The Oxford Seminar in Music Theory and Analysis: Emma Dillon (King's College London)

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Abstract

My paper explores a familiar silence in music history: the seeming limit of notated sources of medieval music as records of sound. It takes as case study songs from the early medieval repertory of French chanson (trouvère song) dating c. 1150-1220. As a foil to the sparse information for sound captured in notated songbooks, I explore alternative routes into the soundworlds - or timbres - of the songs. My talk maps an interdisciplinary methodology for re-sounding trouvère songs, embracing diverse materialities, literary environments and soundscapes shaped by and informing the experience of trouvère songs, contexts that ultimately invite more expansive categories of song and sound. In keeping with OSiMTA's theme, I will reflect on recent deliberation in the field of music theory, analysis and pedagogy, opening discussion on how the approach proposed could inform the study and teaching of medieval songs and poetry within music studies and potentially also in other fields of medieval history and literary studies.

Biography

Emma Dillon is Professor of Music and Medieval Studies at King's College London. Her research focuses on European musical culture from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. Her work ranges widely in terms of repertories, sources, and methodological approach, and broadly speaking falls at the intersection of musicology, sound studies, medieval studies, and the history of material texts. She is the author of Medieval Music-Making and the Roman de Fauvel (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and The Sense of Sound: Musical Meaning in France, 1260-1330 (Oxford University Press in 2012), and articles exploring the place of sound and music in medieval culture. Emma is currently PI of a five-year interdisciplinary project, Musical Lives: Towards an Historical Anthropology of French Song, 1100-1300 [2023-2028] (EP/X022501/1), a UKRI Frontier Research Grant. More information about the project and team may be found here. 

Oxford Seminar in Music Theory and Analysis 

Season 6 (2023-24) 

The theme for the sixth season of seminars is: Sound-Timbre-Silence. 

The Oxford Seminar in Music Theory & Analysis (OSiMTA) meets twice a term on selected Tuesdays at 17.15 UK time. Its convenors are Dr Esther Cavett and Professor Jonathan Cross. 

Our conception of theory and analysis is critical, plural and interdisciplinary. In shaping the seminars, we aim to reflect the broad range of activity taking place under the heading of theory and analysis today, as well as to challenge boundaries, embracing not only 'conventional' practices, histories of theory and repertoires, but also new interdisciplinary approaches that engage with cultural studies, ethnomusicology, aesthetics and philosophy, psychology, politics, performance studies, popular music studies, and so on. Speakers include distinguished local, national and international scholars. 

Seminars are open to all, including the general public. Sessions will last 90 minutes and lively discussion is encouraged. They will also be livestreamed via Zoom. 

Regular updates, abstracts and Zoom links will appear on the OSiMTA pages. You can also follow OSiMTA on Twitter/X.