During the annual meeting on 2 March 2018 of the Societas Mediaevistica, this year at the Staatsunabhängige Theologische Hochschule Basel in Riehen, Switzerland, Ulrike Hascher-Burger (Utrecht team) presented an aspect of her research titled “Die Macht der Vergangenheit: Das Hostienwunder von Amsterdam vor und nach der Reformation” (The Force of the Past: The Miracle of Amsterdam before…

On Tuesday 20th February the Cambridge team welcomed Katarina Livljanic (Université Paris-Sorbonne and director of “Dialogos”) to Emmanuel College to work with Adam Mathias, Anonymous III (AP), and a number of choral scholars from the university. Over the course of the day, singers worked on a range of pieces, from chant through to 13th century Parisian…

On the 25th and 26th of January 2018, the SoundMe teams convened in Heidelberg for a collaborative meeting with members of the project Die frühe Messvertonung zwischen liturgischer Funktion und Kunstanspruch, based at the Departments of Musicology in Mainz and Weimar-Jena. The meeting was organised as a series of eight papers, in which the speakers…

On 23-24 January members of the Prague and Warsaw teams conducted research at the Stadtbibliothek in Trier. They were interested in little known manuscripts containing Central European repertory from the fifteenth century. Their attention focused in particular on manuscript 322/1994, which is the principal source of polytextual motets and Latin songs. The investigation concentrated on…

In December 2017 the magazine ‘Academia’, which popularises scientific research, published Anna Kilian’s interview with Paweł Gancarczyk. In a long conversation on the subject of project SoundMe, Gancarczyk explained the idea behind it and presented the research conducted by the Warsaw team on music in Central Europe and Italy.

The December issue of ‘Ruch Muzyczny’, the oldest Polish journal devoted to contemporary musical life, carries a popularising article by Bartłomiej Gembicki. The author discusses the phenomenon of what is known as ‘Monteverdi’s Vespers’, demonstrating that in fact this term no longer applies just to ‘Vespro della Beata Vergine’, published in print in Venice in…

On 7 December 2017 Paweł Gancarczyk and Bartłomiej Gembicki from the Warsaw team visited the Fryderyk Chopin Music School in Bytom (Upper Silesia). Paweł Gancarczyk held two classes with the pupils at the school, presenting the latest HERA-based research. He talked about the presence of the music of the past in the fifteenth and sixteenth…

Martin Luther, the (Protestant) Reformation, and music: combined, this constellation illustrates one of the most revealing “uses of history” in European musical culture. In order to commemorate the publication of Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses (Disputation on the Power of Indulgences) on 31 October 1517, the Lutheran Church – in the centuries that followed – also…

A group of choral scholars from Cambridge University performed a programme of medieval music for Christmastide on 24th November 2017. The concert explored, through performance, ways in which medieval musicians made use of familiar Christmas melodies, often recasting them and elaborating upon them in fascinating ways. A particular emphasis was placed on the repertory studied…

On 27 November Paweł Gancarczyk gave a lecture at the V. Saradjishvili Tbilisi State Conservatoire in Georgia. He presented musicological research in Poland and the main principles and aims of the SoundMe project. In his presentation he focused on the functioning of the musical past in the music repertory of the Bohemian Utraquists.