And was the holy Lamb of God,
On Englands pleasant pastures seen!
- And did those feet, William Blake

tirsdag 16. juni 2015

Soundtrack of spring term research

With the spring term coming to a close, and in order to keep up a minimum of regularity in the posts on this blog, I now wish to share with you some of the music that has kept me company through the spring term. Since February - the beginning of the Danish term - I have spent most of my weeks preparing my lectures, writing scripts for my classes, read through the material and more, and then prepared the texts for the week. Since I have designed the course and put together its syllabus myself, I have been required to spend even more time making due preparations than I might otherwise have done had I taken over some existing course, and this has resulted in some long days in the office. To help me in this process, I have had a number of musical pieces which I have had running in the background for hours on end. 

When I'm working with medieval history in its sundry forms, I usually listen to music from the sixteenth century and earlier, although occasionally moving into the early decades of the seventeenth. This was a habit I began during my MA research, as I had by then been introduced to a much wider variety of early music than I had previously known, thanks to some courses designed by my MA supervisor, to whom I owe my knowledge of Guillaume Machaut, Guillaume Dufay, Palestrina and others. 

The selection of this blogpost does not contain the totality of songs to which I worked this term, but it is a representative selection, including pieces I first discovered this spring and therefore became an intrinsic part of this season's soundtrack. 




Palestrina (1525-94) - Missa Assumpta Est



Palestrina - Missa Nigra Sum



Annibale Padovano (1527-75) - Mass for 24 voices



Roland de Lassus (1530-94) - Lamentations of the Prophet Jeremiah



Alessandro Striggio (c.1536-92) - Mass for 40 and 60 voices



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