Description
In this paper, I shall have a preliminary look at the use of medieval chant in late eighteenth-century music, focusing on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. To my knowledge, such a topic has not been much explored in general by musicologists, although individual examples have been studied, notably concerning Mozart who in some instances appropriated plainchant melodies and recitation modules in musical compositions, mainly – but not only – in liturgical compositions. I shall deal with concrete examples in order to discuss to what extent such compositional reworking of medieval musical artefacts can be understood to derive musical meaning from the historical liturgical background of the quoted or “paraphrased” artefacts. Since a notion of “medieval chant” (as opposed to “chant”) seems to not yet have formed part of the musical conceptualisations of the incipient musicological scholarship, nor did it belong to the understanding of a general audience, appropriations of elements from what nowadays is termed “medieval chant” were not necessarily historically conceived. However, I shall argue that the way these elements were used often gave them a position of being “other” in relation to the musical materials otherwise employed providing them with an archaic and sometimes otherworldly character closely related to their historical context.| Period | 15 May 2010 |
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| Event title | International Congress on medieval Studies |
| Event type | Conference |
| Organiser | Western Michigan University |
| Location | Kalamazoo, MI, United StatesShow on map |