In December 2017 the magazine ‘Academia’, which popularises scientific research, published Anna Kilian’s interview with Paweł Gancarczyk. In a long conversation on the subject of project SoundMe, Gancarczyk explained the idea behind it and presented the research conducted by the Warsaw team on music in Central Europe and Italy.
The December issue of ‘Ruch Muzyczny’, the oldest Polish journal devoted to contemporary musical life, carries a popularising article by Bartłomiej Gembicki. The author discusses the phenomenon of what is known as ‘Monteverdi’s Vespers’, demonstrating that in fact this term no longer applies just to ‘Vespro della Beata Vergine’, published in print in Venice in 1610, but to various compilations (generally referred to as reconstructions) which were not produced until the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
On 7 December 2017 Paweł Gancarczyk and Bartłomiej Gembicki from the Warsaw team visited the Fryderyk Chopin Music School in Bytom (Upper Silesia). Paweł Gancarczyk held two classes with the pupils at the school, presenting the latest HERA-based research. He talked about the presence of the music of the past in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as well as its functioning in contemporary culture.
Martin Luther, the (Protestant) Reformation, and music: combined, this constellation illustrates one of the most revealing “uses of history” in European musical culture. In order to commemorate the publication of Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses (Disputation on the Power of Indulgences) on 31 October 1517, the Lutheran Church – in the centuries that followed – also relied on liturgical forms and musical means.
A group of choral scholars from Cambridge University performed a programme of medieval music for Christmastide on 24th November 2017. The concert explored, through performance, ways in which medieval musicians made use of familiar Christmas melodies, often recasting them and elaborating upon them in fascinating ways. A particular emphasis was placed on the repertory studied by the Cambridge team, that is, music of 13th-century Paris, where these issues and techniques played a key role. This free concert took place at Selwyn College Chapel, Cambridge, at 7.30pm. A short impression for those who couldn’t visit the concert: Angelus ad virginem, a Medieval Carol.
On 27 November Paweł Gancarczyk gave a lecture at the V. Saradjishvili Tbilisi State Conservatoire in Georgia. He presented musicological research in Poland and the main principles and aims of the SoundMe project. In his presentation he focused on the functioning of the musical past in the music repertory of the Bohemian Utraquists.
PhD candidates Christine Roth (Heidelberg) and Manon Louviot (Utrecht) undertook research at the Herzog August Bibliothek (HAB) in Wolfenbüttel in August and September 2017.
On Sunday 22 October 2017, the members of the Warsaw SoundMe team and project leader Karl Kügle (Utrecht team) attended a concert at Polskie Radio (Polish Radio) in Warsaw. Reputed Polish jazz musician Paweł Szamburski (b. 1980) and his group Bastarda presented their debut album Promitat eterno in a live performance.
On 10 October 2017 Bartłomiej Gembicki presented his research at the 5th “SoundMe” seminar in Warsaw. He discussed early 17th century Italian music for Vespers, relying on sources ranging from early music prints to contemporary CD covers. By doing so, he disclosed the motivations and strategies that established the myth of Venetian Vespers music, highlighting how this shapes modern popular perception of early baroque music. The paper was followed by a lively discussion, which centred on the role of the musicologist as the receiver/constructor of the musical past.
On 18 and 19 September 2017, SoundMe Project Leader and Principal Investigator of the Utrecht team Karl Kügle paid a research visit to the Landeshauptarchiv in Koblenz (Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany). There, he examined a set of fragments of so-called ars nova polyphony. He recently discovered the fragments in a late fifteenth-century manuscript from Boppard (Middle Rhine) now kept at the Landeshauptarchiv.
