| Abstract | Paper -a:
Scholarship on the musical sources of the 15th century has often focused on treasured choirbooks or individual manuscript discoveries, with the result that a hierarchy of musical texts from the central to the marginal, the elaborate to the workmanlike, has yet to be completed. This paper seeks to establish a classification of polyphonic sources, highlighting less-studied manuscript ephemera. The humbler characteristics of composer rough drafts, student sketches or performer copies let slip valuable clues to the circumstances in which scribes copied, peer-to-peer networks between musicians, and the fluid movement of material beyond the codex, offering a unique glimpse of the multifaceted production and dissemination of music outside princely court and private chapel.
Paper -b:
The thematic focus of the 2011 Leeds International Medieval Congress, 'Poor … Rich' has much relevance to the history of medieval secular music as I wish to demonstrate in 'The Troubadours and Social Context'. This paper expands on the content I presented in my paper, 'Heresy and Orthodoxy in Medieval Music', given at the 2009 International Medieval Congress.
The cultural and aesthetic sensibilities of Medieval secular musicians - particularly those of the Troubadours - were naturally shaped by economic and concomitant social forces. 'The Troubadours and Social Context' will explore these forces and their influences upon the heretical trends and attitudes evidenced in the literary texts of the troubadours.
Paper -c:
In medieval Christmas music-liturgical dramas Ordo Pastorum and Officium Stellae, the different approach to the birth of Jesus and his revelation between the Rich, embodied by the Three Kings (positive wealth) and Herod (negative wealth), and the Poor, embodied by Sheppard and Midwifes (economically poor but spiritually rich), constitutes an allegorical representation of medieval society. My paper would examine how different social and economic status are represented in the drama thanks to interacting expressive codes: textual (rubrics, symbols and key words), musical (notation, agogic, executives), liturgical (ritual and repertoires) and dramaturgical (mimics, gestures and costumes) in an interesting and meaningful representation of a society separated between wealth and poverty but unified in the divine revelation.
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