 | Professor Susan Rankin
Professor of Medieval Music, University of Cambridge; Fellow, Emmanuel College (H11) Western medieval music and its transmission and notation from the origins to the thirteenth century and the development of the Latin liturgy, with an especial focus on ritual
I was born in Belfast and attended the girl’s grammar school Victoria College Belfast (and, already then, was conscious of being at the same school as Helen Waddell). I learnt to play the piano, organ and cello: as cellist I played in the Youth Orchestra in Belfast and, in my teens, in the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain. In the NYO I had the chance to play under Boulez, and alongside Simon Rattle (a myth, even aged 16). I left Belfast aged 17 to study at Newnham College, Cambridge, where my Director of Studies was Mary Berry. As an undergraduate I played the cello endlessly, rather more than attending to academic studies; during this time also I learnt to play the bass viol, which became, alongside the baroque cello, the instrument which I continued to play into adult life. I became fascinated by the middle ages, as projected through lectures delivered by John Stevens. As a result of doing a dissertation on a trouvère poet, I continued into postgraduate work, undertaken at King’s College, London (for a Master’s) and then Cambridge again (for a PhD). By this time I had discovered Paris, and above all, the Bibliothèque nationale and its rich collection of medieval manuscripts. My years of doctoral study were more or less entirely transferred to life abroad, registered at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (IVe section). Through this combination of the Ecole Pratique, where I attended the semianrs of Michel Huglo and daily study of manuscripts at the library, I became completely absorbed in the study of medieval liturgy. Finally returning to Cambridge to complete the PhD, I was elected to a research fellowship at Emmanuel College; that developed into a college lectureship (during which I became a graduate tutor, admissions tutor, and Director of Music) and later I was appointed to a University Lectureship. Despite the constancy of my academic relation to Cambridge, my work has continued to be stimulated by contact with European scholars—since study of medieval chant and liturgy has been built into continental educational sturctures more fundamentally than in England. My publications have always centred around liturgy and its music, whether monophonic or polyphonic. The two main directions have been, on the one hand, ritual, and, on the other, sources and their notations. On ritual, I have studied liturgical drama, through types (especially French and English in the 10th-13th centuries), and through institutions (such as St Mark’s, Venice); and on sources, I have written extensively about Sankt Gallen (from the 9th-11th centuries) and Winchester. My passions (in scholarship) are medieval music, obviously - especially when well and beautifully sung; working with manuscript sources - holding them in your hands, reading them, trying to understand what they meant to those who made them; the sense of contact with an individual, a real person, who believed in things and cared about them many centuries ago (I work mainly on material of the 9th-11th centuries). Other passions include my family, and working with students. Becoming a fellow of the Academy is a mark of distinction for my family, friends, students, colleagues. I look forward to finding out what the Academy does, and to working with not only the music section but other medievalists, since interdisciplinary interaction is one of my greatest motivations in scholarship. |
