Borrowing and Citation of tunes in late 15th century song

The project centres on the identification and analysis of songs making use of `non-courtly` monophonic tunes between the end of the 15th and the early 16th century, the collection and representation of such melodies as well as the interaction between monophonic and polyphonic music. While capitalising on some of Mayer Brown`s insights for the definition of `popular`, we expand and elaborate on the author`s key connotations and also consider melodies whose origin may be not necessarily `popular`, but whose structural and language typology clearly mark them out of the then current language of courtly Burgundian and Franco-Flemish art song. With these key conceptual definitions in mind, in addition to the notion of memorability in the Middle Ages, we want to explore the use and migration of monophonic tunes in late 15th -century art song and how they permeate their host composition in terms of, for instance, melodic contour, rhythm, modality and accidental usage. The research will especially focus on groups of art songs built on the same family of tunes of Franco-Flemish and Italian provenance. In evaluating the variants, it might be possible to isolate the structural core of intervals making up the constitutional identity of the borrowed melody. This will however be achieved without pretending to recover `one` original version, as this would be particularly out of place for a repertory still largely unstable and partly based on orality. The tunes thus identified will then be collected and presented in an electronic database with information on the composition(s) they stem from and with a list of all major and minor variants characterizing them in their different polyphonic contexts. In a successive stage the structural and modal configuration of the melodies and their polyphonic arrangement will be taken into account. The chosen analytic model will be based on recent studies, which have focussed on the relationship of late medieval/Renaissance music theory and contemporary polyphony. It will provide an indispensable historically founded hermeneutic tool for determining the degree of embeddedness of the tunes within the polyphonic web: whether and in how far the composer`s goal was to genuinely cite and keep the motives recognizable, or to use them merely as more or less important structural scaffolding elements, with a variety of different citation typologies between these two poles. This kind of analysis, which could additionally help to better understand the personal style of a composer, is of course part and parcel of the abovementioned process of identification and edition of the monophonic tunes. It is envisaged to publish the outcomes of this project throughout the research time in the form of articles and essays in peer-reviewed journals as well as providing the base of a future book on this topic. The catalogue of monophonic melodies will be published as an online, open access database.

The late 15th century witnesses a great surge in the employment of pre-existent, popularizing melodies as a basis for polyphonic chanson compositions. Although specific studies have been devoted in the past decades to the analysis of this artistic phenomenon, no comprehensive exploration of the repertoire had until now been attempted. Now that the present FWF-project has been brought to completion, a fully searchable relational database with a transcription of the relevant melodies, lists of concordances and variants has been prepared, an article has been submitted and accepted and more papers on this topic are presently being written.The database makes available for all interested scholars and musicians a large amount of monophonic repertory previously not directly accessible as such. It lays the basis for further research in the topics of borrowing, citation, compositional approaches, as well as questions of literary genres as emerging in texts and poems accompanying the music. Furthermore, thanks to its internal linking to the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music (DIAMM), one of the most important electronic resources for source studies of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the database has increased its visibility and international diffusion within the academic community.Many of the polyphonic arrangements of monophonic melodies are anonymous, though a substantial number is also attributed to such important composers as Josquin Desprez, Loyset Compère, Henricus Isaac and Antoine de Févin. Although the focus of the project is not authorial, analysis and comparison of the different arrangement strategies may help better gauge and refine our understanding of the compositional processes at work for some composers setting themselves the task of reworking supposedly pre-existent material, often of a very simple nature. Moreover, the wide circulation of many of these tunes raises the question of what constituted a repertory in the late Middle Ages and the possible role of memory in its transmission. Given that the melodies, thanks to frequent concordances with two contemporary monophonic chansonniers, are also often associated with narrative strophic texts, this research endeavour potentially opens up new perspectives for the study of specific literary genres lingering between courtly and popularizing milieus, providing at the same time a broader and richer picture of music history between the late 15th and the early 16th century.