Scholarship and Biography
Karen Desmond is Professor of Music (tenured) at Brandeis University. She works on the manuscripts and notation of French and English polyphony in the later Middle Ages. Her research as a historical and digital musicologist delves into the aesthetics, theories, and technologies that underpinned medieval music-making
Desmond welcomes applications from prospective PhD students interested in working on any aspect of medieval music, music notation, or digital musicology.
Several of Desmond's publications explore the expansion of music notation systems during a period known as the “ars nova” or "new art." The music notation developed by ars nova theorists in the first half of the fourteenth century ushered in possibly the most significant change in the way in which musicians and composers in western Europe conceived musical compositions through the visual forms of music notation. Desmond's monograph on the ars nova, titled Music and the Moderni, 1300-1350: The Ars nova in Theory and Practice, won the 2019 Lewis Lockwood Award from the American Musicological Society, and was a finalist for the 2019 Wallace Berry Award from the Society for Music Theory. This book's research and writing was supported by an NEH Research Fellowship (2014), an SSHRC Banting Fellowship (2014-16). Other book projects include her translation of Lambert’s Ars musica, edited by Christian Meyer (Ashgate, 2015) and The Montpellier Codex: The Final Fascicle, a collection of essays co-edited with Catherine Bradley (The Boydell Press, 2018). Desmond was co-editor for two recent special issue journals: one on the fourteenth-century composer, Philippe de Vitry (in Early Music), and one on the fourteenth-century astronomer and music theorist, Jean des Murs (in Erudition and the Republic of Letters).
Her current research centers on the liturgical polyphony of late medieval England, and the Worcester Fragments more specifically. Her most recent publication in the Journal of the American Musicological Society ("W. de Wicumbe’s Rolls and Singing the Alleluya ca. 1250"), through an investigation of mid-thirteenth-century manuscript fragments, examines the connections and crossover between the plainchant Alleluya prosula, insular liturgical polyphony, and the motet.
Desmond is also a digital musicologist: her music encoding project "Measuring Polyphony" was awarded an NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant for the development of an online mensural music editor (2019-20). The "MP Editor" allows users to transcribe compositions in a style of medieval notation—called “mensural notation”—directly from digital images of the original manuscripts (available at https://editor.measuringpolyphony.org). Capitalizing on the availability of high-quality images via IIIF, the computer encodings transcribed by users of the MP Editor follow the community-based standards of the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI), and are linked directly to “zones” within the manuscripts, which allows for the simultaneous viewing of the image and its encoding in a web browser.
Desmond has a wide range of teaching and research experience at several different international institutions including the University of Cambridge (Visiting Fellow, Clare Hall and Visiting Scholar, Faculty of Music, Spring 2019), Harvard University (Visiting Assistant Professor, Spring 2018), McGill University (Banting Postdoctoral Fellow, 2014-2016), the University of Cologne (a postdoctoral researcher (2012-2013) on a DFG-funded project led by Prof. Dr. Frank Hentschel at the Institut für Musikwissenschaft), and University College Cork (Lecturer in Musicology, 2011-13). Her Ph.D. in musicology is from New York University (2009), and was supervised by Edward H. Roesner. Desmond served as chair of the American Musicological Society’s Board Committee on Technology from 2019-2022, and currently sits on the editorial boards of the Journal of Musicology and Early Music.