Scholarly Books by Jason Stoessel
Miscellanea Bibliothecae Apostolicae Vaticanae XXV (Studi e testi, 534), 2019
Descrizione bibliografica in www.vaticanlibrary.va ------Proprietà letteraria riservata
by Katherine Butler, Samantha Bassler, John MacInnis, Jason Stoessel, Tim Shephard, Férdia J Stone-Davis, Erica Levenson, Amanda Eubanks Winkler, Jamie Apgar, Sigrid Harris, and Aurora Faye Martinez Myths and stories offer a window onto medieval and early modern musical culture. Far from merely ... more Myths and stories offer a window onto medieval and early modern musical culture. Far from merely offering material for musical settings, authoritative tales from classical mythology, ancient history and the Bible were treated as foundations for musical knowledge. Such myths were cited in support of arguments about the uses, effects, morality, and preferred styles of music in sources as diverse as theoretical treatises, defences or critiques of music, art, sermons, educational literature, and books of moral conduct. Newly written literary stories too were believed capable of moral instruction and influence, and were a medium through which ideas about music could be both explored and transmitted. How authors interpreted and weaved together these traditional stories, or created their own, reveals much about changing attitudes across the period.
Looking beyond the well-known figure of Orpheus, this collection explores the myriad stories that shaped not only musical thought, but also its styles, techniques, and practices. Moreover, music itself performed and created knowledge in ways parallels to myth, and worked in tandem with old and new tales to construct social, political, and philosophical views. This relationship was not static, however; as the Enlightenment dawned, the once authoritative gods became comic characters and myth became a medium for ridicule. This collection provides a foundation for exploring myth and story throughout medieval and early modern culture, and facilitating further study into the Enlightenment and beyond.
Identity and Locality In Early European Music, 1028-1740
Refereed Journal Articles by Jason Stoessel
Music Perception, 2021
Historical listening has long been a topic of interest for musicologists. Yet, little attention h... more Historical listening has long been a topic of interest for musicologists. Yet, little attention has been given to the systematic study of historical listening practices before the common practice era (c. 1700–present). In the first study of its kind, this research compared a model of medieval perceptions of “sweetness” based on writings of medieval music theorists with modern day listeners’ aesthetic responses. Responses were collected through two experiments. In an implicit associations experiment, participants were primed with a more or less consonant musical excerpt, then presented with a sweet or bitter target word, or a non-word, on which to make lexical decisions. In the explicit associations experiment, participants were asked to rate on a three-point Likert scale perceived sweetness of short musical excerpts that varied in consonance and sound quality (male, female, organ). The results from these experiments were compared to predictions from a medieval perception model to in...
Using Optical Music Recognition to Encode 17th-Century Music Prints: The Canonic Works of Paolo Agostini (c.1583–1629) as a Test Case
7th International Conference on Digital Libraries for Musicology, 2020
There have been several attempts to improve the retrieval of symbolic music information by Optica... more There have been several attempts to improve the retrieval of symbolic music information by Optical Music Recognition (OMR) to increase the “searchability” of digital music libraries of early music prints and to facilitate the collection of data for musicological research. Their success has varied. This report describes a new online OMR system based upon industry-standard platforms to automate the encoding of early 17th-century music prints. Due to our research on composers of canons in early 17th-century Rome, we have used as a test case the early music prints of Paolo Agostini. Agostini was maestro di cappella at St Peter’s Basilica and the most active exponent of advanced contrapuntal techniques, especially canon, in Rome in the 1620s. We developed a digital tool to process images of Agostini’s printed music and to classify 7,092 automatically selected objects according to 38 music symbols using supervised learning with convolutional neural networks (CNN). The resulting system, In...
Music Analysis, 2018
Tournai, Bibliothèque de la Cathédrale, ms. A 27 (olim 476), is well-known for its early polyphon... more Tournai, Bibliothèque de la Cathédrale, ms. A 27 (olim 476), is well-known for its early polyphonic setting of the Ordinary of the Mass (fols 28r-33v). Views on the musical cohesion of these settings vary. Charles van den Borren (1957, p. ii) adduced from patterns of transmission and stylistic features that the Mass was the work of several composers over several decades. 1 Irene Guletsky has argued for a single composer and a dating of 1317-25. Guletsky"s conclusions require further scrutiny elsewhere, but David Catalunya"s re-dating of the Las Huelgas manuscript, which transmits the Credo of the Tournai Mass, to the 1340s has some bearing on this discussion. 2 Nicola Tangari"s recent discovery of yet another transmission of the Credo in a source still in use at Avignon and then Rome in the 1360s challenges both an early dating and a one-composer hypothesis. 3 Certainly, the motet Se grasse/Cum venerint/ITE MISSA EST, which completes the Tournai Mass, still attracted the attention of the music theorist Johannes Boen in the 1360s. 4 Musicologists have long known that two additional settings of the Ordinary of the Mass, a Sanctus and Kyrie (in that order), appear in ars nova mensural notation in the Tournai manuscript. Yet their true nature has only been recently recognised, despite already being transcribed, albeit erroneously, in well-known twentieth-century monumental editions (see Table 1). In June 2014 Michael Scott Cuthbert announced on social media that he had used computational analysis to show that the once seemingly monophonic Kyrie and Sanctus could be rendered as polyphony. 5 In response, Ján Janovčik and Jason Stoessel proposed that each could be performed as a three-voice canon. 6 (See Appendices 1 and 2 for Stoessel"s transcriptions of the Kyrie and Sanctus.) 7 The discovery of the Tournai canons changes the history of canonic composition and to some extent established views on the so-called Tournai Mass.
Editing Early English Music (Review Article)
Musicology Australia, 2016
Just what does ‘English’ or ‘British’ mean for the music of the fourteenth and fifteenth centurie... more Just what does ‘English’ or ‘British’ mean for the music of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries? Can there be definitions of these term centred on the small but important island off the Atlantic coast of the European mainland, whose identity has been most recently transformed from a rusty former superpower to a cultural and business capital of the world, so-called ‘Cool Britannia’? Even attempts to escape the slippage between the geopolitical entities of England and Britain are prone to disagreements and equivocations. Turning to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the situation was no clearer. The strong admixing of royal French and English bloodlines during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the fact that the English line was descended from a conquering French line and the death of last of the Capetan line of French kings, Charles IV, in 1328 resulted in the longest war (or series of wars) in European history between rival English and French claimants for the French throne, the so-called Hundred Years War. For a time, swathes of continental northwest Europe, even Paris, were English possessions. The consequence was cultural exchange. French kings and princes were hostage-guests, sometimes for many years, of their English victors. Princes brought their musicians from England and even hired continental composers. Add to this the two enormous church councils of the early fifteenth century—the schism-busting Council of Constance (1414–1418) and the conciliar-movement-busting Council of Basel (1431) at which representatives of all ‘nations’ of Europe and beyond were present with their entourages, including musicians—and some of the problems of trying to distinguish English
Con lagreme bagnandome el viso: mourning and music in late medieval Padua
Plainsong and Medieval Music 24, no. 1 (2015): 71-89
In the years before his death, Johannes Ciconia (1370?–1412) set to music several poems penned by... more In the years before his death, Johannes Ciconia (1370?–1412) set to music several poems penned by the young Venetian humanist Leonardo Giustinian. One of the earliest of these settings is Con lagreme bagnandome el viso. This article proposes that both the poem and its setting by Ciconia operate within the emotional community of early humanists active at Padua in the decades around the year 1400. The public funeral oratory of one of the high-profile humanists active in this community in Padua, Pier Paolo Vergerio, reveals a renewed interest in ancient rhetoric that was instrumental in the development of new modes of self-expression within this emotional community. Different types of musical repetition in Ciconia's setting of Con lagreme serve as musical analogues to rhetorical figures of pathos witnessed in the orations of Vergerio.
The inner gatherings of the music manuscript Modena, Biblioteca Estense, MS. α.M.5.24 (Mod A II-I... more The inner gatherings of the music manuscript Modena, Biblioteca Estense, MS. α.M.5.24 (Mod A II-IV ) contain a tangle of politically-charged songs, mostly in French, referring to the tumultuous Great Schism of the Western Church (1378–1417) and the prowess of several princes of ascendant Italian states during the same period. Some scholars have connected the repertoire of Mod A II-IV with Petros Filargos, sometime Archbishop of Milan and then the short-lived conciliar pope Alexander V. Yet art-historical evidence now strongly suggests that Mod A II-IV was completed during the pontificate of Alexander’s successor, John XXIII, between September 1410 and March 1411 in Bologna. During the first two years of John’s pontificate the influential and wealthy prince of France, Louis II of Anjou, prosecuted his claim for title of the Kingdom of Naples in Italy, simultaneously supporting John XXIII’s military campaign to reclaim Rome. This article explores a new hypothesis that part of the repe...
The Angevin Struggle for the Kingdom of Naples (c.1378–1411) and Politics of Repertoire in Mod A: New Hypotheses
Journal of Music Research Online 5, 2014
The inner gatherings of the music manuscript Modena, Biblioteca Estense, MS. α.M.5.24 (Mod AII-IV... more The inner gatherings of the music manuscript Modena, Biblioteca Estense, MS. α.M.5.24 (Mod AII-IV) contain a tangle of politically-charged songs, mostly in French, referring to the tumultuous Great Schism of the Western Church (1378–1417) and the prowess of several princes of ascendant Italian states during the same period. Some scholars have connected the repertoire of Mod AII-IV with Pétros Fílargos, sometime Archbishop of Milan and then the short-lived conciliar pope Alexander V. Yet art-historical evidence now strongly suggests that Mod AII-IV was completed during the pontificate of Alexander’s successor, John XXIII, between September 1410 and March 1411 in Bologna. During the first two years of John’s pontificate the influential and wealthy prince of France, Louis II of Anjou, prosecuted his claim for title of the Kingdom of Naples in Italy, simultaneously supporting John XXIII’s military campaign to reclaim Rome. This article explores a new hypothesis that part of the repertoire of Mod AII-IV—and possibly the manuscript’s very structure—reflects the presence of the Angevin prince at the court of John XXIII in Bologna in the second half of 1410. It considers how other political threads running through this manuscript render it an unlikely candidate for a source connected with the pro-Visconti Alexander V.
Intellectual History Review, 2017
Petrarch’s description of his ascent of Mont Ventoux in 1336 provides a point of departure for ex... more Petrarch’s description of his ascent of Mont Ventoux in 1336 provides a point of departure for exploring the dynamic between the old and new, logic and rhetoric, absolute and relative knowledge, and scholasticism and humanism in writings on music from early fifteenth-century Padua. Early fifteenth-century Padua was a city of contrasts in which two intellectual traditions – one condemned by Petrarch and the other his legacy – ran alongside, and often entangled with, each other: scholasticism and early humanism. The writings on music of Paduan citizens Johannes Ciconia and Prosdocimo de’ Beldomandi afford insights into the reception of these intellectual traditions. Ciconia’s Nova musica embraces the spirit of early humanism by proposing a revolutionary understanding of music as grammar and rhetoric, largely from the perspective of some of the oldest authors of Latin music theory. Prosdocimo’s scholastic approach to musical knowledge nonetheless demonstrates an interest in the aesthetics of listening that emphasises the role of emotion, especially pleasure, in musical experience. Yet, Ciconia alone provides the most forceful exposition of an emotional theory of musical expression that ultimately manifests itself in the music that he composed during the last decade or so of his life in Padua.
Early Music 42/4 (2014): 613–617
In 1984, John Stinson and Brian Parish developed Scribe, a computer program to encode every meani... more In 1984, John Stinson and Brian Parish developed Scribe, a computer program to encode every meaningful mark on each page of a medieval music manuscript and produce an on-screen representation of these data in both medieval and modern notation. Scribe data have proved essential for creating statistical and comparative analyses, compositional analyses and producing online thematic indices for the Medieval Music Database over a large body of music. Even though the Scribe still functions in cross-platform DOS-emulated computer environments, the growth of Digital Humanities, linked open data and enormous potential for online research collaboration offers a series of opportunities for encoded medieval music notation data. This report details the authors’ efforts since 2013 in converting Scribe’s data into open access data based upon the standard being developed by the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI). When coupled with recent developments in the Standard Music Font Layout (SMuFL) project, our new Scribe-based module, known as NeoScribe, offers significant enhancements to the MEI standard that stand to benefit current and future developments in digital musicology.
In 1247 Simon of Saint-Quentin compared Mongol song to the howling of wolves. Like Simon, authors... more In 1247 Simon of Saint-Quentin compared Mongol song to the howling of wolves. Like Simon, authors writing about music from the late thirteenth to mid-sixteenth century often associate the singing of certain socio-linguistic groups with the vocalizations of animals. This article argues that these statements betray what Cary Wolfe has termed the discourse of animality. This discourse seeks through a process of alienation to define morally or theologically the Latin West's place in the world. Yet anthropomorphized animals in literature and song often instruct human readers/listeners in social and moral conduct. What might it mean when singers take on the voices of animals in Giovanni da Cascia's Agnel son bianco and Donato da Cascia's Lucida pecorella? By tracing metaphorical references to sheep, goats, and wolves in classical Roman and medieval literature, the article offers new social and political readings of these two madrigals.
The Journal of Musicology 31/1: 1–43, 2014
Scholars have proposed Milan, Pisa and/or Bologna as possible locations for the copying of the in... more Scholars have proposed Milan, Pisa and/or Bologna as possible locations for the copying of the inner gatherings (II–IV) of the manuscript Modena, Biblioteca Estense Universitaria, [alpha].M.5.24 (Mod A) and have argued that some of the compositions might have originated in the circle of Archbishop of Milan Pietro Filargo. Yet evidence based on Mod A’s repertory and the scant biographies of its composers is insufficient for determining the manuscript’s origin. To solve this problem, I look at Mod A as a cultural artifact, attributing its illumination to the Master of 1411, an illuminator active in Bologna from 1404 to 1411, or to his assistant, both associated with the manuscript workshop of the Oli- vetan abbey of San Michele in Bosco, on the outskirts of medieval Bologna. The Master of 1411 might have been Giacomo da Padova, an illuminator documented there between 1407 and 1409. Iconographical analysis shows that the illuminator of Mod A possessed considerable knowledge of Paduan culture before the fall of the ruling Carrara family in 1405. This knowledge is apparent in his use of an astrological allusion to Carrara heraldry in his decoration of the song Inperial sedendo. His illumination of a Gloria by Egardus with the figure of Saint Anthony of Padua implies a familiarity with Padua’s musical institutions. Mod A may have been illuminated when the papal entourage of John XXIII visited San Michele in Bosco in the fall of 1410, although further compositions were added after the illuminator had finished his work. This conclusion invites scholars to consider afresh the social context that might have fostered the compilation of the repertory in the inner gatherings of Mod A.
Music and Letters, Jan 1, 2010
Acta Musicologica, Jan 1, 1999
Scholarly Book Chapters by Jason Stoessel
«La grandezza del numero sonoro»: Canonic Techniques, Combinatorics, and Early Scientific Thought in Seventeenth-Century Rome
Music and Science from Leonardo to Galileo, edited by Rudolf Rasch. Music, Science, and Technology. Turnhout: Brepols, 2022
Johannes Ciconia and his Italian poets: Text, Image and Beyond in Early-Fifteenth-Century Padua
Polyphonic Voices: Poetic and Musical Dialogues in the European Ars Nova, edited by Anna Alberni, Antonio Calvia and Maria Sofia Lannutti. La Tradizione Musicale, 22; Studi E Testi, 13. Florence: Edizioni del Galluzzo per la Fondazione Ezio Franceschini, 2021
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Scholarly Books by Jason Stoessel
Looking beyond the well-known figure of Orpheus, this collection explores the myriad stories that shaped not only musical thought, but also its styles, techniques, and practices. Moreover, music itself performed and created knowledge in ways parallels to myth, and worked in tandem with old and new tales to construct social, political, and philosophical views. This relationship was not static, however; as the Enlightenment dawned, the once authoritative gods became comic characters and myth became a medium for ridicule. This collection provides a foundation for exploring myth and story throughout medieval and early modern culture, and facilitating further study into the Enlightenment and beyond.
Refereed Journal Articles by Jason Stoessel
Scholarly Book Chapters by Jason Stoessel