Dr Emma Hornby of the University of Bristol has been awarded a Religion and Society Small Research Grant worth £95,000 by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for a one-year project on ‘Compositional planning, musical grammar and theology in Old Hispanic chant’.
The grant will enable Dr Hornby and Professor Rebecca Maloy from the University of Colorado at Boulder to produce a collaborative monograph. It will also fund a series of lecture-recitals with the Bristol Music Department Schola Cantorum in 2010. The Schola Cantorum is an auditioned women’s choir, open to single and joint honours music students at the University of Bristol, that specialises in medieval music.
The performances will include the few transcribable Old Hispanic chants, cognates in other European traditions, and tentative and purely illustrative realisations of some sample chants from the project. These events will bring this medieval sound world and its historical and theological context alive to audiences of early music enthusiasts, school and college pupils, the academic community, and the general public in Bristol and beyond.