Analysis
A Thesaurus of sixteenth-century Musical Types
We began with a conversation about style and structure in the sixteenth-century chanson—through the music itself, through the theoretical writings of sixteenth century musicians, and through the observations of modern scholars. From here we developed a Thesaurus of musical conventions, then undertook a systematic inventory of these figures as they appear in the first eleven books of Du Chemin’s series, as graduate student assistants from across North America put the method to work. The results of their insights (over 11,000 analytic observations in all) allow users to search, display, and discuss the corpus. We can regard the repertory from a distance (noticing the relative ubiquity or scarcity of a given contrapuntal scheme) and up close, with the ability to jump to the precise location of a given pattern.
View the Thesaurus below, and explore thousands of example via the Advanced Search engine on the Lost Voices website.
More information about how to use the search tools is here.
Concerning our analytic methods, see Freedman, Richard, Jamie Apgar, and Micah Walter, “In Search of Lost Voices” Journal of the Alamire Foundation 9/2 (2017), 319-53. https://www.brepolsonline.net/doi/abs/10.1484/J.JAF.5.115547
Read more the a our Du Chemin Dossier, which explains our methods of analysis and reconstruction (also see the embedded version below).
