Karen Desmond

Associate Professor of Music

Departments/Programs

Medieval and Renaissance Studies
Music

Degrees

New York University, Ph.D.
New York University, M.A.
University College Cork, B.Mus.

Expertise

Medieval music and theory and its intellectual contexts; Music in England in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; the writings and music of Jehan des Murs, Philippe de Vitry, Jacobus and his Mirror of Music, Guillaume de Machaut; manuscripts, palaeography, codicology, notationl digital editions; digital musicology; digital humanities.

Profile

Karen Desmond is an Associate Professor of Music at Brandeis University, and works on the manuscripts and notation of French and English polyphony in the later Middle Ages. The materials she studies include music and theory manuscripts of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, archival documents, and a wide variety of primary and secondary sources that attest to the larger intellectual and institutional contexts in which music making happened during the later Middle Ages. Her publications center on the aesthetic and theoretical systems that underpinned medieval music composition. On a more general level, her work explores the use of theoretical models and tools from other disciplines or other times to investigate change and creativity in the arts.

Desmond welcomes applications from prospective PhD students interested in working on any aspect of medieval music, music notation, or digital musicology.

Desmond's first monograph, Music and the Moderni, 1300-1350: The Ars nova in Theory and Practice, won the 2019 Lewis Lockwood Award from the American Musicological Society, and was a finalist for the 2019 Wallace Berry Award from the Society for Music Theory. This book's research and writing was supported by an NEH Research Fellowship (2014), an SSHRC Banting Fellowship (2014-16). Other book projects include a translation of Lambert’s Ars musica, edited by Christian Meyer (Ashgate, 2015) and The Montpellier Codex: The Final Fascicle, a collection of essays co-edited with Catherine Bradley (The Boydell Press, 2018). Desmond was co-editor for two recent special issue journals: one on the fourteenth-century composer, Philippe de Vitry (in Early Music), and one on the fourteenth-century astronomer and music theorist, Jean des Murs (in Erudition and the Republic of Letters).

Desmond's planned second monograph, titled Breaking and Remaking: Polyphonic Liturgical Music in Medieval Worcester and Beyond, centers on the Worcester Fragments and the cycles of creativity, efflorescence, obsolescence, destruction, reuse, rediscovery and reconstruction that defined the performance and composition of English music during the Middle Ages, and its transmission and study since.

Desmond is also a digital musicologist: her music encoding project "Measuring Polyphony" was awarded an NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant for the development of an online mensural music editor (2019-20).

Desmond has a wide range of teaching and research experience at several different international institutions including the University of Cambridge (Visiting Fellow, Clare Hall and Visiting Scholar, Faculty of Music, Spring 2019), Harvard University (Visiting Assistant Professor, Spring 2018), McGill University (Banting Postdoctoral Fellow, 2014-2016), the University of Cologne (Postdoctoral researcher, 2012-2013), and University College Cork (Lecturer in Musicology, 2011-13). My Ph.D. in musicology is from New York University (2009), and was supervised by Edward H. Roesner. At present, she's chair of the American Musicological Society’s Board Committee on Technology (2019-2022), and sits on the Council of the American Musicological Society. She also sits on the editorial boards of Plainsong and Medieval Music and the Journal of Musicology.

Courses Taught

MUS	1a	Exploring Western Music
MUS	131a	History of Music I: Ancient through Early Baroque
MUS	135a	History of Music III: Romantic and 20th Century
MUS	180b	Proseminar in Digital Musicology
MUS	184b	Proseminar in Medieval Music
MUS	202b	Seminar in Seeing Sound: The History and Practice of Notation to c. 1500
MUS	212a	Seminar: Analyzing Early Music (1300-1600)
MUS	224b	Seminar in Medieval Music

Awards and Honors

2019 Lewis Lockwood Award for outstanding work of musicological scholarship (early stages), from the American Musicological Society (2019)

Scholarship

C. Philipp E. Nothaft, Karen Desmond & Matthieu Husson, ed. Erudition and the Republic of Letters: Jean des Murs's Quadrival Pursuits (Special Issue). Brill, 2019.

C. Philipp E. Nothaft, Karen Desmond & Matthieu Husson. "Introduction: Jean des Murs's Quadrival Pursuits." Erudition and the Republic of Letters 4. (2019): 1-12.

Desmond, Karen. "Jean des Murs and the Three libelli on Music in BnF lat. 7378A: A Preliminary Report." Erudition and the Republic of Letters 4. 1 (2019): 40-63.

Bradley and Karen Desmond. "Introduction." The Montpellier Codex: The Final Fascicle. Contents, Contexts, Chronologies.. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2018. 1-12.

Bradley, Catherine and Karen Desmond, ed. The Montpellier Codex:The Final Fascicle. Contents, Contexts, Chronologies.. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2018.

Desmond, Karen & Anna Zayaruznaya, ed. Early Music: Philippe de Vitry and the Ars nova (Special Issue). Oxford University Press, 46 2018.

Desmond, Karen & Anna Zayaruznaya. "Editorial: Philippe de Vitry and the Ars nova." Early Music 46 (2018): 373.

Desmond, Karen. "'One is the loneliest number . . .’: The Semibreve Stands Alone." Early Music 46. (2018): 403-416.

Desmond, Karen. "Notations." A Companion to Medieval Motets. Ed. Jared Hartt. Farnham: The Boydell Press, 2018. 103-130.

Desmond, Karen. "Review of Music and Culture in the Middle Ages and Beyond: Liturgy, Sources, Symbolism edited by (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2016)." Music & Letters vol. 99 2018: 278-281.

Desmond, Karen. "Texture, Rhythm, and Stylistic Groupings in Montpellier 8 Motets." The Montpellier Codex: The Final Fascicle. Contents, Contexts, Chronologies. Ed. Catherine A. Bradley and Karen Desmond. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2018. 139-160.

Desmond, Karen. Measuring Polyphony: Digital Editions of Late Medieval Music. <http://www.measuringpolyphony.org>.

Desmond, Karen. Music and the moderni, 1300-1350: The ars nova in Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Desmond, Karen. "Philippe de Vitry: Ars nova." Lexicon Musiktheorie. 2017.

Desmond, Karen. "Brittani in Ps.-Adalbolds Epistola cum tractatu de musica instrumentali humanaque ac mundana." ‚Nationes‘-Begriffe im mittelalterlichen Musikschrifttum Politische und regionale Gemeinschaftsnamen in musikbezogenen Quellen, 800-1400. Ed. Frank Hentschel. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2016. 239-246.

Desmond, Karen. "Katzenmusik in der Kirche: Elias Salomo über den Verfall der geistlichen Musik." ‚Nationes‘-Begriffe im mittelalterlichen Musikschrifttum Politische und regionale Gemeinschaftsnamen in musikbezogenen Quellen, 800-1400. Ed. Frank Hentschel. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2016. 197-203.

Desmond, Karen. "Regionalspezifische Aspekte von Rhythmus und Notation nach Anonymus IV: Angli." ‚Nationes‘-Begriffe im mittelalterlichen Musikschrifttum Politische und regionale Gemeinschaftsnamen in musikbezogenen Quellen, 800-1400. Ed. Frank Hentschel. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2016. 117-136.

Desmond, Karen. "The Monstrous New Art: Divided Forms in the Late Medieval Motet by Anna Zayaruznaya (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)." Early Music vol. 44 2016: 333-334.

Desmond, Karen. "The shapes and seams of French motets, c.1315-60." Rev. of The Monstrous New Art: Divided Forms in the Late Medieval Motet, by Anna Zayaruznaya. Early Music vol. 44 2016: 333-334.

Desmond, Karen. "Zur „englischen“ Prägung des Tonale secundum usum ecclesiarum Anglie et Francie des Amerus/Alvredus." ‚Nationes‘-Begriffe im mittelalterlichen Musikschrifttum Politische und regionale Gemeinschaftsnamen in musikbezogenen Quellen, 800-1400. Ed. Frank Hentschel. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2016. 77-88.

Desmond, Karen. "A Paradise of Priests: Singing the Civic and Episcopal Hagiography of Medieval Liège by Catherine Saucier (University of Rochester Press, 2014)." Early Music vol. 43 2015: 320-322.

Desmond, Karen. "Did Vitry Write an Ars vetus et nova?." Journal of Musicology 32. 4 (2015): 441-493.

Desmond, Karen. "The Art of Grafted Song: Citation and Allusion in the Age of Machaut by Yolanda Plumley (Oxford University Press, 2013)." Plainsong and Medieval Music vol. 24 2015: 99-103.

Meyer, Christian (ed.) and Karen Desmond (trans.). The Ars musica attributed to Magister Lambertus/Aristoteles. Trans. Karen Desmond. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015.

Desmond, Karen. "The Refrain and the Rise of the Vernacular in Medieval French Poetry by Jennifer Saltzstein (Boydell & Brewer, 2013)." Speculum vol. 89 2014: 824-6.

Desmond, Karen. "Refusal, the Look of Love, and The Beastly Woman of Machaut’s Balades 27 and 38." Early Music History 32. (2013): 71-118.

Desmond, Karen. "The Sense of Sound: Musical Meaning in France, 1260-1330 by Emma Dillon (Oxford University Press, 2012)." The Medieval Review 2013

Desmond, Karen. "Ars musica septentrionalis: De l’interprétation du patrimoine musical à l’historiographie, ed. Barbara Haggh and Frédéric Billiet (Presses de l’université Paris-Sorbonne, 2011)." Notes: Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association vol. 68 2012: 811-814.

Desmond, Karen. "Florentius de Faxolis: Book on Music, ed. and trans. Bonnie J. Blackburn and Leofranc Holford-Strevens (Harvard University Press, 2011)." Early Music vol. 40 2012: 687-688.

Desmond, Karen. "Texts in Play: The Ars nova and its Hypertexts." Musica disciplina 57. (2012): 81-153.

Desmond, Karen. Omni desideranti notitiam: A Music Theory Text from the Fourteenth Century. <http://www.arsmusicae.org>.

Desmond, Karen. "Behind the Mirror: Revealing the Contexts of Jacobus's Speculum musicae." Diss. New York University

Desmond, Karen. "New Light on Jacobus, Author of Speculum musicae." Plainsong and Medieval Music 9. (2000): 19-40.

Desmond, Karen. "Sicut in grammatica: Analogical Discourse in Chapter 15 of Guido’s Micrologu." Journal of Musicology 16. (1998): 467-493.