The present study investigated the relationship between memory for particular items (nouns embedded in sentences) varying in bizarreness and the spatial location in which they were learned. Consistent with earlier findings, the items embedded in bizarre sentences were better recalled than those embedded in common sentences. This mnemonic advantage for bizarre sentences did not extend to memory for source (spatial location), which did not reliably vary as a function of bizarreness. This pattern is inconsistent with several existing theoretical formulations of the relation between item and source encoding and related findings. We propose a theoretical possibility for integrating these varied findings. Finally, the expectation-violation explanation of the bizarreness effect was not supported by the absence of a relation between recall of the items and memory for context.
In the mid-fourteenth century the Black Death inflicted one of the most devastating losses of life in human history. This was met by exercises of collective piety such as the singing of psalms and the celebration of special votive masses, which encouraged social cohesion in the face of the tragedy. This article presents results from an analysis of fifty-seven manuscripts containing copies of the monophonic ‘Recordare domine’ Mass, reportedly created at the behest of Clement VI at Avignon during his Black Death-spanning pontificate. Of these, seven manuscripts contain fully notated renditions of each of the chants for the Mass Propers, enabling us to decouple questions concerning the organisation and transmission of the melodies from those of the texts set to them. When the different versions of the Mass are compared, two major findings emerge. First, differential patterns of consistency within the texts and melodies suggest that the texts of the ‘Recordare domine’ Mass may have circulated separately from the melodies set to them, with the choice of music left to the discretion of the local performing clergy. Second, the patterns of variation between different versions of the Proper texts and melodies allow us to see how a variety of composition strategies (including mnemonic processes) were used to create new music for the mass. The ‘Recordare domine’ Mass thus sheds light not only on the performance of organised sacred music at a pivotal point in European history, but also more generally on the processes of chant composition as a tool for use in response to social stress.
One of the greatest scourges of the later medieval period was plague. While there is a considerable scholarly literature tracing the impact of the dread disease on literature and art, the impermanence of performance has rendered the extension of such studies to the field of music problematic. These problems are to some extent surmountable in studying the fifteenth-century hymn Stella celi extirpavit, a Marian invocation unequivocally phrased as a plea for deliverance from illness. In this essay, it is proposed that the Stella celi is representative of the beliefs and skills shared by a broad spectrum of late medieval society in the shadow of the plague. Analysis of musical and textual features, and the contexts of performance, further suggest links with the artistic and intellectual concerns of the Franciscan Order, which may have thus enabled otherwise ephemeral music to be preserved as an enduring response to epidemic calamity.
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