While troubadour and trouvère repertoires have recently received fresh attention from music scholars, the study of medieval German vernacular song—Minnesang—continues to be located firmly outside the canon(s) of musicology. The present thesis seeks to re-insert Minnesang into musicological discourse by demonstrating the ways in which the repertoire has been constructed as musical, both by the creators of medieval manuscript sources and by modern scholars. The modern ontology of music as defined by notation and performance has prevented scholars from understanding manuscripts such as the Codex Manesse (C) as intrinsically musical. While the texts alone may have sufficed to enable their intended audiences to view them as musical entities, C’s 137 author miniatures further contribute to the manuscript’s musicality: the Minnesänger are depicted as authors and experiencing personae, revealing a strong concern for oral communication—which, in the Middle Ages, was inherently musical. The Jenaer Liederhandschrift (<b>J</b>) and other manuscripts equally reveal their musicality when scrutinised beyond the search for musical notation: through ordering and folio design. The thesis establishes the influence exerted by previous scholarship on today’s lack of interest in the music of Minnesang, and outlines the importance of scholarly discourse and its study in a historiographical context. Before the 1970s, an existing musical discourse on Minnesang encouraged musicologists and philologists to continue to engage in it—despite the fact that the dominant interest in contrafacture and rhythm found few answers in the surviving source material. A concluding case study of Walther von der Vogelweide’s Palästinalied exemplifies the musicality of medieval manuscripts and its complex (mis)construction by modern scholarship. The thesis provides the basis for a fresh assessment of the music of Minnesang: beyond the confines of modern ontologies of music, and as part of the study of medieval song.

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Music theory of Hildegard of Bingen’s era articulated a cosmological worldview, providing thinkers with a way of understanding human beings, the world, the heavens, and how they all interact with each other in musical terms. Hildegard was familiar with this music theory through her theological predecessors. This dissertation argues that a better understanding of Hildegard’s theology requires a deeper consideration of how this musical cosmology influenced her because of the way music pervades her work. Music theory is a major piece of what undergirds her Benedictine, liturgical worldview. To demonstrate this, I take up the task of explicating and illuminating Hildegard’s Christology in terms of her understanding of music and music theory. This task is different from previous scholarship which analyzes Hildegard’s writing about music in terms of her broader theology. I bridge the gap between musicologists and liturgists, on the one hand, who focus on Hildegard’s theology of music but neglect broader consideration of her theology and, on the other hand, theologians who acknowledge music as an integral part of Hildegard’s life but largely consider her theological visions in abstraction from it. I argue that Hildegard uses music theory to define and explicate Christ and Christ’s interactions with the world, sometimes explicitly, but primarily implicitly. Her theological vision centers Christ in a resounding universe. By understanding Christ as symphonia, Hildegard emphasizes the Son’s unique relationship with humanity. While readers cannot understand every aspect of Hildegard’s Christology by considering music theory, music theory helps to illuminate it in a particular way, enabling us to understand Hildegard’s theology more deeply. Thus, this study provides an example for how future scholars can continue to interpret Hildegard’s understanding of various theological loci. In addition, it submits Hildegard as an example of how to unite music/liturgy and theology in a fruitful way for both the Academy and the Church. / 2025-04-25T00:00:00Z

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This thesis addresses the relatively narrow understanding of simple polyphony in music history. Using three examples, I provide a survey, mostly of secondary literature available in English, and offer an overview of the use of simple polyphony in three different places and time periods in Western Europe during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. More specifically, I examine the music of the Devotio Moderna in the Low Countries and Northern Germany during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Llibre Vermell and Iberian pilgrim culture in the fourteenth century, and the laude and processional genres in Northern Italy during the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. My purpose is to bring the topic of simple polyphony—significant despite its simplicity—back to the center of the music history narrative.

Scholarship on medieval contrafacture has long been engaged in the Kontrafakturjagd, the hunt for songs whose textual and structural similarities suggest they might also share melodies. By making melodies freely exchangeable, this practice has tended to treat the music of medieval song as if it were an empty vessel, overlooking the ways in which contrafacta might construct musical meaning to serve various political, devotional, or aesthetic ends. Rather than making a case for contrafacture among songs whose shared melodies are questionable, this dissertation provides a context rich perspective on certain groups of 'close contrafacta' - songs whose status as contrafacta is already known and supported by strong musical, textual, and contextual evidence. In five case studies, all of which take at least one song from the trouvère repertory, and which represent the most common contrafact genres - political serventois, Marian song, and crusade song - I consider the ways in which their melodies could signify. More specifically, I examine the interrelated layers of the melody's performed sound structures, its cuing of previous texts on the listener, and its integration of old and new contexts. The case studies reveal a culture that cared about melodic association and used it in sophisticated ways. In the first two chapters, which address political contrafacture, the music's textual associations form a background against which the contrafact text reacts ironically, while its melodic origins evoke precise geopolitical loyalties or antagonisms. The third and fourth chapters on Marian song, conversely, point toward efforts to intensify and develop a song's meaning through contrafacture, while the fifth chapter's contrafact text cites its own affective reason for melodic re-use. In all case studies, not only does the music cue text and context synoptically; its performed structures also intensify and subvert textual meanings, showing how music can enrich literary interpretations of medieval song.

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Orientador: Denise Hortencia Lopes Garcia / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Arte / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-14T23:08:27Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 VottaJunior_Alfredo_M.pdf: 13778431 bytes, checksum: cbba6684483b3568f6d78a26e474efea (MD5) Previous issue date: 2009 / Resumo: O compositor estoniano Arvo Pärt, nascido em 1935 e radicado na Alemanha desde os anos 1980, tem sido objeto de atenção do mundo musical por sua peculiar linguagem modal baseada na técnica tintinnabuli, formulada e nomeada pelo próprio Pärt. Esta técnica se baseia na ideia de utilização exclusiva das três notas de uma tríade em ao menos uma das vozes da textura musical. Esta técnica tem sido utilizada por Pärt desde meados dos anos 1970. Sua obra apresenta também numerosas afinidades com a música medieval, arte estudada por Pärt nos anos de interrupção de seu trabalho composicional que se prolongaram de 1968 até 1976. O canto gregoriano ocupou lugar de destaque nestes estudos, sendo por esta razão importante para a compreensão de sua obra. São apontados também, por inúmeras fontes (trabalhos acadêmicos, encartes de gravações e textos críticos jornalísticos), vínculos da obra de Pärt com o minimalismo, que se manifestam sobretudo no ideal de stasis, nos processos aditivos e nos ciclos. As técnicas desenvolvidas por Pärt, bem como aquelas que se podem relacionar a ele, são fértil campo para a formulação de novas ideias composicionais e mesmo para o reencontro com ideias antigas que podem fertilizar a expressão musical atual. / Abstract: Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, born in 1935 and living in Germany since the 1980s, has been the object of close attention by the musical world due to his peculiar modal language based on his own tintinnabuli technique. This technique builds upon the exclusive use of the three notes of a triad in at least one of the voices of a given musical texture. Pärt has been using this method since the mid-seventies. His work displays great affinity with medieval music as well. The music of the Middle Ages was studied by Pärt during his period of compositional silence from 1968 to 1976. Since that includes especially Gregorian chant, this genre is crucial for proper understanding of Pärt's work. Numerous sources (academic papers, recordings' booklets and press writings) have also pointed resemblance of Pärt's compositions with minimalism chiefly due to the ideal of stasis, additive processes and cycles. Pärt-developed and -related techniques are a fertile environment for the creation of new compositional ideas and a new approach towards ancient ideas as a means to contribute with current musical expression. / Mestrado / Mestre em Música

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