Music Colloquium with David Fallows

‘Voices and Instruments in the Songs of the 14th and 15th Centuries’

Abstract: In the early 1980s various musicologists (who all happened to be English) shocked the world by suggesting that there was a very good case for performing the polyphonic song repertory before about 1480 without instrumental participation. This caused a lot of unhappiness and was famously dubbed the ‘English a cappella heresy. More to the point, though, the arguments became far too heated and the issues remain unresolved to this day. I shall explain how the situation arose and how there is an urgent need for a cooler look.

David Fallows taught at the University of Manchester from 1976 to 2011 and was president of the International Musicological Society from 2002 to 2007. He holds a BA from Cambridge, an MMus from King’s College, London, and a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. His books include Dufay (1982), Josquin (2009), and A Catalogue of Polyphonic Songs, 1415–1480 (1999).