Lost & Found: Traces of Early Music

Welcome

Lost&Found is a three-year project that focuses on fragmentary musical sources from the medieval and early modern periods in Portuguese collections, prompting renewed comprehension of these cultural products and their meanings. The project develops across two lines of research: 1) medieval musical-liturgical fragments and 2) incomplete sources of polyphony, including the reconstruction of missing voice-parts. Launched in March 2021, it is funded by the Government of Portugal through the FCT–Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, and is based in CESEM–Centre for the Study of the Sociology and Aesthetics of Music at Universidade NOVA de Lisboa.

With the project reaching its final months, we will be ready to share the findings, ideas, and difficulties we have encountered in the process. To that end, we are organising an international colloquium to be held in Cascais – a charming coastal town about 30 Km west of Lisbon – on 19-22 July 2023. We would like to invite colleagues to join us in the discussion.

Keynote speakers will include Susan Rankin (University of Cambridge, UK), Debra Lacoste (Dalhousie University, Canada), and Owen Rees (University of Oxford, UK). There will also be a concert by the Porto-based ensemble Arte Minima directed by Pedro Sousa Silva.

This colloquium is co-hosted by the CESEM–Centre for the Study of the Sociology and Aesthetics of Music at Universidade NOVA de Lisboa in the framework of the FCT-funded R&D project PTDC/ART-PER/0902/2020 and Fundação Dom Luis I, Cascais.

Organising committee: João Pedro d'Alvarenga and Alberto Medina de Seiça, with the assistance of Zuelma Chaves, Nuno de Mendonça Raimundo, the managing team of CESEM, and Isabel d'Alvarenga (Fundação Dom Luis I).

Download the programme and abstracts booklet here.