Please join us on Monday, November 18, 2013, at 5:00 pm in the Lilly Library for “Marchetto and Prosdocimo: A Musician and an Astronomer on Music in Medieval Padua,” the inaugural lecture in a new series from Indiana University Jacobs School of Music’s Center for the History of Music Theory and Literature (CHMTL) by the renowned medievalist and musicologist Jan Herlinger.
All are welcome. Refreshments will follow the talks. In order to prepare for the reception, we ask that you please fill out the small form available here if you are planning to attend.
Jan Herlinger is Derryl and Helen Haymon Professor of Music, emeritus, at Louisiana State University and an Adjunct Researcher at the University of Alabama School of Music. Professor Herlinger has edited, translated, and written widely on medieval music theory; he has contributed to the New Grove Dictionary of Music, the Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages, Medieval Italy: An Encyclopedia, the New Oxford History of Music, and the Cambridge History of Western Music Theory; and to the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Acta Musicologica, and Music Theory Spectrum. He served as Secretary of the American Musicological Society, 1996–2001, and, from its beginning, as a member of the Board of the Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum, a project hosted by CHMTL.
Abstract:
Marchetto was a choirmaster in Padua in the early 14th century; Prosdocimo de Beldemandis an astronomer, physician, and professor of arts and medicine at the university in that city in the early 15th century. Both wrote extensively on music, covering many of the same topics (Prosdocimo wrote on arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy as well). Their music treatises are well known among students of medieval music and deemed essential for its understanding; but their experiences of music, their views of it, and their attitudes toward it were very different. The talk traces their differences—even conflicts—of opinion, and will include images of medieval manuscripts and audio clips of pieces each writer would have known.
For more information about this lecture, please refer to the Jacobs School of Music blog.