would reflect on the hocket’s dual character theoretically. The motet poses artfully some of the same questions about the audibility of form that preoccupy modern scholarship. These voices from the thirteenth century might remind us that ethical debates about correct listening are much older than current disciplinary concerns. But recognising the longevity of the debates does not force us to agree with old positions.
PhD Dissertation by Sean Curran
A new paleographical assessment of La Clayette’s notation uncovers a broadly consistent set of procedures for notating rhythm, and reveals nuances of rhythmic style not previously identified in published editions of the repertory. Telling paleographical details suggest the book sustained a performance practice in which a single musical reader coached other singers live from the manuscript. This is akin to the practice advocated by La Clayette‘s literary works, in which a reader would perform the texts aloud for his audience; though the musical version of the practice incorporated the literature’s auditors as singing participants. The only skill required to sing these pieces was the willingness to be taught how. I suggest that the value of singing the motets lay in their ability to produce devotional mental images in ways continuous with the literary texts, and to script a performer’s response to them in ways the literary texts could not. Several of the motets engage the memory of ribald vernacular songs, then rewrite that memory devotionally through Latin contrafacture. Thus the pieces offered a devotional training in interpretation itself, one that was contingent upon their musical difficulty, and which cast devotion as a practice adopted by choice and through labor. In later stages of the manuscript’s life, its compilers unfolded some of the music’s other interpretative possibilities through literary choices that did not fit the volume’s first devotional frame. The unruliness of La Clayette’s final form betrays changing interpretations of its musical contents over time, and puts pressure on scholarly assumptions about how material texts must anchor the interpretation of music and literature.
Finally, through an analysis of a single motet from the La Clayette manuscript (Par une matinee [807] / Mellis stilla [808] / ALLELUIA [unidentified]), conducted in dialogue with a paleographical study of each of its fifteen manuscript witnesses, we see how composers could articulate from within motets new ideas about the social domain of music writing in ways that left a lasting legacy to the fourteenth century. I argue that a musicopoetic gambit in the French triplum satirically represents the overheard (but newly composed) song of a shepherdess and her lover as unwritable, and therefore irrational. But its satire is doubly undone, first in that the notational “house style” of La Clayette renders it illegible except through precisely the kinds of oral practices to which it would claim superiority as an written composition; and second, in that the Latin motetus against which the French voice was composed was known far more widely, as a popular sung prayer that did not need writing to endure. While the triplum’s style would assert the distinction of the notation in which it was written (in a manner resembling the tendentious, roughly contemporaneous social commentary of Johannes de Grocheio), Mellis stilla suggests that the reach of music writing had limits that did not match the more widespread ability to sing in polyphony. Beyond the written testimony, vernacular polyphony in a style so similar to the motet as sometimes to be indistinguishable from it thrived in ways the triplum’s composer probably would not have encouraged, but which our historiographies should now acknowledge.
The final sections of the article analyse the musicopoetic games of the motet Dame de valour (71) / Dame vostre douz regart (72) / MANERE (M5). Similarly to the St. Emmeram theorist, the piece self-consciously highlights the difficulty and worth of close listening (a theme inspired by its tenor’s scriptural source), and does so with a hocket that marks a complementarity of breaking and integration, of a formal sort, several decades before Lambertus and St. Emmeram would reflect on the hocket’s dual character theoretically. The motet poses artfully some of the same questions about the audibility of form that preoccupy modern scholarship. These voices from the thirteenth century might remind us that ethical debates about correct listening are much older than current disciplinary concerns. But recognising the longevity of the debates does not force us to agree with old positions.
A new paleographical assessment of La Clayette’s notation uncovers a broadly consistent set of procedures for notating rhythm, and reveals nuances of rhythmic style not previously identified in published editions of the repertory. Telling paleographical details suggest the book sustained a performance practice in which a single musical reader coached other singers live from the manuscript. This is akin to the practice advocated by La Clayette‘s literary works, in which a reader would perform the texts aloud for his audience; though the musical version of the practice incorporated the literature’s auditors as singing participants. The only skill required to sing these pieces was the willingness to be taught how. I suggest that the value of singing the motets lay in their ability to produce devotional mental images in ways continuous with the literary texts, and to script a performer’s response to them in ways the literary texts could not. Several of the motets engage the memory of ribald vernacular songs, then rewrite that memory devotionally through Latin contrafacture. Thus the pieces offered a devotional training in interpretation itself, one that was contingent upon their musical difficulty, and which cast devotion as a practice adopted by choice and through labor. In later stages of the manuscript’s life, its compilers unfolded some of the music’s other interpretative possibilities through literary choices that did not fit the volume’s first devotional frame. The unruliness of La Clayette’s final form betrays changing interpretations of its musical contents over time, and puts pressure on scholarly assumptions about how material texts must anchor the interpretation of music and literature.
Finally, through an analysis of a single motet from the La Clayette manuscript (Par une matinee [807] / Mellis stilla [808] / ALLELUIA [unidentified]), conducted in dialogue with a paleographical study of each of its fifteen manuscript witnesses, we see how composers could articulate from within motets new ideas about the social domain of music writing in ways that left a lasting legacy to the fourteenth century. I argue that a musicopoetic gambit in the French triplum satirically represents the overheard (but newly composed) song of a shepherdess and her lover as unwritable, and therefore irrational. But its satire is doubly undone, first in that the notational “house style” of La Clayette renders it illegible except through precisely the kinds of oral practices to which it would claim superiority as an written composition; and second, in that the Latin motetus against which the French voice was composed was known far more widely, as a popular sung prayer that did not need writing to endure. While the triplum’s style would assert the distinction of the notation in which it was written (in a manner resembling the tendentious, roughly contemporaneous social commentary of Johannes de Grocheio), Mellis stilla suggests that the reach of music writing had limits that did not match the more widespread ability to sing in polyphony. Beyond the written testimony, vernacular polyphony in a style so similar to the motet as sometimes to be indistinguishable from it thrived in ways the triplum’s composer probably would not have encouraged, but which our historiographies should now acknowledge.