đź“… Date: Friday, November 6, 2026
đź•’ Start Time: 4:00 PM
đź“Ť Location: Harkness Chapel, Classroom
đź‘Ą Who: Free | Open to the public
About The Series
Our weekly Friday colloquia showcase current research by distinguished visiting scholars alongside our own faculty and graduate students in musicology, historical performance practice, and music education. A brief reception follows each talk to keep the conversation going. All are welcome!
About The Talk
“Hidden Symmetries and Motivic Tiling in Renaissance Song from Binchois to Bourgeois”
Abstract: Since Guillaume de Machaut’s Ma fin e mon commencement, composers have demonstrated their fascination with motivic transformations, especially in the form retrograde canons. This paper identifies previously unrecognized symmetrical patterns in music from ca. 1400-1550. These include mirror image motives in counterpoint, melodic palindromes, and motives elided to their own retrograde-inversion, and extended passages whose melodies create consonant counterpoint against their retrograde, inversion, or retrograde-inversion, and sometimes all versions simultaneously, like contrapuntal magic squares. Based on observations by scholars of Burgundian architectural ornaments and symmetrical tiling, I enlist the vocabulary of geometry to consider how such passages were crafted.
By tracing the evolution of these passages through several generations of composers—from Gilles Binchois to Johannes Ockeghem, and then to Loyset Compère, Josquin Desprez, and Antoine Brumel—I argue that these patterns played a foundational role in the development of systematic pervasive imitation of sixteenth-century counterpoint and continued to inform the stock melodic vocabulary of songs and hymns well beyond the Renaissance.
About The Speaker
Adam Knight Gilbert, musicology, recorder and historical double reeds, is one of the premier international players of the Renaissance shawm. He grew up in Columbia, South Carolina. The first graduate of the Early Music program at the Mannes College of Music in New York City, he has performed as a member of New York’s Ensemble for Early Music, the Waverly Consort and Piffaro, the Renaissance Band. He has appeared with ensembles such as Calliope, ARTEK, New York Cornet and Sackbut Ensemble, The Court Dance Company of New York, the Folger Consort, Concert Royal, The Bach Ensemble, Chatham Baroque, Newberry Consort, Canto (Colombia) and La Caccia Alta (Belgium) among others. He is also a founding member of ensemble Ciaramella, which performs concerts of fifteenth-century music in the U.S., Israel, and Belgium, and has recorded on the Naxos label.
Gilbert studied recorder at Rotterdams Conservatorium and studied in Leuven, Belgium from 1998 to 2000 as a recipient of the Fulbright and Belgian American Education Foundation Grants working on his dissertation “Elaboration in Heinrich Isaac’s Three-Voice Mass Sections and Untexted Compositions.” He completed his Ph.D. at Case Western Reserve University in 2003 and taught for two years as a visiting assistant professor at Stanford University. Gilbert can be heard on Dorian, Deutsche Grammophon’s Archiv, Passacaille, Musica Americana and Lyrichord labels. His research specialties include allusion in fifteenth-century song and Mass, pastourelles and their symbolism, improvisation, compositional processes and embellishment from 1400–1700. He lectures, gives master classes internationally and is an adjunct faculty of Tilburg Conservatorium in Holland.
Venue Information
Harkness Classroom, located inside Harkness Chapel, serves as both a lecture hall for large classes and a backstage area during events. It is also the meeting location for the CWRU Music Colloquium Series.
Health + Safety
The health and well-being of our community is important to us as we gather for campus events. University Health and Counseling Services provides up-to-date guidance and resources to help support a safe campus experience. For life-threatening emergencies, please call CWRU Public Safety immediately at 216.368.3333.