Biography
I am an Assistant Professor in Early Music and a Fellow of Clare Hall. My research centres on the music of medieval Europe, with a particular focus on song in France in the long thirteenth century, and combines historical musicology with music analysis, manuscript studies, critical theory and digital humanities. I am particularly interested in exploring what songs meant to medieval people—how composing, singing, listening to and writing down songs enabled medieval people to understand their place in the world. My current monograph project traces intersections between song and violence in thirteenth-century France, arguing that metaphors of violence provided poet-composers with a way to talk about musical acts and meaning. I have published on Old French song and fourteenth-century motets and in 2024 received the Roland Jackson award at the AMS for an article of exceptional merit in the field of music analysis.
Following a DPhil at the University of Oxford, I held teaching positions at New College, Oxford and the University of Bristol and postdoctoral fellowships at University College Dublin and New College, Oxford. I am active as an early music singer and organist and regularly lead workshops on singing early music from facsimile.
Publications
Peer-reviewed articles
Mason, Joseph W, ‘Extreme vocality and the boundaries of song in the medieval crusades’, Journal of Musicology 41/1 (2024): 73–114.
Mason, Joseph W., ‘Trouver et partir: The meaning of structure in trouvère song’, Early Music History 40 (2022), 207–251.
Mason, Joseph W., ‘Oral and written transmission in the early jeu-parti’, Music & Letters 103/3 (2022):
399–429.
Mason, Joseph W., ‘Newly discovered 14th-century polyphony in Oxford’, Early Music 49/2 (2021), 245–59.
Mason, Joseph W., ‘Structure and Process in the Old French jeu-parti’, Music Analysis 38/1–2 (2019), 47–79.
Mason, Joseph W., ‘Debatable Chivalry: A jeu-parti by the Duke of Brittany and its context’, Medium Ævum 87/2 (2018), 255–276.
Edited book
Leach, Elizabeth Eva, Joseph W. Mason, and Matthew P. Thomson (eds), A Medieval Songbook: Trouvère MS C (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2022).
Book chapters
Quinlan, Meghan P. and Joseph W. Mason, ‘Popular Culture: In Search of Lost Practices’, in Elizabeth Eva Leach and Helen Deeming (eds), The Bloomsbury Cultural History of Music in the Middle Ages (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023), ch. 6.
Mason, Joseph W, 'Jeux-partis and their contrafacts in C', in Elizabeth Eva Leach, Joseph W. Mason, and Matthew P. Thomson (eds), A Medieval Songbook: Trouvère MS C (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2022), ch. 10.
Teaching and Supervisions
Part IA: music history workshop (Josquin des Prez)
Part IB: troubadours and trouvères
Part II: medieval motets
MPhil: music and medieval manuscripts
I am available to supervise BA and MPhil projects on all aspects of music before 1400.
