The Influence of the Middle Ages on Contemporary Composition

A Case Study

Abstract

This study investigates the influence of medieval music on the compositions of musicologist and medievalist Manuel Pedro Ferreira, comparing it with the role it played during the 1970s in the works of two composers from the previous generation, Jorge Peixinho and Constança Capdeville. It is established that, for them, medieval music served both as a fragmentary presence and as structural inspiration. The question is then raised as to whether, in more recent creations, the status of medieval elements in status has occurred. If such a change has taken place in Ferreira’s case, a second question arises: whether this change resulted from the author’s musicological identity, his artistic personality, or perhaps a shared aesthetic inclination; in which case, such a transformation could be symptomatic of something more significant in the history of recent music. An analysis of compositional processes, by typology of use, will gradually lead to the conclusion that there was indeed both continuity and change, but the latter is less connected to the author’s musicological skills, which emerged during the 1980s, than to his artistic and ideological stance, which dates back to the late 1970s and underpins his advocacy in the press, in the following years, in favour of musical postmodernism.