Árni Heimir - Melódía, The Manuscript

The Manuscript “Melódía” and foreign music in Iceland in the 16th and 17th centuries

The Icelandic music manuscript known as “Melódía” contains 223 songs and is the most important source for music in Iceland in the seventeenth century. The manuscript’s heading suggests that its contents are foreign songs, but their origins have largely been shrouded in mystery. In recent years, it has been discovered that many of them derive from printed songbooks from continental Europe, mostly Germany and France. In the lecture, Árni Heimir Ingólfsson will discuss the manuscript and his research on it. He will focus on a new discovery regarding a song that turns out to be a motet by one of the most renowned Netherlandish composers in the mid-sixteenth century.

 

Árni Heimir Ingólfsson is a musicologist and artistic advisor at the Iceland Symphony Orchestra. He has written four books on music, all of which have been widely praised. His most recent book, on Icelandic music manuscripts from 1100–1800, was nominated for the Hagthenkir Book award; he has twice received the Icelandic Music Award and twice been nominated for the Icelandic Book Award. Árni Heimir completed his PhD in historical musicology at Harvard University and has held the positions of Associate Professor and later Visiting Professor at the Iceland University of the Arts. He has been Visiting Scholar at Oxford and Boston Universities,

and has lectured widely on music, including in the United States, Great Britain, Sweden, Switzerland, and Japan. He was a Visiting Fellow at Yale University during the 2019–20 academic year.