Margaret Bent | |
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Born | Margaret Hilda Bassington 23 December, 1940 United Kingdom |
Children | 1 |
Awards | |
Academic background | |
Education | Girton College, Cambridge (B.A., PhD) |
Doctoral advisor | Thurston Dart, Brian Trowell |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Medieval music,Old Hall Manuscript |
Institutions | |
Notable students |
Margaret Bent CBE FBA ,(born Margaret Hilda Bassington;23 December 1940) is an English musicologist who specializes in music of the late medieval and Renaissance eras. In particular,she has written extensively on the Old Hall Manuscript,English masses as well as the works of Johannes Ciconia and John Dunstaple. [1]
Bent was educated at the Acton Haberdashers' Aske's School for Girls and Girton College,Cambridge University (where she read music,was organ scholar,and is now an honorary fellow),receiving her BA in 1962 and PhD in 1969. She taught at Cambridge and King's College London after 1963,and became a lecturer at Goldsmiths' College in 1972. In 1975 she was appointed professor at Brandeis University and in 1981 at Princeton University,and served as department chair in both. Bent was president of the American Musicological Society (1984–1986),of which she is now a Corresponding Member. She returned to England in 1992 as senior research fellow at All Souls College,University of Oxford,where she is now an emeritus fellow.
Bent's research centers on English,French and Italian music of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries and includes work on the medieval motet. Her study of the Old Hall Manuscript (both her 1969 dissertation and the edition,co-edited with Andrew Hughes,published in the Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae,1969–73),was a key work in scholarship on early English music. Her studies of John Dunstaple,Philippe de Vitry,Guillaume de Machaut,the Roman de Fauvel, musica ficta and music and manuscripts in the Veneto,have all been highly influential;she was a pioneer in musical paleography and source studies. She co-founded and co-directed the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music [2] serves on many editorial boards of journals and publication series and contributed articles to the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Her publications address technical matters of music theory,techniques of counterpoint,analysis,musica ficta,text-setting,and other issues that bridge notation and performance in early music,descriptions of new sources,aspects of musical transmission,stemmatics,and manuscript studies,interfaces with literary,historical and biographical questions.
Her awards include the Royal Musical Association's Dent Medal,a Guggenheim Fellowship,a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship,the Frank Llewellyn Harrison Medal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland, [3] the Claude V. Palisca award of the American Musicological Society,and honorary doctorates from the universities of Glasgow,Notre Dame and Montréal. [4]
She is a Fellow of the British Academy,Academia Europaea,the Royal Historical Society and All Souls College,Oxford,a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1994), [4] a Corresponding Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America,a distinguished senior fellow of the School of Advanced Study,London University,an International member of the American Philosophical Society, [5] and was appointed CBE in 2008. [6]
She was the recipient of a Festschrift:Citation and Authority in Medieval and Renaissance Musical Culture:Learning from the Learned:Essays in Honour of Margaret Bent (ed. Suzannah Clark and Elizabeth Eva Leach,Boydell &Brewer,2005).
John Dunstaple was an English composer whose music helped inaugurate the transition from the medieval to the Renaissance periods. The central proponent of the Contenance angloise style,Dunstaple was the leading English composer of his time,and is often coupled with William Byrd and Henry Purcell as England's most important early music composers. His style would have an immense influence on the subsequent music of continental Europe,inspiring composers such as Du Fay,Binchois,Ockeghem and Busnois.
Jehan de Lescurel was a composer-poet of late medieval music. Jehan's extensive surviving oeuvre is an important and rare examples of the formes fixes before the time of Guillaume de Machaut;it consists of 34 works:20 ballades,12 rondeaus and two long narrative poems,diz entés. All but one of his compositions is monophonic,representing the end of the trouvère tradition and the beginning of the polyphonic ars nova style centered around the formes fixes.
Isorhythm is a musical technique using a repeating rhythmic pattern,called a talea,in at least one voice part throughout a composition. Taleae are typically applied to one or more melodic patterns of pitches or colores,which may be of the same or a different length from the talea.
Ars antiqua,also called ars veterum or ars vetus,is a term used by modern scholars to refer to the Medieval music of Europe during the High Middle Ages,between approximately 1170 and 1310. This covers the period of the Notre-Dame school of polyphony,and the subsequent years which saw the early development of the motet,a highly varied choral musical composition. Usually the term ars antiqua is restricted to sacred (church) or polyphonic music,excluding the secular (non-religious) monophonic songs of the troubadours,and trouvères. Although colloquially the term ars antiqua is used more loosely to mean all European music of the 13th century,and from slightly before.
Ars nova refers to a musical style which flourished in the Kingdom of France and its surroundings during the Late Middle Ages. More particularly,it refers to the period between the preparation of the Roman de Fauvel (1310s) and the death of composer Guillaume de Machaut in 1377. The term is sometimes used more generally to refer to all European polyphonic music of the fourteenth century. For instance,the term "Italian ars nova" is sometimes used to denote the music of Francesco Landini and his compatriots,although Trecento music is the more common term for the contemporary 14th-century music in Italy. The "ars" in "ars nova" can be read as "technique",or "style". The term was first used in two musical treatises,titled Ars novae musicae by Johannes de Muris,and a collection of writings attributed to Philippe de Vitry often simply called "Ars nova" today. Musicologist Johannes Wolf first applied to the term as description of an entire era in 1904.
Ars subtilior is a musical style characterized by rhythmic and notational complexity,centered on Paris,Avignon in southern France,and also in northern Spain at the end of the fourteenth century. The style also is found in the French Cypriot repertory. Often the term is used in contrast with ars nova,which applies to the musical style of the preceding period from about 1310 to about 1370;though some scholars prefer to consider ars subtilior a subcategory of the earlier style. Primary sources for ars subtilior are the Chantilly Codex,the Modena Codex,and the Turin Manuscript.
Musica ficta was a term used in European music theory from the late 12th century to about 1600 to describe pitches,whether notated or added at the time of performance,that lie outside the system of musica recta or musica vera as defined by the hexachord system of Guido of Arezzo.
The Old Hall Manuscript is the largest,most complete,and most significant source of English sacred music of the late 14th and early 15th centuries,and as such represents the best source for late Medieval English music. The manuscript somehow survived the Reformation,and formerly belonged to St. Edmund's College,a Roman Catholic school located at Old Hall Green in Hertfordshire. It was sold to the British Library after an auction at Sotheby's in 1973.
Johannes de Muris,or John of Murs,was a French mathematician,astronomer,and music theorist best known for treatises on the ars nova musical style,titled Ars nove musice.
Byttering was an English composer during the stylistic transitional from medieval to Renaissance music. Five of his compositions have survived in the Old Hall Manuscript,where the musicologist Peter Wright contends they "form a small yet distinctive corpus of work notable for its technical ambition and musical accomplishment".
Johannes de Grocheio was a Parisian musical theorist of the early 14th century. His French name was Jean de Grouchy,but he is best known by his Latinized name. He was the author of the treatise Ars musicae,which describes the functions of sacred and secular music in and around Paris during his lifetime.
Richard Loqueville was a French composer active during the transition between Medieval and Renaissance music. A musician at Cambrai Cathedral,Loqueville was a harpist and teacher,whose students included Edward III,Duke of Bar and the influential composer Guillaume Du Fay.
The Lambeth Choirbook –also known as the Arundel Choirbook –is an illuminated choirbook dating to the sixteenth century. It contains music for 7 Masses,4 Magnificats,and 8 motets. Much of the music is by Tudor-period composers. The major contributors are Robert Fayrfax and Nicholas Ludford;between them they contributed at least ten of its nineteen pieces. Only three of Fayrfax's works have his name attached to them,but five other pieces are known as his;these,along with two by Ludford,are known from concordances in the Caius Choirbook and other manuscripts. Seven anonymous pieces exist in the book:
Ann Buckley is an Irish musicologist,born in Dublin.
Don Harran was professor of musicology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Frank Anthony D'Accone was an American musicologist. He was the author of documentary studies of the musicians and institutions that produced the music of the Florentine and Siennese Renaissance. His many modern editions of the music of this culture made available to present-day performers and scholars for the first time in several centuries a wide-ranging picture of the musical life in Tuscany during the Renaissance. Musicologist Lewis Lockwood stated that his body of work "substantially extends current knowledge of the music history of the Italian Renaissance."
(Thomas?) Damett was an English composer during the stylistic transitional from medieval to Renaissance music.
David Fallows is an English musicologist specializing in music of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance,as well as the performance practice of music. He is a leader in fifteenth-century music studies,particularly secular song,Guillaume Dufay,and Josquin des Prez,both the subject of landmark biographies Fallows has written.
Gilbert Reaney was an English musicologist who specialized in medieval and Renaissance music,theory and literature. Described as "one of the most prolific and influential musicologists of the past century",Reaney made significant contributions to his fields of expertise,particularly on the life and works of Guillaume de Machaut,as well as medieval music theory.
The American Institute of Musicology (AIM) is a musicological organization that researches,promotes and produces publications on early music. Founded in 1944 by Armen Carapetyan,the AIM's chief objective is the publication of modern editions of medieval,Renaissance and early Baroque compositions and works of music theory. The breadth and quality of publications produced by the AIM constitutes a central contribution to the study,practice and performance of early music.