Early Music in Central Europe: Collaborated Research, Migrating Sources, Transregional Connections

The project is co-financed by the Governments of Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia through Visegrad Grants from International Visegrad Fund. The mission of the fund is to advance ideas for sustainable regional cooperation in Central Europe.

Topic and Objectives

Historical narratives on medieval music culture usually depict Central Europe as a marginal region with delayed reception of the newest repertories and with retarded development. This viewpoint is based on insufficient presentation of music sources, their description and interpretation, as well as a misunderstanding of the specific cultural profile of the region. The view also does not correlate with narratives around music ‘centres’, defined primarily based on the knowledge of sources from the European West and South in the post-Second World War period when the study of church culture and music was marginalized or even forbidden by Communist regimes. New or renewed research on medieval liturgical music in all V4 countries in the last three decades is confronted by new methodologies and approaches, to which each country has responded in a different way, developing different strengths - repertory inventories and fragment studies in Hungary, palaeography in Slovakia, questions of transmission and hymnology in Czechia, and monastic studies in Poland. This project follows two goals:

to build a larger research community with an active knowledge and methodology exchange,
to develop common projects and publications that will secure firmer standing in future narratives on history and culture in Central Europe.

The project connects four top teams, each of them excelling in a different research area (liturgy, palaeography, monastic studies, hymnology). Four workshops, one held in each of the V4 countries, provide opportunities for knowledge and methodology exchange. An online lecture series enables us to present our most important results to the broad international community.

Team

TEAM PRAGUE

Masaryk Institiute and Archives, Czech Academy of Sciences
www.mua.cas.cz/en
Hana Vlhová-Wörner
Rhianydd Hallas

TEAM BRATISLAVA

Institute of Musicology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences
http://uhv.sav.sk/en/
Eva Veselovská
Veronika Garajová

TEAM BUDAPEST

Institute for Musicology, Research Centre for the Humanities
https://zti.hu/index.php/en/early-music
Zsuzsa Czagány
Gabriella Gilányi

TEAM WARSAW

Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences
http://www.ispan.pl/en
Irina Chachulska
Dominika Grabiec
Paweł Figurski