Pirates, Doodles and Sinking Castles - Medieval News Roundup

This week's collection of news and tweets for medievalists.

Medieval News Roundup: The Viking Facebook, drunken archaeologists, competitive jousting in Australia and ranting about Lancelot

The Verge takes a look at some of the interesting work being done by statistical physicists Ralph Kenna and Pádraig Mac Carron on medieval sources. Using their background in understanding connections, they examined works such as the Táin Bó Cúailnge to learn more about the relationships between the characters found in its pages.

What Kenna and Mac Carron found was that the epics fell between the real networks and the fictional ones. The network in The Iliad is relatively realistic, and Beowulf's also has realistic aspects, with the exception of the connections to Beowulf himself. That chimed with the idea from the humanities that he, unlike some others in the story, may not have existed. The Táin's network was more artificial. Interestingly, however, they found that a lot of the Táin's unreality was concentrated in just a few, grotesquely over-connected characters. When they theorized that some of those characters might actually be amalgams — for instance, that some of the times the queen of Connacht is said to speak to someone, it might be a messenger speaking for her instead — the network began to look more realistic. At least from a social network perspective, perhaps the Táin is not as fantastical as its reputation would suggest, the researchers proposed. That doesn't mean the events really happened, or that the people are real. But it raises the question of why the network looks the way it does. 

You can read the article The Viking Facebook here.

In First Things, Dale M. Coulter takes a look at the life and influence of Jacques le Goff, who passed away earlier this year. He notes that:

Le Goff sought to help Europeans recognize themselves as still connected by the cultural fabric of a common medieval civilization. Along with his fellow members of the Annales school, he also strengthened the case for the long Middle Ages, extending them all the way to the mid-nineteenth century. Le Goff’s body of work, then, stands as a challenge to historians who argue for the Italian Renaissance and Reformation as a break that unleashed a series of forces, intended or not, ultimately leading to the current social imaginary.

Click here to read the article The Good Historian Resembles an Ogre

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Radio National network offers a look at the world of competitive jousting at an event taking place just outside Sydney. One of the competitors, L. Dale Walter explains how dangerous this sport can be:

"I broke my back in 2011 jumping off my horse when he was slipping in the mud and falling at the end of a list. We came in, I went to pull him up, it was slippery, he started to fall, and I had two pictures in my head: one him falling across my leg, which would shatter my leg, and more scary to me, him falling with his legs crossed, which would shatter his leg."

You can read the article and listen to their broadcast at Competitive jousters take medieval re-enactment seriously

In an article about the upcoming changes to the comic book character Thor, Russell Smith of The Globe and Mail shows that he knows a few things about medieval literature:

I say the original King Arthur rules, and I have no tolerance for a politically correct “modernization” of the story. Everybody knows there was no Sir Lancelot or Holy Grail in the original King Arthur story, as told by Geoffrey of Monmouth in Historia Regum Britanniae in the early 12th century. Lancelot and the Grail were rudely added by Chrétien de Troyes 50 or 60 years later, around 1180. Are we really going to tolerate some French upstart turning King Arthur from a warrior into some kind of romantic soap-opera star just because it suited the spirit of the times?

You can read the full article - Hero mythbusters have gone too far - here

What else should you also check out:

Five Tips for Sieging your Favourite Medieval Castle - the good people at Battle Castle have the pictorial evidence of what the really watch out for when going castle-hopping!

The first episode of the new podcast Drunk Archaeology:



The medieval band Vagarem has just released their new album "Codex Bricolia". You can hear some of their sounds in this YouTube video:



Please visit their Facebook page for details.

Jay-Z goes medieval?

American rap star JAY-Z has released a new album this month entitled Magna Carta Holy Grail. To promote the album, they have placed artwork of the album's cover next to one of the earliest copies of the Magna Carta in Salisbury Cathedral.

Dean of Salisbury the Very Reverend June Osborne told the Salisbury Journal, “We are delighted that Jay Z has chosen Salisbury Cathedral, home to the finest of the four surviving Magna Carta, as the location for the global premiere of his artwork. We know how important the Magna Carta, and all it represents, is to people across the globe. The ideals it embodies are still relevant today.

“Jay Z, through his album, is creating a huge awareness of this historic document and its modern significance to a huge audience in the run up to its 800th anniversary in 2015. We hope to welcome many of his fans here this summer to see the artwork in the Chapter House alongside our Magna Carta.”

Jay-Z was impressed with the ideals of justice and responsibility as written in the Magna Carta, and one song even includes the line "To no one will We Sell, to no one will We deny or delay, right or justice."

Another song, Holy Grail, features Justin Timberlake. You can listen to it below:

Octandre Ensemble: Medieval Modernist - this Saturday in London!

Octandre Ensemble: Medieval Modernist 

7.30pm Saturday 8 December 2012

Church of St. Lawrence Jewry-next-Guildhall, Gresham Street, EC2V 5AA.

The Octandre Ensemble presents a concert featuring the work of its Patron, Sir Harrison Birtwistle. The programme includes his arrangements of music by Ockeghem and Machaut as well as modernist works by him and others, including Stravinsky, Holst and Mason, revealing contrasts and connections. Refreshments will be served, including mead, mulled wine and mince pies.

 Tickets £10/£8

Click here to book online

Click here to download the flyer for the concert

The Geese Book – medieval manuscript now available online

One of the most interesting manuscripts of the late Middle Ages is now available online – The Geese Book, a lavishly and whimsically illuminated, two-volume liturgical book, can now be accessed through a project from the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

The Geese Book was produced in Nuremberg, Germany between 1503 and 1510, and gives the complete liturgy compiled for the parish of St. Lorenz, which was used until the Reformation was introduced in the city in 1525.

The volumes are renowned for their high quality decorative illumination including fanciful pictures, provocative and satirical imagery of animals, dragons, and wild people. The work takes its name from an enigmatic illustration showing a choir of geese singing from a large chant manuscript with a wolf as their choirmaster. A fox, who has joined the choir, extends his paw menacingly in the direction of one of the geese.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

Hildegard of Bingen's music gets modern twist in new album

A medieval nun is poised to become an unlikely chart star after her liturgical chants were transformed into music by Madonna’s record producer.

A series of compositions by Hildegard of Bingen, a Benedictine abbess who died in 1179, have been released as an album, the Telegraph reported.

The producer, Guy Sigsworth, has reworked them to create “ambient remixes.”

Sigsworth is a classically trained musician known for his work with Madonna, Britney Spears and Seal.

The album, Hildegard, is being released by Decca and industry experts predict it will become a chart success.

Sigsworth worked with Stevie Wishart, a composer who studied medieval music and has long been fascinated by Hildegard’s compositions.

Click here to read this article from Truthdrive

See also Hildegard, Sinfonye, classical album of the week

First Performance in 400 Years for Medieval Passover Music

Jewish high school students in Toronto, Canada, will sing two pieces of medieval music from the Passover Seder at their “Sounds of Spring” Musical Concert. This is probably the first time in almost four hundred years that the music has been performed.

In 1644, Johannes Rittangel, a Christian scholar, published a Haggadah with a Latin translation for the benefit of other Christian Hebraists. Unusually, when transcribing the traditional songs at the end of the Passover night Seder meal, he also included musical notation – a unique record of how Passover songs were sung in Medieval times. In what is probably the first public performance of this festival music for almost four centuries, the choir of the Anne and Max Tanenbaum Community Hebrew Academy of Toronto’s Kimel Family Education Centre will feature the music at their annual concert at the Richmond Hill Centre for the Performing Arts on Tuesday, March 27.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

Regency Medievalism and the Early-Romantic Guitar

Professor Christopher Page, a celebrated musician and musicologist, will be coming to the University of Bristol on Thursday [24 November] to give this year’s Tucker-Cruse Lecture in the Department of English.

The lecture, entitled ‘Regency Medievalism and the Early-Romantic Guitar’, will consider how the guitar, so favoured by amateur musicians among the nobility and gentry by 1830, came to be involved with a developing interest in the Middle Ages during the Regency period. It will be illustrated with an original guitar of circa 1825 and by the tenor Christopher Watson.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

The healing joy of singing 13th-century girl-group music

Ironically, one of the most acclaimed names in classical vocal groups for the past quarter-century has been Anonymous 4.

On Saturday, at Mountain View's Community School for Music and Arts, the fabulous female foursome offers an "Informance," a one-hour program of performance and conversation, presented by Stanford Lively Arts. Anonymous 4 will demonstrate the building blocks of creating arrangements for their medieval songs and chants.

In 1986, in New York, the four women of Anonymous four came together, from different musical backgrounds and with different musical instincts. "For us, it was an experiment," said founding member Marsha Genensky, a Menlo Park resident. "All of us knew each other from singing in other groups that did slightly later early music, Renaissance music."

They wondered what medieval music would sound like in higher voices. "In the mid-1980s, women were not singing medieval music professionally. So we didn't know what it sounded like. And we couldn't go back to the Middle Ages to find out," Genensky said, laughing. "We tried it, loved the sound and decided to do a program. Then we wanted to do another program. We had a passion for it and worked really hard at it. At a certain point, we made a pact among ourselves to forego other freelance work, so that we could focus all of our rehearsal and performance time on creating this sound with this one set of people. It snowballed and here we are, 25 years later."

Click here to read this article from the Mercury News

Stanford scholar finds the origins of Western poetry in troubadours’ songs

Stanford Assistant Professor Marisa Galvez has written a book about medieval songbooks, pointing to troubadours as the models for modern poets.

The poem can seem like a timeless art form. When we talk about the poetry of nature or dance, we’re referring to a primeval form of language – it’s as if verse existed before other words even made it on the scene.

But, in reality, the European poem as we know it was invented, and fairly recently, too. What we in the West think of as poetry is largely the result of 12th-century troubadours and their controversial insistence on singing about the profane.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

Understanding the Art of Memorization through a Medieval Singing Tool

In an age of sheet music, pianos, and electronic keyboards, the study of a nearly extinct technique for learning how to sing might seem unwarranted. But Jesse Rodin, an assistant professor of music at Stanford, believes that an antiquated teaching tool reveals much about a faculty that has arguably been neglected in this era of instant access to information: memory.

The Guidonian Hand was a musical staple of medieval clergymen, choirboys, and composers. A map of notes arranged on the hand, it was used to help aspiring singers remember how musical notes relate to one another. Had you watched a church choir perform 500 years ago in France, the Low Countries or Italy, you could be certain that the singers had used the Hand, at least in their formative years.

Click here to read this article from the Science Blog

The Melodies of the Emperors

In ancient China, court music was so valued that musicians and their instruments were buried with the emperor after the ruler’s death. In fact, so respected was such music that it spread to imperial courts in Japan, Korea and Vietnam. But in the early 1900s, when the last Chinese emperor was overthrown, the 3,000-year-old musical tradition died out in China.

It was not heard again in Beijing until October 2009, when musicians from Nanhua University, a small private school in Chiayi, southern Taiwan, were invited to play the music at the China Conservatory, a Beijing institution that focuses on the research and study of traditional Chinese music. “The audience clapped really loudly. The instruments were different. They’d never seen them before, or heard the music before,” says Xie Jiaxing, director of the China Conservatory’s Institute of Music Research.

Click here to read this article from the Taiwan Review

Medieval-style organ unveiled at St Fagans museum

A working reconstruction of a medieval church organ is being unveiled at the National History Museum at St Fagans, Cardiff.

No originals have survived intact after the 16th Century Reformation and the organ has taken nine months to complete.

It recreates a unique sound not heard for hundreds of years.

Click here to read this article from the BBC

Vocalists of Trio Medieval breathe life into old and new songs

The art of vocal production is both subtle and difficult, and the Trio Medieval displayed their impressive skills Saturday night in a program of English Medieval polyphony and Norwegian folk songs.

Presented at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception by the Friends of Chamber Music, Trio Medieval featured three female singers from Norway. Individually and as a group, they displayed a penchant for a light, clean and stunningly beautiful vocal color. Recording artists with the prestigious ECM label, their recordings have been very well received, one even receiving a Grammy nomination. The first half of the program featured medieval sacred music from Worcester, in the west of England. It combined a number of musical settings of parts of the Mass text with other devotional works and even two pieces written in the 21st century.

Click here to read this article from the Kansas City Star

"Lost" 450-year-old mass soars on British charts

A sumptuous first recording of a long-lost 450-year-old Italian Renaissance mass written for 40 different vocal parts has soared onto British pop charts a week after its release.

The recording by British vocal group I Fagiolini of the little-known Alessandro Striggio's 1566 mass for 40 voices -- most masses are written for four -- made its debut at number 68 on the pop charts, above Bon Jovi, George Harrison and Eminem.

It was number two on the classical charts, just behind Dutch violinist waltz master Andre Rieu.

Click here to read this article from Reuters

Trio Medieval ready to release new disc of sacred music from 13th century England

It's been a while since the excellent Norwegian female a cappella Trio Medieval has recorded a disc. In advance of the release of their latest, A Worcester Ladymass, next Tuesday, NPR is offering a free sneak peak on its website. It's a fantastic mix of great sound, serious scholarship and accessible new music.

Click here to read this article from the Toronto Star

Evoking the Moods and Mysteries of a Medieval English Christmastide

Lionheart has wisely developed a cottage industry in thematic Christmas programs, each built around the repertories and traditions of a single country.

“Tydings Trew: Feasts of Christmas in Medieval England” has become the most popular of them, partly because this finely polished vocal sextet has recorded the music — its “Tydings Trew” CD was released by Koch International Classics in 2003 — but also, no doubt, because audiences are charmed by the alternation of Latin chant and medieval English carols, which the group sings with appropriate accents and pronunciation.

Click here to read this article from the New York Times

Bangor Pontifical doodles show us the middle ages were juvenile, too

It looks like something Jake and Dinos Chapman might do if they turned their hand to the creative defacement of illuminated manuscripts: the Viz-style gargoyle just to the left of the plainchant notation on page 77 of the nearly 700-year-old Bangor Pontifical, one of the treasures of the Welsh medieval world. On a road trip through the country to create a Welsh Christmas for this Saturday's Music Matters, I saw, handled and turned the pages of this book at Bangor University.

Click here to read this article from The Guardian

Review: Medieval Mass makes for a new musical world

Da Camera, seizing on a medieval exhibit at the Dallas Museum of Art, presented Houston with a likely first Thursday at the Villa de Matel.

Guillaume de Machaut's Mass of circa 1364 is an icon in Western classical music that most people never hear live. It's the first known, complete musical Mass by a single composer. It represents a world of music utterly unrelated to our common, harmony-based style (classical and pop). That ear-opening quality was vividly present in the performance by France's Ensemble Organum and director Marcel Peres.

The group is making a brief Da Camera-produced U.S. tour that hits Houston, Dallas (for the show The Mourners: Medieval Tomb Sculpture From the Court of Burgundy) and New York.

Click here to read this article from the Houston Chron

The Early Interval: Making Music in Columbus

Ron and Janice Cook’s basement houses one of Columbus’s fi nest cultural treasures: a thoughtfully acquired and carefully maintained collection of recorders, harps, crumhorns, bowed instruments, a hurdy-gurdy, and much more. When used to realize medieval and Renaissance music, this instrumental smorgasbord, its owners, and their friends form The Early Interval.

This ensemble is familiar to many in the OSU community; The Early Interval has performed at Vagantes, CMRS annual conferences in the 1980s and 1990s, and departmental concerts and academic meetings. And while the artistry of The Early Interval continues to engage, entertain, and educate new audiences, it has been an integral part of Ohio’s early music scene since its founding in 1976. Today, seven artists continue the tradition: Jim Bates, Janice Cook, Ron Cook, Sean Ferguson, Lyz Liddell, Monica Rudy, and Tamara Seckel.

Click here to read this article from Nouvelles Nouvelles (Ohio State University)