All Souls Seminars in Medieval and Renaissance Music
This long-running series of seminars, convened by Dr Margaret Bent, considers all aspects of medieval and renaissance music. It runs on Zoom in Michaelmas and Hilary Terms and generally attracts a large international audience. Usually, a presenter speaks for around 30 minutes and then engages with invited discussants for another half an hour. The floor is then open for questions and lively general discussion. Each term's seminars are announced in advance on this page and attendees are asked to register via the button below.
For each seminar, those who have registered will receive an email with the Zoom invitation and any further materials a couple of days before the seminar. If you have questions, please send an email to Joseph Mason, who is dealing with the practicalities of holding these seminars via Zoom. From January 2026, some seminar presentations will be recorded and uploaded to the seminar's YouTube channel.
Margaret Bent (Convener, All Souls College)
Joseph W. Mason (University of Cambridge)
Michaelmas Term 2026
22 October 2026, 5pm–7pm BST
Presenter: David Catalunya (Universidad Complutense de Madrid),
Title: Divine Harmony in Bronze Pipes: The Bethlehem Organ as a Practical Source for Pythagorean Theory
Discussants: Andrew Hicks (Cornell University) and Hans Fidom (Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam)
The organ inspired a surge of fascination across medieval Europe as both a technological marvel and as a symbol of divine harmony. Yet despite the instrument’s entry into Latin Christian liturgy in the 10th century, the earliest surviving organ pipes in Europe date from the 15th century. The Terra Sancta Museum in Jerusalem preserves the remains of an 11th-century church organ, brought to Palestine by the Crusaders and discovered during archaeological excavations at the Basilica of the Nativity in Bethlehem. This seminar situates the Bethlehem organ within the broader intellectual transformations of the 10th to 12th centuries, when the instrument emerged as a privileged site for interaction between Pythagorean cosmology and artisanal knowledge. A group of theoretical treatises from the late 10th and 11th centuries, known as the mensura fistularum tradition, articulated principles for constructing organ pipes according to Pythagorean harmonic proportions. These texts have often been dismissed as abstract idealisations detached from practice, belonging to the speculative realm of musical theory rather than to the workshop. The measurements of the Bethlehem pipes, however, correspond to the mathematical models described in these treatises with millimetric precision. This compels a reassessment of the relationship between theory and practice in the High Middle Ages, raising new questions about how such texts were read, applied, and transmitted.
12 November 2026, 5pm–7pm GMT
Presenter: Davitt Moroney (University of California, Berkeley).
Title: Precursive canons, 1450-1600: Notation, Renotation, and Function
Discussants: Denis Collins (University of Queensland), Patrick Macey (Eastman School of Music)
Given the many important aspects of Bonnie Blackburn’s research, it is easy to overlook her efforts to draw attention to a category of canon that she termed ‘precursor canon’. This curious contrapuntal phenomenon, which flourished from about 1450 to about 1600, comprises works where, counterintuitively, the notated canonic part does not start first. Instead, the unnotated derived voice, must start (subversively showing up the misleading limitations of later terminology such as dux and comes).
My presentation will explore the following points. (1) The characteristics of this phenomenon. (2) The probable causes of notational precursivity and how they draw our attention to the more significant phenomenon of structural precursivity. (3) Pieces where the notation was subsequently altered, obscuring the structural precursivity. (4) Pieces where vestiges of an earlier notation suggest that someone (composer? copyist? printer?) renotated the music, despite no source surviving with the original notation. (5) Canonic structures, notably by Willaert and his followers, that contain canons with two distinct solutions: one where the derived voice follows the notated one, in the expected manner, and the other where the derived voice must be resolved precursively. This double feature, canon duplex, exploits the juxtaposition of the two different solutions for a single canonic line, displayed across two contrasting settings of hymn verses, two partes of a motet, or two different realizations of a canonic chanson.
3 December 2026, 5pm–7pm GMT
Presenter: Karen Cook (Hartford College)
Title: The Paris-Avignon-Northern Italy information highway: new witnesses to the transmission of late medieval theoretical material
Discussants: Jason Stoessel (University of New England)
Gathering 16 of Seville, Biblioteca Capitular y Colombina, MS. 5-2-25 is riddled with connections to a host of late medieval treatises. It provides yet another instance of the contiguous copying of versions of the Ars contrapuncti and the Libellus cantus mensurabilis (both attributed to Jean des Murs) and the anonymous Tractatus figurarum. While certainly Northern Italian, the gathering is uniquely tied to Avignon via its copy of Johannes Pipardi’s De arte cantus, and thus to Paris given that treatise’s ties to the Berkeley manuscript (1375). In this talk, I focus on two anonymous works in the gathering. First, a two-sentence paragraph contains uncommon vocabulary connected to the Berkeley manuscript, the treatise De semibrevibus caudatis housed in Paris, and the Avignonese theorist Pierre Taillandier. Secondly, the anonymous “Ad evidentiam tam mensurabilis quam inmensurabilis musice” is interestingly and unusually concordant, on the one hand, with the Introductio musice secundum Johannes de Garlandia and Volentibus introduce, and on the other hand to the much later Breviloquium musicale by Bonaventura da Brescia, the anonymous Quaestiones et solutiones, the Crawford anonymous, and works by the later theorists Heinrich Saess and Domingo Marcos Durán. I thus demonstrate that both works reveal further evidence for the transmission of music theories from France, more specifically Paris through Avignon, to Northern Italy, where they connect to later trends in the Veneto.
Advance notice of speakers for spring 2027
28 January 2027: Alison Altstatt (University of Northern Iowa), ‘Inside the Scriptorium at Kloster Preetz’
18 February 2027: Karen Desmond (University of Maynooth), ‘Writing polyphony down: Insular polyphonic manuscripts and their production contexts, c.1150-1350’
11 March 2027: Klaus Pietschmann (University of Mainz), Beyond Dynastic Representation: Courtly Actors, Music, and Articulations of National Belonging in the Orbit of Maximilian II’