Tim Shephard: Sounding the Bookshelf 1501: Music in a Year of Italian Printed Books
The Department of Music Research presents:
Tim Shephard, Professor in Musicology, University of Sheffield, England
"Sounding the Bookshelf 1501: Music in a Year of Italian Printed Books"
Description
The project “Sounding the Bookshelf 1501,” funded by the Leverhulme Trust and hosted at the University of Sheffield, UK, asks a simple question: standing in a Venetian bookshop towards the end of the year 1501, what information about music might you encounter as you browse the new printed titles available for purchase? Very few of the books printed in Italy in 1501 were “about” music, but almost all of them mention music in passing, and sometimes at length, whilst discussing something else. These kinds of casual, fragmentary comments on music were surely read by many more people than specialist music theory, the audience for which was probably very small. To recover these comments and characterise the contradictory and incoherent field of everyday musical knowledge they comprise, our project team are reading every book printed in Italy in 1501 cover-to-cover, excerpting every passage mentioning music, sound or hearing. With our work now roughly 60% complete, the big picture is beginning to emerge, and in this presentation I will attempt (for the first time!) to summarise what we’ve found.
