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Elina G. Hamilton, The Gothic revolution, Early Music, Volume 40, Issue 1, February 2012, Pages 159–160, https://doi.org/10.1093/em/cas015
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Crisp, autumnal weather greeted delegates to the campus of Princeton University for a discussion of Ars Antiqua music, an exciting, decisive and perplexing period in Western European music history. Titled ‘The Gothic revolution: music in Western Europe, 1100–1300’, the aim of the conference was to bring together a broad sampling of the most recent scholarship conducted in this area of musicology and to form a podium from which future scholarly direction and collaborative projects and networks might be determined. To participate in this discussion, scholars of early music gathered from Europe (Bangor, Glasgow, Hamburg, Pavia, Oxford, Poitiers, Southampton and Vienna) and all across North America (California, Illinois, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Haven, New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Ontario, Pennsylvania and Texas).
Having been greeted hospitably by Wendy Heller and Rob Wegman, our hosts at Princeton, the conference began: there were eight sessions of engaging and informative papers over the course of three days. The first day saw presentations by nine scholars debating matters of organum, song and poetry. Barbara Haggh’s discussion of organum observed regional particularities in its use while Solomon Guhl-Miller delivered a paper on the performance practice of organum purum. Christian Thomas Leitmeir reminded us of how our understanding of and engagement with medieval music changed significantly within the 20th century. The compositional process of motets and clausulas and their Latin and French texts have been a point of contention among scholars of Notre Dame sources for some time, and in a session devoted to the discussion of song, Catherine Bradley, Gregorio Bevilacqua, Mary Channen Caldwell and Hana Vlhová-Wöner investigated these problems with fresh eyes and new methodologies. A session devoted to poetry included a sing-along with the audience during Warwick Edwards’s paper, and a presentation investigating connections of poetry with sermons by Ann-Zoé Rillon concluded the first day of invigorating discussion.
