Dr Joseph Mason wins prize at AMS annual meeting
Congratulations to alumnus Dr Joseph Mason (Lincoln College, 2010) who has been awarded the Roland Jackson Award for outstanding work in music analysis at the American Musicological Society. Dr Mason is currently a lecturer at New College, having completed his bachelor's degree and DPhil at Lincoln College.
The Roland Jackson Award was first presented in 2016 and recognizes an article in the English language of exceptional merit in the field of music analysis by a scholar who is a member of the AMS or a citizen or permanent resident of Canada or the United States.
The award was given for Dr Mason's journal article 'Trouver et partir: The meaning of structure in trouvère song', Early Music History 40 (2022): 207-51. The abstract is below and you can read the full article in the Early Music History journal.
Abstract
In their songs, trouvères referred to their own acts of composition in various ways, not least as 'finding' (trouver) or 'dividing' (partir). Both terms had a wide and varied usage in medieval French culture and carried meanings that shape the way that the melodic structure of trouvère songs might be analysed. Invention, and its sister art of memory, played a key role in rhetorical practices. The process of 'finding' a melody and adorning it with memorable musical figures is performed in the structure of some songs. Division was used for intellectual work, as found in the classificatory models of medieval encyclopedic works, but it also signified socio-political animosity and strife. Through close readings of text-music relationships in four jeux-partis, the cultural significance of the musical acts of invention and division in thirteenth-century Arras is assessed in order to explore why trouvères performed acts of invention and division through their songs.
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