Prof. em. Dr. Andreas Haug

E-mail: andreas.haug@uni-wuerzburg.de

Website: https://www.musikwissenschaft.uni-wuerzburg.de/team/haug-andreas-prof-dr/

Research Interests:

Pre-Modern Western Music History; Monophonic Music in the Middle Ages; Music and Religion in Late Antiquity; History of Musical Concepts

Biography

Andreas Haug is Professor Emeritus of Musicology at the University of Würzburg, where he held the Chair of Music in Pre-Modern Europe from 2008 through 2024. He received his Ph.D. in 1985 and his Habilitation in 1999, both from the University of Tübingen. He has published mainly on Western music and its intellectual and socio-political context from the 4th to the 13th centuries. He was founder and co-director of the Corpus monodicum, a long-term project of the Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature. He is a member of the European Academy and was fellow at Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften in Vienna and at the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures at the University of Hamburg.

Project Abstract

The Dark Ages of Rhythm in Western Music History (4th to 13th Century CE)

My project is part of a broader investigation into the long-term preconditions for the emergence of Western music. Western music can be seen as the result of an integration of pre-modern cultural techniques of sound into the modern system of fine arts. Within this system, music distinguishes itself from its sibling arts under the notions of Tonkunst and Zeitkunst. During my fellowship, I am re-examining an episode in Western music history that was precarious for the genesis of music as a 'temporal art': The almost one-thousand-year-long absence of any concrete indications of rhythm from musical composition, performance, and (once it had been invented) notation from the 4th to the 13th century CE in the Latin West. Music historians refer to the music of this period as 'non-mensural music', a term that makes the absence of the attribute whose historical loss it indicates seem less arresting than it actually is. The long dormancy of a component of music that had been discovered in ancient Greece, when it was released from its entanglement with melos and meter, and without which modern Western music would be inconceivable, subverts the notion of an alleged continuity between ancient Greek and modern Western music.

I want to approach the problem by advancing three propositions. First, it was the religious transformations of the Late Antiquity that led to the disruption of the rhythmic tradition in the Latin West. Second, during the absence of time intervals of measurable duration and perceptible limits, composers and performers cultivated a temporally coherent melodic syntax by imitating the temporal before-and-after relationships governing the verbal syntax of Latin prose and non-metrical verse. Third, the return of rhythm and its notation into musical composition and musical thought in the environments of the cathedral and university in 13th-century Paris came about without the gap in the transmission of the Greco-Roman concept of rhythm's being bridged or bypassed; it was a reinvention, not a rediscovery.