January 12, 2024 | 3:30PM
Fulton Recital Hall, Goodspeed Hall, 4th floor
“To grasp the wind” (ut ventum teneat)
Calvin M. Bower
Professor emeritus, University of Notre Dame
Bower will speak to the limitations of knowledge we face when dealing with the actual sounds of music within Western culture just before the turn of the second millennium. His paper will be centered around the Liber hymnorum of Notker Balbulus of St. Gall (†912), the edition of which Bower edited and published in 2016. Musical performances of four ‘sequences’ from Notker’s work will be featured, and the linguistic and musical principles governing choices made in the performance will be addressed. The ‘mirrors’ of Latin linguistic features, musical pitch collections, challenges of musical memory, and the rise of musical notation will be addressed. Some tentative answers to skeptics (like Bower) may be posed.
About Calvin M. Bower
Bower has devoted a career covering more than six decades to the study of medieval music theory, medieval musical practices, medieval musical repertoires, and music within medieval liturgical practices. His teaching career began at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (1963-1969), after which he taught for a dozen years at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. In 1981 he moved to the University of Notre Dame where he taught in the Department of Music and the Medieval Institute, retiring in 2006. From 1988 he began working with scholars at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, Munich, where he continued his research until 2016. He and his colleague Michael Bernhard (Munich) edited four volumes of glosses on Boethius’ De institutione musica (Glossa Maior in institutionem musicam Boethii, 1993-2011), and he served as one of the principal contributors to the Lexicon musicum Latinum, 1992-2016). Bower has also, from time to time, taught the History of Medieval Theory at the University of Chicago.