Dr Emily A Wride

My research interests broadly span the use and understanding of medieval music and its notation. In this vein, I am currently working as a Research Associate on Giovanni Varelli’s ERC starting grant ‘Scribes of Musical Cultures. Decoding Early Technologies of Music Writing in Latin Europe c. 900–1100’ (SCRIBEMUS) hosted at the University of Pavia.

Rooted in the Old Hispanic Liturgy, my previous PhD research at the University of Bristol examined a medieval manuscript associated with 12th- to 13th-century Toledo (Toledo, Cathedral Archive, MS 35.4). In this project I explored the palaeographical and codicological characteristics of the manuscript, looking especially at the morphology of musical shapes (neumes) and their conceptualisation across the extant Old Hispanic sources (with a focus on horizontal Old Hispanic notation). I also examined how music and musical formulas were used within chants in T35.4. Through this work I was better able to situate this little studied manuscript within the broader context of Toledo and of the Iberian peninsula in the medieval period. 

In additional projects, I have also worked on developing methodologies for identifying scribes in neumatic notations and the implications of scribal styles and musical dialects in the Old Hispanic corpus with Prof. Emma Hornby and Marcus Jones, interrogated the motivations behind writing music in a project with Prof. Rebecca Maloy, and considered how the processionals of Syon Abbey inform us about female agency in the medieval period.