Colloquium: Prof Susan Rankin

Prof Susan Rankin (University of Cambridge)

‘capturing sound, designing notation, writing music’

Susan Rankin holds a personal chair in the University of Cambridge as ‘Professor of Medieval Music’. She was educated at the universities of Cambridge, King’s College London and Paris (École Pratique des Hautes Études, IVeme section). Her scholarly work engages with music of the middle ages through its sources and notations and through its place and meaning within ritual. Those ways in which music was exploited as an element within church ritual, and especially in dramatic ceremonies, have formed a long-term focus of study. A second focus has been the palaeography of musical sources copied at Sankt Gallen in the early middle ages. Most recently she has edited a facsimile of the early eleventh-century ‘Winchester Troper’ (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 473), demonstrating to what extent it is possible to transcribe the earliest European repertory of two-part polyphony. In Spring 2007 she gave the Lowe lectures at the University of Oxford entitled ‘Impressed on the Memory: Musical Sounds and Notations in the Ninth Century’, and this forms the basis of her current project while based at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. She was elected fellow of the British Academy in 2009.