May 13, 2025 – May 15, 2025 Conference Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance, Tours
The intended purview and reach of this conference is the mutual exchange among national and international specialists on problems surrounding the digital edition of ‘songs’ from the medieval/early modern West. The term ‘song’ should be understood as broadly defined as possible and meant to include any poetic text set to music within different ‘national’/linguistic traditions. The contributions will focus on finding the most intuitive and effective ways of translating this kind of repertory into digital editions via, e.g., MEI (Music Encoding Initiative), without obliterating, but, on the contrary, highlighting the scribal and codicological peculiarities of specific parent sources. One of the most important features of digital editions is their interactive potentiality, allowing the synoptical display and critical comparison of concordances and related settings. This opens up new perspectives and offers stimulating impulses for scholars, as well as for modern interpreters of this repertoire. Reflections prompted and aroused during the conference could help answering questions such as the extent to which notational idiosyncrasies of individual sources and, for instance, recurrent melodic formulas mirror specific and even regional performance habits of the time when the relevant source was notated. The use of digital tools could moreover refine our understanding of degrees of similarity and relationships among different ‘songs’, possibly also aiding in the mapping of ‘song families’.
Carlo Bosi, LE STUDIUM / FIAS Research Fellow FROM Mozarteum University & Paris Lodron University of Salzburg – AT
Richard Freedman, LE STUDIUM Visiting Researcher FROM Department of Music, Haverford College – US
IN RESIDENCE AT Centre for Advanced Studies in the Renaissance (CESR) / CNRS, University of Tours – FR