Late breaking information

MUSICOLOGY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM

18/02/2017

A New Source for 15th-Century Song

Colloquium Musicology
Prof. dr. David Burn, KU Leuven

Thursday 16 March 2017, 15:30 - 17:00
Nieuwe Doelenstraat 16, Room 3.01

Abstract
In December 2015 a musical source that had been purchased at auction by a private Belgian art-dealer was brought to the Alamire Foundation in Leuven for examination. The source, it turns out, is a previously unknown late fifteenth-century chansonnier, complete and in its original cloth binding. The discovery of such a new source counts as sensational: only a very small number of similar such sources survive, and the last time that anything equivalent appeared was in 1939. In my presentation, I will present this new songbook, discussing the methods involved in coming to terms with a new musical source, and the consequent remapping of known terrain that that entails.

Prof. dr. David Burn teaches in the musicology department of the University of Leuven, and is head of the Early Music research group. His research is focussed on the later 15th and 16th centuries, with particular interest for Heinrich Isaac and his contemporaries, interactions between chant and polyphony, source-studies, and early-music analysis. He is a member of the editorial board member of the book-series Analysis in Context: Leuven Studies in Musicology, and serves on the Board of Directors of the Alamire Foundation. Together with Sarah Long, he is General Editor of the Journal of the Alamire Foundation, a journal devoted to all aspects of research and performance of music in or connected with the Low Countries during the ancient régime.