University of California, Berkeley

Graduate Student, Music

PhD candidate (ABD)

Thesis Title: Vernacular Book Production, Vernacular Polyphony, and the Motets of the 'La Clayette' Manuscript (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, nouvelles acquisitions françaises 13521)

About

In my dissertation, “Vernacular Book Making, Vernacular Polyphony, and the Motets of the La Clayette Manuscript,” I examine the social location of music writing in the thirteenth century, when, for the first time, a previously unknown polyphonic piece could be deciphered accurately from the page, and when an explosion in vernacular literary production also enabled written polyphony to circulate to new audiences.  Previous histories have considered the motet an elite or professional genre because of the sonic complexity of its pre-eminent feature, the simultaneous declamation of different texts in different languages.  I examine the codicological and paleographical evidence of supposedly peripheral sources to explore how this abundant music made sense on new markets beyond its Parisian, clerical origins, and what other kinds of vernacular music were incorporated into it along the way.  In this account, the motet’s musical difficulty had a broader social life than its intractable effect has allowed modern ears to hear.