The Leuven Chansonnier: A New Later Fifteenth-Century Song Source

• Music Colloquium series 2017-2018

Speaker: David Burn (University of Leuven)

Venue: The Dome, Bramall Music Building (3rd Floor)

All Students and Staff are welcome to attend. Attendance is required for all MA Music Students.

Abstract

In December 2015 a musical source that had been purchased at auction by a private Belgian art-dealer was brought to the Alamire Foundation in Leuven for examination. The source, it turns out, is a previously unknown later fifteenth-century chansonnier, complete and in its original cloth binding. The discovery of such a new source counts as sensational: only a very small number of similar such sources survive, and the last time that anything equivalent appeared was in 1939. In my presentation, I will present this new songbook, discussing the methods involved in coming to terms with a new musical source, and the consequent remapping of known terrain that that entails.