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The Presence of the Past: bringing back to life Bosch's butt song

Amelia, a music major at Oklahoma Christian University recently discovered, while looking at The Garden of Earthly Delights, the triptych by Hieronymus Bosch, a partition written on the butt of one of the infernal characters. Amelia decided to transcribe the song based on her knowledge of Gregorian chants. She mentionned that she assumed the second line of the staff was C, since it is common for Gregorian chants for this era. She is still working on the transcription with musicology colleagues. http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/culture-lifestyle/140214/hierony... This research process seems to be directed towards what Taruskin calls either "authenticity", or "historical verisimilitude". The scholar is trying to recreate the music with her knowledge of standards from this era. The goal isn't performance here but more an attempt for restitution, to bring to life this part of the painting and give a soundtrack to the Hell part of the triptych. But other people decided to add their subjectivity of performers to this reconstituted music piece: on youtube, you can find a metal version of this song, where the guitar riffs of contemporary metal meet the the infernal atmosphere of the painting.

Course: 
Songs of Love and War: Gender, Crusade, Politics (Winter 2014)
Project type: