The early music seminars, directed by Pedro Memelsdorff since 2006, take place at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini twice a year in February and October, thanks to the contribution and collaboration of the Fondation Concordance, the Fondation Irma Merk and the Fondation L. + Th. La Roche (Basel, Switzerland). The October seminar is devoted to the Roman de Fauvel, a long early 14th-century satirical poem attributed to Gervais du Bus, a clerk at the court of the King Philip IV (the Fair) of France.
Based on the metaphor of an ass – Fauvel – who had become a monarch through a twist of fate, the Roman is a caustic criticism of the royal court and church and was banned for being heretical and seditious. This did nothing to diminish its popularity, however. Published around 1310-14, the Roman was almost immediately interpolated with some remarkable images and, most importantly, pieces of music composed in a variety of monophonic and polyphonic styles, including some of the most sophisticated motets of the French Ars nova, attributed to the poet, composer and diplomatic Philippe de Vitry.
The seminar will explore the complex cross-media relations between test, image and music as found in the richest interpolated version of the Roman – manuscript no. 146 in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France – with some of the greatest experts on the subject: Benjamin Bagby, founder and director of the celebrated medieval ensemble Sequentia, and the eminent musicologists Margaret Bent and Anna Zayaruznaya (Universities of Oxford and Yale).
On Friday, 12 October at 6pm the scholarship-holders (selected through an international call for applications), directed by Benjamin Bagby will perform in a public concert at the Auditorium “Lo Squero”
Inés Alonso Botella, soprano
Roberta Diamond, soprano
Ozan Karagöz, tenore
Jung Min Kim, soprano
Sylvia Leith, mezzo soprano
Laura Martínez Boj, soprano
Wolodymyr Smishkewych, tenore
Raphaële Soumagnas, soprano
Belén Vaquero Hernandez, soprano
Free entrance
