Annual-Report-2019

CITATIONS: THE RENAISSANCE IMITATION MASS
(CRIM)
Human & Social Sciences 2019
94
Prof. Richard Freedman
LE STUDIUM Marie Skłodowska-Curie
Research Fellow
Smart Loire Valley General Programme
From: Haverford College - US
In residence at: Centre for Advanced Studies
in the Renaissance (CESR) - Tours
Nationality: American
Dates: January 2019 to January 2020
Freedman’s scholarly research focuses on the
music of the Renaissance: its cultural context
and its contrapuntal workings. His writings have
appeared in leading scholarly journals, and in two
books, The Chansons of Orlando di Lasso and
their Protestant Listeners: Music, Piety, and Print
in Sixteenth-Century France (Rochester, 2001) and
Music in the Renaissance (W.W. Norton, 2012).
Freedman has also taken on leadership
roles in digital work for the leading academic
societies devoted to musicology. He was chair
of the Technology Committee of the American
Musicological Society (the leading organization
of the field), and board member and chair of
the Digital and Multimedia Committee of the
Renaissance Society of America, another leading
academic society. In 2019 he began a term
as a member of the Board of Directors of the
Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale
(RILM), the leading bibliographical resource for
musicology.
Prof. Philippe Vendrix
Host scientist
Philippe Vendrix is the former Director of the
Centre d’Etudes Supérieures de la Renaissance
(2008- 2015). He obtained his PhD in 1991 in
musicology with the highest distinction from the
examination jury at the University of Liège. He
has been a member of Council of the American
Musicological Society, 2001-2004. Elected in
2010 to the Alumni College of the Belgian
Royal Academy. He has editorial management
responsibilities of various collections including
Ricercar. He is on the editorial board of leading
publications in musicology and a member of the
Scientific Council of Répertoire International de
Littérature Musicale, New York and the European
Science Foundation. He is currently the president
of the University of Tours.
CRIM poses a simple but provocative question: What is similarity in music?
The allusiveness of musical discourse is so fundamental to the Western
tradition that it is hard to imagine a work that does not in some way make
reference to some other composition, type or topic. Indeed, over the last
1000 years music has continued to reference earlier pieces, from rampant
borrowing of George Frideric Handel to the looped sampling heard in
hip-hop. Citations: The Renaissance Imitation Mass (CRIM) focuses on
an important but neglected part of this allusive tradition: the so-called
“Imitation” or “Parody” Mass of the sixteenth century, in which short sacred
or secular pieces were transformed into long five-movement cyclic settings
of the Ordinary of the Catholic Mass: Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and
Agnus Dei. The resulting works are far more than collections of quotations.
The sheer scope of the transformation required the composer to re-think
the model: shifting, extending, or compressing ideas in new musical
contexts and to meet new expressive purposes. If counterpoint is a craft
of combinations, then the Imitation Mass involves the art of recombination
on a massive scale. These works offer an unparalleled way to learn how
composers heard (and understood) each other’s music.
Freedman’s fellowship with Le Studium gave him the time to:
1. evaluate the results of the first phase of work on CRIM
2. select works for the next phase of CRIM
3. work with IT specialists to elaborate the CRIM web site
4. explore machine-assisted systems for analysis and discovery of
musical patterns
5. craft interpretive essays and commentaries based on data gathered
to date
The pace of collaborative work, and especially the collaborative development
of digital tools, often proceeds both more slowly and more quickly than
originally anticipated. The year in Tours was no exception in this respect.
Curation the archive of CRIM analyses was painstaking. Some aspects of
our technical development of software were also slow, mainly on account
of the limited availability of some of our part-time consultants. But on other
fronts we made much progress. Thanks to the presence in Tours (and at the
CESR) of Le Studium Fellow Emilio Sanfilippo, we advanced the conceptual
and computational standing of our analytic categories, in particular via
the notion of «ontologies» by which machines can identify and locate
related digital objects. Work with Daniel Russo-Batterham, an Australian
musicologist and data-scientist and long-time CESR collaborator,
produced meaningful visualization and pattern-finding engines that will
help scholars understand «similarity» in new ways. Meanwhile Freedman’s
interactions with other Le Studium scholars showed how tools from other
fields might be used to explore musical data, too. But by far the most
important progress was made at the human level, as Freedman traveled
to give conference presentations, teach graduate seminars, and finally in
convening the workshop-conference (see below) that helped us refine our
methods, identify new repertories, and outlined a series of modular units
in which research and pedagogy would mutually inform each other in the
years ahead.