Sacred Music and its Contexts in 16th-Century Europe (06)

Award

PhD Research Bursary

Supervisors/Schools:

Professor Thomas Schmidt-Beste (School of Music)
Dr Christian Leitmeir (School of Music)
Dr Sally Harper (School of Music)

Description of Project:

Focussing on a major composer (e.g. Orlando di Lasso, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Nicolas Gombert, Giaches de Wert or Philippus de Monte) and/or a particular musical genre (masses, motets, liturgical polyphony), the project will seek new ways of analyzing sacred music within the framework of social, cultural, aesthetic and liturgical contexts within which it was composed.

The bursary will be awarded to a researcher with previous knowledge in Renaissance music, who can demonstrate an ability to open new perspectives on sacred music of the generation of composers born in the first third of the 16th century. As the scholarship is intended to support research which promises to break new grounds on a factual and/or methodological level, we do not propose a narrow thematic or personal focus on the project, but instead will select the candidate according to the innovative potential of their proposal.

The project will be placed within the context of CREaM (Centre for Research in Early Music) at Bangor. Founded in 2007 by Professor Thomas Schmidt-Beste, this research cluster – focussing on sacred repertoires of pre-1700 music – has produced synergies between research activities undertaken by individual staff members (both within the School of Music and in the context of IMEMS) and has developed into the base for a growing postgraduate community.

Research activities of CREaM members are regularly showcased in high-profile publications as well as at specialised conferences in Britain and abroad. Since its foundation, CREaM has held two major international early music conferences, in 2007 and 2008.

Supervisory Team:

Professor Thomas Schmidt-Beste
has published widely on questions of text declamation and text underlay (book publication 2003), music and humanism, music theory and sources. He is the director of CREaM and also one of the directors of the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music (DIAMM), the world-leading digital resource for early music studies. Recently, his focus has been on the digital codicology of music and also on the musical style of sacred music in the first half of the 15th century.

Dr Christian Leitmeir
has become an authority on the Flemish composer Jacobus de Kerle (1531/2-1591) through his large-scale monograph and a forthcoming complete edition. His research on Renaissance music focus strongly on the later 16th century with particular emphasis on confessionalisation, church music reforms, liturgy, genre and musical exchange between institutions in Western and Eastern Europe.

Dr Sally Harper
is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Music who has researched and published widely on music in medieval and early modern Wales and on medieval liturgy. Publications include a monograph on medieval English Benedictine liturgy (1994), chapters on the Bangor Pontifical and Penpont Antiphoner in Music in Welsh Culture before 1650 (2007), and a detailed initial study of the Bangor Pontifical (Welsh Music History, 1997). She is co-director of the Bangor Pontifical Project, and is part of the core research team for the AHRC/ESRC Religion and Society project, ‘The experience of worship in late medieval cathedral and parish church’. She has also contributed to the web-based AHRC dafyddapgwilym.net project, and led a related AHRC research project on the performance of medieval vernacular verse in Wales, Ireland and Scotland (http://projects.beyondtext.ac.uk/vernacularpoetry/index.php).

For full details of the terms and conditions of this award see

Queries prior to a formal application concerning this research project should be addressed to:
Professor Thomas Schmidt-Beste (mus205@bangor.ac.uk)
Dr Christian Leitmeir (c.leitmeir@bangor.ac.uk)
Dr Sally Harper (s.e.harper@bangor.ac.uk)

Application:

The application deadline is noon on Friday 30 April 2010. For more information on how to apply, please visit here.

Applicants will be contacted during the month of June 2010 with information relating to their submissions.