Biography

A music director and musicologist, Pedro Memelsdorff has long been a member of Jordi Savall’s Hesperion XXI and of a duo with Andreas Staier. In 1987 he founded the ensemble Mala Punica, specialized in late medieval polyphony, and in 2021 Arlequin Philosophe, specialized in French-Caribbean music. A former fellow at Villa I Tatti, Bloch lecturer at Berkeley, and Blodgett Distinguished Artist at Harvard, he is an Affiliate Researcher at the University of Tours, co-director of MA programs at the Esmuc-Barcelona, and directs the Early Music Seminars at the Fondazione Cini in Venice. He has also served as the Director of the Schola Cantorum in Basel. His research fields are late-medieval polyphony and 18^th-century music in the French Caribbean.

Project Summary

The Sound of Sense is a book project that explores various aspects of the relationship between poetry and music in late 14th- and early 15th-century Italy. Drawing on methodological issues discussed by metricologists and music theorists of the time (including Gidino da Sommacampagna, Johannes Ciconia, and Pseudo Antonio da Leno), as well as on the corpus of specialized historiography, the study focuses on a series of case studies on Francesco Landini, Antonello da Caserta, Johannes Ciconia, and Matteo da Perugia. These are explored above all with regard to their intertextual, interdiscursive, or intermedial relationships both with possible musical or poetic models and with their graphic presentation in the manuscript transmission. Finally, the discussion extends to the possible semiotic implications of apparently anomalous forms—including pieces that thematize their own (pseudo) incompleteness.