By the year 1000, musical notation already spread to nearly every corner of western Europe, from Anglo-Saxon Britain to Visigothic Spain, from southern Italy to northern Germany. With the creation and development of different notational families gradually came the awareness of the existence of such distinct traditions. The fact itself that regional ways of writing sound settled in often well-defined scripts may be interpreted as not just the mere adoption of established practices, but also as efforts to shape and preserve particular styles as elements constituting institutional or congregational identities. Current broad categorisations of music scripts fail to account for individual variations and the intricacy of different layers of development; existing models explain the early spread of musical notation only with geographical proximity or institutional connections. These ideas do not fully elucidate the complex dynamics that allowed individual singers and their communities to adopt and adapt music notations, remaining a major challenge in the field. The seminar will discuss the range of possible methodological approaches for tracing, in surviving manuscripts and fragments, the patterns of development and spread of music writing across Latin Europe, shifting the focus from scripts to scribes (of either gender), and crucially from centres to networks. The discussion will contribute to situate the five-year ERC project SCRIBEMUS 'Scribes of musical cultures. Decoding Hidden Technologies of Music Writing in Latin Europe (ca. 900–1100)' in its proposed methodological and scientific framework. Starting in June 2023, SCRIBEMUS will be the first-ever project of this kind to be devoted entirely to the study of tenth and eleventh centuries.

Biography:

Giovanni Varelli received his PhD from the University of Cambridge, and spent the past six years at the University of Oxford, first as Prize Fellow at Magdalen College and then as adjunct Research Fellow at the Faculty of Music. He has held visiting positions at the Universities of Würzburg, Regensburg, and Trento, and was recently Fellow of the Harvard Research Centre, 'Villa I Tatti' in Florence. As of last July, Giovanni is Marie Curie Research Fellow at the University of Trento, a position he will be holding until June 2023, when he will take up the post of Associate Professor at the University of Pavìa, in conjunction with the start of his 5-year project on early chant notation SCRIBEMUS, funded by a Starting Grant from the European Research Council. Giovanni Varelli is a specialist on musical notation and liturgical books of the early Middle Ages.