Mission Statement

Early Musics Skills and Resources is an AMS Study Group which aims to coordinate and energize the study of musical practices from before around 1600 by focusing on the skills necessary to teach and undertake research into musics of the distant past. The term “Early Musics” signals a desire to embrace diverse musical traditions from around the globe, including hybrid practices that emerged from trans-continental, socio-cultural, and commercial movements and routes. Research into early musics continues to be vital, vitally important, and importantly challenging for the future. Members of this group share not only an interest in studying and teaching these musical traditions, but a commitment to facilitating the specialist training and interdisciplinary collaboration upon which so much successful work depends. 

By focusing on skills rather than output, the Study Group complements early music sessions at the national meeting of the AMS, creating space to discuss the “how” of early music research. Our goal is to facilitate knowledge of and access to extracurricular opportunities and to act as a central networking hub for scholars, teachers, students, and performers to develop further training opportunities.

Announcements

May ESMR Newsletter

The latest Study Group Newsletter is available here. If you have news that you would like to share about publications, awards, CFPs, job opportunities, etc., please let us know so that we can include these items in upcoming communications. You can email the officers at ams.srem@gmail.com.

This month, the newsletter covers the following topics:

• EMSR Updates
  • EMSR Advisory Board Elections  
• Announcements        
  • Plainsong and Medieval Music (PMMS) Reading Group (9 June, 17:00 BST)
  • Student applications for the DACT Otto Ege transcription project   
  • Call for papers: Certaldo conference, “Musica, Parola, Figura, Canto. Interdisciplinary Approaches”         
  • Medieval and Renaissance Music Conference, Program

Upcoming Deadlines:

Student applications for the DACT Otto Ege transcription project

Cataloging Otto F. Ege’s Liturgical Manuscript Fragments in the Cantus Database

With the support of a grant from the American Musicological Society’s Early Music Program Fund, the Digital Analysis of Chant Transmission (DACT) project seeks six students for work in Summer 2026 to catalog fragments from the collection of Otto F. Ege for the Cantus Database.

The American manuscript dealer Otto F. Ege (1888-1951) dismantled and sold hundreds of medieval manuscripts, profoundly shaping North American collections. A growing literature has traced Ege’s manuscript fragments, with particular attention to those included in his Fifty Original Leaves from Medieval Manuscripts (FOL) portfolios due to their systematic dissemination. In Summer 2026, DACT will assemble a team of six students to index fragments of the liturgical chant manuscripts represented in Ege’s FOL portfolios for the open-source Cantus Database (https://cantusdatabase.org), a resource essential to the study of Latin liturgical chant.

We invite graduate and upper-level undergraduate students currently studying at North American universities to apply for six short-term positions to help describe and inventory the liturgical fragments included in Ege’s FOL portfolios. These manuscripts can give valuable insights about historical musical practices, but only if their data are accessible.

Students will:

●  Become familiar with Otto F. Ege’s Fifty Original Leaves portfolios, which transmit a variety of book types, scribal conventions, and paleographic challenges

●  Contribute to one of the longest-running digital musicology projects

●  Create online publications in a database used by tens of thousands of people each year in a variety of fields

●  Become part of a network of chant scholars across the globe

●  Help bring to light chant sources in North America

●  Contribute to the understanding of historical music and music manuscripts

Previous experience with chant, Latin, and medieval liturgy is helpful, but not required. Students will be mentored by members of the DACT team. Each participant will receive an  honorarium of $500 (USD) for approximately 25-30 hours of work. Initial transcriptions and meetings with DACT mentors should be completed in Summer 2026. To apply for one of the positions, send a letter of interest with your affiliation, academic year, the name of a Faculty supervisor or a referee who can support your application, and a brief description of interest (maximum 200 words) by Friday, May 22, 2026 to  dact.fragments@gmail.com, copied to Fragments Team Lead Alison Altstatt (alison.altstatt@uni.edu), Project Manager Debra Lacoste (debra.lacoste@dal.ca), and Research Associate Anna de Bakker (anna.debakker@mcgill.ca)

MAA 2027 (Toronto)

The 102^nd Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America will take place in Toronto 15-17 April 2027. Submissions for sessions and individual papers are due 1 June 2026.

For additional information, please see https://www.medievalacademy.org/page/MAA2027.

Upcoming Events:

Plainsong and Medieval Music (PMMS) Reading Group (9 June, 17:00 BST)

The next session of the Plainsong and Medieval Music Society (PMMS) Reading Group will take place on the 9 June at 17:00 (BST). Prof. Elizabeth Eva Leach FBA will be talking about her recent book, Medieval Sex Lives: The Sounds of Courtly Intimacy on the Francophone Borders (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2023).

The Reading Group meets every two months to discuss new and upcoming work by members of the PMMS community. All are welcome, but participants must be members of the PMMS, and signing up in advance is required. If you are interested in taking part, please do join the society. Members also receive copies of the Plainsong & Medieval Music journal, as well as invitation to Society events and discount on Society publications. 

To sign up to attend this Reading Group session, please provide your details by filling out the form here. A joining link will be sent to your email address in due course.

Sipping From the Fire Hose: Finding and Managing Early Music Research Tools and Resources

The Early Musics Skills and Resources Study Group will host the following roundtable at AMS 2026 (online): Sipping From the Fire Hose: Finding and Managing Early Music Research Tools and Resources. The panelists bring expertise spanning music theory, manuscript studies, plainchant, polyphonic repertories, and digital humanities, and represent institutions across North America and Europe. Their collective endeavors encompass the development of searchable databases for theoretical treatises as well as repertorial and textual corpora, computational approaches to musical analysis, the digitization and cataloguing of medieval and Renaissance sources, and the integration of digital tools into graduate and undergraduate pedagogy. We look forward to a vibrant and productive discussion; we will provide details when they are available. 

Officers