Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1958, Frank Harrison noted that [Pre-Tudor] examples of secular music are few and of minor importance, and I have not dealt with them here. Nothing identifiable as minstrel music has survived, and the history of minstrelsy belongs to the study of social life and customs rather than of actual music. The history of musical instruments other than the organ is in much the same case, for there is no evidence that any instruments but the organ were normally played in church, and the musical remains are restricted to a small group of instrumental dances. Thus secular music was dismissed from the authoritative work on music in medieval Britain. One can hardly blame Harrison, for surviving examples of medieval English secular music are not only few in number, but so enigmatic that the precise problems are elusive, let alone the solutions. Some intriguing questions are raised by his remarks, nevertheless. It may be true that ‘nothing identifiable as minstrel music has survived’, but it is also true that we should probably not recognise a piece of minstrel music if we saw it. For this reason the surviving examples of secular music, few and enigmatic as they are, become of prime importance to any study of minstrelsy. Could any of these survivals be minstrels’ music? – and, if so, could the minstrels have read the written music or performed from it? Harrison also restricted himself to English sources, a pragmatic if rather limiting decision. At the time he wrote, it was sensible not to rely on continental evidence, because it was by no means clear that such evidence would be relevant to English music. Sixty years on, it is certain that the British Isles were not culturally isolated from the continent of Europe, and that minstrel practices in England and Scotland were likely to be influenced by those in continental Europe. There were opportunities for exchange of information during the visits of continental nobles to the English Court, and in the travels of the English abroad. As we have seen, some foreign minstrels remained in Court for weeks or even months at a time, and we should expect them to share their repertories and methods with their English colleagues, and vice versa . That was, after all, the purpose of the minstrel schools, to which English minstrels travelled.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.025 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".