Guest Lecture Series - Emily Zazulia

Event time: 
Friday, November 22, 2019 - 1:30pm
Event description: 

Emily Zazulia (University of California, Berkeley)
Lecture Title:  Metaphors of Music Writing
1:30 pm
Stoeckel Hall 106
 

Metaphors of Music Writing

Late-medieval composers took great interest in writing music that complicates the relationship between what is seen and what is heard. In the early fifteenth century, a musician might be asked to sing a line slower or faster, with a different rhythmic disposition, or starting on a different pitch than what was written. By the end of the century composers had begun crafting elaborate puzzles that require singers to read lines backwards, upside-down, or even to perform the notes in a different order than they appear on the page. In this talk I consider what such unorthodox uses of notation have to tell us about music writing more generally, questions that concern the relationship between musical creations and the tools available to create them. Attending to how this repertory foregrounds its written form allows us to connect premodern ideas about the intermediary of musical recording to related concerns in other periods. For a long time interest in musical notation has extended only as far as practical knowledge demanded, but because this music is preserved exclusively in written form, we cannot ignore the mechanisms of its preservation. Viewing notation as a transformational technology that does more than record sound stands to change the way we think about music’s literate traditions in the late middle ages—and beyond.

Funding for this lecture is generously provided by The Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Fund at Yale University

Calendar Type: 
Guest Lecture Series