Medieval French Lyric Across Linguistic Borders: Music, Imitation, and Intertextuality

forthcoming

MUSICA FRANCA will investigate the role music played as a shared medium of communication across medieval Europe, enabling texts and ideas to travel across linguistic and political borders. Indeed, medieval poets and performers thought of melodic borrowing and re-use as constitutive to the process of creation. By investigating melodic imitation, intended as a range of techniques (from borrowing stylistic features to the reuse of entire melodies) in French, Galician-Portuguese, German, and Occitan lyric, from the 12th up to the first half of the 14th century, this project proposes to uncover a network which today appears to us as silent, but which profoundly shaped European intellectual history. The project will implement digital resources to encode and analyse melodies of the four repertories and explore their interconnections. The project’s main aims are: • To define a cohesive methodology for analysing melodic imitation across European lyric repertories, leveraging digital tools to uncover hitherto unknown melodic connections. • To provide a new methodological framework for the study of medieval aesthetics of imitation. This transdisciplinary methodology aims to integrate literary, philological, and musicological studies with network theory, in a translingual perspective. • To offer new topographic representations of medieval Europe, tracing the networks expressed by exchanges of texts and music and their interrelations with their cultural context. • To demonstrate how processes of imitation across different linguistic areas contributed to shaping European identities and a shared musical culture. The project will produce a series of monographs on musical imitation in medieval Europe, along with two main digital outputs: • The complete digital edition of the music of the trouvères. An interactive platform of geographical networks of musical imitation in medieval Europe.