Kyrie Ekaterina Bouressa

I am a Ph.D. student working under Ichiro Fujinaga and Julie Cumming in the Music Technology & Musicology area of the Schulich School of Music, McGill University. My research interests are in writer identification and scribe attribution in medieval manuscripts, a computer vision task which seeks to utilise the information gleaned from the particular characteristics of a writer to identify their hand in other examples. Particularly I'm interested in script detection and scribal attribution as it extends to music manuscripts, which had not yet been studied in the field of historical writer identification.

Before my arrival at McGill I studied at the University of Texas under Luisa Nardini, collaborating on a research project on the Soundscapes of Naples, investigating a pair of tenth century literary manuscripts containing versions of Virgil's Aeneid, Ovid's Metamorphoses, and Servius' commentary on the Aeneid. I analysed the role that the added unheighted (adiastematic) neumes served in such literary manuscripts as insight into the pedagogical role of music in medieval education. Similarly, I indexed and cataloged a fifteenth-century Toledan manuscripts, containing a Mass for the Dead as a Fellow at the Harry Ransom Center.

The research I conducted for my Master's regarded the role textual community had around Þingeyrar Monastery in Northern Iceland, influencing the writing of the sagas with a focus on how the monks served as interlocutors between an oral storytelling tradition and their own written dramatic one, with performative markings in the margins potentially providing insight into how the monks interacted with and performed this largely oral tradition in a monastic context.

I am an upright bass player primarily, though I also play the hammered dulcimer, balalaika (prima and contrabass), merlin (lap guitar), and trombone. I've had the great fortune to perform as a principal bassist in several opera festivals, and recently have had the privilege of playing with the McGill University Baroque Orchestra's Fall 2023 and Winter 2024 performances. Some of my non-classical collaborations can be found on Spotify under "Cougar Roots Ensemble" or "Bayou City Ramblers".

• Bouressa, Kyrie. 2022. “Textual Community and Þingeyrar Abbey.” Master’s Thesis, Austin, Texas, United States of America: University of Texas at Austin.

• Bouressa, Kyrie. 2023. “Textual Community and Þingeyrar Abbey.” In Proceedings of the 58th International Conference of Medieval Studies. Kalamazoo MI, United States of America.

• Bouressa, Kyrie. 2023. "Unheightened neumes in two tenth century literary manuscripts at San Giovanni a Carbonara." In Soundscapes of Naples Naples, Italy.

• Bouressa, Kyrie. 2022. "Conducting Research at the Harry Ransom Center." In American Musicological Society: Early Music Study Group Archival Skills and Resources, New Orleans LA, United States of America.