Research project "Regional and geographical community terms in music writing of the Middle Ages (ca. 500 to 1500)"
[This content is not available in "Englisch" yet] Made possible by the German Research Foundation (DFG)
Start: May 2009, end: September 2013
Head: Prof. Dr. Frank Hentschel (Institute of Musicology)
Staff members: Dr. Karen Desmond, Dr. Gunnar Wiegand, Dr. Marie Winkelmüller
Assistants: Silvia Böhnert, Marian Weiß
In the music-related literature of the Middle Ages, we repeatedly encounter community terms with a regional or geographical component, which can conceal a wide variety of concepts. The complex terms gens, natio, populus or civitas etc. only inadequately describe the interaction of linguistic, ideological, political, regional and other coordinates that determine these community concepts. These play such an important role in music writing that their systematic interpretation should significantly advance our understanding of this corpus of sources. The interdisciplinary project aims to reconstruct the respective meaning of the community terms and the motivations with which they were used. The research interest extends beyond the interpretation of music writing to the musical practice of the Middle Ages, in that the geographical or cultural grids that emerge in the music writing are placed in relation to the practical circumstances to which they partly allude. The project naturally addresses topics such as a sense of unity and "identity" in the Middle Ages and aims to contribute to research into the emergence of nationalism.
Publications
'Nationes', 'Gentes' and music in the Middle Ages