MUMH 6020 "Plainsong, Liturgy, and Ritual in the Italian Middle Ages"
Benjamin Brand
Fall 2007
Medieval Italy boasted some of the most ornate liturgies in western Christendom. On high feasts, its clerics enacted sacred spectacles comprising plainchant and improvised polyphony, spectacles that befitted the glorious monasteries and cathedrals in which they worshiped. This seminar explores the rich musical culture that gave rise to such performances through an examination of one of its most important sources, the Liber Magistri ( Book of the Master ). This was a virtual encyclopedia of plainsong compiled for the cathedral of Piacenza in the twelfth century. The study of the liturgical genres contained therein, as well as a variety of musico-analytical and paleographic approaches to them, will prepare students to work with diverse liturgies in the Middle Ages and beyond. Equally important, we will draw on other disciplines and fields art, ecclesiastical, and liturgical history, ritual studies and historical ethnography in order to reconstruct the ceremonial and broader socio-political contexts in which medieval plainsong was so firmly embedded.