Graeme Boone on Late-Medieval Polyphony and Architecture

Friday, March 24, 2017 - 4:00pm to Saturday, March 25, 2017 - 3:55pm
622 Dodge Hall, Columbia University, New York NY 10027     map

BLURRED LINES: LATE MEDIEVAL COUNTERPOINT AND ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN
Graeme Boone, Ohio State University 

Art historians and musicologists alike have long intuited a shared identity between late-medieval polyphony and flamboyant architectural design, but the nature and significance of this striking resemblance has never been seriously discussed. Close study of the surviving evidence demonstrates that identical constructive principles are at work in both arenas, suggesting the existence of a distinctive intellectual, aesthetic, and cultural turn on the eve of the Renaissance, the full recognition of which stands to transform the disciplines of late-medieval musicology and art history, and to anchor our understanding of fifteenth-century European mentalities in a broader and more inclusive way.

Graeme Boone is Professor of Musicology at The Ohio State University. A scholar of Renaissance polyphony and American popular music, he is the author of Patterns in Play (OUP, 1999)  and numerous articles on paleography, musical analysis, and the relationship between poetry and song in the fifteenth century. He has also co-edited a book of essays on the analysis of rock music (Understanding Rock, 1997).

This event is hosted by the Columbia University Seminar in Medieval Studies.