Review: Measuring Polyphony: Digital Encodings of Late Medieval Music

Abstract

Measuring Polyphony: Digital Encodings of Late Medieval Music . Karen Desmond, Project Director. URL: https://measuringpolyphony.org/ Transcription is hard. Complicated or unfamiliar music makes it harder. In his book on music editing, James Grier reminds us that the edited or transcribed musical text is “not so much a tool, leading to higher ends, as an active, critical participant in those ends, fostering further critical study and the ultimate goal, one hopes, of all types of musical endeavour, the animation of the music in performance.”1 These are high stakes, especially when the pieces at hand are motets from the end of the medieval era, written in mensural notation. The website Measuring Polyphony uses the most recent technology in digital transcription to “animate” upward of sixty of these motets as found in the pages of several well-known thirteenth- and fourteenth-century manuscripts. This project is more than simply a digital update to the more traditional format of the printed edition; each piece is linked to a high-resolution image of its appearance in the original manuscript, and an audio playback (in MIDI) is available for listening while watching the notes in the various voice parts turn red as they sound. These visual and auditory features lift these motets out of their traditional identity as academic notation exercises and imbue them with life, appealing to the “musician” within the “musicologist.” As a medievalist, my view is that we badly need this kind of revitalization, especially in the current academic climate, in which our field flirts increasingly with extinction. …