Professor Emma Hornby
M.A., Ph.D.(Oxon.)
Expertise
Professor Emma Hornby works on medieval liturgy and chant. Since 2009, she has focused primarily on Old Hispanic chant, liturgy, theology and manuscripts, co-publishing with colleagues in the USA, Spain, the Netherlands and UK
Current positions
Professor of Music
Department of Music
Contact
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Biography
Emma Hornby arrived at the University of Bristol in 2007, after temporary positions at Worcester College, Oxford; Christ Church, Oxford; Durham University; and Goldsmiths, University of London.
Her DPhil work on eighth-mode tracts grew into an interest in the interaction between oral and written musical cultures in the middle ages, on musical grammar and its interaction with textual grammar and rhetoric, and on the transmission of medieval melody. In 2009, she started working collaboratively with Professor Rebecca Maloy on Old Hispanic chant and liturgy, and this partnership has yielded multiple publications, breaking new ground in scholarship on early medieval Iberian music. Hornby and Maloy have worked over many years with a software engineer, Paul Rouse, to develop computer-assisted analysis for unpitched chant notation, and as a result have been able to pinpoint many aspects of the musical grammar of Old Hispanic chant. They have worked with postdoctoral researchers on externally-funded projects, and with international colleagues, building a flexible collaborative team to address interdisciplinary questions about early medieval liturgy, theology, melody, culture and manuscript culture.
Research interests
Emma Hornby's research is focused on medieval western liturgical chant. She is currently working on Old Hispanic chant in collaboration with Professor Rebecca Maloy (University of Colorado at Boulder). Their first joint monograph is Music and Meaning in Old Hispanic Lenten chants: Psalmi, Threni and the Easter Vigil Canticles (Boydell & Brewer, 2013). They are now working on Iberian Saints, in an AHRC-funded project with colleagues from Spain, the UK and the Netherlands. Hornby leads a Leverhulme-funded Iberian processions project, and a Leverhulme/BA funded project on comparative computer-assisted analysis of Georgian and Old Hispanic chant. Emma also has research interests in the transmission of western liturgical chant (including aspects of orality), analysis of formulaic chant, and the relationship between words and music in the Middle Ages.
Emma is co-editor, with J.R.Watson, of the Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology (online publication, 2013). This major resource is the first encyclopedic dictionary in this subject area since John Julian's Dictionary of Hymnology (1892); totalling approximately 2,000,000 words, it contains over 3000 entries by 300 contributors.
Her first book, Gregorian and Old Roman Eighth-Mode Tracts, was published by Ashgate in 2002 and her second book, Medieval Liturgical Chant and Patristic Exegesis: words and music in the second-mode tracts was published by Boydell and Brewer in 2009. She is co-editor, with David Maw, of Essays on the History of English Music in Honour of John Caldwell: Sources, Style, Performance, Historiography (Boydell and Brewer, 2010). Emma has published articles in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Traditio, Scriptorium, Plainsong and Medieval Music and The Journal of Musicology; her Journal of Musicology article was included in Thomas Forrest Kelly’s collection of seminal articles in the field, Oral and Written Transmission in Chant (Ashgate, 2009). Emma is director of the Bristol University music department’s Schola Cantorum,which specialises in medieval music.
Emma won a prestigious Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2009, and has also been awarded grants by the AHRC/ESRC Religion and Society Programme (2009-11), the European Research Council (2013-18), the AHRC (2016-17 and 2019-23), the Leverhulme Trust (2016-21) and the Leverhulme/British Academy (2020-22). These collaborative research projects have a separate web page: bristol.ac.uk/oho-project
Projects and supervisions
Research projects
Musical rhetoric in early medieval Old Hispanic and Georgian liturgical chant: new directions in computer-aided comparative analysis
Principal Investigator
Managing organisational unit
Department of MusicDates
31/08/2020 to 31/08/2023
Standard grant: Cultural identity, evolution and transition in the cults of medieval Iberian saints
Principal Investigator
Managing organisational unit
Department of MusicDates
02/09/2019 to 30/04/2023
Understanding Old Hispanic chant manuscripts and melodies
Principal Investigator
Managing organisational unit
Department of MusicDates
01/07/2016 to 30/07/2017
Integrating Turkish: Beyond East and West: Developing and Documenting an Evolving Transcultural Musical Practice
Principal Investigator
Role
Researcher
Description
Deniz Küstü (The Sea-Crossed Fisherman), Opera #1 involving integration of Turkish and Western Instruments and Voices, June 11, 2016, IstanbulManaging organisational unit
Department of MusicDates
01/09/2015 to 31/07/2022
Thesis supervisions
Insular Secular Carolling in the Late Middle Ages
Supervisors
Critical Editions of Edward Elgar's Recitations and Marches
Supervisors
Compositions responding to melodic gesture and textual pacing in the Old Hispanic rite
Supervisors
Music and Mission: A Case Study of the Anglican-Xhosa Missions of the Eastern Cape, 1854-1880
Supervisors
Old Hispanic notation and the early written transmission of chant
Supervisors
Old Hispanic musical and notational practices in Toledo
Supervisors
Text and Melody in the Blessing of a Bell
Supervisors
Sacred-secular, gospel-pop crossovers
Supervisors
Publications
Recent publications
31/05/2024Chant Editing and Analysis Program
Creating and Using Liturgies for the Commune sanctorum in Medieval Iberia
Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle
Notated chant in the opening folios of the León antiphoner
Les folios introductifs de l’Antiphonaire de León (Archivo de la Catedral de León, ms. 8). Études critiques et édition
Las procesiones y su canto en la liturgia hispánica
anuario historia de la iglesia
Scribal identity and scribal roles in early medieval Iberia
Early Music History
Teaching
Emma Hornby teaches undergraduate and masters units on medieval music, including music palaeography (with a concentration on unpitched notations), musical analysis, and consideration of music in its cultural contexts.
She supervises PhDs on topics ranging from early medieval manuscript studies to 19th- and 21st-century music and theology topics.
