ABSTRACT This research undertakes an interdisciplinary investigation that combines medieval musicology and virtual acoustics applied to heritage spaces. It is centred around acoustic reconstructions of the Great Chapel within the Palais des Papes in Avignon during various historical periods. This chapel served as a significant venue for choir singing of the Ars Nova musical repertoire in the 14th century, coinciding with the Palais des Papes’ role as the official residence of the papacy. The study presents a concise overview of the architectural history of the Palais des Papes and its chapels, followed by the methodology for virtually reconstructing the acoustics of the Great Chapel under diverse conditions. An experimental phase employed a choir ensemble specialising in the Ars Nova repertoire, immersing singers in the virtual acoustics of the Great Chapel using a real-time room auralisation system designed for headphone reproduction. Through this experiment, we examined the singers’ musical performance in response to the simulated acoustics. The efficacy of the proposed auralisation system was assessed based on participants’ feedback regarding its ability to accurately replicate the acoustic conditions of an authentic music performance space. Motivation In the last two decades, several series of medieval vocal music concerts were organised in the Great Chapel of the Palais des Papes, as the acoustics of that modern place are considered adequate for vocal music performance. The Great Chapel was renowned in the 14th century as one of the prominent venues for the practice of Ars Nova2. However, its acoustics have likely evolved since the time when the papal chapel cantors performed there. Even though its modern-day architecture is largely similar to its medieval counterpart due to a renovation in the early 20th century aimed at restoring the Palais des Papes to its medieval condition, the Great Chapel has lost, along with its original function, its lavish decoration and period furniture. This historical evolution motivated our recreation of the historical acoustic conditions of a vocal performance in the Great Chapel. Thanks to progress offered by room acoustics modelling and auralisation techniques3, it was possible to study the musical interpretations of a vocal ensemble specialising in medieval music within the virtually reconstructed acoustics of the Great Chapel of the Palais des Papes. This archaeoacoustic research, bringing together musicologists and acousticians in the context of the IMAPI4 (Musical Interpretation in Immersive Heritage Acoustics) and PHE5 2 Ars Nova is a musical style that developed in France in the 14 th century as the successor of the Ars Antiqua exemplified by the School of Notre -Dame. It allowed for a higher degree of musical expressiveness in the polyphony and for more elaborate rhythmic modes thanks to a new standardised system of musical notation, even though some studies have shown that interpreting Ars Antiqua and Ars Nova as two radically opposite styles is probably excessive (Tanay 1992). 3 Auralisation is the audio equivalent of visuali sation, rendering the room acoustic measurement or simulation data audible. For a more detailed description, see Kleiner et al. (1993). 4 https://imapi.hypotheses.org/ 5 http://phe.pasthasears.eu/ (the Past Has Ears) projects, was born out of the desire to investigate the interrelationships between historical production venues and heritage musical productions (Ferrando 2020; Ferrando 2022; Katz et al. 2020). The main objective centres around experimental research on the interpretation of heritage music in the virtually reconstructed acoustics of the Great Chapel of the Palais des Papes in different historical states (1362, 2022). For this purpose, professional singers specialising in medieval vocal repertoire participated in a laboratory experiment where they performed a corpus of 14th century music pieces, with the aim of studying historically informed musical practices and the resulting musical gestures (Ferrando and De Muynke 2022). The Palais des Papes in Avignon as one singer described, finding the medieval room “musically more satisfying.” Others appreciated the improved ability to hear each other, particularly in achieving a more balanced blend between the two highest voices, which enhanced the ensemble’s overall interpretation. These insights suggest that the reconstructed medieval acoustics could inspire new aesthetic approaches to medieval singing, challenging the traditional emphasis on highly reverberant environments. The potential for advancing musicological understanding was also recognised. The singers’ feedback demonstrates the value of the auralisation system in exploring historical acoustic contexts. They described it as an opportunity to connect with the acoustics of the 14th-century pontifical chapel, aiding in refining historically informed performance practices. As ongoing objective analyses of the recorded performances continue, they promise to reveal further insights into the relationship between acoustics, vocal production, and the interpretation of medieval repertoire. Overall, the singers’ experiences highlight the system’s ability to recreate the acoustic conditions encountered by musicians in the 14th-century pontifical chapel. This elicited reactions from the ensemble that constitute a key outcome of the study, particularly in exploring how such acoustic reconstructions can contribute to both historical understanding and modern interpretations of early music. Conclusion This paper presented an interdisciplinary study bridging medieval musicology and room acoustics, focusing on the virtual reconstruction of the acoustics of the Great Chapel of the Palais des Papes in Avignon in two historical states. These reconstructions were auralised for singers from a vocal ensemble specialising in medieval repertoire during a laboratory-based

URL: http:// journals.openedition.org/textusmusica/355 ; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/15lr7 This text was automatically generated on March 24, 2026. The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) may be subject to specific use terms. «I Did it My Way»: Emotion in the Performance of Medieval Melodies Manuel Pedro Ferreira Introduction 1 The Early Music performer is always confronted with the need to create a satisfactory experience for modern ears that can do justice to a historically remote artefact represented by musical notation. The performer’s challenge is to produce an historically adequate rendition, including convincing text delivery, that also captivates the contemporary public. The historian can concentrate on one particular aspect of distant reality, ignoring others, and work out an interpretation for it. So can the historical musicologist when dealing with an aspect of the music or its context. But a performance requires that you engage with all aspects at once and work «I Did it My Way»: Emotion in the Performance of Medieval Melodies Textus & Musica, 7 | 2023 1 out an integrated approach. The stage reinstates life, even when its ultimate model lies far in the past. That is its strength and attraction, but this also generates concern regarding the right balance between practical feasibility, historical accuracy, and public appreciation. 3 Early Music performers derive their artistic identity and authority from both technical skill and historical credentials. The latter can haunt us. Are we really trying as hard as we can to take into account, in our musical interpretation, all the available historical information? Some medieval authors tell us of emotionally charged musical experiences. «I Did it My Way»: Emotion in the Performance of Medieval Melodies Textus & Musica, 7 | 2023 4 The Emotive Performance Ideal in Sacred and Secular Music 12 Emotional, unbound performance style is not something that we usually associate with the Middle Ages, and even less with the Early Music ensembles that perform the music today. There are nonetheless hints that medieval audiences could have experienced highly emotional responses to musical performances that sought to create this effect. Engaging the emotional response of today’s listeners of medieval music is therefore compatible with the historical record. He required of his brotherhood that for the main celebrations of Jesus Christ, singing should be carried out before His altar «with organs and horns, and with lutes and other instruments, loud voices and with all pleasures» associated with music, including dance16. Religious contexts also employed festive musical practices to incite the joyfulness appropriate to certain Christian feasts. 14 Emotionally intense musical experiences are not restricted to the religious sphere; secular music provides additional examples, and this awareness should inspire contemporary performers to be as bold as possible in their reconstructions of medieval song. If modern performers are to be faithful to medieval sources, they need to recreate emotional involvement with their listeners, in terms compatible with both the historical record and the notated musical sources. This implies a new focus on tools to engage the audience. Evoking an emotional response in the listeners is just as important a component of Historically Informed Performance Practice as the reconstruction of the correct psalm tones. 29 An early music performer should approach the repertory with the fullest array of historical tools available to understand it and make the most from it, including emotional involvement from the audience, in a context of historical otherness which poses its own challenges and unavoidably calls for some kind of The presence of Galician-Portuguese contrafacta involving surviving notated troubadour sources is dealt with in Manuel Pedro Ferreira, «À maneira de proençal : melodias de além-Pirenéus na lírica galego-portuguesa», Zaragoza, Institución Fernando El Católico, in press. 25. The facing English translation is loosely based on Zenith, Cantigas, p. 315. «I Did it My Way»: Emotion in the Performance of Medieval Melodies Textus & Musica, 7 | 2023 13 ABSTRACTS The Early Music performer is always confronted with the need to create a satisfactory experience for modern ears that can do justice to a historically remote artefact represented by musical notation. The stage reinstates life, even when its ultimate model lies far in the past. This generates concern regarding the right balance between practical feasibility, historical accuracy, and public appreciation. This essay argues that emotional power and flawless voices provide an important bridge between the medieval and the contemporary reception of Early Music. It addresses some editorial and performative problems that arise when liturgical chant is removed from its context. Grounded in professional experience, it offers some tools for intensified communication, in order to foster the goal of emotional involvement in the performance of medieval music.

This issue of Textus & Musica, «Performance of Medieval Monophony: Text and Image as Evidence for Musical Practice», explores textual and visual sources related to the performance of medieval monophonic song, providing insight into historical contexts and practices. Monophonic song is fundamental to medieval musical culture, but many questions related to its performance still need to be explored further. Medieval music manuscripts document the evolution of monophonic music and its performance practices over time; however, they only capture a fraction of the story. Other sources, such as architectural remains, artwork, and textual accounts, provide complementary perspectives on how monophonic song was experienced and practiced.This issue brings together research from an international conference held at the Nova University of Lisbon in January 2023. Scholars from different disciplines examine medieval monophonic song performance, including liturgical practices, visual depictions, normative literature, and artistic representations across medieval Europe and Byzantium. The contributions explore various aspects of monophonic singing, from musical and textual interpretation to the embodied experience of performers, revealing a rich interplay between text, music, and performance practice.This introduction opens up these interdisciplinary approaches, focusing mainly on liturgical practices within medieval religious orders. Descriptive sources like chronicles offer glimpses into the daily practices of religious communities. These narratives underline the spiritual significance of sung performance and the expectations for singers in performing liturgical chants. Prescriptive sources, such as customaries and liturgical ordinals, outline the specific tasks of chant leaders and provide instructions for conducting liturgical music. These documents reveal meticulous attention to detail in maintaining musical quality and correcting deviations during performance through hand signals The terms «monophony» or «monodic» derive from the Greek monodia ( μόνος = ‘alone’, ᾠδή = ‘song’) for solo singing accompanied by instruments 1. Historians of medieval music use, not always very rigorously, different terms to describe a variety of related cultural practices: chant (plainchant), liturgical chant, Latin song, or sacred song, often contrasted with vernacular chant and monodic song (in the spoken European languages other than Latin). Monophony is distinguished from polyphony, that is, song with two or more vocal lines, which evolved rapidly in the high and late Middle Ages. Textus & Musica, 7 | 2023 1 notation technologies that both changed over time and varied by region 4. Each style of notation had its own strengths and weaknesses: it is commonly recognized, for example, that the sensitive expressiveness and vocal nuances 5 of early neumes were lost with the pitch precision of notation on staff systems 6, especially when it comes to square notation. These musical sources provide invaluable and primary evidence for the performance of medieval song, without which no reconstruction of medieval music would be possible. 3 Nevertheless, a multitude of other sources reveals aspects of medieval single-voice song that are not preserved in textual or melodic notation. This sung repetition of the organ’s melody changes the melodic structure of Sancti Spiritus assit simply through performance. Such insight about the musical realization of sequences and their characteristic melodic patterns cannot be deduced from the sequentiaries and their musical notation alone. 26 The cantor or chantress performed a wide range of functions within his or her monastic or canonical community. They were responsible for liturgical preparation and practice, provided musical direction, taught music to members of the community and usually sang a few solo chants during the liturgy. The music manuscripts containing melodic notation are only one source among many – textual, visual, and material – that can open the musical world of medieval monks and nuns to researchers. Gathering Scholars of Monophonic Song Across Medieval Europe 27 This issue draws together some of the research presented at an international conference organized by the editors, hosted by the Centre for the Study of the Sociology and Aesthetics of Music (CESEM) at the Nova University of Lisbon in January 2023, and funded by the European Commission as part of the Marie Skłodowska Curie project RESALVE 41. Setting aside written music and the rapidly developing notation technologies of this period, the conference sought to explore how different records and other modes of inquiry reveal information about monophonic vocal performance in the high and late Middle Ages. Topics addressed at the conference included a wide variety of source types, from manuscript illuminations depicting singers to the melodic implications of medieval punctuation. Susan Rankin, «Carolingian Music», Carolingian Culture: Emulation and Innovation, Rosalind McKitterick (ed.), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 274–316, and Ead., Writing Sounds in Carolingian Europe, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018. 5. Timothy McGee, The Sound of Medieval Song, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1998, pp. 123-124. 6. Susan Rankin, «On the Treatment of Pitch in Early Music Writing», Early Music History, 30, Her scholarly focus lies on medieval sacred chant within its historical, hagiographic, and liturgical contexts, as well as on performance practice and gender dynamics. Recent publications include a book on liturgical offices and the cult of Saint Ursula Kultgeschichte als Musikgeschichte: Offizienzyklen zu Ehren der heiligen Ursula und der elftausend Kölner Jungfrauen (Schöningh/Brill, 2022) and articles in journals like Kurtrierisches Jahrbuch, Textus&Musica and Kirchenhistorisches Jahrbuch. Additionally, she is the founder and artistic director of the ensemble KANTIKA, specializing in medieval music.

An attractive goal in the study of Gregorian chant melodies is reconstructing unobserved melodies as they may have been transmitted along their history, especially as early chant notation does not capture pitch exactly. We propose doing this computationally using Ancestral State Reconstruction over phylogenetic trees. Bayesian phylogenetic trees have shown promise as a tool to study the evolution of chant melodies, by inferring a plausible topology of chant transmission. However, the inferred trees cannot be used as Ancestral State Reconstruction inputs directly, because they are undirected, and their branch lengths conflate time and evolutionary rate. We therefore first apply Divergence Time Estimation to separate them and represent the tree in a directed form on the time dimension. Using Ancestral State Reconstruction, we then obtain reconstructions of melodies for each of the ancestral nodes, in addition to their distribution in time obtained from Divergence Time Estimation, and thus recover a phylogeny of chant melody with a music-historical interpretation. We applied this method to the Christmas Vespers dataset, and compare the results against musicological knowledge and melodies reconstructed at Solesmes using methods of contemporary philology, which shows potential for reconstructing cultural transmission through time. Using Ancestral State Reconstruction, we then obtain reconstructions of melodies for each of the ancestral nodes, in addition to their distribution in time obtained from Divergence Time Estimation, and thus recover a phylogeny of chant melody with a music-historical interpretation. We applied this method to the Christmas Vespers dataset, and compare the results against musicological knowledge and melodies reconstructed at Solesmes using methods of contemporary philology, which shows potential for reconstructing cultural transmission through time. status released display-pdf yes is-olf no is-manuscript no is-preprint no is-journal-matter no is-scanned no is-retracted no Received 2025 Sep 10; Despite this current methodological limitation, our approach using phylogenetic tree inference under Bayesian inference has shown promise by inferring a plausible Bayesian phylogeny of chant melody [ 16 ], but the method stops short of providing a music-historical interpretation of the resulting phylogeny as it is unrooted, limiting its value to chant scholarship. We propose an extended procedure for inferring from chant melodies a phylogeny with a more defined music-historical interpretation, and thus the value of its predictions can be evaluated more accurately. In 2023, Bayesian phylogeny inference using the sequence of pitches in a set of aligned melodies as data has been proposed [ 16 ], which sampled the posterior distributions of the unrooted topology as well as branch lengths, which were unfortunately not easy to interpret in a music-historical context. This limitation has directly inspired our present work. There are works from the history of chant scholarship that show evidence for the existence of certain melodic dialects [ 1 , 3 ], which should in fact be expected due to the oral nature of chant transmission [ 11 , 17 , 18 ], even though the extent of this orality is unclear [ 19 ]. The evolutionary perspective on cultural evolution has been applied in music [ 20 ] as well as in other areas, for instance in linguistics [ 21 ], and human tool development such as knots [ 22 ] and palaeolithic artifacts [ 23 ]. A phylogeny of Gabon folk music patrimonies has been proposed [ 24 ], which highlighted the role of vertical transmission, compared to the focus on lateral transmission in evolutionary linguistics [ 6 ]. Bioinformatics tools have been used to characterize diversity in Japanese vs. However, the gap between computational results and their music-historical interpretation remains wide [ 16 , 34 ]. This work aims to provide a method that significantly reduces this gap with predictions directly testable against concrete musicological knowledge. Furthermore, the second and third criteria – legitimate tradition and needs of contemporary liturgy, which included the skill sets and habits of early 20th century singers [ 62 , 63 ] – would gravitate towards a later aesthetic of chant that is closer to the world of tonality, and the Cistercian reform is a significant stepping stone in this respect [ 38 ]. 4 Discussion We introduce a method for building interpretable phylogenies of chant melody. Because there is no known “true” phylogeny of chant, we rely on comparing the resulting phylogeny to music-historical knowledge. The clashes between these priorities, as manifested in the resultant melodies, were subject to heated exchanges at the time [ 62 , 63 , 67 ]. and the process involved diverse influences such as anticlericalism or business interests of print unions [ 68 ]. This can be observed also in the melodies directly when we compare them with the inferred medieval melodies in Fig 2 . The melodies thus cannot be used to directly evaluate how well the root melody is reconstructed by ASR. Another open problem is early chant transmission in adiastematic sources. Here, phylogenies could utilize sequences of neumes and/or visual features of the notation, rather than the melodies themselves. The Music Enoding Initiative (MEI) standard supports adiastematic neumes, but manual encoding is costly and few have the expertise. However, as opposed to finding statistical patterns through machine learning, the phylogenetic pipeline has shown usefulness already with less than 100 transcribed sequences, making it a cost-effective option. Furthermore, by placing an adiastematic source into the phylogenetic tree, one can perhaps use the inferred ancestral melody to help resolve ambiguities of pitch when they arise. Further work on Solesmes melodies may also bring historical chant research in a closer relationship to current living practice, which is based on these editions.

This article draws attention to the need to take into account the Theory of Medieval Music, and especially, the concept of Music in force at that time, as well as the different categories of Music and Musicians, when valuing the Codices of Musicians and the Histories of Las Cantigas of Santa María de Alfonso X el Sabio. In fact, both the different use of the miniature and its compositional and formal characteristics reflect the use of a method of work based on strictly musical concepts, which highlights the musical background of all three arts that are integrated in... (See more) the work: poe