This year’s Royal Musical Association Annual Conference was a special one: not only was it the 60th annual conference, but it also celebrated the 150th anniversary of the association. As is tradition, the Dent Medallist presents a keynote lecture and this year, attendees were privileged to experience Prof Catherine A. Bradley’s lecture titled ‘“Primitive” Polyphony: Perspectives from the Musicological Periphery.’ Following the keynote, RMA Student Committee member Sebastian Bank Jørgensen interviewed Catherine to discuss her experience as an early music scholar, the expansion one’s scholarly purview, and the instigation of an ‘apocalyptic shift in the field.’ Below is an edited transcript of the interview which was conducted on 12 September 2024.
Catherine A. Bradley is Associate Professor in Early Music and a Fellow of St John’s College. She holds a 2 million Euro Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council for her project BENEDICAMUS (Musical and Poetic Creativity for a Unique Moment in the Western Christian Liturgy c.1000–1500). She is co-editor of the Cambridge University Press journal Plainsong and Medieval Music and editor the of Royal Musical Association Monographs series. She has received the Royal Musical Association Dent Medal (2023), the Early Music Award of the American Musicological Society (for her first monograph, Polyphony in Medieval Paris: The Art of Composing with Plainchant, Cambridge University Press, 2018), and the Music & Letters Westrup Prize (2012).
Sebastian Bank Jørgensen (SBJ): First of all, were you nervous before your keynote lecture?
Catherine A. Bradley (CB): Yes, I really was – I’m very happy that it’s over now. It was obviously completely terrifying. But actually, there was a really nice warm feeling in the room as well. I think the RMA Conference is a really friendly conference. It is a friendly society – people just come up and chat to you and there’s no kind of formality, so it felt nice. Once I started giving the paper, it just felt kind of exciting and friendly. But yes, I was terrified for at least a week before.
SBJ: It’s somewhat comforting to know, as a young scholar, that even someone like you, with all that you’ve accomplished, still gets nervous before these big events.
CB: No, of course, and I mean, it’s a huge honour! It’s a really overwhelming honour. And if you look at the people who’ve been Dent Medallists, to get the medal was a real surprise – a real shock! When I got the email telling me, I actually did think that it was spam. It has been lovely to then realise that it was true.
SBJ: You are indeed very deserving of it. And you delivered a fascinating lecture – both the actual topics you were discussing and the general realisations about our field were just very exciting. For those who unfortunately could not join the lecture, could you provide a summary of the contents of your paper?
CB: Basically, I gave the paper on one specific musical technique, which is a technique that I described as voice exchange or the German word Stimmtausch. And the idea is really simple: it’s basically that if you have two people, one sings a phrase that goes up an octave and the other one sings a phrase that goes down an octave, and they do it at the same time and it creates this kind of contrary-motion polyphony. You can do the same with three people, but the polyphony will have to be configured slightly differently. I spent most of my career, starting from my PhD on a really super beautiful, really famous manuscript from Paris dated in the 1240s. It’s now held in the Library of the Medicis in Florence, but it was probably created for Notre Dame Cathedral. It’s an absolutely stunning book with gorgeous illustrations and clearly cost an absolute fortune to make and has thousands of musical compositions in it. It has also been very well studied. But that was where I started, really looking into very close detail at some of those pieces. So, I’ve so far always spent my career looking at these beautiful books of polyphony, the things we read about in history books. Recently, with this big project that I’ve been doing that’s focused on this specific liturgical exclamation ‘Benedicamus Domino’, I’ve started looking at a lot more sources, and I’ve realised that these Parisian books that I study are totally exceptional, but yet they’re what we learn about in history classes. So, my paper for the Dent Medal lecture was focused on this, in a way, simpler, or what people have called a more ‘primitive,’ type of polyphony that you often find copied in a margin or someone found a little bit of space in a book and they just wrote it down really messily; or they might write it down incompletely, like there are two phrases and they just have to show they can be swapped around – and then you’re done: you can make polyphony if you want to, or you could just sing it as a melody. I also tried to show a lot of different kinds of musical sources, different notations. So, the paper was really just about one simple melody that went up and down the octave. But you know, it’s in sources from all over Europe, from Denmark – in fact, quite an early one – England, France, Italy, Germany, Czechia. The first traces are found from the late 1000s and they can be found right up to the 1700s.
SBJ: It didn’t sound like you went looking for voice exchange in these sources. Did it just appear through all those years of studying them?
CB: That’s a really good point, and yes, in a way. I suppose this is often how my projects emerge – I don’t go looking at the sources with an idea. I see enough sources and then I realise that there’s something cool or fun or exciting. So yeah, you’re quite right. I just kept finding different traces of Stimmtausch and I kept coming back to it, and then I built up this bigger and bigger argument. Actually, it had quite a long gestation as an idea because I presented it in a different way initially, and then I got feedback from people, and I’ve been writing it up as an article. It’s been quite fun.
SBJ: It’s one of those things that’s fun about early music: you have to look at a lot of stuff and then piece it together. But it’s also a bit terrifying that you might just not find anything. And this brings me to a quote I have to mention from yesterday. A comment from Mark Everist who said that the results of your research will create, and I quote, ‘an apocalyptic shift in the field’. We might have been in our own silos, and you said that you initially looked at this amazing polyphony and now we might have to look at a much broader range of materials. How do you feel about that comment? I just found it funny!
CB: It was extremely generous of Mark and probably too generous. I have always been someone who studies polyphony and, to be really honest, I do love working on polyphony and probably will always work on polyphony. And I realise that that’s a fundamental kind of prejudice. But I do find it really exciting and that’s where I started my journey of working with early music. For scholars of polyphony, we, I think, are often very blinkered because we have these polyphonic sources which people have worked on for over a hundred years – they’re catalogued and inventoried. So, it feels like a lot of the basic work has been done. I was talking about one particular manuscript the Las Huelgas Codex, which got its first facsimile and edition in the 1930s and there have been tons of facsimile editions and inventories since then. I was able to find new concordances for pieces in Las Huelgas, but in contexts where we didn’t expect to find them. Basically, in books of monophony, not other collections that were predominantly polyphonic. So, I think Mark’s reaction was kind of like ‘wow, okay, we thought we worked on this polyphonic thirteenth-century repertoire – it’s all catalogued and we can just look it up. And now there are all these new sources that we have to look at’. I think the people who are better are the scholars of monophony as they are more used to looking at lots of different things, and the people who work on early song look quite broadly. Us polyphonists, we just look at our little thirteenth-century repertoire and don’t really move outside that. So, I think maybe it applies to one particular part of the field.
SBJ: And also calling it ‘a field’ makes it sound like this one big thing. Was this a realisation that you had yourself? Did you, at some point, realise that ‘well, I’ll have to start looking at a much broader set of texts or materials’?
CB: It came out of my project on the ‘Benedicamus’, which is an ERC funded project, so it’s also a team project. Several people are working on the project and one of our post-docs went to an archive and got lots of images. Obviously, this is the kind of work that it would be really hard to do just by yourself. So having a team is also what makes it possible. But the project, the concept of the project, is to look at one thing, this exclamation ‘Benedicamus Domino,’ but to look at it over a really large period of time. That’s what helped me make connections because I got to know particular melodies and texts. And then I was able to spot them in other places. So, the moment of realisation for the paper was when I was looking at the Las Huelgas Codex, and I went ‘oh I know that piece’ – the piece of Stimmtausch – that’s the piece that’s already in this famous manuscript from 1100 from Aquitaine – the Saint-Martial manuscript, Lat. 1139 in Paris, for anyone who’s interested. I also thought, ‘but hang on, that’s the so-called “Stimmtausch Hymn”’. Then I went and looked up the inventory for Las Huelgas and I saw that they said it was ‘unique’ in this manuscript and I went ‘what??’ It was this moment where I was like ‘wow, but I know that tune, I’ve seen it somewhere else’. And then, of course, I was able to find the text somewhere else – that was a bit harder. But I knew that I could hunt it down. So, it was more that I’ve had a lot of time to look at a large range of sources, but I’ve also been focussing on quite a specific thing. But the thing that I’ve been focussing on takes lots of forms and is very rich. Actually, that’s also how I really enjoy doing my work – finding connections and there’s always a bit of a detective element. This is how I like to work, though not everyone does; it doesn’t suit everyone.
SBJ: And it’s the same way I feel. It’s very exciting but also very terrifying because a lot of those patterns might just never emerge!
CB: I know what you mean. To be honest, I did find my PhD absolutely terrifying. I spent a lot of the time, when I was doing my PhD, thinking ‘what is this about?’ People would ask me ‘what’s your PhD on?’ and I’d be really embarrassed because I couldn’t really tell them. And it was only towards the very end that I felt ‘okay, I know.’ Maybe that’s just part of the scholarly condition. You’ve got to live with the doubt and the uncertainty for a while. And then, I think, you can have a slightly more exciting result.
SBJ: Back to the ‘Benedicamus’ project: how did you actually come up with it? Was it conceived when you were writing your book Polyphony in Medieval Paris?
CB: Actually, it was an idea that I had for a long time. In fact, it was during my PhD when I felt that there’s all this really cool stuff that seems to be associated with this moment of the ‘Benedicamus’. Because I was looking at thirteenth-century motets: there were loads of really weird motets that had these ‘Benedicamus Domino’ texts. So it was an idea that I had in the back of my mind and was just collecting bits and pieces for. It was a really long build-up of small pieces of information. I had my first job – my first permanent job – in America at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. I then – between that job and my job in Oslo – had a year in Paris on a fellowship. It’s hilarious now to think of it: for this one-year fellowship in Paris, I proposed that I would do a project on the ‘Benedicamus Domino’ by myself, 800 to 1500! But that one year gave me the kind of time and space to actually build what became a five-year project involving three post-docs, PhD students, and me. It’s quite sweet now to think that my ambitions were so naïve. But once I had time to look into the idea, I realised how rich it was. Because I was in an interdisciplinary community during the year I spent in Paris, I had to do that thing when people at lunch would ask you, ‘what do you do?’, and they might be a physicist, and you try and explain to them in a way that they can possibly understand. And I think that was what actually helped me get the grant in the end because I had spent so long trying to tell people about this idea and looking at their face and realising that they had no idea what it was about; they think it sounds completely boring or whatever. I think that I was successful in getting the grant because I had that time to pitch it multiple times and ‘let it brew’. Just for the record, I had unsuccessfully pitched the idea for fellowship several times before I got the one in Paris, so you just have to keep trying.
SBJ: But I think that your communication skills were really well demonstrated in your lecture: you delivered a keynote on early music to the RMA crowd which comprise academics from several different disciplines. I knew a little bit of what you were talking about, but I feel like you were great at explaining things in a way for everybody to get what you were talking about. I think that that’s probably also why you got that grant. I think that that’s an important skill to have in these very niche fields of research.
CB: Well, you’re very kind and generous. I did think a lot and try really hard to do that. In our small subfields, we can all talk to each other – like in the thirteenth century, we have all these special names for our manuscripts. I did a practice run of the paper and I was calling one manuscript ‘F,’ and the person I gave the practice run to noted that ‘anyone who doesn’t know about this will just think you’re completely mad, why are you calling it “F”? No one knows what that means.’ It stands for Florence. And they rejoined, ‘well, yeah, but the manuscript is a Parisian manuscript?’ So I’m sure I didn’t fully succeed, but I thought a lot about how to make it as clear as possible and to use many graphics. I’m incredibly lucky because the sources are gorgeous. Some of them are messy, but that’s fun too, to see the contrast. And then there are so many different kinds of notation. Even if the audience absolutely hated listening to me and hated the talk, there were some pretty things to look at. That’s the advantage, I think, of early music: a lot of people have just never seen any of these sources.
SBJ: When you were awarded the Dent Medal, the official article that announced your award highlighted your breadth of knowledge and the different methodological approaches you had taken with your work. This was a perfect way of tying all that together. One of the things that was also highlighted was your grasp of very complex musical material and bringing in this ‘simple’ polyphony – I found it very fascinating! However, I want to go back to the ‘Benedicamus’ project because that’s ending soon, right?
CB: It ends in December 2026, so I have a little bit more time – which is good, because I need it!
SBJ: What are some of the most interesting things you found during this project?
CB: The paper completely came out of the project, but what’s been interesting – and maybe this has actually been the most interesting thing about the project – is how much it challenges my previous work. It has just forced me to realise how focused I was on a small group of sources which are completely exceptional. And now, I see more of the bigger picture. I begin to realise that my previous work is on this tiny little island. And this is more of the kind of reality. Voice-exchange polyphony is still polyphony, it’s still an elite form of music-making in a way – although everyone can do it, and they don’t need to write it down or to read it or anything like that. But it’s still a much more everyday musical practice than the kinds of polyphony we have associated with Léonin and Pérotin, which is music for soloists. The project has really given me a new perspective in my career. It’s taken a long time and it’s been scary to open up that perspective and realise how much I don’t know and how much I’ll never know, but I think it’s good and challenging to do it.
SBJ: Do you have any sort of practical way of thinking? How will you employ this new perspective going forward? Have you made any reflections on how this will affect your scholarship in the future?
CB: Yes. First, I’m going to publish the talk as an article in the Journal of the American Musicological Society in the new year – that’s the first step. Then I’m writing a big monograph that comes out of the project, and I’m still shaping that.
SBJ: From a methodological perspective, do you approach sources now in a different way or approach different sources in general?
CB: Exactly. I approach different sources and I’m able to understand much more stuff now than I was able to before. The more you see, the more you understand. And the more you see, the more you know when something’s unusual or usual. It’s this kind of thing where you just have to have the faith that it’s worth building up the knowledge. And then once you build up the knowledge, it gets easier and easier. I think that’s also the thing for the PhD. Like, the PhD days are so hard because you’re building the foundation. But once you’ve built it, it just gets better and better.
SBJ: And will the voice-exchange technique just be a secondary aspect? Or will that still be a focal point for you going forward?
CB: I think that’s been really productive for me because one of the things that I tried to talk a bit about in the paper was voice exchange – it’s a melody, but it is designed from the start to sound against itself to make polyphony. It is really helpful to break down this idea of what the artificial categories of monophony and polyphony are. It’s also really good to challenge ideas of centre and periphery. So the voice exchange has been one really productive way in for me and it has opened up new sources. That said, I don’t want to just talk about Stimmtausch forever – don’t worry!
SBJ: I think you could still make it very interesting!
CB: It’s been a way in for me and now, I hope, I’ll be able to use that way in to find other exciting things.
SBJ: You mentioned that when you saw these Stimmtausch melodies, you thought ‘oh, I know this, I know this tune.’ But when you looked at all these different sources, what caught your eye? It seemed like the text could be very different. The notation could be very different as well. So, was it the melody that was the thing for you, that you noticed right away or?
CB: In this case, because I was looking at the Las Huelgas Codex, it was the melody because that text is actually quite rare. It was only after I had identified the melody that I was able to track down the text elsewhere. Often, it is the text. The other thing I should say is, in case people are like ‘oh, wow, you recognised the melody,’ it’s really distinctive: it goes up and down the octave, so you don’t even have to look at the page for very long to think ‘ah, that’s Stimmtausch.’
SBJ: It’s very visual.
CB: Yes, it leaps to the eye. So, in a way, it sounds like ‘oh, wow, I discovered this,’ but it wasn’t really that hard. Once I had discovered it, I wondered ‘why did no one else? Why did no one work this out? It’s really obvious!’ But of course, it’s obvious only once you see it.
SBJ: Yes, definitely. For me, the visual exemplarity of notation is so important. Some patterns just jump out to you. I was expecting that it was that pattern that screamed out to you. Because you found this while working on the ‘Benedicamus’ project, did you originally find some of these melodies with the ‘Benedicamus’ text?
CB: Yes, so the example that I’ve been talking was one. They’re little songs for the ‘Benedicamus,’ so the last words will be ‘Benedicamus Domino’ – the exclamation ‘let us bless the Lord’. It tends to start with some kind of poetic text before that. Often, they have these ‘-o’ rhymes to rhyme with ‘Domino.’ This one was ‘In hoc festo gratissimo,’ about a ‘feast.’ The last line was ‘Benedicamus Domino,’ which was why I was looking at it. That helped me make the connection because I knew that this melody was very often used for these little ‘Benedicamus’ songs.
SBJ: It’s so interesting how it all ties together!
CB: Well, it does when it works! Obviously, I have tons of failed ideas. There have been tons of times when I saw something and thought ‘oh, wow, this is this and this,’ and then realised ‘nope, no it isn’t.’
SBJ: It’s very fascinating. We have already touched on your future plans, which is to crystallise this research into a monograph. Congratulations on your new position in Cambridge! Besides continuing to work on this there, what are some other plans?
CB: Thank you very much. I started on the 1 September. There’ll be lots of new opportunities and a great community of people to work with. I am obviously very sad to leave Oslo and to leave Scandinavia actually. I’ll never be on a train or a bus that’s on time ever again…
SBJ: No, not in the UK, that’s for sure!
CB: But no, that will be very exciting. We had our project conference last year in Oslo. I’m going to go now and check the final proofs [of an edited volume arising from the conference], and then that will go for printing with Brepols. That was really fun. There are seventeen chapters in the volume by eighteen authors. They found a lot of really amazing stuff. We have one chapter by PhD student Thomas Phillips at Bristol. He’s looked at one source from Saint Albans that’s now in Oxford, and has catalogued all the melodies. And then we have another from Laine Tabora from Riga who has been doing her PhD in Rome. She found loads of ‘Benedicamus’ in some really cool sources from Riga that I had no idea about. There are loads of really fun contributions offering different perspectives. It was a great luxury to have Bonnie Blackburn as the copy editor of the volume. She’s marvellous; when I sent the drafts to her, she went ‘oh, your little versicle can make so many chapters!’ For my own book, I’m able to build on all the contributions from other people who give me all kinds of perspectives, as I could have never done all that work myself. It’s exciting.
SBJ: Well, congratulations on everything! I think we’re all really happy that you got that grant and that the project happened. Thank you for taking the time to do this interview. We look forward to hearing more about your work!
CB: Thank you so much, Sebastian. And it’s been a really lovely conference.