Musical and Poetic Creativity for A Unique Moment in the Western Christian Liturgy, c.1000-1500

ongoing

BENEDICAMUS pursues a transformative focus on creative practices surrounding a particular moment in the Western Christian liturgy: the exclamation Benedicamus Domino (“Let us Bless the Lord”), which sounded in song several times a day from c.1000 to 1500. This moment was granted special musical licence c.1000: singers of plainchant melodies could choose to reprise a favourite tune from the Church music for the day, re-texting it with the words Benedicamus Domino. In consequence, Benedicamus Domino enjoyed unprecedented longevity and significance as a focus of compositional interest, prompting some of the earliest experiments in multi-voiced polyphonic composition c.1100, as well as a lasting tradition of popular, devotional carols in the 1300s and 1400s. Histories of music have principally told the stories of particular composers, genres, institutions, or geographical centres. BENEDICAMUS undertakes the first longue durée study of musical and poetic responses to an exceptional liturgical moment, using this innovative perspective to work productively across established historiographical and disciplinary boundaries. Encompassing half a millennium of musical and ritual activity, hundreds of musical compositions, poetic texts, and manuscript sources, it offers pan-European perspectives on a chronologically and geographically diverse range of musical and poetic genres never before considered in conjunction. It develops new methods of music analysis to uncover traces of ad hoc or improvisatory performative practices that were not explicitly recorded in writing, forging interdisciplinary contexts for thinking about artistic creativity and experimentation in a time-period where these concepts have been little studied. BENEDICAMUS engages with the beginnings of musical and poetic genres and techniques that were crucial in shaping practices still current today, and reflects on music’s enduringly complex relationship with spirituality, ritual, and the sacred.