Convegno internazionaleInternational Conference
Il convegnoThe Conference
In ogni tradizione — musicale, letteraria, figurativa — ciò che è sopravvissuto rappresenta solo una parte di quanto fu prodotto: opere scomparse, frammenti mutili, materiali dispersi, autori senza nome. Il convegno assume il «perduto» come oggetto di studio, capace di generare nuove domande e di condizionare la nostra conoscenza dell'opera, dell'autore e dei suoi metodi di lavoro.
Muovendo dall'impulso di Henry Bardon (La littérature latine inconnue) e dalla proposta metodologica di Claudio Vela (Dall'esistente all'esistito. Per una filologia dei perduti, 2019), il convegno legge l'assenza non come limite, ma come agente che partecipa alla trasmissione, alla memoria e alla canonizzazione. Sono accolti contributi di taglio filologico, storiografico, teorico e metodologico.
In every tradition — musical, literary, visual — what has survived represents only a fraction of what was once produced: lost works, mutilated fragments, dispersed materials, anonymous authors. The conference takes the «lost» as an object of study in its own right, capable of generating new questions and reshaping our understanding of the work, its author, and their working methods.
Moving from the impulse of Henry Bardon (La littérature latine inconnue) and the methodological proposal of Claudio Vela (Dall'esistente all'esistito. Per una filologia dei perduti, 2019), the conference reads absence not as a limitation, but as an active agent in transmission, memory and canon formation. Contributions take philological, historiographical, theoretical and methodological perspectives.
ProgrammaProgramme
Università degli Studi di Pavia (Italy)
“Assenza, più acuta presenza”. I perduti sono con noi (almeno un po’)
La perdita come presenza con cui fare i conti in àmbito filologico e storiografico. Partendo da casi specifici della letteratura italiana, l’intervento vuole mettere in evidenza dei fenomeni generali che superano i limiti di una singola disciplina e possono collegare tra loro ricerche in campi diversi. Il percorso dall’esistente all’esistito come pratica di attenzione integrale al rapporto tra presente e passato.
“Absence, a sharper presence”. The lost are with us (at least a little)
Loss as a presence to be reckoned with in philology and historiography. Starting from cases from Italian literature, this paper aims to highlight general phenomena that transcend the limits of a single discipline and can connect research in different fields. The path from the existent to the existed as a practice of integral attention to the relationship between present and past.
Claudio Vela is a full professor of Italian Philology at the Department of Musicology and Cultural Heritage of the University of Pavia, based in Cremona, where he served as director from 2018 to 2024. His research ranges from thirteenth-century Italian literature to the twentieth century, with critical editions and contributions on authors and topics spanning from Petrarch, Bembo, and Castiglione to Gadda and Ripellino. A co-founder of the Centro Studi Gadda, he is editing, together with Paola Italia and Giorgio Pinotti, the new Adelphi edition of Carlo Emilio Gadda’s works.
Independent scholar
This paper examines how seventeenth-century writers addressed musical loss and what these accounts reveal about contemporaneous understandings of music and its past.
Before 1600, writing on music’s history was sporadic and varied in purpose, appearing in musical treatises, theological works, and humanistic scholarship. In the early seventeenth century, a broader range of authors—including professional musicians—produced more systematic accounts for an expanding literate audience, and by the century’s end, these efforts had coalesced into a recognizable genre of book-length, broadly chronological histories of music’s origins and development.
Later commentators often relegated these pioneering accounts to the prehistory of music historiography, faulting them for neglecting its “proper” object. More historically attentive scholars have emphasized a positive program, situating these writings within a tradition with its own scope, methods, and aims, distinct from later musicology.
This paper adopts a different perspective by focusing on the negative program evident in passages where authors confront musical loss. It argues that such moments illuminate the fundamental conditions under which the musical past could be imagined in the first place.
The analysis proceeds from a close reading of these passages, exploring the relationship between musical loss and its broader conceptual environment, with particular attention to its multi-modal manifestations across the registers of existence, knowledge, value, and experience.
The study is anchored in selected passages from the second volume of Michael Praetorius’s Syntagma Musicum (1619) and supplemented with other seventeenth-century sources. It also engages complementary bodies of secondary literature, including recent work in the history and anthropology of ignorance and scholarship on loss and related concepts.
Jan Wessel is an independent scholar specializing in the (pre-)history of musicology. He holds an MA in the History of Ideas from the University of Oslo and a PhD in Musicology from the University of Copenhagen. His recent research has focused on topics related to the emergence of music as a subject of historical inquiry in early modernity.
Royal Northern College of Music (United Kingdom)
In 1902 we see young Alma Schindler, a student of Alexander von Zemlinsky, being told by her fiancé Gustav Mahler that a marriage between them will only work if she gives up composing. Her initial agreement and the emotional agony that dogged their relationship eventually led to the loss of an unknown but presumably large number of works by Mahler-Werfel, with only 14 songs now available. As we move later into the twentieth century, the gendered reasons for the loss of music by female composers become less blunt but they are no less dangerous to their bodies of works. In this paper I am going to suggest additional categories of loss or lack that complement Vela’s textual categories by using biographical, music-analytical, and historical lenses.
The paper will use case studies to extrapolate some contexts for the often messy and fragmentary archival situations of female composers with specific regards to gender and (self-)censorship. Case studies will be drawn from the catalogues and biographies of composers such as Elisabeth Lutyens, Dorothy Gow, Delia Derbyshire, and Julia Perry – all twentieth century composers living and working in the United Kingdom or United States with strong links to modernist continental Europe.
Annika Forkert is a musicologist and Senior Lecturer in Music at the RNCM, Manchester. Her research and publications focus on the history, analysis, and aesthetics of: British music since 1900, microtonal music, and female composers. Her monograph Elisabeth Lutyens and Edward Clark: The Orchestration of Progress in British Twentieth-Century Music was published by Cambridge University Press in 2023. Recent articles include ‘Modernist Self-Parody in Walton’s Façade’ (Music & Letters, 2025) and ‘Microtonal Restraint’ (Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 2020). Annika holds a PhD in Music from Royal Holloway, University of London, and a Magistra Artium in Musikwissenschaft and Philosophy from Humboldt-University Berlin.
Uppsala University (Sweden)
Between 1738 and 1753, the theatre company Swenska comedien staged some of the earliest operas and musical entertainments in the Swedish language in Stockholm. Although these works were central to the emergence of a Swedish operatic tradition, their music is today almost entirely lost. The repertoire is preserved primarily through printed libretti, apart from two surviving scores of the opera Syrinx (1747) and a few isolated arias.
This paper examines how these operas can be analysed, contextualised, and partly reconstructed through a combination of archival research, libretto studies, and musical-poetic analysis. Possible surviving arias are located through archival work. Detailed readings of the libretti contribute to reconstructing aspects of musical-dramatic structure, scene organisation, and performance practice. Verse forms and their relationship to known musical settings could help identify patterns that indicate musical features and character.
The operas of Swenska comedien, often based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, differ from both the heroic narratives of opera seria and from the contemporary social comedies of opera buffa. Dramaturgically, these works show influences from French opera, English secular oratorio, and commedia dell’arte, while musically they appear to have been pasticcios incorporating adapted arias from Italian and German sources. As such, the repertoire provides a compelling case study for a deeper understanding of transnational operatic practices, cultural translation, and aria circulation in the mid-eighteenth century. While the music of the operas at Swenska comedien may be lost, the repertoire provides new insights into both Swedish and wider European operatic history.
Satyanita Emma Sohlgren completed her PhD in Musicology at Uppsala University, Sweden, on 5 June 2026. Her doctoral dissertation, “Cultural Transfer through Opera Arias: Material Culture and Musical Practices in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Sweden” (Uppsala: Uppsala University, 2026), examines the dissemination, adaptation, and performance of opera arias in mid-eighteenth-century Sweden, as well as the role of opera within eighteenth-century elite culture. She holds a BA in Music from the University of Cambridge (2012) and an MA in Musicology from Uppsala University (2020). She has also studied Italian language and literature at Stockholm University and the Università degli Studi di Padova (2013–2015).
Maynooth University (Ireland)
Sources of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century English polyphony mostly survive as isolated entries in commonplace books or as fragments that were repurposed, sometimes centuries after their creation, as structural reinforcement for bindings. There can be little question that much of this repertory has been lost. Even so, scholars have discerned a vibrant culture of polyphony that was, in important respects, unlike what we find in the more familiar (and much better preserved) sources associated with mainland Europe. As Peter Lefferts and Katherine Kennedy Steiner have shown, this culture of polyphony was closely tied to the worship of the Virgin Mary. Much of the music that survives appears to have served an enormously popular and demanding liturgical regimen that was typical of English cathedrals: votive Marian masses celebrated daily at side altars and, at many institutions, in “Lady” chapels.
In this paper, I examine one textual reference—hitherto unnoticed by musicologists—to the use of polyphony for the Lady mass at Lichfield Cathedral in the mid-thirteenth century. This affords a rare glimpse of how, and by whom, polyphonic repertory was cultivated in England. At Lichfield, the daily Marian mass was celebrated by a cohort of singers known, in Middle English, as “clerk vicars” (clerk vikars). The clerk vicars of Lichfield, who appear to have been specialists in the Marian liturgy, were expected to know a body of so-called “common songs” (cantilenas communes). Quite possibly, these were Marian sequences. I place this reference in conversation with fragmentary musical sources that attest the circulation of sequence texts and melodies in monophony and polyphony.
Taken together, this evidence points to a largely lost culture of Marian music that centered on singers like Lichfield’s clerk vicars: low-ranking, low-paid choral clergy who found, in the Marian liturgy, an ideal outlet for their creative energies.
Eric Nemarich is a postdoctoral researcher and historian at Maynooth University. Eric holds a PhD in Medieval History from Harvard University, where he defended his thesis, “Zealots of Justice: Coercive Officials in Late Medieval Italy,” in August 2024. His scholarship, drawing upon the archival riches of Italy, England, and France, uses the techniques of social history to reconstruct premodern communities that were bound together by the creation and exchange of knowledge. As resident historian for the ERC-funded BROKENSONG project at Maynooth, Eric studies the institutional environments in which polyphony flourished throughout Britain and Ireland between 1150 and 1350.
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain)
This paper explores the lost ritual and architectural heritage of Dominican male convents in the Mediterranean cities of Barcelona, Valencia, and Palma de Mallorca between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the early modern period, these monasteries structured religious life through a dense network of liturgical practices; yet many were partially or entirely demolished in the following centuries, their sacred spaces transformed, and their documentary and musical traces fragmented or dispersed.
Although the primary musical sources associated with these convents have been almost entirely lost, this study aims to reconstruct their liturgical life through the systematic analysis of secondary sources. Particular attention is given to liturgies involving movement – namely processions – both within conventual spaces (churches and cloisters) and in the urban environment. These ritual practices were performed either by the Dominican friars themselves or by lay confraternities associated with the convents, extending the sonic and ritual presence of the convents beyond their walls and into the city.
By integrating architectural studies, the history of liturgy, and music history, this research aims to reconstruct a ritual environment unfolding across the entire liturgical calendar, encompassing both major feasts and everyday devotional routines. Focusing on soundspace and performance practices, the project restores the monastery as a dynamic, multisensory setting in which architecture, ritual, and sound were continuously negotiated and experienced.
Chiara Mazzoletti is a PhD candidate in Musicology and a member of the ERC SOUNDSPACE project. She holds a master’s degree in Musicology from the University of Pavia–Cremona and a Master of Advanced Studies in Gregorian Chant from the Università della Svizzera Italiana. Her doctoral research focuses on liturgical practice and the sonic configuration of ritual spaces in the Dominican convents of the Crown of Aragon; her second line of research concerns medieval musical and liturgical manuscripts from the area of Lucca (IT). She is also editor-in-chief of the ‘Pressus Maior’ scientific journal and the artistic director and conductor of the Schola Cantorum Cantus Fugiens, with which she won the Micrologus Prize at the “Guido d’Arezzo” International Competition.
Uppsala Universitet (Sweden)
As with much of the repertoire from the 16th and 17th centuries, the music composed for the liturgy of the dead is also marked by numerous lost compositions. For other repertoires, the only surviving traces of lost music often come from indirect sources, such as printers’ inventories, library catalogues, or private correspondence. Funerary music, however, provides an additional resource: funeral books, that are printed accounts of solemn exequies, usually dedicated to the commemoration of noble figures. These publications, besides describing the ceremonial arrangements and ephemeral structures, usually offer significant details about the liturgical celebration and its musical accompaniment.
In recent years, musicology has shown renewed interest in these documents, focusing in particular on the terminology used, with the aim of exploring late Renaissance and Baroque attitudes and sensibility toward death. My study seeks to direct attention more specifically toward the musical dimension, analysing funeral books as potentially valuable sources for reconstructing lost repertoires and performance practices. By examining two particularly significant cases printed in Italy, the research aims to identify as many features as possible of certain lost compositions: their structure, the liturgical texts that were set to music, the use on instruments, the possible alternation between polyphony and plainchant, and their stylistic characteristics.
Riccardo Pintus is a PhD candidate at Uppsala University. After graduating in Music from the Conservatory of Sassari, he earned a master’s degree in Musicology at the Department of Musicology and Cultural Heritage, University of Pavia/Cremona. His MA thesis, a critical edition of Palestrina's Requiem, received an honourable mention at the Pier Luigi Gaiatto Award and was published by the Levi Foundation (2024). His research focuses on analytical and philological issues in Renaissance repertoire, on which he has published in Italian as well as international journals.
Maynooth University (Ireland)
Nearly every surviving manuscript of polyphony from late medieval Britain and Ireland (c.1200–1400) is fragmentary: some 280 leaves from at least 140 dismantled music books—largely recovered from bindings or preserved in situ within their host volumes—survive, many of them severely damaged and barely legible. This piecemeal preservation, especially when set against the comparatively substantial Continental record, has encouraged historiographical narratives that privilege French sources in studies of late medieval polyphony, while leaving Insular traditions underexplored (Lefferts 1986). Addressing this situation requires, first, the reconstruction of fragmentary Insular sources often excluded from reference editions and, second, the reassessment of Insular polyphony within Continental transmission networks.
This paper presents the two approaches to Insular polyphony through two case studies, focusing respectively on the fourteenth-century fragments Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud. Misc. 594 (Ob594) and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodl. 384 (Ob384). Both Ob594—the ghostly imprint of a lost pastedown—and Ob384—a set of heavily palimpsested flyleaves—were analysed using multispectral imaging (MSI) as part of the ERC Consolidator Grant project BROKENSONG, enabling the recovery of music writing on these damaged fragments.
The paper demonstrates how MSI results can be mobilised to address broader research questions concerning the historical contextualisation of Insular polyphony. In the case of Ob594, the recovered notation permits comparison of different notational states of the same polyphonic piece across multiple sources, shedding light on processes of transmission and musical revision. The results for Ob384 enable the reconstruction of a unique and hitherto neglected Gloria setting, which is then examined in relation to comparable Continental repertoires.
In sum, this paper shows how modern imaging technologies can not only recover musical evidence that would otherwise remain invisible, but also render it productive within historiographical discourse.
Dr Johanna Thöne is a postdoctoral researcher on the ERC Consolidator Grant project BROKENSONG, led by Professor Karen Desmond at Maynooth University, Ireland. She holds degrees in harpsichord, Classical Philology, and Musicology, and specialises in the analysis of fourteenth-century polyphony. Johanna received her PhD from the University of Oslo in 2024 with a thesis entitled ‘Papal Polyphony during the Great Western Schism (1378–1417)’. For her dissertation, she was awarded His Majesty the King of Norway’s Gold Medal for the best doctoral thesis in the Humanities in 2025. Her broader interests include fragmentology and digital reconstruction, palaeography, and repertory transmission.
USC Thornton School of Music (United States)
Scholars have extensively reconstructed lost voices in four-voice Renaissance polyphony through contrapuntal clues and aided by computer analysis. To what extent is it possible to reconstruct the polyphony of a three-voice chanson, when even only one voice survives? To answer this question, this paper addresses three case studies.
First, the oddly fragmented tenor voice of the three-voice chanson labeled only “T” in the Glogauer Liederbuch (Berlin (Krakow) MS Mus. 40098) hides an unrecognized canonic voice, revealing that it is almost certainly a French combinative chanson. Moreover, it shares uncanny similarities to the anonymous chanson “Soubz lex branches” in the chansonnier Dijon 517. Both songs stand out in the combinative chanson repertory for their shared approach to imitation in their tenor voices and motivic vocabulary.
Second, structural imitative anonymous rondeau “Pour vostre amour” in the Dijon Chansonnier (Bibliothèque municipale, MS 517 (olim 295)) makes it possible to reconstruct almost its entire missing Cantus voice with confidence, thus highlighting the high level of its contrapuntal craft.
Third, the anonymous rondeau “Je n’ay quelque cause de joye” in the chansonnier EscA (E-E MS V.III.24) survives with only its Cantus and text. This lone voice contains an unusual cadential motive found in only two other chansons on the manuscript, songs that Walter Kemp attributes to “school of Binchois” based on stylistic grounds. To achieve a rich reconstruction of the original missing voices, I propose a three-tiered approach distinguishing between passages with single most likely solutions, those with a few conventional treatments, and those with insufficient evidence to approximate original missing voices beyond generic solutions.
In each of these cases, reconstructing their lost voices is the first step to answering a larger question: what can we learn about these songs by engaging in the process of searching for lost voices?
Adam Knight Gilbert is Professor, Director of the Early Music Program and Chair of Musicology at USC’s Thornton School of Music. He has published on instrumental performance practice, the music of Henricus Isaac, composed and extemporized counterpoint and ground-bass improvisation, fifteenth-century dance, songs, and Masses, and music at Mission San Gabriel. He has performed and recorded on recorder, shawm and bagpipe with The Waverly Consort, Ensemble for Early Music, Piffaro and directs ensemble Ciaramella. He is recipient of the 2008 Noah Greenberg Award, joint-recipient of the 2014 Thomas Binkley Award with Rotem Gilbert, and recipient of the 2025 Gabler KulturPreis.
Çankırı Karatekin University (Türkiye)
The Ottoman kopuz and its improved variant, the şeşhane, were significant skin-faced, unfretted plucked lutes rooted in ancient Turkic tradition. Despite their prevalence until the eighteenth century, these instruments are now extinct, with no surviving specimens available for study. This paper reflects on a research project dedicated to the historically informed reconstruction of these lost lutes, addressing the challenges posed by fragmentary sources.
Due to the absence of physical artifacts, the reconstruction process relied heavily on a critical synthesis of historical and contemporary data. While primary written documents and visual depictions—specifically miniature paintings—served as the foundation for the design, they often lacked precise details, necessitating a more comprehensive evaluation across multiple aspects. On the other hand, extant similar lutes from Central Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa were utilized as supplementary sources to fill these organological gaps.
This paper will outline how these diverse sources were pieced together to determine essential features such as form, dimensions, materials, and construction techniques. It will discuss the methodology of “piecing together” information, where critical interpretation was necessary to resolve deficiencies in primary data and avoid a superficial approach. By comparing the initial reconstruction proposals with the actual assessment of these sources and the implementation of findings, I will try to demonstrate how reasonable solutions were applied in an attempt to achieve an optimally fulfilling, historically informed reconstruction of the kopuz and şeşhane.
M. Emin Soydaş is a professor in the Music Department of Çankırı Karatekin University in Turkey. After completing his BA in History and MA in Turkish Music, he received his PhD in Musicology and Music Theory from İstanbul Technical University in 2007, with a thesis on Ottoman musical instruments. His research interests have mainly focused on the historical aspects of Turkish music, particularly the instruments and musical analysis.
Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza” (Italy)
The diachronic dispersion characterising written traditions has frequently led to the loss of an author’s entire body of work, and even their very memory. However, chance discoveries or systematic examinations of archival and library collections, especially previously unexplored, bring to light sources that were unknown, or regarded as lost.
A recent example is a polyphonic Missa defunctorum attributed to an unidentified composer contained in a miscellaneous manuscript compiled in the first half of the 17th century in Siena, Italy. Unlike the other works included in the collection, the Requiem by ‘Orlandi’ is apparently extant, albeit incomplete, only in this witness. Furthermore, the most plausible hypotheses regarding the identification of its composer are at odds with the complete lack of known indirect evidence. The complex history of the transmission and survival of this work encompasses various shades of ‘lost’ and ‘rediscovered’ that involve both the text and the musical composition, as well as the very identity of the composer. Orlandi’s Mass constitutes a case study of particular interest: attributional hypotheses require a complex approach to the system of text-context relations, which demands a critical analysis of the methods and tools from an epistemological perspective, through which knowledge of the work can be reconstructed.
Luca Benedetti is a PhD candidate in Heritage Science at the University of Rome 'La Sapienza', and a member of the ERC LAUDARE project. He graduated in Musicology from the University of Pavia, campus of Cremona. His research focuses on liturgical and devotional music of the Renaissance and Early Modern periods, with particular attention to productive and performance contexts, as well as reception dynamics.
Fondazione G. Rossini (Italy)
Among the Rossini autographs held by Fondazione G. Rossini in Pesaro, one bears a curious title: Teodora e Ricciardino. This manuscript, which is unfinished and almost certainly incomplete, was studied in the late 1960s by Philip Gossett («Acta Musicologica», xlii, 1970, pp. 48-58) with the aim of investigating Rossini’s creative process.
The absence not only of a date but also of any other indication capable of revealing the possible occasion for its composition has, over the years, compelled scholars to exercise a certain caution in formulating conjectures on the matter. Following Philip Gossett’s simple hypothesis regarding the dating of this autograph, Paolo Fabbri has more recently put forward the possibility that it might be linked to a famous case of a rossinian perduto/sommerso: the opera written (or perhaps merely sketched) for Genoa in the spring of 1814.
Based on an analysis of the manuscript and drawing on documentary evidence that has remained in the shadows until now, this presentation will attempt to propose a new hypothesis for its identification; a hypothesis that will bring from the oblivion of time a rossinian unexpected perduto ignoto.
Andrea Malnati graduated from the University of Milan and obtained his PhD from the University of Pavia under the supervision of Fabrizio Della Seta, with a thesis on the ‘Gran Scena’ in Italian opera between 1790 and 1840. Since 2015, he has been a research fellow at the Fondazione G. Rossini in Pesaro, for which he has edited, with Alice Tavilla, the critical edition of Eduardo e Cristina (2023). His other publications include the book La Gran Scena nell’opera italiana (1790–1840) (Pesaro, Fondazione Rossini, 2017) and the critical edition of Girolamo Crescentini’s Sei cantate per voce sola e fortepiano (London, Consonarte, 2017).
Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain)
The project Correspondences between Music and Literature in the Silver Age II (MULICO2) has recently developed a set of databases and a digital portal devoted to lyric theatre in Spain, Hispano-America and other Spanish-speaking territories, with the aim of integrating historical catalogues, archival holdings and scattered digital resources. A significant part of this repertoire – especially that produced outside canonical centres and in colonial or postcolonial contexts – is known only through fragmentary traces such as isolated libretti.
This paper presents the methodological framework of the portal and shows how the systematic cross-referencing of heterogeneous sources (including the Catálogo del Teatro Lírico by Iglesias de Souza, SGAE catalogues, the Historia de la Zarzuela, specific theatre collections such as the Teatro Tacón in Havana or the Legado Cullá, as well as catalogues from the Museo Nacional de Música de Cuba, the National Libraries of Chile and Peru, and the Instituto Nacional de Estudios de Teatro of Argentina) makes it possible to reconstruct the existence and circulation of works now largely lost or surviving in mutilated form. The discussion will focus on three main axes: the normalisation of names and biographical data for composers and librettists, which allows us to follow careers and authorial networks that would otherwise remain invisible; the shifting geography of Spanish-language lyric theatre between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, highlighting peripheral hubs (Havana, Lima and various African and Asian cities of the former Spanish empire); and the possibilities and limits of a “database philology” when confronted with the absence or extreme dispersion of musical and literary materials.
In doing so, the portal not only documents a submerged heritage, but also offers critical tools to rethink the relationship between “existent” and “lost” in Hispanic musical theatre, and the ways in which this repertoire enters or resists historiographical canonisation.
Tatiana Aráez Santiago — Musicologist and pianist with a PhD (Extraordinary Award, International/European Mention) from the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM), specialising in Spanish and Latin American music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, musical circulation, national identity, and relationships between music and literature. Her work combines archival research with digital and quantitative methods to reconstruct fragmentary repertoires and dispersed sources. She is currently Assistant Professor at UCM, where she directs the project Correspondences between Music and Literature in the Silver Age II (MULICO2) and coordinates initiatives on women’s musical heritage.
África González Alonso — Musicologist with a degree from the Complutense University of Madrid, specialising in Audio Production, and a master’s degree in musical research from the Universidad Internacional de La Rioja. Her work focuses on digital humanities, sound heritage preservation, and music production research. She combines interdisciplinary methodologies with archival approaches to address the documentation and analysis of contemporary music production practices. Currently, she is a pre-doctoral researcher in the MULICO2 project. She also collaborates with the SonoLAB team and the Music Production Research Group at SIbE–Sociedad de Etnomusicología.
Beethoven-Haus Bonn (Germany)
As an indispensable prerequisite, any critical edition should be based on the existing sources as closely as possible. The editor has to explain how they relate and how they constitute the musical text. Any deviation from the sources is to be kept to a minimum and plausibly explained.
Following this prerequisite, lost sources obviously cannot play any role for the musical text. Any attempt to reconstruct their lost content would be mere speculation, which would be contrary to the principles of a critical edition. However, considering what lost sources might have looked like can provide important insights into the creative process and help to understand the often complex and dynamic relationship between the preserved sources. In the case of Beethoven, these considerations might be of specific relevance: The authorized sources are not only dependent on genealogical relationship but were also revised multiple times in several stages by the composer himself – within the compositional process and in various combinations of sources. By relating the surviving sources, it is sometimes possible to draw conclusions about missing ones. This can sometimes even help to reconstruct correction lists or to explain stages of revision.
Dealing with lost sources requires a high degree of methodological reflexion and transparency in the edition. My paper will discuss various types of lost, presumably authorized sources – above all concerning Beethoven’s symphonies and chamber music.
Jens Dufner studied musicology, Romance and Slavic languages at the universities of Bonn and Cologne. Degree of Magister artium in Bonn with a thesis on Franz Schubert and his symphonic fragment in E major D 729, Dr. phil. with a dissertation on Joseph Martin Kraus’ opera Æeneas i Carthago. Employed at the Beethoven-Haus Bonn since 1998, since 2004 as research assistant as part of the new critical edition of Beethoven’s works. His current research project is the edition of the Piano Trios.
Schola Cantorum Basiliensis (Switzerland)
Medieval liturgical fragments are traditionally approached as incomplete survivals of once coherent manuscripts, valued primarily for the possibility of reconstructing lost codices, textual traditions, or liturgical uses. This paper proposes a different methodological perspective by considering the fragment not simply as the remnant of a lost whole, but as a point of intersection between multiple historical trajectories. Far from representing only destruction or deficiency, fragments preserve traces of production, use, transformation, reuse, archival transmission, and modern scholarly interpretation. At the center of this study lies the notion of absence. The fragment constantly confronts the scholar with what is no longer there: missing folios, disrupted textual sequences, incomplete musical structures, lost manuscripts, and broken archival contexts. Yet this absence is not merely a limitation. It becomes an essential component of interpretation, requiring acts of reconstruction, imagination, and methodological negotiation. The fragment invites scholars not only to recover what has been lost, but also to reflect on the conditions created by loss itself.
The paper explores how fragmentation generates new forms of evidence and new historical meanings. Medieval liturgical fragments frequently survive because they were reused in bindings, administrative structures, or archival contexts, and their material afterlives often reveal histories distinct from those of the manuscripts from which they originated. As a result, the same fragment may be read simultaneously as a witness to liturgical practice, a material object shaped by use and reuse, an archival artifact, and a product of modern scholarly classification. Through selected examples, the study argues that fragments should be understood not as incomplete objects awaiting restoration, but as multilayered witnesses whose very incompleteness produces meaning. In this sense, absence itself becomes archival evidence and an active space of historical interpretation.
Trained in musicology at the University of Pavia and in palaeography at the University of Rome (PhD), Laura Albiero conducted her research at the Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes (Paris) and at the Bibliothèque nationale de France before joining the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis. A collaborator of the Fragmentarium project at the University of Fribourg and recipient of the Albi Rosenthal Fellowship in Music at the Bodleian Library, Oxford (2016), her research focuses on medieval liturgy, musical palaeography, and codicology. Together with Christian Meyer, she co-directs the series Catalogue des manuscrits notés de France, published by Brepols.
SedeVenue
Palazzo Raimondi, Aula Magna
Corso Garibaldi 178
26100 Cremona (CR), ItaliaItaly
Sede del Dipartimento di Musicologia e Beni Culturali, Università di Pavia.Home of the Department of Musicology and Cultural Heritage, University of Pavia.
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Gianmario Borio, Michela Garda, Massimiliano Guido, Stefano La Via, Ingrid Pustijanac, Angela Romagnoli, Federica Rovelli, Rodobaldo Tibaldi, Giovanni Varelli, Pietro Zappalà, Paolo Bertinelli, Michele Leggieri, Giovanni Lipardi, Matteo Lombardi, Giulia Manfredini, Francesco Orio, Alessandra Paciotti, Cecilia Raunisi, Sara Vrdoljak.
Paolo Bertinelli, Michele Leggieri, Giovanni Lipardi, Matteo Lombardi, Giulia Manfredini, Francesco Orio, Alessandra Paciotti, Cecilia Raunisi, Sara Vrdoljak.
Convegno promosso e organizzato dalle dottorande e dai dottorandi in Musicologia dell'Università di Pavia (sede di Cremona).A conference promoted and organised by the PhD candidates in Musicology at the University of Pavia (Cremona).
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convdottorale.musicologia.unipv@gmail.comL'ingresso è libero e il convegno è aperto a studiose, studiosi e a tutte le persone interessate.Admission is free; the conference is open to scholars, students and all interested participants.