In 1991, the alternative rock band Dead Can Dance released an album that caught the attention of music reviewers by constructing an aural allegiance to the Middle Ages.
REVIEW: The Ballad of Robin Hood
November 30, 2015 By
Over the holiday season, Southwark Playhouse is presenting their reinterpretation of The Ballad of Robin Hood.
Free Online Course on Medieval Music Begins today
November 1, 2015 By
The University of Basel and Future Learn have teamed up to offer a seven week free online course that will teach the history of musical notation in the Middle Ages, and show you how to decode medieval music manuscripts.
Music for a Captured King: Richard the Lionheart and Blondel
October 8, 2015 By
Love him or hate him, one thing you can say about England’s Richard the Lionheart is that there are some great stories about him.
Anne Boleyn’s Songbook
October 7, 2015 By
Now for the first time in 500 years much of the music included in Anne Boleyn’s songbook has been recorded by the Alamire Consort, under the direction of Dr. David Skinner of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge University.
Horn Iconography as Found in the Grand Medieval Bestiary
August 5, 2015 By
Given at the 47th International Horn Symposium, on August 4, 2015
Hildegard’s Cosmos and Its Music: Making a Digital Model for the Modern Planetarium
August 1, 2015 By
The work reported on in this talk is a collaborative effort involving forces performative, scholarly, and technological. Because of the way Hildegard describes her understanding of the cosmos in the treatise Scivias, the model unfolds in two acts.
Through the Looking Glass Darkly: Medievalism, Satanism, and the Dark Illumination of the Self in the Aesthetics of Black Metal
July 14, 2015 By
The upside-down world of Satanic black metal is uncanny, both familiar in its use of inverted tropes and schemes and yet completely ‘other’ to those on the outside looking in, including Christians and consumers of mainstream popular culture.
Californication – Medieval cover version by Stary Olsa
May 6, 2015 By
The Belarussian band Stary Olsa, whose video of their medieval version of Metallica’s song One was a viral hit last year, have just released a new cover for the song Californication, originally by the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Discovering hidden music in the Bestiary of Love
March 13, 2015 By
Elizabeth Eva Leach speaks on ‘Richard de Fournival Across the Disciplines’
Medievalism and Exoticism in the Music of Dead Can Dance
February 28, 2015 By
In 1991, the alternative rock band Dead Can Dance released an album that caught the attention of music reviewers by constructing an aural allegiance to the Middle Ages.
The Troubadours, Part I: Sad Songs Say So Much
January 29, 2015 By
The height of their popularity was in the 12th-13th Centuries, and they wrote songs about people, politics, and religion, but most of all, love. Let’s take five minutes to talk about troubadours.
Earliest known piece of polyphonic music discovered
December 17, 2014 By
New research has uncovered the earliest known practical piece of polyphonic music, an example of the principles that laid the foundations of European musical tradition.
The Medieval version of Metallica
November 15, 2014 By
The medieval folk band Stary Olsa has made an impressive cover of the Metallica song ‘One’.
A Medieval Scholasticus and Renaissance Choirmaster: A Portrait of John Hothby at Lucca
September 24, 2014 By
John Hothby’s career as cathedral choirmaster at Lucca is one of the longest, best documented, and most exceptional of any Northern musician active in fifteenth-century Italy.
Natasha Mira finds her voice with Medieval Pop
August 17, 2014 By
‘I can finally say I feel at home with Medieval Pop as a sound and a brand that is 100% honest with myself.’
Ecstatic Dance: Medieval Dansomania and the Love Parade in Berlin, 1996
August 13, 2014 By
While dancing they are oblivious to their surroundings, they shriek, scream, and rave – note the use of ‘rave’ in its older meaning of manic behaviour – and they have visions which ‘according as the religious notions of the age were strangely and variously reflected in their imaginations.
Sumer is Icumen In!
May 28, 2014 By
One of the most famous pieces of music that has survived is a Middle English song about summer
Music as Text and Music as Image
May 4, 2014 By
Danielle Trynoski reports on ‘Music as Text and Music as Image’ by Susan Boynton at the Medieval Academy of America and Medieval Association of the Pacific Conference
‘A great heathen fist from the North’: Vikings, Norse Mythology, and Medievalism in Nordic Extreme Metal Music
May 1, 2014 By
Viking metal is a dynamic and popular subgenre of metal music of burgeoning popularity coming primarily from Nordic countries.
The Place of the Organ in the Medieval Parish Church
April 18, 2014 By
A list of eight hundred existing parish churches with a priori evidence of organs has been drawn up, forming the basis for exploration of medieval churches for physical evidence of liturgical musical arrangements, including organs.
What does a 500-year-old song found on a butt in hell sound like?
February 24, 2014 By
If one looks closely at the famous painting, The Garden of Earthly Delights, created by Hieronymous Bosch around the year 1500, you can find many strange images. This includes a scene in hell where someone has musical notes on their butt. Now, a student has deciphered what this music sounded like.
The Monochord in the Medieval and Modern Classrooms
February 10, 2014 By
The monochord was a standard feature of musical pedagogy in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. In the modern classroom, it allows our students to experience the pedagogical world of the medieval classroom, bringing a deeper reality to an otherwise abstract series of concepts.
The Music and ‘Scopic’ (Bardic/Skaldic) Elements of our Anglo-Saxon Ancestors
February 5, 2014 By
The life of the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings was probably filled with tunes and music wherever they worked and lived – from the more formal pieces of courtly music to the everyday, when men could be found just singing tunes to the cattle as they milked, or kept rhythm to songs as they sowed the seed in the ploughed fields
In Search of the Secrets of Medieval Organs
February 3, 2014 By
On Friday and Saturday, June 9 and 10, 2012, a concert and workshop focusing on the medieval organ were held at the Basel (Switzerland) Peterskirche. They dealt with concepts, designs, rep- ertoire and the medieval organ used in ensemble.
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