Elisabeth Hufnagel Successfully Defends Her PhD Dissertation

3 November 2023

Photo: CSMC

Elisabeth Hufnagel has passed her viva voce examination, thus completing her PhD in Musicology.

Congratulations to Elisabeth Hufnagel, who defended her PhD dissertation on 2 November 2023! Her thesis on Musical Notation between Individualisation and Standardisation: Proportion Signs in the Manuscripts of the So-called Ars subtilior was supervised by Oliver Huck.

The dissertation is a study of so-called ‘proportion signs’, which were introduced by composers of polyphonic music in France and Italy in the late 14th and early 15th century in order to depict complex rhythms. Proportion signs, which can be symbols, Arabic numerals, or fractions thereof, appear in great variety and shape, not only in Ars subtilior music manuscripts but also in treatises on music from the same period. Even though these treatises were intended to help standardise musical notation (in addition to functioning as reference books for students in educational institutions), the use of proportion signs in Ars subtilior music remained highly individual, which manifests itself in the fact that the same proportion is sometimes represented by a number of different proportion signs in the same manuscript and occasionally even in the same piece. The dissertation compares all proportion signs used in Ars subtilior manuscripts, thus shedding light on practices of composers, theorists, students, and scribes in different Ars subtilior circles.