On Tuesday 12 September 2017 Antonio Chemotti (Warsaw team) presented his “Sound Memories” research project at the international conference Die Musikkultur der evangelischen Kirchengemeinden in Breslau. Gestaltung ihrer Tradition und die musikalische Ökumene (Wrocław, 11-13 September 2017).
From July 4 through July 8, 2017, the entire SoundMe team attended the 45th Medieval and Renaissance Music Conference in Prague. Two sessions were convened in order to present and discuss the first results of our research project.
On Wednesday 31 May 2017, in the library of the Institute of Musicology of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Antonio Chemotti delivered a paper entitled The Musical Past in 16th Century Silesia. Chemotti shared the first results of his research in this field, focussing on the songbook Ein schlesich Singebüchlein (Wroclaw 1555). The presentation was followed by a lively discussion, during which the participants addressed the stylistic features of selected musical examples from the Silesian source, considering the historical and cultural meanings of ‘archaic’ musical practices.
During 26–28 April 2017 Jan Ciglbauer, Paweł Gancarczyk and Lenka Hlávková carried out HERA-related research in the Czech Republic and Hungary. Their visits to the libraries in Opava (Silesian Museum) and Budapest (National Széchényi Library and University Library) involved examining unknown or little-known sources from the first half of the fifteenth century.
In January 2017 listeners to 2 Polish radio stations had the opportunity of learning about the main ideas behind the SoundMe project, and about the research being conducted by the Warsaw team. During the programme Wieczór RDC (Evening with Radio for You) broadcast by the station Radio dla Ciebie, Prof. Paweł Gancarczyk talked about the special features of research into early music, and the ways in which the ‘musical past’ is present in musical culture of the 15th and 16th centuries.
On 13 December 2016 the Warsaw team inaugurated a cycle of seminars devoted to the SoundMe project. The subject of the first meeting was Music for the dead in Italy, 1550-1650, with a paper given by Antonio Chemotti.
The Heidelberg University organises a workshop for the collaborative research project ‘Sound Memories: The Musical Past in Late-Medieval and Early-Modern Europe’ from 1 until 3 December. The workshop will focus on issues of material culture and the typology of sources involved and will include members of the Heidelberg SFB 933 ‘Material Text Cultures’ as well as external invited speakers.
How did the concept of a “musical past” develop between the late Middle Ages and Early Modern Age? This question is the focus of a European research team that includes music scholars from Heidelberg University. “Based on new types of notation for polyphonic music, a new form of large-scale, retrospective music collections arose in 13th-century Paris in which repertoire was canonised. We want to examine how musical traditions up to the 16th century were exploited in various political and religious contexts by the cultivation of ‘old’ or even archaic styles and repertoires”, explains Prof. Dr Inga Mai Groote of the Heidelberg University Department of Musicology.
A consortium of music scholars from the University of Cambridge, the University of Heidelberg, Charles University Prague, the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, and Utrecht University under leadership of Prof. Karl Kügle has been awarded a prestigious HERA subsidy in the amount of 1.2 million euro for their project ‘Sound Memories: The Musical Past in Late-Medieval and Early-Modern Europe’ (SoundMe).
