Rob Wegman

Associate Professor of Music

My interest in late-Medieval and Renaissance music goes back to the first year I spent as an undergraduate at the University of Amsterdam, in 1979. The training I received there from Chris Maas was of the old-style, rigorous kind: paleography, textual criticism, notation and editorial practice, and archival studies. I still get tremendous fun out of pursuing these approaches. After graduation in 1986, I studied one year with David Fallows at Manchester, who encouraged me, in addition, to engage critically with fifteenth-century musical style. These various interests were brought together in my dissertation on the Masses of Jacob Obrecht, which I defended for the Ph.D. degree at Amsterdam in 1993.

In 1991-1995 I worked at Oxford as a research fellow, and developed there an interest in late-Medieval musical aesthetics and sociology. One project was a study of musical authorship in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, during which the modern concept of 'the composer' could be said to have originated. That project, in turn, sparked a fascination with the widespread late-Medieval practice of polyphonic improvisation, and especially how a deeper understanding of that practice might call into question some of the 'work'-based criteria that are habitually employed in modern criticism and analysis. From there it was a logical step to ask whether the most fundamental assumptions about music in late-Medieval culture may not have been conditioned more by views on hearing and listening than on composition and notation. (I organized a symposium on this issue at Princeton in September 1997.) In the summer months I continue my archival research on musical culture in late-Medieval Flanders, focusing at present on Alexander Agricola, and I have finally summoned up the courage to confront the (for me) deeply problematic figure of Josquin des Prez. This led to the International Conference "New Directions in Josquin Scholarship" (organized with NEH support at Princeton in October 1999).