Miriam Wendling
Alamire Foundation, Leuven

Abstract

The idea of a one-way street between from plainchant to polyphony has deep roots. We talk about adding a second voice to plainchant as an early form of polyphony and later, we examine how far a composer has strayed from known versions of a chant in their cantus firmus. A cantus firmus becomes a sort of non-player character: we, and composers before us, react to it. In this talk, I want to start turning this idea around and to explore using a cantus firmus as a plainchant record. As a case study, I chose a distinct Spanish version of the communion chant Lux aeterna, from the Mass for the Dead, which survived into the second half of the sixteenth century. It is melodically different from its more common Roman counterpart and has a textually different versicle. At least a dozen sources of this chant survive in manuscript and print, and three polyphonic settings are known. The polyphonic sources are associated with a region from which we do not have any plainchant sources, which offers us the opportunity to treat the cantus firmus settings as part of the chant record and to test the plausibility of an analysis of all sources.

Biography

Miriam Wendling received her PhD from the University of Cambridge and held postdoctoral positions in Hamburg and Leuven. She was a 2022-2023 Fellow at the Newberry Library in Chicago and now works at the Alamire Foundation in Leuven. Her research covers medieval and early modern plainchant, liturgical history, and translation practices.