Stefano Milonia works on medieval literature, music, and digital humanities. He is the Principal Investigator of the European Research Council-funded project Musica Franca at Sapienza University of Rome. He has held research and teaching positions at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Paris), the University of Warwick, the Scuola Superiore Meridionale in Naples, the University of Tübingen, and the American Academy in Rome. He was a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge and at McGill University.
How did your time at the Academy shape or shift the direction of your project so far?
The fellowship gave me the time and opportunity to closely study one of the most remarkable medieval musical manuscripts, the fourteenth-century French songbook, Vat. lat. 1490 of the Vatican Library. The materiality of medieval books tells us much more than their content alone, even today (perhaps especially) when digital libraries have deeply changed how medievalists approach sources in their daily work.
At the Academy, I was constantly negotiating between the material and the digital, as I worked to develop computational tools to analyse recurring musical segments in the more than 300 melodies of the songbook. Through close observation of the manuscript, I identified six musical copyists, whereas previously only one had been assumed. In my digital analysis, I was also able to isolate melodic traits recurring in a group of songs that could be ascribed to a particular copyist. This is significant because it shows that digital tools can help identify different agencies within a body of songs that at first glance appear homogeneous; more broadly, it suggests that some copyists consistently modified their models according to their musical training and habits. Although musicologists generally acknowledge that such processes occurred, they are usually considered part of a traditional layer that is difficult to identify in concrete terms. In my current and future research, I remain committed to pursuing this path and to exploring methodologies that may help disentangle, whenever possible, the layers of musical tradition that lead from the poet-composers to the manuscripts we can hold in our hands today.
What part of your daily routine or environment at the Academy most influenced you and your work?
Talking with such remarkable people at lunch and dinner changes one's routine quite radically. It is not something that happens every day. In my daily work, I value the time I can spend focusing on one, often very specific, topic: a song, a poetic line, a particular variant transmitted by a single manuscript. Once I stepped out of my studio or the library, and encountered the vast range of subjects others were working on—their art, their poetry, their research—which felt vertiginous, in the best sense. My world expanded daily during my time at the Academy.
I loved gathering on Mondays, when fellows present their "Shoptalks": the openness of a community that engages so attentively with one another's work, even when it lies far beyond their own field, is truly exceptional. During my stay, I felt constantly inspired by the people around me.
Did any encounters – with people, places, or new information – open up new paths in your research or practice in the past months?
The daily encounters with creative people, exploring their own paths to create something meaningful, were truly inspiring. While I continue to focus on academic papers, I think of them much more as part of a creative process. Focusing less on what a peer reviewer might spot, and more on what I can offer the reader after spending countless hours with medieval music and poetry has turned out to be not only more productive, but also more rewarding.
Meeting Chuna McIntire was probably the most significant encounter for me at the Academy. Having the chance to speak with a performer of traditional songs and dances transmitted entirely orally was extremely meaningful for someone whose research aims to re-envision the performances of troubadours before they were committed to writing and passed on into the songbooks we study today. However, conversations with Chuna—in which often I found myself a silent recipient—meant much more than drawing possible parallels with past musical cultures, the use of repetition, or the connection between words, melody, and the body. His explanations of aspects of Yu'pik culture, from the relationship with nature to the conceptualization of time, were as fascinating as they were illuminating, suggesting how poetry and music can find integration within an understanding of the world.
I should also mention others: Sean Mooney, an extraordinary singer, with whom it was extremely interesting to explore possible ways of performing medieval music; and David Keplinger, with whom I found not only a dear friend, but someone capable of speaking about poetry in the most natural and profound way.
Being immersed in such a creative community prompted me to reconsider the relationships between different domains of generative thought, and it has influenced how I approach literature, art, and how ideas emerge between people.