CESTA Seminar Series with the Josquin Music Project - Jesse Rodin, Craig Sapp, and Christina Ding
Abstract:
Millions of musical notes, sprinkled among Renaissance manuscripts, are ripe for digital analysis. These notes—and their interactions with each other—are notoriously hard to control: without years of close study, how can one know if a given melodic idea is rare or commonplace, a given rhythm mysterious or mundane?
Our presentation introduces the Josquin Research Project (JRP, josquin.stanford.edu), a tool for exploring a central repertory of Renaissance music. We show what the project can do, how it is being used by a diverse constituency, and how humanities research of this kind can profitably change our engagement with large data sets.
About the Researchers:
Jesse Rodin, Director of the Josquin Research Project and Associate Professor of Music at Stanford, strives to make contact with lived musical experiences of the distant past. Rodin directs Cut Circle (cutcircle.org), a renowned vocal ensemble that brings Renaissance music close. A passionate teacher, he has led seminars, workshops, and masterclasses internationally. At Stanford he co-teaches “Food, Text, Music: A Multidisciplinary Lab on the Art of Feasting,” in which students explore historical sources, perform poetry and music, and cook medieval recipes. Rodin’s work has received wide recognition, including a recent fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation.
Craig Stuart Sapp, Technical Director of the JRP, is Adjunct Professor of Music and a researcher at the Center for Computer Assisted Research in Humanities at Stanford University. He teaches classes in digital representations of music and computational music analysis (Music 253 & 254). Other digital music projects he is working on are the NEH-funded Tasso in Music Project (tassomusic.org), the Stanford Piano Roll Project, and a digital edition of Chopin’s music with the Fryderyk Chopin Institute in Warsaw, Poland.
Christina Ding is a sophomore majoring in Computer Science and minoring in East Asian Studies. Christina is currently working on the JRP as an undergraduate research intern through CESTA. She has a background in music performance and composition. Since coming to Stanford she has been interested in studying the intersections between tech and music. On campus she is also involved in research within the CS department, as well as with student groups like the Stanford Symphony and Girls Teaching Girls to Code.
Lunch will be served.