MUSRES · Musica Restituta. Retrieving Hidden Chant from Medieval Palimpsest Manuscripts

Musica Restituta. Retrieving Hidden Chant from Medieval Palimpsest Manuscripts

The main objective of MusRes is to contribute to answering pivotal questions about the history of European music on the early dissemination of musical notation in western Europe, as key to understanding the earliest phases of the creation of visual representation of music. Each of the different notational families used its own repertory of signs and techniques for the representation of melodic inflections. Neumatic notation was, therefore, a system of communication which worked fully only within the limits of pre-established musical conventions. The study of these shapes allows us to understand how medieval singers reacted to the cognitive challenges of converting sounds into visible form, as well as how different individuals and institutions shaped their music scripts by potentially revealing previously unrecorded systems of notation, filling important lacunae in the chronology and geography of primary sources. This period also corresponds to the first emergence of books dedicated to music: the earliest surviving books containing the notation for chants for the Mass date to ca. 900, while the earliest complete compilation for the chants of the Divine Office come from the late 10th c. The time span, which covers a crucial phase in the history of European music, will also allow the observation of patterns of development in the production of written musical media over three centuries. Moreover, the presence of at least two different registers, usually the verbal and the musical text, made the written artefact a multimedia and multi-layered object that could be accessed with different levels of literacy. The study of contents' organisation and production techniques of early medieval chant books provides insights into how cultural manifestations such as religious worship and ritual were preserved and transmitted in a material object. MUSRES had five interconnected research objectives: - to substantially advance our understanding of the cognitive and material processes, as well as of the graphic forms and techniques employed by early singers to represent the sounds of music through the first-ever digital reconstruction and study of five 'lost' chant manuscript sources; - to further define the intersections between cultural processes of canonisation of religious ritual, and their first transmission in material, manuscript forms, set in their broader historical contexts; - to innovate in the field of digital image editing techniques applied to palimpsests manuscripts; - to foster research in Digital Humanities by developing the first on-line platform for the study and editing of palimpsest sources, achieving significant longer-term and cross-disciplinary applications; - to promote the knowledge of the beginnings of vocal music in Europe for impact in the wider society.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз