Plainchant
Plainchant appears in many guises. The oldest repertoire is preserved in manuscripts located in what are now Switzerland, Germany and France. The hundreds of sources that bear witness to the long history of plainchant in our region are far less well known and studied. Plainchant from the Low Countries has its own characteristics and repertoire, and it requires thorough research to understand it better and situate it within plainchant repertoire as a whole.
These characteristics are reflected in the polyphony that is derived from plainchant. In fact, polyphony cannot be understood independently of the Gregorian chant it is based on: if we want to understand fifteenth and sixteenth century polyphony fully, a good understanding of plainchant from the Low Countries is indispensable.
According to Antwerp, Reformed to Rome: Music, Liturgies, and Identities in the Bishopric of Antwerp (1559–1801)
Cantors and Catafalques: Music and Death c. 1300–c. 1530
The multisensory world of Vadstena Abbey in the Late Middle Ages
The Chant Background to the Early Polyphonic Requiem
The Transmission of the Cantus Sororum
Inventories of antiphonaries held in Flanders
The origin, development and standardization of the medieval historia in the Low Countries (tenth-fourteenth centuries)
The plainchant of the secular clergy in the Low Countries: music and liturgy at the collegiate Church of Our Lady in Tongres (fourteenth-fifteenth centuries)
Local sequences and local liturgy in medieval Europe
Polyphony
The Franco-Flemish polyphonic repertoire from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is a high point in the music history of the Low Countries: almost all the important composers and musical personalities in the whole of Europe came from our region. However, that does not mean that we have already found out everything there is to find out about it. Very many aspects are still unexplored, from biographical details and archive documents to analyses of the sources.
What is more, new technologies often make research from innovative perspectives possible, such as acoustic analyses of the music and of the historical acoustics in which the music was heard – even if the places in question have long since disappeared. An increasing number of sources of polyphony are also becoming available in digital form, which contributes both to the detailed study of the sources themselves and to their protection and conservation.
Josquin des Prez and the Early Modern Motet
Rethinking Mensural Notation: Composition, Transmission, and Performance
The Leuven Chansonnier and Fifteenth-Century Courtly Song
The House of Polyphony: International Centre of Excellence for the Valorization of Low Countries Musical Heritage
Séverin Cornet: Opera Omnia
Alamire Digital Lab
Authorship and Anonymity in Sixteenth-Century Music: The Case of the Alamire Manuscripts
The 'Alamire' Manuscripts in Partbook Format
Towards a typology of 'everyday polyphony': development of tools and strategy
Integrated Database for Early Music (IDEM)
Music and Theology in Reformation Germany: The Case of Leonhard Päminger
The partbook of Zeghere van Male (Cambrai, Médiathèque municipale MSS 125-8)
Een procesgerichte benadering van renaissancepolyfonie: temporaliteit en klankervaring als organisatieprincipes in de ricercars van Adriaan Willaert
Het meerstemmige religieuze muziekrepertoire uit Noord-Frankrijk van ca. 1370 tot ca. 1550 als normatief referentiepunt voor het ontstaan en de bloei van de renaissancepolyfonie
De Vlaamse Polyfonie: onderzoek naar mechanismen van opkomst, evolutie en verspreiding
Ars Nova - fragments from the Low Countries (fourteenth century)
Musical Life in the Low Countries
Music is not created in a vacuum; countless factors play a role in its creation. Not least of these are the ‘soundscapes’ of medieval and Renaissance cities, the institutions where music was taught and practiced, such as abbeys, collegiate churches and cathedrals, the organizations that promoted it, including guilds and confraternities, and the music collections where it has been – and still is – preserved. It is only by charting these and many other elements that we can reveal how thoroughly music is intertwined with its surrounding world.
The basse danse of Margaret of Austria
Salva nos, Domine: A study of chanted confraternity liturgies and their social contexts in the Southern Low Countries, 1300-1550
The study and edition of sixteenth century Renaissance polyphony from Flanders and French Flanders
Music and urban context in Flanders and neighbouring regions (ca. 1350 - 1797)
Kerkelijke muziekcollecties in Vlaanderen (ca. 1650 - ca. 1800)
An archival study of music in the Low Countries from the late Middle Ages to 1797
Music and Musical Life at the Collegiate Churches of the Low Countries
St Bavo's Church and musical life in Ghent in the sixteenth century
The study of music in the Low Countries in the Renaissance
Liturgy, music and musical life at the collegiate churches of Brussels and Cambrai
Accoustics
Cracking the codes of musical notation and converting them from image to sound is a complex process. Flemish polyphony is all too often unknown because the gulf between the source materials in which the compositions are stored and the musicians who are expected to transfer the music to their audiences is too wide.
Experience has shown that it is extremely difficult to fill this gap by solely applying traditional research and valorization methods. Conceived out of a fundamental concern for the preservation, accessibility, study, and valorization of our musical heritage, and to raise awareness of it in the fields of research, performance practice, education, and culture, the projects of the Alamire Foundation therefore deliberately and systematically include the development and use of high-technology.