Livingstone Undergraduate Research Award in Creative Works and Media Production
Livingstone Undergraduate Research Award in Creative Works and Media Production
Caterina Manfrin
Flute Treatises of the 18th and 19th centuries: A Study on the Evolution of the Pedagogical Practices of Ornamentation
View Caterina’s project online
I studied flute treatises from the 18th to 19th centuries to analyze the evolution of ornamentation pedagogy. A tradition now lost today, ornamentation was once part of daily practice and routine for musicians. By studying these treatises, I was able to track how each ornamental figure was taught, and how it slowly faded out of use. My hope is that through this research project modern musicians can discover true and historically accurate ornamentation techniques in order to better understand and interpret music from the time period.
What is your major and expected year of graduation?
I am a third year Flute Performance Major and will graduate in the spring of 2026.
What inspired you to pursue your project?
This project first started out as a “Final Research Project” for my Music History class. We started the research a little before mid-semester, and I soon discovered that I was interested in taking this research further than a class assignment. After discovering several flute treatises, I continued to look for more and more, and in each one, I discovered different teaching styles, techniques and opinions on ornamentation. My curiosity naturally increased which pushed me to pursue a bigger individual research project.
How did the Libraries support your research?
I was able to check out a lot of physical copies of treatises from Temple’s Charles Library, as well as academic books on the topic. However, some treatises were available only at other university libraries, by which I used EZBorrow, and was able to obtain these physical copies in as little as 32 hours. Having access to a lot of online databases through the Temple Library was extremely useful as well, I had access to a plethora of secondary sources that aided in my contextualization of my project. Through these databases I found scholarly articles, dissertations, and English translations of foreign language texts.
Caterina already struck me as a budding historian during a sophomore-year survey. As a junior, she took a writing-intensive history course and chose to write a term paper on melodic ornamentation in flute music and pedagogy during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This is an especially rich topic, so it would have been reasonable for Caterina to confine herself to one or two of the most important primary sources. Instead, she examined more than a half dozen of them. Her wide-ranging study offers lucid descriptions of various ornamental practices ca. 1700–1850, traces both continuities and discontinuities among them, and makes a compelling case for their relevance to present-day musicians. Caterina is a curious and tenacious researcher, and here she displays an uncommon ability to synthesize and interpret complex material.
-Steven D. Zohn, Professor, Music Studies, Boyer College of Music and Dance
This category covers research which culminates in a creative or multimedia work in areas such as Visual Arts, Music, Dance, Theater, or Media Production.
This award is generously sponsored by John H. Livingstone, SBM ’49.