Music Research Seminar: Helen Deeming (Royal Holloway University of London)
Event abstract
Writing a history of medieval music for a broad readership in the 2020s is an endeavour beset with challenges and replete with opportunities. In this talk, I will discuss the process of conceiving, planning, and writing a new medieval music text-book for students and general readers, exploring the ways in which my work drew on recent disciplinary methods and approaches while also building upon much older foundational scholarship. Writing medieval music history in a way that is both true to its subject and fit for contemporary purpose was a balance that was at times difficult to strike, and this talk hopes to inspire broader discussions about music history and the responsibilities of the historian across other periods and areas of the discipline.
About Helen Deeming
Helen Deeming is a specialist in medieval music, with particular expertise in medieval song (Latin, French, and English), medieval polyphony, manuscripts and source studies, and medieval notation. She has published on music in England and France from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, and on music's institutional, archival, and social contexts. Current projects include a study of the graphic representation of musical sound in pictorial contexts, entitled Picturing Sound: Musical Notation in Medieval Images.
Her scholarly edition, Songs in British Sources, c.1150-1300, was published as volume 95 of the prestigious series Musica Britannica in 2013, making a large repertory of early songs available in print for the first time. With Elizabeth Eva Leach, she co-edited Manuscripts and Medieval Song: Inscription, Performance, Context (Cambridge, 2015), which presented vital new perspectives on the material forms in which song was transmitted between the ninth and the early fourteenth centuries. Forthcoming work includes contributions to The Cambridge History of Medieval Music and The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music, and her work has appeared in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Music & Letters, Early Music, Plainsong & Medieval Music, Journal of the Alamire Foundation, and the international journal of manuscript studies, Scriptorium, along with chapters in edited books.
Helen Deeming studied music and medieval history at the University of Cambridge before writing her Ph.D. on English music of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In 2004-05 she held the Senior Rouse Ball Research Studentship at Trinity College, Cambridge; after Visiting Lectureships at Cambridge and King's College London, she was Lecturer in Music at the University of Southampton before joining Royal Holloway in 2009.
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