Musical reuse in the Notre Dame repertory: historiography and new computational directions

Stutter, Joshua J. (2025) Musical reuse in the Notre Dame repertory: historiography and new computational directions. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow.

Abstract

Of the many questions that we may wish to ask of the repertory of twelfth- and thirteenth-century music commonly known as Notre Dame polyphony, issues surrounding musical reuse and borrowing suffuse nearly every aspect. Questions of chronologies, locations, composers, purposes, processes, orality, performance, transmission, as well as all manner of other unknowns in the repertory, can be well argued and evidenced by the presence (or not) of musical reuse and borrowing. The freedom with which fragments, and sometimes even entire settings of music, circulated throughout thirteenth-century musical culture appears to defy our typical notions of chronology, composition, and even deterministic process.

Musicological scholarship from the 19th century to the present day places the clausula at the centre of this whirlwind of borrowings and musical–textual allusions, the enigmatic form by which the contemporary music theorist Anonymous IV contended that the modernisation of the repertory had taken place. Modern study has identified many so-called substitute clausulae in the fragments of polyphonic settings transmitted in certain fascicles of the central manuscript sources, and it is largely by these substitute clausulae that the later genre of the motet was created. However, relating substitute clausulae back to their source organa and forward to motet has proven difficult, due to the music of the Notre Dame repertory refusing to yield in all cases to the simple and causal chronology that this implies.

More recent work in particular is considering how musical reuse in the Notre Dame repertory may be conceived beyond the static and one-to-one substitutions of clausulae. These are often thought of as different phenomena: processes such as indirect concordances and melodic formulae are considered entirely separate from clausula substitution. At the same time, musical reuse has been treated with a particularly restrictive historical focus, and the clausula has been given centre stage as the main vehicle for musical reuse, catalogued and analysed as tightly interwoven with motet, and minimising other forms of musical reuse in the process. However, when we try to uncover what authors actually mean when they are discussing aspects of musical reuse such as the clausula, we find their definitions inexact and conflicting.

This dissertation therefore tackles the issue of musical reuse in the Notre Dame repertory afresh, placing the notation of the manuscript sources at the centre of the study and considering how the broader issue of reuse can be studied holistically in the twenty-first century, beyond limiting categorical descriptors and arbitrary criteria. By creating new methodological tools around the complex and ambiguous notation of thirteenth century polyphony, I investigate how new digital methods can be harnessed to extract patterns of musical reuse further than via simple verbatim substitution. The operation and interpretation of thirteenth century notation poses new and unique challenges for representation in the computer which have not yet been satisfactorily solved. I therefore develop novel encoding, optical music recognition, and analysis methodologies to approach these problems from new angles, centred around a specially created online database for the browsing, editing, and analysis of thirteenth-century polyphony.

Using the novel tools that I present as part of this study, I extract new and previously undetected patterns of musical reuse within the repertory that fall outside of our typical perceptions of independent reuse phenomena, pointing the way towards a wider and more nuanced concept of musical reuse as a dispersed network of common musical culture in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This is a concept that does not necessarily rely on causality or linear process, and hence may resolve the underlying issues (chronology, composition, and deterministic process) that musical reuse represents.

• Item Type: Thesis (PhD)
• Qualification Level: Doctoral
• Subjects: M Music and Books on Music > M Music
• Colleges/Schools: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Culture and Creative Arts > Music
• Supervisor's Name: McGuinness, Professor David, Duguid, Dr. Tim and Tucker, Dr. Joanna
• Date of Award: 2025
• Depositing User: Theses Team
• Unique ID: glathesis:2025-85172
• Copyright: Copyright of this thesis is held by the author.
• Date Deposited: 09 Jun 2025 15:18
• Last Modified: 09 Jun 2025 15:21
• Thesis DOI: 10.5525/gla.thesis.85172
• URI: https://theses.gla.ac.uk/id/eprint/85172