‘Giving New Voice to a Forgotten Past: Polyphony in Twelfth-Century Paris’
OnlineChloë Allison tells the story of late 12th-century singers at Notre Dame de Paris as part of the Royal School of Church Music Lunch-time Lecture Series. She explores how unnamed but extremely skilled singers worked together orally to develop completely new and hugely ambitious ways of creating music. She asks how we can access this fluid, oral music-making through its 'fossilisation' in surviving manuscripts and introduces her audience to the kinds of 'detective' historical methods needed to explore this music, which captivated her as an undergraduate and inspired her doctoral research.
