Undergraduate Research & Scholarships

Lara Oge Humanities

Between Two Lines: Understanding Two-Part Music from the Renaissance

Scholars Journal

In most modern books, paratextual material identifies an author and date, perhaps a sense of genre and even audience. But books did not always disclose so much to their users. My project focuses on a sixteenth-century music manuscript that reveals hardly any information. The manuscript contains eighty-nine pieces, but only one names its composer. There is no date to situate it in history, nor any paratext to inform us of its function. The musical contents remain largely unidentified, blurring our ideas for how this book was used, yet one feature is apparent: the music is for two parts and, as such, is sui generis. By examining the contents, physical features, and historical context of this and other similarly unique manuscripts, I explore the two-part music repertoire that is often sidelined in favor of more complex polyphony.