From Sign to Sound: Towards an Aesthetic Presence of Dead Music

Like other art forms that come alive only in performance, music is in a precarious ontological state.

This seminar invites renewed reflection on the gulf between music’s “real presence” as sound and its re-representation as sign. I will approach this issue from the vantage point of seminal efforts, made some 100 years ago, to revive music from the distant past that lay beyond the living “memory” of a continuous performance tradition. The seminar will be driven by a critical engagement with early recordings and writings from the 1920 and 1930s that addressed the challenge in fundamentally ways: from a constitution and literal execution of the notated text (“sola scriptura”) to the more radical re-creations that afforded modern audiences a visceral experience of the essence of a musical work that cannot be captured in notation alone (“real presence”).

Christian Thomas Leitmeir is an Associate Professor of Music at the University of Oxford and a Tutorial Fellow at Magdalen College. An expert on medieval and Renaissance music, he has developed a strong interest in musical notation, the religious contexts and frameworks for music-making and the history of musicology during the first half of the 20th century. He is a Lay Dominican.