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Albiero, Laura (CNRS, Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes) – Ignesti, Alessandra (University of Oslo)

https://www.irht.cnrs.fr/fr/annuaire/albiero-laura

https://www.hf.uio.no/imv/english/people/aca/temporary/alessaig/

Submersus iacet: Benedicamus Domino Melodies and Tropes in the Patriarchate of Aquileia

One of the most important and influential liturgical traditions of the Western Church flou­rished within the Patriarchate of Aquileia, a transcultural metropolitan province extending from eastern territories in Istria and Slovenia to the borders with the ecclesiastical provinces of Ravenna, Milan, Chur, and Salzburg. The suppression of the Aquileian rite caused the loss of its associated chant repertoire, yet remnants resurface in a few compositions, texts, and melod­ic variants that have been highlighted in previous scholarship (Cattin, Petrobelli, Pres­sacco, Rusconi, Vildera). Concurrently, the prolonged exposure of the territory of the Patri­archate to Central European influences resulted in the creation of a layered and diverse chant corpus. An example is the well-known Benedicamus Domino Easter trope Submersus iacet Pharao, unique to Cividale, the so-called ‘canto ongaro’ whose composition was allegedly at­tri­buted to Hungarian patriarch Bertold of Andechs. This lecture aims to map the chant land­scape of the Patriarchate through the lens of a liturgical component that allowed for special mu­sical creativity and license: the Benedicamus Domino versicle and its tropes. Preliminary analysis of untroped Benedicamus melodies attested in sources from the main centres of the Patriarchate points to a connection with the German-speaking lands. A tradition of Benedi­camus tropes, by contrast, appears more isolated and variable, with an unparalleled penchant for Benedicamus tropes in Cividale. Assembling a representative corpus, this lecture traces concordances with neighbouring territories, highlighting musical transformations and variants to assess the interactions between Aquileian, Roman, and Germanic traditions.

 

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Alís Raurich, Cristina (Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg / Instituto Complutense de Ciencias Musicales, Spain)

https://cristinaraurich.cat/

A Newly Discovered Early Thirteenth-Century Gradual-Troper-Sequentiary from Southern France: The Saint Maur Manuscript 

In 2014 an early thirteenth century manuscript with Aquitanian notation was discovered in a private collection: the Saint Maur Gradual-Troper-Sequentiary. The discovery and subsequent study of this source reveal that it is a key piece among southern French manuscripts in terms of contents, notation and the cult for Saint Maur. Given the lack of complete or almost com­plete graduals in Aquitanian notation from thirteenth-century southern France, the Saint Maur manuscript stands as a unique example of its kind. The only graduals with similar character­istics are Salamanca, Archivo y Biblioteca de la Universidad 2637 and Toledo, Archivo y Biblioteca Capitulares de la Catedral 35.10, both from the Iberian Peninsula. Among the high­lights of the troper-sequentiary are nine unica: one Regnum prosula, a fragment of an Agnus Dei trope, a sequence for Saint Maur, and two remarkable sets of responsory tropes for Christ­mas and Epiphany, which are rare examples of late twelfth and early thirteenth-century re­spon­­sory trope creation in southern France. The identification of the cult of Saint Maur in a southern French manuscript is an unusual finding. While it was previously assumed, based on John Wickstrom’s research, that Maurus was not venerated in southern France, the manuscript offers clear indications (two sets of mass chants, a Regnum prosula and a sequence) of such a cult of the saint and a feast day dedicated to him fixed in the calendar. The manuscript’s con­tents and its association with the cult to Saint Maur prompt a series of questions about the place this source was used and its relationship with other religious centres in southern France. This lecture offers an overview of the manuscript’s contents, its implications for provenance, and its relationship with other manuscripts.

 

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Andrés Fernández, David (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) - Ruiz Torres, Santiago (Universidad de Salamanca)

https://www.ucm.es/dep-musicologia/david-andres-fernandez

https://produccioncientifica.usal.es/investigadores/57926/detalle

The Rhymed Office for Saint Raymond of Roda: Poetry and Veneration in Medieval Aragon   

Roda de Isabena, located in the central Pyrenees, was the oldest of the Aragonese cathedrals. As a result of political interests derived from the Christian conquest, this church was the suf­fragan of three archbishoprics—Narbonne, Tarragona and Zaragoza—and got to share its chair with two cathedral churches: Barbastro and Lérida. Raymond, a cleric arrived from the Languedoc region, was bishop of Roda-Barbastro between 1104 and 1126. He was the most important bishop in this area and time, and had territorial conflicts with both royal and eccle­siastical authorities. Nonetheless, his cult was adopted in the region right after his death, on 21 June 1126, and he was canonised in the following years. A few music manuscripts have survived from the cathedral of Roda, but only one, the so-called Breviary of Roda or Psalter of St. Raymond, from 1191, transmits an exclusive rhymed office for this bishop as well as his vita, a psalter and a hymnary. This lecture will introduce the rhymed office, within an historical-liturgical context, together with an exploration of both texts and melodies. Additio­nally it will show the circulation of its chants and cult through later manuscripts.

 

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Atkinson, Charles M. (The Ohio State University / Universität Würzburg)

https://music.osu.edu/people/atkinson.5

“Wrong-Way Corrigan?” Or just a little off-course? The Alia musica´s Expositor and the Modes

The Principal Author of the Alia musica, the Expositor, has been referred to as the “Wrong-Way Corrigan” of medieval music history. As opposed to Boethius, the Expositor segmented the Greater Perfect System from the lowest pitch to the highest, thereby yielding octave spe­cies that were upside-down in relation to those of his fifth/sixth-century predecessor. As a result, he charted a course that earned him the epithet applied to the 20th-century aviator who ostensibly was planning to fly to California, but landed in Dublin instead. But does the Ex­po­si­tor really deserve a reputation equivalent to that of “the worst navigator in aviation history?”  

In this lecture I shall argue that the Expositor’s course was a logical one and that it is con­sistent within itself. I shall demonstrate that the Expositor did understand Boethius, and that he drew upon his own understanding of the species/modes in order to situate the proportional and mu­si­cal analyses of the ecclesiastical toni in his source treatise within a venerable mathe­matical and musical tradition. When he makes statements such as “the lichanos hypaton [D] of the Hypodorian is the proslambanomenos [D] of the Dorian” it is clear that the Expositor had Boethius’s wing diagram before him, and that he understood it. It is also clear that he un­der­stood the distinction between the modi of Boethius and the toni of plainchant, and could apply the former in explication of the latter. These and other factors lead me to conclude that the Ex­positor was on course after all.

 

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Ball, Nicholas David Yardley (University of Oslo)

https://www.hf.uio.no/imv/english/people/aca/temporary/ndball/

The Written Tradition of Monophonic Untroped Benedicamus Domino Chants

While the versicle, Benedicamus Domino, and its response, Deo gratias, were sung daily at the conclusion of several of the Office hours and at the conclusion of Mass in penitential sea­sons, the melodies to which these texts were sung have been studied only in part. Skeleton catalogues have been published by Barbara Marian Barclay (1977) and Michel Huglo (1982), with further material included in the Ite missa est catalogue produced by William F. Eifrig and Andreas Pfisterer (2006). There is however no comprehensive study of the Benedicamus Domino chant melodies of the kind that exists for the chants of the Mass Ordinary.

This lecture reveals the first results of such a study. Drawing material from more than 100 manu­scripts dating from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries, which together include more than 1300 chant items, this lecture sheds new light on the Benedicamus Domino chant tradi­tion, tracing its historical and geographical contours with selected case studies. It addresses the fol­lowing questions:

1) Is there a core melodic tradition or traditions for the Benedicamus Domino, shared within or between different institutions and religious organizations or across particular geographical areas?

2) What happens beyond the limits of any core tradition, and how do apparently new or loca­lized traditions change at different times and in different places?

3) How widespread a practice was that revealed by Anne Walters Robertson (1988), whereby Benedicamus Domino chant melodies were borrowed from elsewhere in the chant repertory, and did such a practice ever become systematic?

 

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Batoff, Melanie (Luther College, Iowa)

https://www.luther.edu/faculty/melanie-batoff

The Visitatio sepulchri: The Platypus of Medieval Liturgical Rites?

Since the late nineteenth century, when German scholars had unearthed scarcely more than a handful of Visitatio sepulchri rites in medieval manuscripts, they began to categorize them earnestly. These scholars were likely inspired by the zeal of early naturalists, who created taxonomies of flora and fauna. However, unlike the naturalists, who reevaluated their already nuanced taxonomies when they encountered baffling Australian species such as the platypus, generations of scholars of the Visitatio sepulchri have continued to use overly simplistic cate­gorization systems. These single-criterion systems have persisted even as the repertory has burgeoned to over seven-hundred extant Visitationes and as the astounding degree of varia­bility that Visitationes exhibit has come to light.

This lecture will demonstrate that, to some extent, medieval Christians felt at liberty to shape the Visitationes within their communities in their choices of chants and performance aspects, perhaps more so than with any other liturgical rite. However, our rigid categorization systems, which are based on simplistic dichotomies (i.e., the Visitatio is either this or that) create an illusion that Visitationes are more systematic and unified than they are. I will argue that Visi­ta­tiones need to be studied holistically by considering multiple criteria (i.e., performance aspects, chants, and textual sources), and by conceptualizing the relationships among Visitati­ones as a continuum rather than as a dichotomy. This change in methodology helps to show which versions of the Visitatio are related in meaningful ways, and in doing so, brings to light what I will argue are the two greatest influences on the compositional designs of the Visitatio sepulchri: the early liturgical usages of the Quem queritis in sepulchro dialogue (the Marys and angels’ dialogue) and the manner in which religious communities shaped the Visitatio to suit their needs and musical preferences. 

 

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Bleisch, Nicholas (KU Leuven)

https://trismegistos.academia.edu/NicholasBleisch

Juliana of Mont-Cornillon and the Premonstratensians: the Reception of the Early Corpus Christi Feast as Seen through its Late Variants

The earliest version of the Office for the Feast of Corpus Christi has been definitively associated with the activity of Juliana of Mont-Cornillon, prioress and mystic. The text and music of this office came to be replaced by another version, associated with Thomas Aquinas and effectively promulgated as a universal celebration under John XXII in 1317. The persistence of further, unrelated versions of the office as well as variant and hybrid combinations of the two have raised the question of what intermediate versions of the Office existed in the thirteenth century. Juliana’s later connection with the Cistercian order in particular has resulted in recent debate over whether Cistercian versions of the Office reflect adherence to the early Office, or later revisions of Aquinas’ version. 

This lecture reconsiders the reception of the feast in the Cistercian Order by comparing divergences attested in Premonstratensian sources and commonalities in the sequence of chants between orders. The Premonstratensians, due to their early resistance to Juliana’s efforts, largely adopted only the later, Thomistic version of the Corpus Christi Office. However, Premonstratensian sources frequently reveal influence from localized versions of both Mass and Office, often due to the purchase of liturgical books for cathedral use, as for example in the well-known Strahov Antiphoner, whose origin at Esztergom Cathedral has been established by Szendrei Janka and Dobszay László. Variants in sources from closer to Liège also demonstrate that the early manuscripts now canonized by modern editions of the office may not tell the whole story. Where Premonstratensian and Cistercian sources agree in multiple instances, we may infer the existence of a common point of origin, an early office that had already spread before the imposition of the regularized 1317 version of Thomas’ office.

 

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Boudeau, Océane (CESEM, Universidade Nova de Lisboa)

Obtained a M.A. in musicology at the University of Tours (dissertation devoted to the ron­deaux by Guillaume de Machaut, 2000); doctorate under the supervision of Marie-Noël Co­lette at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (2013), on the Office of the Circumcision of Sens (MS. 46 of the Mediathèque municipale). Starting in 2015, she has been a Research Fellow of CESEM (Universidade Nova de Lisboa). Her research project is devoted to litur­gical music noted in Portuguese sources as well as to networks for the creation and dis­semination of plainsong repertoires within the Iberian Peninsula.

The Musical Manuscripts from the Hieronymite Monastery of Belém

This project came about following an informal talk with Prof. Manuel Pedro Ferreira, who in­formed me of the presence of choirbooks from the Hieronymite monastery of Santa Maria de Belém in Lisbon. These manuscripts had in fact been identified in the collections of the Bibli­o­teca Nacional de Portugal and the Free Library of Philadelphia (USA). The project last­ed twenty-four months (2022–2023) and brought together a team of nineteen researchers and two consultants. In addition to the manuscript choirbooks, the corpus also included two print­ed Hieronymite liturgical books: a missal and a breviary. 

The primary aim of the project was to make the images of the manuscripts accessible, to pro­vide a description of each of the books and, more generally, to broaden our knowledge of the Hieronymite liturgy. However, it soon became apparent that not all the manuscripts had been copied for the Belém monastery, and that research into the place of use was necessary. The connections with Roman-Franciscan and Toledan traditions were also explored to gain a more precise view of the uniqueness, or not, of the Hieronymite tradition. The project’s achieve­ments have been many and varied, with a strong emphasis on events aimed at the general pub­lic. An exhibition of Hieronymite manuscripts was organised at the Biblioteca Nacional de Por­tu­gal, together with an inaugural concert.

 

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Brewer, Charles E. (Florida State University, retired)

https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/ViewContributor/document/obo-9780199757824/obo-9780199757824-0276.xml?id=con10391

The Lyrics of Bartłomiej z Jasła in the Context of Late Medieval Latin Song

Bartłomiej z Jasła (c.1360-1407) left his native Poland to study at the University of Praha, re­ceiving his bachelor’s degree in 1382 and his master of arts in 1384. Though he began teach­ing there in 1385, around 1390 he returned to Poland and helped to reestablish the University of Kraków, where he may have preached its first Mass on 4 December 1390.

Among his works preserved at the Jagiellonian Library are four lyrics that Bartłomiej copied in his own hand into BJ Rkp. 2192 towards the end of the fourteenth century, first identified by dr. Maria Kowalczyk: “Ab eterno preconceptam”, “Mirans stupet en natura”, “Gaude mun­di incola”, and “Buccinemus in hac die”, which included the acrostic “Bartholomeus de Jas­sel”. With the exception of the last song, the others parallel traditional lyric meters and could easily be adapted to traditional melodies. “Buccinemus in hac die” is unusual, however. For­tunately, Bartłomiej’s student, Łukasz Jarosławczyk from Wielki Koźmin, included with his copies of these four lyrics in BJ Rkp. 2210 a staff and neumes for “Buccinemus in hac die”.

These four songs and this unique melody, however, have not appeared within other lists or discussions of late medieval Latin song. Unfortunately, recent web blogs and videos present a version of “Buccinemus in hac die” that display a complete misunderstanding of the notation, form, and context for Bartłomiej’s song. More fruitful is a comparison and contrast with other late medieval Latin monophonic songs, such as those found in the Mosburg Gradual from 1360 or written by Petrus Wilhelmi de Grudencz during his studies in Kraków in the early fifteenth century. When examined in light of recent research on musical life at universities in Central Europe, Bartłomiej z Jasła’s songs provide a unique and intimate view of musical creativity in the late Middle Ages.

 

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Buchinger, Harald (Universität Regensburg)

https://www.uni-regensburg.de/theologie/liturgiewissenschaft/team/profdrharaldbuchinger/index.html

Monastic Reform and the Codification of Processional Chants: A Case Study of St. Emmeram (Regensburg)

The later tenth and early eleventh century were a key phase of liturgical development which saw major projects of codifying the hybrid Romano-Frankish liturgy, including innovative and instable material that was not canonized by Roman inheritance. Along with the famous Pon­tificale Romano-Germanicum which collected material for the hand of the bishop, custo­ma­ries from reform monasticism provided specifically monastic versions. St. Em­me­ram, an ab­bey related to prominent other monastic centres as well as to emperors and not least to  bi­shop Wolfgang, was a hub of this development. The earliest extant reform customary from  the East Frankish territory of the Empire is thought to pertain to this abbey, which at the same time ran one of the most productive scriptoria of liturgical manuscripts for use within and far beyond the own monastic context. This lecture investigates the repertory of  proces­sio­nal chants in sources directly or indirectly related to St. Emmeram. It expounds com­mona­li­ties and particular propers in this instable part of early medieval chant and discuss­es the ap­parent limits of the monastic reform programme of the Consuetudines.

 

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Caldwell, John (Oxford University)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Caldwell_(musicologist)

Mapping Musical Space in the Early Middle Ages: A Hypothetical Reconstruction

The creation of the Roman chant repertory in a form close to what is now known as Gregorian chant was a formidable undertaking, whenever and wherever it came about. It does not seem possible for it to have taken place without some way of imagining a structure of pitch-relation­ships, whether the repertory was essentially the achievement of Roman cantors or of the Frankish recipients of a basic Roman framework. In either case the work was evidently accomplished prior to the establishment of an unambiguous notational system, ultimately that of the pseudo-Oddonian scale and its associated representation on a staff.

While my reconstruction is speculative, I believe it can draw on evidence from early theore­tical systems and notational methods to lend it plausibility. It rests on the notion of disjunct pairs of tetrachords of the form TST and associated concepts of modality, acquired from Greek-language sources and applied to the needs of a distinctive Latin-language style. My hypothesis is that while there were never more than two tetrachords in play at the same time, tonal range could be extended by the principle of octave-concomitance, and tonal variety ac­commodated by the shifting of tetrachordal positions, even during the course of a chant. I be­lieve this shifting can explain the anomalies that are to be found in the later letter- or staff-notated versions of many chants, such as those explored by Maloy in her study of the offer­tories.

 

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Cazaux, Christelle – Albiero, Laura – Romanens, Matthieu (Fachhochschule Nord­west­schweiz / Schola Cantorum Basiliensis)

https://www.forschung.schola-cantorum-basiliensis.ch/de/forschung/carmina-burana-online.html

The Carmina Burana Online Project: How to ‘Edit’ Melodies Noted in Adiastematic Neumes?

The Codex Buranus (c. 1230) is one of the most important collections of medieval poetry. It contains 254 items, mainly Latin and German songs, as well as seven liturgical plays. About 60 items have been provided with adiastematic neumes, but only a third of them have con­cordances in sources that allow some melodic comparisons. 

The project Carmina Burana Online. A Digital Edition, Musicological Study and Practical Exploration of the Codex Buranus and Related Sources aims to provide a complete digital edition of this corpus of texts, focusing on the analysis of 60 melodies transmitted in the Codex Buranus and their approximately 110 melodic concordances in parallel sources. The musicological part of the project (edition, critical notes, analysis) will be complemented by practical research to propose new performative approaches.

In this presentation, the Carmina Burana Online project team would like to present and dis­cuss some examples of the problems and challenges posed by such an edition, and to ex­change views with other researchers involved in the digital edition of liturgical or non-liturgical repertoires written in neumatic notation.

 

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Chachulska, Irina (Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences)

I. Chachulska is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Musicology at the IAPAS, Her academic interests include musical paleography, source studies, and codicology, as well as medieval liturgy and chant of the Western Church. Her current research focuses on Cister­cian medieval chant sources. She runs the Polish section of the CANTUS database (Plain­chant Sources in Poland – Cantus Planus in Polonia) and is a member of the research team Manuscripta.pl – A guide to medieval manuscripts in Polish collections.

Unity Amidst Diversity: Tracing the Various Forms of Cistercian Notation

Cistercian notation — or perhaps we should say ‘Cistercian-type’ notations — exhibit both unity and diversity simultaneously. When comparing Cistercian notation from sources across dif­ferent regions and periods, it is astonishing to note that, while the set of signs and the struc­ture of the individual neumes are generally consistent, the neume forms vary significantly in terms of their calligraphy. The former adheres to the original system, while the latter reflects local influences. These calligraphic differences within the Cistercian notational system are revealed not only in the overall distinction—implying that neumes in German lands were com­mitted to parchment with Gothic penwork, and in Latin countries, noteheads took on an appear­ance in the manner of square notation—but particularly within the ‘Gothic branch’ itself. Hence, the calligraphic features can indicate a particular region, thereby specifying the pro­ve­nance of the individual sources, while the neume structure can serve only as a criterion for iden­tifying a specific liturgical tradition (that is, Cistercian).

It appears that the primary calligraphic variants of Cistercian notation may have developed in the oldest monasteries founded in the vicinity of significant ecclesiastical centers, where staff no­tation with its distinctive features was already well-established and subsequently could have influenced the calligraphic habits of the local Cistercians. 

The main aim of the lecture is to trace the most significant calligraphic variants of Cistercian notation, providing clues to determine the more precise provenance of Cistercian sources.

 

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Čizmić Grbić, Ana (University of Zagreb Academy of Music) - Vrdoljak, Sara (University of Zagreb Academy of Music)

http://www.muza.unizg.hr/2-odsjek-za-muzikologiju/nastavnici-2-odsjeka/ana-cizmic-grbic-ass/

https://hr.linkedin.com/in/sara-vrdoljak-914096229

The Office of Saint Quirinus of Siscia

The Cathedral of Krk, Croatia, holds a small collection of six medieval liturgical music manu­scripts, including two nearly identical “twin” antiphonals. These codices are written on parch­ment in a round Gothic script (Italian rotunda) and black square notation on twelve red four-line staves. Each large volume contains chants for the entire liturgical year. According to the old cathedral inventory, they date from the fifteenth century, though an earlier dating seems more appropriate. 

This study focuses on a previously unknown office of Saint Quirinus found in the antiphonals. The Bishop of Siscia has been celebrated as a patron saint in Krk since the twelfth century at least, and according to some sources, as early as the sixth century. During the Middle Ages, the bishopric of Krk belonged to the patriarchates of Aquileia, Grado, and eventually Venice in the fifteenth century. These traditions could be possible sources of influence, but the office chants appear to be unique and have not been found in any other documented source. The text alone appears in Farlati’s Illyricum Sacrum (1775) based on an unspecified source from Krk, but this version differs slightly from the one found in the antiphonals. This raises further questions about the dating and provenance of these codices, at the same time suggesting the possibility they were produced by a local scribe. 

This lecture will attempt to answer these questions based on the analysis of chants and texts as well as the palaeographical and codicological characteristics of the antiphonals. 

 

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Collamore, Lila (independent scholar)

https://medren2021lisbon.hcommons.org/lila-collamore/

Hexachords and the Melodies of Gregorian Chant

Taking the earliest chant melodies as evidence, it is argued here that they were sung and com­posed using hexachords—six-note structures—independent of the scale of the theorists that was built with intervals determined by ratios.  (Theorists also used four-note tetrachords to describe musical space and formulate a scale.) Hexachord singing is most evident in chants that changed mode and shifted the entire hexachord up or down a step with the change of mode. These chants presented problems for later singers and theorists who wished to notate them using gamut-based notation, which did not allow for this kind of scale shift because to notate it accurately would require the use of E-flat, F-sharp, or other notes that did not yet exist on the gamut. But with hexachords alone (and no gamut), the singer simply moved the whole hexachord up or down and renamed the sounding pitches to their new notes based on their position on the new hexachord.  For example, G (UT) became A (RE), A (RE) became B (MI), B-flat (which didn’t exist before) (MI) became C (FA), and C (FA) became D (SOL).  

Thus, when Guido d’Arezzo (died after 1033) developed a system of hexachords to negotiate his gamut, he was not inventing something new, but used an existing singer’s system for mov­ing along the gamut. As his gamut-based notation took hold, the earlier practice of shifting hexachords as melodies changed mode could not be sustained and the melodies were edited to fit into the constraints of the gamut.

Understanding this method of singing opens up a new way of interpreting mode changes within the earliest chant melodies prior to staff notation and offers insights into what the ori­ginal readings of such melodies would have been.  

 

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Czagány Zsuzsa (HUN-REN Research Centre for the Humanities, Institute for Musicology / HAS ‘Momentum’ Digital Music Fragmentology Research Group, Budapest)

Zsuzsa Czagány (1967) graduated in 1990 in Musicology and Aesthetics at the Comenius University Bratislava and received her PhD in Musicology from the Liszt Ferenc Music Uni­versity in Budapest in 2002. Since 2024 she is holding a DSc of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. She is currently a senior researcher at the HUN-REN Institute for Musicology, and head of the Department of Early Music History. Since 2019, she is the principal investigator of the academic project Digital Music Fragmentology. She is working in the field of medieval chant and chant theory with a special focus on the repertory of the divine office in Central-Europe, late medieval saints’ historiae, source studies and fragmentology.

https://ldzf.zti.hu/en/, http://fragmenta.zti.hu/en/

Pieces of a Giant Puzzle. Music Manuscript Fragments at the Crossroads of Times, Regions, and Disciplines

The five-year project of the Digital Music Fragmentology Research Group launched at the Institute for Musicology in Budapest will end in September 2024. The primary goal of the project was to explore, organize, describe and publish the fragments of medieval music ma­nuscripts originating from the territory of the medieval Hungarian Kingdom. However, as the research progressed, the initiative has become much more. Over the years, not only new sources have emerged in large numbers, but the methods and tools of research have also changed, and even the objectives have become more nuanced. Several spin-offs have been launched from the core start-up, expanding the field of vision. The proposed lecture presents the multidirectional, divergent process that led from primary on-site source exploration to the fullest possible reconstruction of medieval notated codices, at the same time revealing un­known areas of early modern and modern cultural history represented by the host books, their owners and itineraries.

 

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Denk, Lucia (Princeton University) 

Lucia Denk is a third-year graduate student and PhD candidate in Musicology at Princeton University. She holds a Master of Arts in Musicology from Dalhousie University and a Mas­ter of Music in Piano Performance and Pedagogy from Salem College. She is a research as­sis­tant for the Digital Analysis of Chant Transmission (DACT) project, working with Can­tus Da­ta­base in particular. Her research interests include medieval and early modern plainchant, female com­posers, musical intertextuality, and the intersections between musicology and the digital hu­ma­nities.

'Imperatrix gloriosa, Imperatrix angelorum': Transforming Mariological and Musical Aesthetics Through an 'Imperial' Medieval Sequence 

The title “Imperatrix” conjures images of female majesty, potency, imperialism. In the twelfth century, Marian sequences commencing with this title emerged, emphasizing Mary’s status as empress of the heavens, a monarch of seemingly limitless and fearsome prowess. Simulta­ne­ous­­ly, however, the texts of these sequences, depending on local traditions, conveyed to a greater or lesser degree overtones of Mary’s clemency, flexibly playing with shifts in Mario­lo­gical affect and simulating a dynamic, spatial tension between majestic, awe-invoking dis­tance and a maternal, reassuring closeness. The form of the sequence was an especially apt vehicle for creatively expressing contrasts in meaning and aesthetics; as Lori Kruckenberg notes: “in contrast to most Mass Proper chants, repertories of sequences were open to change, expanding and contracting – sometimes slightly, sometimes radically—as the genre was cul­ti­vated and renewed aesthetically and stylistically over several centuries” (Kruckenberg, 2018). The question, therefore, must be asked: what, precisely, was the level and quality of impact/ agency of “Imperatrix” sequences, in contrast to other Marian sequences of medieval Europe? An in-depth cross-comparison of the texts and music of “Imperatrix” sequences in a wide range of manuscript sources, through the help of digital tools in chant databases such as CAN­TUS, reveals that the “Imperatrix” sequence was not merely another eloquent tool of Marian devotion, but one which actively represented and reinforced a transformation of Ma­ri­o­logical aesthetics, particularly in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Musical analysis also elucidates the dramatic use of sequence form to highlight the tension, kinesthetically embod­ied through liturgical performance, between seemingly conflicting representations of Mary. Ultimately, I suggest that the “Imperatrix” medieval sequence, more than other chant genres referencing Mary’s imperial authority, propelled a calculated rhetorical interplay of diverging images of Mary, thus dialectically facilitating a significant shift in the musical aesthetics of medieval Marian devotion.

  

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Déri Balázs (Eötvös Loránd University, Faculty of Humanities, Budapest / HUN-REN, Institute of Musicology, Budapest)

He studied Iranian Languages and Latin at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Faculty of Hu­manities, Budapest (1972–1977), Hungarian Language and Literature (1972–1974), An­cient Greek (1973–1979), and then Coptic and Catalan (1977–1979 and 1978–1981, re­spec­tively). 1990–1995 he was a musicology student at the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music, Bu­da­pest. Since 1998, he obtained the doctoral degree (PhD dissertation: The structure of the hymn cycle Cathemerinon of Prudentius). He habilitated in 2003.

1977–1994: Editor of the Dictionary of Medieval Latin in Hungary, 1993–1997: Biblical Greek-Latin language teacher at the Reformed Theological Aca­demy in Budapest. 1998–2019: he taught Latin Language and Literature at the afore­mentioned university (ELTE), 2002–2019 as the Head of the Department, 2008–2019 as a University Professor. 2003–2006, during the period of adaptation and introduction of the ‟Bologna system”, he was Vice-Dean of Education of the Faculty. He initiated the Religious Studies program at the Faculty (2006), which eventually led to the establishment of the Department of Religious Studies in 2019. This department is also responsible for research into the history of liturgical studies. After a semester, he handed over the chair to István Miklós Földváry. He also taught Catalan literature, general metrics and poetics, and he led the faculty’s creative writing program for several years. He supervises doctoral courses in Clas­si­cal Philology and Religious Studies, and has been supervisor of numerous students on a wide variety of topics. Among them was Miklós István Földváry. He will retire as Professor Emeritus of the Faculty on 4 August 2024.

Since 1993 he has been the founding editor-in-chief of the professional and interconfessional (Jewish and Christian) journal Hungarian Church Music (Magyar Egyházzene), and one of the leaders of the Hungarian Church Music Society. 2018–2023: he was Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Musico­logy, where he worked at the Archives and Department for Folk Music and Folk Dance Re­search (and Eastern Christian and Jewish Archive). Now he works there as a retired researcher.

Since the age of nine, he has been an organist and cantor in various denominations, since 2001 in the cathedral of the Serbian Orthodox Church, Szentendre. In the 80’s he was mem­ber of the Schola Hungarica. He is also a choral conductor.

Déri is a poet and a literary translator (mainly in Latin, Ancient and Modern Greek, Catalan, Portu­guese, Hindi and some other languages). In his younger years he wrote cartoon scripts, hosted and edited many radio and television programmes on music and religious culture.

Among others, he was awarded the Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary (2014).

 

Medieval Latin Literary Works as Secundary Liturgical Sources 

The Admonitions (Latin: Libellus de institutione morum), summarizing the principles of go­vernment, had been completed in the 1010s or 1020s for King (St.) Stephen I of Hungary's son and heir, Emeric. This earliest literary work in Hungary, a mirror for princes, has been constantly commemorated in Hungarian culture. Several ancient and modern editions of the text have also been produced. Its three longer biblical quotations have been regularly indi­cated in the apparatus criticus; they were duly noted as paraphrases of the Vulgata text. How­ever it was not noticed that they were not paraphrases, but literal quotations from three suc­cessive responsories of the Historia Sapientiae:

responsorium Domine Pater et Deus (CAO-6503, cf. Eccli 23, 4-6)
responsorium Emitte Domine sapientiam (CAO-6657, cf. Sap 9, 10)
responsorium Audi fili mi disciplinam (CAO-6140, Prv 1, 8 et 4, 10)

The first two can be found in all later Hungarian sources of the Office, but Audi fili mi only in a private 14th century breviary. These mentions predate the earliest liturgical sources of the Office in Hungary by decades, and despite their small number, they allow us to draw some serious conclusions. By following this trail, I hope to demonstrate that in the works of Hun­ga­rian medieval Latin literature (and possibly eveywhere in the Western culture) intended for a wide audience, biblical quotations appeared primarily through liturgical-musical mediation, either literally or as paraphrases.

 

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Drummond, Henry T. (KU Leuven)

Doctoral studies at the University of Oxford. FWO Senior Postdoc at the KU Leuven. Re­search areas: chant and liturgy in the Refor­mation, Jesuits, and music within royal courts in Iberia and the Low Countries. First monograph: The Cantigas de Santa Maria: Power and Persuasion at the Alfonsine Court (OUP 2024).

Questioning Temporality in the Revision of Early Modern Chant

This lecture considers aspects of time in the revision of liturgical chant manuscripts at the ab­bey of Averbode, located in the Belgian province of Flemish Brabant. This community of Norbertine canons had a complex history during the early modern period. Due to the Eighty Years’ War, the abbey was subject to iconoclastic destruction, during which time its members had to flee to nearby Diest. Their abbey was further exposed to the ravages of plague, drasti­cally reducing its membership in the 1580s. While neighbouring abbeys updated many of their chant books over the next century, Averbode stands out as an institution with a largely unedited chant repertory. The abbey is particularly notable as one of the few places in the Low Countries that retains the Premonstratensian version of the liturgy that predates Guil­laume-Gabriel Nivers’s comprehensive revision of 1680. In this lecture, I examine a handful of chants from Averbode’s manuscripts, and show how the prior state of art can be reliably assessed by comparing with sources from neighbouring abbeys. I show that the pro­cess of revising older chant was both gradual and non-linear. From a small number of case studies, it becomes apparent that individual houses relied upon individual policies of revision, explain­ing subtle divergences from Averbode’s unedited layer. The Averbode repertory there­fore offers a step back in time, to an earlier method of both textual and musical writing. The ra­ti­onale behind Averbode’ retention of the earlier repertory will be questioned, and the prac­ti­cal use of its sources considered. What emerges is a location-specific and context-dependent pic­ture of liturgical sources, where older and newer technologies could coexist despite calls for textual and musical consistency that became ever more prominent in the early modern period. 

 

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Eben, David (Charles University, Prague)  

https://uhv.ff.cuni.cz/en/people/ac/eben/

'Behold, the Morning Star Shines': The Offices of St Ludmilla in Medieval Bohemia

The cult of a saint usually unfolds most intensively where its relics are kept. The case of St. Ludmila is no exception. Prague’s St. George’s Monastery, where the saint was solemnly buried in 925 after her transfer from Tetín, plays a central role in this development. The Be­ne­dictine nuns of St. George rightly felt as the guardians of these precious relics, and it is cer­tainly largely to their credit that Ludmila eventually took her permanent place in the Bohe­mian pantheon in the fourteenth century. In previous musicological research, the Office of St. Ludmila is not unknown. However, the history of the repertoire is relatively complicated, and many questions remain unanswered, especially those concerning the dating and origin of the Office. In this lecture I would like to distinguish the individual layers of the repertory and con­tribute to the current discussion with some new insights.

 

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Enyedi Mózes (HUN-REN Research Centre for the Humanities, Institute for Musicology / HAS ‘Momentum’ Digital Music Fragmentology Research Group, Budapest))  

Mózes Enyedi (1995) graduated as a church musician from Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music in Budapest in 2023. He is currently a junior researcher at the Department of Early Music His­to­ry at the HUN-REN Research Centre for the Humanities, Institute for Musicology in Buda­pest, and also a member of the ‘Momentum’ Digital Music Fragmentology Research Group. He is involved in fragment research and in the building of the online chant database Melo­di­arium Hungariae Medii Aevi Digitale. His research interests include also the recitative genres of medieval chant in Central Europe with a special focus on short responsories and the melodic variants of the Canticum Danielis. 

https://ldzf.zti.hu/en/ http://fragmenta.zti.hu/en/

Responsoria brevia in Manuscripts from Medieval Hungary and Their Melodic Groups

The collection of medieval Hungarian short responsories is rich and diverse. Particularly re­markable are the pieces used during Lent, which, in their ornateness and vocal range, evoke the responsoria prolixa, but the material is also notably varied outside of this period. In ad­dition to the common 3-4 melodic groups found in Western liturgy, there are also newer me­lodies in this tradition. In this lecture, I aim to demonstrate the main melodic groups, focusing primarily on musical connections and highlighting the more unique, ornate melodies.

 

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Farkas Domonkos (Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music / Premonstratensian Abbey, Gödöllő)

Domonkos Farkas graduated in Church Music at the Liszt Academy of Music (BA: 2011, MA: 2013). His doctoral (DLA) thesis ‟Hungarian-language Gregorian Chants from the Inheri­tance of László Dobszay” was written under the supervision of Janka Szendrei and Miklós István Földváry (2022). Currently, he is the musical director of the Premonstratensian Abbey of Gödöllő and adjunct professor of sacred music at the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music.

László Dobszay, the Composer, and the New Hungarian Gregorian Chant

László Dobszay (1935–2011), a prominent figure in the research of Gregorian chant for de­cades, began his highest musical studies at the age of 12 at the composition department of the Academy of Music, where his professor was Zoltán Kodály, among others. He also studied history and Hungarian language and literature at Eötvös Loránd University, where he gradu­ated as a teacher. From the 1960s until his death, he was intensively involved in the renewal of Catholic church music, both theoretically and practically. One of his main areas of research on Gregorian chant was the typification of the melodies of the antiphonal and responsorial re­pertoire. In the development of the new Hungarian-language Gregorian chant, he did not simp­­ly translate the ‟official” (Liber usualis) Latin chant material, but reworked the indivi­dual settings with the knowledge of a theoretician and at the same time with the creativity of a com­poser. His legacy includes more than 2,300 Gregorian chants (mass and chant settings and other chants) in Hungarian. 60% of these have been published in printed editions, and many are now in national circulation. His Gregorian chant material is the most complete in the offi­cial hymnal of the Transylvanian diocese (Romania).

In the early seventies, a heated debate erupted around the new movements, which still divides the Hungarian church music scene. Some saw it as a violation of the millennia-old sacred Gre­gorian tradition, others as an organic continuation of that. How can this church music re­form be assessed today, half a century later? What influences have shaped it? Is it authentic or arbitrary? How did it go from an experiment to an inevitable factor of the Hungarian church music?

The speaker will share his observations from a comparative musical study of the whole mate­rial, which will reveal how far Dobszay goes in the new settings and where the Gregorian be­gins.

 

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Fenton, Cassandra (University of Bristol)

Currently writing her PhD, funded by the AHRC-SWWDTP. Her topic is medieval English pontificals and their music

Pisteuuo is ena Theon in CCCC163: Investigating the Greek Credo in Anglo-Saxon England   

In this lecture, I examine the chant Pisteuuo is ena Theon, a Greek transliteration of the Nicene creed, as it appears in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 163 (CCCC163), an eleventh century pontifical produced in Worcester. This manuscript contains only eighteen instances of neumed musical notation, varying from partially notated incipits to full melodies. Of these, the most extensively notated melody is Pisteuuo is ena Theon, written with a mix of Anglo-Saxon neumes and pitch letters. The presence of this chant makes CCCC163 one of roughly six surviving sources produced in England containing chants from the Missa Graeca, Greek-texted settings of Ordinary mass chants. CCCC163 is potentially the only surviving source produced in England containing a notated Pisteuuo melody out of the nearly twenty surviving sources containing notated Pisteuuo settings from across the Latin West. Through comparing CCCC163 with other contemporary Pisteuuo melodies and contextualising this manuscript among other English sources for Missa Graeca chants, I investigate what this unique chant might indicate about CCCC163's origin and use and situate this within a broader discussion of the reception and circulation of Greek-texted melodies in Anglo-Saxon England. 

 

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Ferreira, Manuel Pedro (CESEM, Universidade Nova de Lisboa)

Educated at Lisbon and Princeton University (PhD dissertation under Kenneth Levy on Gre­go­rian chant at Cluny, 1997), he teaches since 2000 at the Musicology Department of the Fa­culdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade Nova de Lisboa (FCSH/NOVA). 2005–2023: he chaired the Research Centre on the Sociology and Aesthetics of Music (CESEM) at FCSH/NOVA, where he created its Early Music research group and led a number of compe­titive-funded projects. He was elected in 2010 a member of the Academia Europaea and also served as Director-at-large of the International Musicological Society (2012–2022). He au­thored or edited over twenty books.

Texts and Voices Lost and Found. Recovering, Reconstituting, and Recreating Musical Fragments (c.1100–c.1600) 

This project focused on incomplete musical sources from the medieval and early modern pe­riods and their historical contexts, with the aim of investing them with significance beyond their condition as fragmentary cultural artefacts. It developed across two parallel lines of re­search: 1) medieval musical-liturgical fragments and 2) incomplete sources of polyphony. The purpose of Line 1, the focus of the current presentation, was to characterise all the known ex­tant chant fragments dating from between the late eleventh and the early sixteenth century pre­served in heritage institutions in Coimbra and related sources from Évora. Its methodology involved the indexation and study of the full contents of all fragments, including notational and scribal cha­racteristics, text scripts, and liturgical use. It was necessary to take into account not only the presence in Coimbra of different kinds of musical agents, but also the internatio­nal circulation of books and their bindings. By the end of the project, enhanced knowledge of early chant at Coimbra, in its melodic and institutional variety, was achieved, together with a fuller percep­tion of its relationship with other urban traditions, which will be commented upon with the corresponding illustrations. The studied fragments are now permanently avai­lable on the Portuguese Early Music Database (PEM) at http://pemdatabase.eu. 

 

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Ferreira, Manuel Pedro (CESEM, Universidade Nova de Lisboa), (Luca, Elsa de* (CESEM, Universidade Nova de Lisboa), Thomae, Martha (Martha Eladia María Thomae Elías)* (CESEM, Universidade Nova de Lisboa)) *in absentia

Educated at Lisbon and Princeton University (PhD dissertation under Kenneth Levy on Gre­go­rian chant at Cluny, 1997), Ferreira teaches since 2000 at the Musicology Department of the Fa­culdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade Nova de Lisboa (FCSH/NOVA). 2005–2023: he chaired the Research Centre on the Sociology and Aesthetics of Music (CESEM) at FCSH/NOVA, where he created its Early Music research group and led a num­ber of com­pe­titive-funded projects. He was elected in 2010 a member of the Academia Euro­paea and also served as Director-at-large of the International Musicological Society (2012–2022). He au­thored or edited over twenty books.

Born and educated in Italy, Elsa De Luca obtained her PhD in Historical Musicology at the Università del Salento (‘I manoscritti musicali dell’Archivio di San Nicola a Bari: elementi francesi nella musica e nella liturgia’, supervisor: Marco Gozzi), currently (2016–) car­rying out palaeographical research into Iberian medieval notation through the research project ‘A pre-Gregorian musical repertory under scrutiny: neumes, scribes, and books of the Old His­pan­ic Chant’. Coordinator of the Portuguese Early Music Database; member of the CESEM-FCSH editorial committee and review editor for the Portuguese Journal of Musicology.

Martha Thomae Elías is a postdoctoral research fellow for the ECHOES project at the NOVA University of Lisbon, where she leads the development of tools to facilitate the search and ana­lysis of chants encoded in the MEI music format. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Mathe­ma­tics from Universidad del Valle de Guatemala and a Master’s and PhD degree in Music Tech­nology from McGill University (under the supervision of Ichiro Fujinaga and Julie Cum­ming), focused on digitizing and encoding Guatemalan polyphonic choirbooks from the colo­ni­al period.

ECHOES. An Interface for the Automatic Analysis of Plainchant

The interdisciplinary research project “Echoes from the Past: Unveiling a Lost Soundscape with Digital Analysis” (ECHOES) pursues a deeper understanding of the plainchant sources cur­rently found in the Braga region, in northern Portugal. This research projects aims at bring­ing historical musicological research into the twenty-first century. It pushes standard metho­do­logies for research and open their barriers to fully exploit the most recent technologies for music encoding and automatic analysis. While the main research questions are musicological, ECHOES involves a large component of information technologies related to the development and application of techniques such as Optical Music Recognition (‘OMR’) and Music En­cod­ing Initiative (‘MEI’) to early music scores. ECHOES combines these technologies in new ways to make available to scholars and music aficionados a chant repertory that was part of the cultural identity of the region of Braga for centuries. The project has two main goals; on one hand we are working toward the publication of all the plainchant sources currently kept in the local archives of Braga (and the nearby city of Guimarães) in the Portuguese Early Music (‘PEM’) database. On the other hand, we are developing a prototype interface that will per­form automatic analysis of a selection of 100 chants written in square and Aquitanian nota­tion. In this presentation we plan to describe how the prototype interface is being built and the most important musicological choices we made to assemble this new tool.

 

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Földváry Miklós István (Eötvös Loránd University, Faculty of Humanities, Budapest, Department of Religious Studies / Research Group of Liturgical History)

Miklós István Földváry (1978) is the head of the Research Group of Liturgical History and the Department of Religious Studies at the University Eötvös Loránd, Budapest. Originally trained as a classical philologist, he turned to medieval Latin studies and especially to litur­gical sources and practice. He is chiefly interested in the variation of Western liturgical uses and systematically edits the extant service books of medieval Hungary. Himself a liturgical singer, he is one of the leading personalities for the reinvigoration of the Roman Rite and its Esztergom Use in Hungary.

https://elte.academia.edu/MiklósIstvánFöldváry/CurriculumVitae

From Mapping to Narrative: the Diversity of Ember Saturday Canticles 

The canticle of the three Hebrew youths in the fiery furnace is a symptomatic piece of Grego­rian chant. Although its concept is rooted in Christian antiquity and has several parallels in the Old Latin rites, it is a relative novelty in the Franco-Roman context. Unlike other widespread titles of the mass antiphonary, it does not come from an undocumented prehistory but emerges gradually in an age of written sources. Moreover, it is not a single chant that survives in paral­lel variants, but a group of fundamentally different chants. They are assigned to the same li­tur­gical positions but differ both textually and melodically. As such, however, the canticle sheds light on the changing stylistic preferences of early medieval music and the local atti­tudes towards the preservation and handling of a growing Gregorian repertoire. This lecture aims to reconstruct the history of the Ember Saturday canticles and to map their use in the established traditions across Europe in the High Middle Ages. As a methodological by-product, the study will demonstrate how historical information can be derived from geographical re­cords.

 

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Gilányi Gabriella (HUN-REN Research Centre for the Humanities, Institute for Musi­cology / HAS ‘Momentum’ Digital Music Fragmentology Research Group, Budapest)

Gabriella Gilányi (1976) graduated from the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music in 2001 and received her PhD from the same institution in 2007. She is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Musicology of the HUN-REN Research Centre for the Humanities, Budapest. Her research interests include medieval music history, plainchant studies, and fragmentology. Currently, she is mostly involved in music paleographical research. In 2020 she launched the Hungarian Neume Catalogue website, which presents the musical writing signs of medieval Hungary. From 2018 to 2021 she was a lecturer at the Liszt Academy. Since 2019, she has been a full-time member of the ‘Momentum’ Digital Music Fragmentology Research Group of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. 

https://ldzf.zti.hu/en/; http://fragmenta.zti.hu/en/; https://neuma.zti.hu/en_index.asp

From the Cantional of the 'Monks in a Wimple' to the Codex Fragments. A Premonstratensian Chant Notation and Its Sources in Medieval Hungary

The plainchant of the Hungarian Premonstratensians is not known from medieval codices: all manuscripts were destroyed in the storms of history. The only surviving witness is a retro­spec­tive musical manuscript from the early 16th century: the Cantional of the Premonstraten­sian nuns of Szeged (they were called the ʻmonks in a wimple’ by their contemporaries). In studying this remarkable late source, I noticed a peculiar notation among the music scripts, which allowed me to identify a series of previously unspecified fragments and a unique chant notation as Premonstratensian. This discovery is also significant because the new fragments provide some insight into a hidden musical and notational practice of the order, which, to our surprise, appears to have been closely intertwined with local Esztergom customs.

 

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Göbölösné Gaál Eszter (HUN-REN Research Centre for the Humanities, Institute for Musicology / HAS ‘Momentum’ Digital Music Fragmentology Research Group, Budapest)

Eszter Göbölösné Gaál (1993) graduated from the Church Music Faculty of Liszt Ferenc Aca­demy of Music in 2017 with an MA and in 2019 with a TMA degree. As a church musician she started to work at the HUN-REN Research Centre for the Humanities, the Institute for Mu­sicology Budapest, at the Department of Early Music History in 2018, and became a mem­ber of the HAS ‘Momentum’ Digital Music Fragmentology Research Group in 2019. She is also an assistant lecturer at the Theology Faculty of the Károli Gáspár University of the Hun­garian Reformed Church, and an active church musician. She will defend her DLA thesis on printed protestant funeral hymnals in the following semester.

https://ldzf.zti.hu/en/; http://fragmenta.zti.hu/en/

Small Fragments, Interesting Stories

Codices from mediaeval Hungary’s territory scarcely and rarely survived complete, which makes fragmentology an especially important and exciting field of mediaeval musicology in this area. Parchment leaves reused as book covers are the most common findings and it is not im­possible to even find matching series. The book part on which my lecture focuses is also often made of upcycled materials. The small fragments of the spines are often the only mes­sen­gers of the original codices, and can in lucky circumstances give a glimpse not only of their stories, but can also assist with exploring the route of their host volumes. In my lecture I present two small case studies from the Diocesan Library of the Roman Catholic Church, Nagy­várad (Oradea) and from the Central Lutheran Collection, Budapest focusing on the use of online databases in the research process to showcase how fascinating the smallest pieces of parchment can be.

 

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Grabiec, Dominika (Polish Academy of Sciences, Institute of Art)

http://www.ispan.pl/pl/o-instytucie-sztuki-pan/biogramy-pracownikow-naukowych/mgr-dominika-grabiec

The Seventeenth-Century Dominican Gradual from the Female Convent in Piotrków Try­bu­nalski as a Testimony of the Reception of the Liturgical Reforms and Polish Traditions

Among all the Dominican graduals preserved in Poland, the four-volume gradual PL-Kd mss. 9-12 L, written between 1632 and 1635 by Błażej Derey, OP for the newly founded female Dominican monastery in Piotrków Trybunalski deserves special attention. The only remaining complete Polish gradual from the Dominican female convent, the manuscript is richly and carefully executed, with beautiful decorations and numerous detailed rubrics indicating, for example, moments of lighting candles, kneeling or bowing during the most important ceremonies, as well as the passages of chants sung by cantor, two friars or all the choir. There are no similar rubrics in liturgical books from male Dominican convents, so the manuscript is an important source of knowledge about liturgical practice.  

In my presentation I will compare the repertoire of the gradual from Piotrków with the reper­toire of a three-volume complete gradual from the main male Dominican monastery in Kra­ków, written in 1536, to show the changes introduced to the Dominican liturgy in the Polish province in the seventeenth century, following successive monastic reforms. These changes are particularly evident in the addition of new offices to the Sanctorale.

While most of the changes are compatible with the guidelines of the reformers, some chants written in the last volume of the gradual from Piotrków clearly indicate that the Dominican liturgy adopted elements of a specifically Polish liturgical practice. Examples include a Credo whose melody is a contrafact of a medieval Polish Easter song, other Credo melodies written with mensural notation, and an Advent sequence Mittit ad Virginem interspersed with verses of Polish Marian song written in square notation, all of them popular in Poland from the se­cond half of the sixteenth century.

 

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Haggh-Huglo, Barbara (University of Maryland)

https://music.umd.edu/directory/barbara-haggh-huglo

Between Du Fay and Today: The Praemonstratensian Order and the Survival of the Recollectio Gaudiorum Beatae Mariae Virginis

Witnesses to the celebration of the Marian feast of the Recollectio festorum beatae Mariae Virginis by Praemonstratensian communities throughout the Low Countries range from a book of ca. 1500 probably from Park to a printed supplement of offices proper to the Abbey of Park near Leuven dated 1453. The feast was celebrated by male and female Praemonstra­tensians and printed repeatedly in books for the Praemonstratensian Order of Belgium, mean­ing that it is possible that it was celebrated by more communities than can presently be proven. I will explain Gilles Carlier’s relationship to the Praemonstratensian Order, which may be the reason why this feast was celebrated by this Order more than any other, then describe the of­fice, which includes a chant composed by Du Fay, and finally survey the Prae­monstratensian houses where the Recollectio was sung that were particularly known for their music.

 

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Haggh-Huglo, Barbara (University of Maryland)

https://music.umd.edu/directory/barbara-haggh-huglo

Michel Huglo at Solesmes, his catalogue of processionals, his research on music theory, and his papers

Despite his many publications, Michel Huglo left important projects unfinished. Here I will share what I learned about his research at Solesmes, his cataloguing of processionals, and his work on Abbo of Fleury, Isidore of Seville, and Plato’s 'Timaeus’. I will emphasize what he thought was important and why, and describe the projects he began that remain to be done. I will explain where his papers are and how they are organized.

 

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Hallas, Rhianydd (Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences)

https://www.mua.cas.cz/en/lide/detail-hallas

Missing Chants and Unspecified Melodies: How Scribes Dealt with Incompletely Transmitted Offices

The spread of liturgical chants into a new geographic, cultural, or musical context is particu­lar­ly interesting when the act of transmission itself introduces some level of alteration—whether due to scribal error, deliberate preference, or through the expansion of an incomplete or partial dissemination. These variants are particularly interesting in the case of contrafacta, where we have three points of comparison—the text, the melody, and the original melody from the source chant—because they can offer glimpses into the reception of the contrafact and its mode of transmission. 

A particularly revealing example can be found in the early fifteenth-century manuscript S-Uu C 621 of a likely English provenance, now held in the Uppsala University Library, which con­tains an unusual version of the Visitation office Accedunt laudes virginis. This version devi­ates from the original in its melodies and texts, eschewing the contrafact tunes based on Julian of Speyer’s thirteenth-century office for St Francis of Assisi, using different chants for the responsories in the second and third nocturns of Matins, and changing the text in the Lauds antiphon for the Benedictus. A comparison with instances of the Visitation in other manu­scripts reveals that these variations are also present within the fourteenth- or fifteenth-century antiphoner D-FUl Aa 55 from the collegiate church of Rasdorf as well as other insular unno­tat­ed sources. 

This lecture analyses the Accedunt laudes virginis offices found in these manuscripts to reveal how the scribe(s) dealt with missing chants and a lack of detail regarding the melody to be used with the texts, as well as theorising on a possible link between the two geographically distant sources.

 

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Hankeln, Roman (Norwegian University of Science and Technology)

https://www.ntnu.edu/employees/roman.hankeln

Notated Medieval Liturgical Fragments in the Gunnerus-library, Trondheim (Norway)

The Gunnerus-library, today part of Trondheim’s University library, has its roots in the eigh­teenth century book-collection of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters, a col­lection primarily concerned with (early) modern history, theology and the natural sciences. Coinci­den­tally, however, the library houses around 180 medieval fragments (nineteenth to sixteenth century) which deserve international attention from medievalists. Most of these frag­ments were im­ports. They travelled to the North as part of the binding of seventeenth- and eigh­teenth-century books, which had been bought on the continent. Recently the fragments were removed from their book-carriers and digitized. 

During the 1960ies some of these fragments were described by the well known liturgist Lilli Gjerløw. Since autumn 2022 I am revising and expanding her descriptions, identifying and de­scribing in addition those fragments where such a description is still absent.

The present lecture will address those Gunnerus-fragments which once belonged to medieval liturgical books with music notation. Most of them were written during the twelfth to the six­teenth century. Almost unknown to the scientific community today, they deserve attention due to their content as well as due to the various notational styles represented (square notations, gothic notations, Messine/Lothringian notations). Special attention will be paid to a small number of fragments which have a Nordic (Norwegian?) origin. Due to the immense loss of Nordic liturgical sources during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries these items are of high relevance for musicological research on Nordic cultural heritage.

 

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Hannikainen, Jorma (National Library of Finland)

DMus. Jorma Hannikainen, has been a head of the church music department at Sibelius Aca­­demy of the University of Arts, Helsinki. Until 2007 he served as a church musician and a choir conductor. After retiring in 2021 he has continued as a researcher, a choir conductor and a composer. Since September 2022, he has been working also at the National Library Finland as a manuscript researcher in a four-year project.

Features of the Melodies in the Liturgical Manuscripts of the Late Medieval Turku Diocese: As a case example Graduale Ilmolense (The National Library in Helsinki A^o II.55)

This lecture is part of a four-year-project Tradition and variation – Medieval Chant in the Dio­cese of Turku, which explores the mass melodies used in Finland in the Middle Ages. There are two musicological researchers, Jorma Hannikainen and Hilkka-Liisa Vuori, and two ap­proaches to the topic from different angles and time periods. Vuori’s material consists of the earliest notated Missal fragments (twelf–thirteenth century) used or written in Finland, now pre­­served in the Fragmenta membranea collection of the National Library of Finland. Hanni­kai­nen concentrates on larger fragments and whole manuscripts from the fifteenth and six­teenth centuries.

In our project, we hope to deepen the understanding of the liturgy and its development in me­di­e­val Finland. Was the liturgy musically Dominican in the flourishing period of the diocese (fourteenth and fifteenth centuries) as previous research has assumed? What musical tradi­tions do the fragments of the earliest books, from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, rep­re­sent? How fast or slow was the change from the Gregorian chants to the music of reforma­tion? At this point in our investigations, we are mainly concentrating on comparative studies of individual fragments and manuscripts, and we will be able to provide only very preliminary answers to these questions.

 

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Hartmann-Strauß, Jasmin (Universität Würzburg)

https://www.musikwissenschaft.uni-wuerzburg.de/team/jasmin-hartmann-strauss-ma/

Diagrams in the Manuscript Tradition of Boethius´ De institutione musica: Formations and Transformations

Boethius´ De institutione musica is one of the most important witnesses for the reception of ancient Greek music theory, the ars musica, during the Middle Ages and beyond. While the text of this treatise has long been a topic of scholarly investigation, a detailed systematic ex­amination of the diagrams in the manuscript copies of the treatise is still missing. The lack of such a study is striking now more than ever, given that diagrams and the ways in which they function have become an important topic of research in their own right. Indeed, a new scho­lar­ly discipline, diagrammatology, has grown out of such research, encompassing semiotic and media-theoretical concepts in addition to purely formal considerations. The present lecture will show how these principles can be employed fruitfully in the study of the corpus of diagrams in Boethius´ Musica. 

Based on selected examples from ninth- to twelfth-century manuscripts of Boethius´ De in­stitutione musica this lecture will show: a) how diagrams work as representations of know­ledge related to the ars musica, b) how they have been formed on the basis of models and conven­tions used in other disciplines (mainly arithmetic, geometry and logic), and, c) how they re­flect processes of reception and understanding of the discipline musica.

 

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Hende, Fanni (HUN-REN–NSZL Fragmenta et Codices Research Group, Budapest)

Fanni Hende studied History and Latin Language and Literature with specialization in Medi­eval Studies at the Pázmány Péter Catholic University, where she successfully defended her PhD in History guided by András Forgó and Géza Pálffy in 2017 (dissertation: Political Re­pre­sentation at the Hungarian Diets between 1687 and 1765) Since 2014, Hende has been member, and since 2022 senior research fellow of the Fragmenta et Codices Research Group, Budapest. Hende published the catalogue of the fragment collection of the National Archives of Hungary in Budapest in 2018.

Newly Discovered Liturgical Codex Fragments at the National Archives of Hungary. An Ongoing Research Project 

Only a small part of the codices made or used in the medieval Kingdom of Hungary has sur­vived, and the number of them can be only approximately reconstructed from the codex frag­ments mostly reused as binding materials. The research of this source started 50 years ago by László Mezey and the Fragmenta Codicum Research Group, which continues revelation under the name of Fragmenta et Codices Research Group. Large number of medieval liturgical manu­scripts was destroyed throughout history, therefore the importance of the codex frag­ments as witnesses of the former medieval manuscripts extends to the analysis of medieval liturgy. The musical analysis of the notated liturgical fragments in Hungary started with Janka Szendrei and László Dobszay, and nowadays the members of the Digital Music Fragmentolo­gy Research Group are pursuing the research. Our research group has established a close cooperation with them from the very beginning in the exploration of the codex fragments. 

In addition to the notated fragments, emphasis should also be placed on fragments without mu­sical notation in the better understanding of the liturgy used in the medieval Kingdom of Hungary, and the possible variations within these traditions. 

In my lecture I present hitherto unknown liturgical codex fragments kept at the National Ar­chives of Hungary in Budapest, and place them within the rites used in the medieval Kingdom of Hungary. In the framework of the János Bolyai Research Scholarship supported by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, I am systematically revealing the in situ fragments pre­served at the archives. The result of my ongoing work is until now the discovery of several liturgical codex fragments. The host volumes issued in the Kingdom of Hungary in the six­teenth/seventeenth century belong to the Archives of the Hungarian Chamber. The fragments were excised from codices used in the Kingdom, and were reused as pallium of these docu­ments, as strong and cheap covering material. 

 

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Hoefener, Kristin (CESEM, Universidade Nova de Lisboa)

Researcher in the Early Music Group at CESEM, University Nova of Lisbon, with the project “Chant Culture in Female Dominican Convents with a Focus on Portugal: Repertoire, Sources, and Practical Performance”. Doctorate in musicology from the University of Würz­burg (Germany) and a double master’s degree in musicology (University of Amsterdam) and medieval history (EPHE, Paris). From 2021 to 2023, she was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Post­doctoral Fellow at the University Nova in Lisbon with the project “The Revival of Salve Regina. Medieval Marian Chants from Aveiro: Musical Sources, Gender Specific Context, and Performance”. She is the founder and artistic director of the ensemble KANTIKA, specia­lizing in medieval music, and works as choir conductor.

Exploring Liturgical Identity: a Case Study of the Female Dominican Convent of Jesus in Aveiro (15^th c.)

Founded in 1458, the Convent of Jesus in Aveiro received papal approval in 1461. It imme­diate­ly adopted the observant reform, an appropriate choice for this congregation of aristo­crat­ic women with close ties to the royal Portuguese family. During the foundational period, the convent constructed conventual buildings, the church, its interior and cultural environment, and a scriptorium where the sisters copied liturgical manuscripts for their own use (at least in the very beginning). They needed to borrow manuscripts from another Dominican monastery to start, here most likely from the Nossa Senhora da Misericórdia—the friars preachers in the immediate vicinity—there is little latitude for shaping your new liturgy. This early corpus has survived until today by staying almost entirely in the convent library, the present day “Santa Joana Museum”. I will present some of the early manuscripts from the collection, focusing on specific liturgical feasts contained in these books. The patronage of Jesus implies particular artworks and gives the tone for enhancing feasts celebrating Jesus: Corpus Christi, the Holy Cross, Jesus’s heart, or the Transfiguration, as we can see in the earliest antiphoners, graduals, and processionaries. Second are the Marian feasts of Purification (February 2), Annunciation (March 25), Assumption (August 15), Nativity (September 8), and, later on, Visitation (July 2) and Sanctification (December 8). The feasts celebrating Jesus and his mother, Mary, are the most elaborate and ornate in the liturgical manuscripts. However, similarly significant for a female community is the choice, i.e., the presence or absence of other female saints, reflecting its particular importance for this convent, a particular nun, or the Dominican order in general.

 

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Hong Li-Xing (Lionel) (Fu Jen Catholic University, Taiwan)

Li-Xing Hong holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Fu Jen Catholic University. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Music, the Holistic Education Center and Associate Research Fellow in Fu Jen Academia Catholica, Fu Jen Catholic University. He is one of the first scholars to investigate in-depth the history of Catholic sacred music in China, as well as the publication of Chinese hymnals. His book, Sung Prayers: Sketching the Development of Chinese Catholic Music Before Vatican II (2020), received the Scholarly Monograph Award in the Humanities and Social Sciences in Taiwan.

A Musicologist Robed as a Missionary: Jean Loriquet, SJ (1813-1886) and His Musical Writings

This lecture investigates the musical writings of the French Jesuit, Jean Loriquet (1813–1886), who ar­­rived in China in 1847 and evangelized in the Jian-nan region for over four decades. In addition to his missionary work, Fr. Loriquet is equally known for his exceptional music ta­lents and refine taste in sacred music. From his letters written to his confreres, family and friends, he demonstrated profound knowledge of music theory, especially of Gregorian chant, and discussed extensively the music used in liturgical setting in the foreign land. Regrettably, most of these letters have never been published and closely studied previously. Through ar­chival study, the author hopes to unveil more about the practice of sacred music in China through the lens of Fr. Loriquet’s letters, while situating this practice within the larger context of the nineteenth-century restoration of Gregorian chant.

 

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Hornby, Emma (University of Bristol)

https://www.bristol.ac.uk/people/person/Emma-Hornby-a238102b-619e-405f-bbae-b30b158e4635/

Saint Michael the Archangel in Early Medieval Iberia: An Interdisciplinary Reading

Christian texts, melodies, images, buildings and rituals are experienced in combination, not one-by-one. This presentation offers an intertextual reading of multiple kinds of evidence relating to Saint Michael the Archangel, focusing on the monastery of San Miguel de Escala­da, 30km from León, whose foundation inscription dates it to 913AD. This monastery is thought by many scholars to have been the original destination of MS 644 of the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. MS 644, dated to the mid-tenth century, contains one of the famous illuminated copies of the Commentary on the Apocalypse by Beatus of Liébana. Three closely related versions of the Old Hispanic feast of Saint Michael survive, one in the León antiphoner, a manuscript associated with León Cathedral. The biblical books of Daniel and the Apocalypse, Beatus’s commentary and its illustrations combine with the Old Hispanic chants (both texts and melodies), prayers and readings, and with the architectural particula­ri­ties of San Miguel de Escalada, to allow a multifaceted reading of how the 29 September feast of the Archangel Michael might have been experienced in one of his patronal monasteries in the mid-tenth century. There is emphasis on invocation of the Archangel’s presence at his feast, as well as other angels. The texts also concentrate on Saint Michael’s role as the prince of heaven’s army, as holder of the Book of Life, and as a powerful intercessor on behalf of the faithful.

 

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Horváth Balázs (ELTE Research Group of Liturgical History, Budapest)

Balázs Horváth (1990) graduated from Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest with an MA in Classical Philology in 2016. He is a Latin philologist and historian of liturgy, and defen­ded his PhD thesis on the liturgical contexts and philological problems of the Codex Pray at Eöt­vös Loránd University in 2023 under the supervision of Miklós István Földváry, and has been a researcher at the ELTE Research Group of Liturgical History since 2015.

A Critical Examination of the Codex Pray. The Liturgical Use of a Late Twelfth-Century Hungarian Sacramentary and its European Context

The Codex Pray, copied at the end of the 12th century, represents one of the most significant cultural monuments in Hungarian history. In terms of its genre, the Codex Pray can be clas­sified as a standard sacramentary, which is a liturgical book containing the prayers of the priest celebrating the Mass. On one hand, the book contains a number of significant parts and appendices, which make it a valuable source for a range of medieval research topics. For in­stance, it contains a brief historical yearbook, medical history notes in its calendar, Easter images for art history, the decisions of the inaugural Hungarian councils, and, of course, Gre­gorian music. On the other hand, the Old Hungarian funeral oration, preserved in the funeral ceremony, is not only the first coherent textual record of the Hungarian language, but also the first document of the Finno-Ugric language family, and even of the entire Uralic language family. The codex was discovered in 1770 by György Pray, a Jesuit priest and scholar, and since then, numerous studies have been conducted on it, primarily focusing on the Old Hun­garian language texts, but also on the historical and canonical texts preserved in the codex. The objective of this lecture is to ascertain which new liturgical methodology can be employed to examine the Codex Pray as a liturgical source. The research will focus on identifying the liturgical use of the Codex Pray and to which European liturgical uses it is related. This will be achieved through the methodology of the ELTE Research Group of Liturgical History and the source collection of the liturgical database Usuarium. The objective of this study is to un­der­stand what kind of liturgical use the codex follows, and for which monastic community it was compiled.

 

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Høye, Marit Johanne (independent scholar)

M. J. Høye is a Norwegian flutist and musicologist. She holds a PhD in musicology from the University of Trondheim (NTNU), and a diploma from the Grieg Academy in Bergen. Her research concerns transmission studies focusing on the Kyrie chant and on the sequence repertory of medieval Nidaros. She currently teaches the flute and plays historical flutes and medieval harp with ensembles in Oslo.

Some Observations on Regional Variants with Kyrie Chants and Sequences 

This lecture examines melodic variability and regional identity with Kyrie chants and se­quences. Previous studies show interesting aspects of melodic variability with early mono­phonic chant repertories, and discuss implications regarding melody transmission and the relationship between manuscripts. I have shown how French sequences are sometimes notated with German melodic features otherwise only known from the transmission of their melodies with other texts, and how Kyrie melodies often show a blending of regional traditions in manu­scripts from east France or north-west Germany (ref. 2012, 2014, 2016, 2020). The pre­sent study pursues further questions concerning melody variations and regional identity. A single manuscript will be the starting point to discuss a select group of Kyrie chants and se­quences with manuscripts across Europe. The findings of this study will add to the more ge­neral discussion regarding manuscripts from regions that display multiple influences with their melody tradition.

 

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Jacob, Uri (Bar-Ilan University)

Uri Jacob is a musicologist who specializes in medieval music and is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Music at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. Since the completion of his PhD at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2021, followed by a postdoctoral fellow­ship at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, several of his articles have been accepted for publication in peer-reviewed journals as well as in edited volumes. Currently, he is writ­ing a monograph on medieval song repertories in the context of the crusading enterprise.

Exsultent agmina as a Topical Crusader Sequence 

Musico-poetic responses to the crusading enterprise are found in two main medieval reper­tories: secular monophonic song, both in Latin and in the vernacular, and liturgical mono­phonic chant. However, the ways in which works within these two broad repertories relate to this theme differ significantly. While the secular song repertory consists of a varied array of references to contemporary events, locations, and figures explicitly related to the crusades (Spreckelmeyer 1974; Paterson 2018), within the liturgy one would mostly find recontextua­lizations of existing chants that highlight concepts such as the resurrection and the imitation of Christ (Salvadó 2011; Gaposchkin 2017) or new compositions that reverberate the spirit of crusading more abstractly (Fassler 1993; Hankeln 2011). The sequence Exsultent agmina, sole­­ly preserved in the twelfth-century liturgical manuscript Laon, Bibliothèque municipale, 263, is an exceptional case in which these differing patterns of representation intersect. While its formal and general generic traits square with those typical of the northern-French sequence of the period, its thematic content seems to be topical, celebrating the Latin conquest of Jeru­sa­­lem in 1099. This lecture will analyse the musical, literary, and historical aspects of this se­quence, examining them against the backdrop of both the repertory of crusading-related se­cu­lar songs and that of chants within crusader (and crusader-influenced) liturgies.

Along­side the attempt to pinpoint the dating and provenance of this sequence and to under­stand its possible role as a vehicle of crusader propaganda, the lecture will address the poten­tial political implication of such topical liturgical songs more broadly.

 

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Jones, Marcus (University of Bristol)

https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/en/persons/marcus-jones-2

The Transmission of Chant at San Millán de la Cogolla in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries

The origins of very few Old Hispanic manuscripts can be securely attributed. This presents a significant challenge in the study of Old Hispanic chant: it has not been possible to explore melodic transmission at a single institution. Instead, previous studies have explored melodic transmission in relation to the provenance of the Old Hispanic materials. In my Ph.D. dis­ser­tation, I firmly position London, British Library Add. MS 30845 as a product of the Northern Iberian monastery of San Millán de la Cogolla. In a forthcoming monograph, I, along with my collaborators, present our evidence for attributing three further manuscripts—Madrid, Biblio­teca de la Real Academia de la Historia Cod.30 and Cod.60 and New York, Hispanic Society of America Library B2916—to San Millán de la Cogolla. More than forty chants in BL45 are also preserved in one or more of these three manuscripts. These shared chants offer an almost unique opportunity in the study of the Old Hispanic rite to assess the transmission of melodies within a single institution across the tenth and eleventh centuries. In this lecture, I present the findings of my comparative analysis of the unpitched melodies of these shared chants, and what light this sheds on written exemplars, scribal melodic identity, and the transmission of Old Hispanic chant at San Millán de la Cogolla.

 

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Kainzbauer, Xaver (Universität Mozarteum Salzburg)

Studies of church music in Vienna, as well as theology and musicology. Church musician, 1975–99 in St Elisabeth Vienna, 1999–2017 with the Benedictines (Scots) in Vienna. 1984 to 1988 postgraduate studies with Godehard Joppich and Luigi Agustoni (Gregorian chant courses in Essen / Germany). Since 1988 Professor of Gregorian Chant at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg. From 1996 magister scholae at the canons in Klosterneuburg.

The ars cantilenae or, How the responsoria prolixa of the Cantus Gregorianus are Com­posed     

The Cantus Gregorianus is centonized, that is, it is composed of centones—prefabricated parts. To identify each cento and to describe its use/meaning is the task my research.

In order to be able to make generally valid statements about the cantus, the first step is to find the earliest possible form of the melodies, a standard text. For this purpose we created tableaus from ten leading manuscripts of the eleventh to thirteenth century and the two adia­ste­matic sources Hartker and Mont Renaud. These tableaus are available at www.omnigreg.at  and show how the cantus constantly evolved from the tenth to the thirteenth century, changing step by step from ‟language art” to ‟music”.  Obviously, a West-Franconian and an East-Fran­conian tradition existed already before the writing down in the tenth century. Mont Renaud with Worchester and Benevent form the traditio occidentalis, which turns to new stylistic cur­rents at tableaus an early stage. This is especially evident in the filling of interval leaps to scales and through further enrichments of the melody.

The traditio orientalis, on the other hand, with Hartker, Karlsruhe, and Toledo, is more con­servative, and in Hartker there is still a wealth of rhythmic differentiation notated that reveals the cantus in its original form as a language art. Our standard text corresponds to the codex Hartker.

The centological approach compares a given passage not only in different manuscripts but also with all corresponding passages in other pieces. This cross-checking (crosscheck) flows into tables that show how one and the same cento is modified based on the accent structure.

Already at the end of the nineteenth century, Walter H. Frere established the three-period structure of the responsories. Each of these periods is again divided into Incipit and Termi­natio, so that six centones result: AB – CD – EF. In all modes, the material of the terminatio of the first and third periods is identical, resulting in the structure AΩ – CD – EΩ. The re­spon­­so­rial centones indicate with a final formula in which position within the responsory they stand. In a penultimate formula, they indicate where within the cento the more important ac­cent lies: behind (f – finalis), in front (i – incipiens), or first and last accents are equivalent (if). In addi­tion, the ending itself may be modified once again: the usual weight of the ending (mega) may be somewhat withdrawn (micro) or reduced altogether (mini).

The at first sight complicated, but actually very clear ‛composition’ of the responsories has grown entirely out of the text structure. The melodic form follows the text form. Variations arise only when the text is unusually structured. Since the monks of the early Middle Ages memorized their liturgical texts, they could also memorize the melodic form of these liturgical texts, since it is nothing more but also nothing less than the instruction how to interpret the text. The melody of the responsories indicates how the text is emphasized. Gregorian Chant is ‟language art”. 

 

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Kalechyts, Antanina (Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien)

https://www.mdw.ac.at/antanina-kalechyts/

Saint Gall Neumes: Further Inputs for Interpretation  

Differences in the scribal style of Gregorian chants in adiastematic manuscripts can be ex­plained superficially by the origin of the sources and the assignment to manuscript families. However, this reasoning cannot explain the conspicuous differences within the rich manu­­script family from St. Gall. The manuscripts herein must undoubtedly be attributed to the same local tradition, yet the sources differ significantly in the setting of additional signs. This work therefore follows the thesis that the individual writing styles reveal a wealth of details that are of relevance to today’s interpreters. The comparative study of St. Gallen sources in particular provides an insight into the interpretative style of individual scribes. In the search for an adequate interpretation, there are therefore several approaches to dealing with this source situation. Theoretically, one can opt for a manuscript selected according to one’s own principles and use this as a basis for interpretation. It is also possible to approach the sources with the aim of creating an ‟original version” and to give preference to older notation over more recent ones. But how valuable are findings from more recent manuscripts and their in­dividual characteristics, especially through comparative studies? What function can be attri­buted to the episemes? These questions will be explored using the example of selected Advent and Christmas chants in the St. Gall MSS.

 

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Karlsson, Jonas (Universität Hamburg)

https://uni-hamburg.academia.edu/JonasKarlsson

Melodic families and interlinear musical notation in Ethiopian-Eritrean antiphonaries

The main Ethiopian-Eritrean antiphonary—the Dǝggʷā—contains several different ways of categorizing antiphons based on musical characteristics. In this lecture, I will present a pre­li­minary study of the relationship between two of these systems, namely, the ‘melodic fami­lies’ (a broad categorization attested since the earliest chant manuscripts, dating from the twelfth–thirteenth centuries) and the ‘mǝlǝkkǝt’ (an interlinear musical notation invented in the six­teenth century). Bernard Velat, a French researcher who edited several Ethiopic liturgical books in the 1960s, has pointed out that there seems to be a relationship between these two systems. However, he was working from the assumption that the mǝlǝkkǝt predate the melodic families. Since manuscript discoveries in the past decades have reversed the relative dating of the two systems, it is now opportune to revisit Velat’s observation and explore it further—espe­cially in light of what it may tell us about the origin of the mǝlǝkkǝt. Over the past de­cades, several scholars have hypothesized that the invention of the mǝlǝkkǝt was the result of foreign influence and was inspired, for example, by the Portuguese Jesuits active in Ethiopia during the sixteenth century (Getatchew Haile 2011). However, if a dependency between the mǝlǝkkǝt and the earlier system of melodic families can be established, this would suggest that they are rather part of a developing indigenous Ethiopian-Eritrean tradition of noting down music.

 

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Kasprzyk, Paweł (independent researcher, Białystok/Poznań)

Paweł Kasprzyk, organist and gregorianist, holds a Master of Engineering degree in Com­puter Science from Poznań University of Technology (2015) and a Master of Arts degree in Sacred Music, specializing in liturgical monody, from Fryderyk Chopin University of Music (2019). He also completed post-diploma studies in Liturgical Monody at the Pontifical Uni­versity of John Paul II in Krakow (2018) and post-diploma studies in Choirmastership and Voice Emission at The Feliks Nowowiejski Academy of Music in Bydgoszcz (2023).

Historically Informed Performance of Late Plainchant – Sixteenth- to Eighteenth-Century Liturgical Monody from the Abbeys of Polish Benedictine Nuns after the Reform by Magdalena Mortęska

Magdalena Mortęska (or Mortenska) was born in 1554. In the spring of 1579, at the age of twenty-five, and against her father’s wishes, she decided to enter the then-abandoned Chełmno monastery. In the same year, she made her profession and was immediately named Abbess of the renovated nunnery. Mother Mortęska reformed her monastery strictly according to the ideas of the Council of Trent, both in terms of spirituality and in the sphere of monastic law (with some relaxation, however, in the matter of the enclosure). She worked closely with the Jesuits, never turning to representatives of the male branch of her order for help. During her half-century reign, she received more than two hundred professions and created eight new foundations. She enjoyed great authority among her contemporaries both for her piety and her work of reform, and for her uncommon intellect and legal sense. In addition to spirituality, music flourished in the life of the Polish Benedictines. The monasteries resounded with poly­phonic music, both vocal and instrumental. The core of the nuns’ musical life, however, was daily prayer: the monophonic singing of the office and mass.

This presentation outlines progress in the research investigating how Polish Benedictine nuns chanted their daily prayers during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Preliminary analysis of extant sources indicates that the chant was not rhythmically uniform. The ‟Declarations to the Rule” from Chełmno state, ‟let the words be with prolongation well pronounced.” How­ever, even extensive examination of these sources does not yield a definitive hypothesis. There­fore, ad­di­ti­onal context from the period and region was considered. This two-step filter­ing process, com­bined with artistic judgment, enabled the author to draw practical conclu­sions, advancing our understanding towards a historically informed performance of the re­pertoire.

 

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Katz, Daniel S. (Martin-Buber-Institut für Judaistik, Universität Köln)

Daniel Katz has a Ph.D. from Duke University (The Earliest Sources for the “Libellus cantus mensurabilis secundum Johannem de Muris”, ca. 1340). His subsequent research has been on the manuscript sources for Ashkenazi synagogue chant; due to the lack of earlier materi­als, he works primarily in the period from 1740 to 1840. In 2021 he received a three-year grant from Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in affiliation with the Martin Buber Institute for Jewish Studies at the University of Cologne (Germany). He is a founding member of the Allgemeine Rabbinerkonferenz.

A Gregorian Chant, a Melodic Revelation from Mount Sinai, and the Burning of Martyrs at the Stake: The Legends and Presumed Relationship of Sanctus and Aleinu 

We will probably never know how the earliest Christian chants were related to Jewish chants, due to the lack of ancient sources. Nevertheless, some later notations of Gregorian and syn­agogue chants suggest a relationship. This lecture discusses one such case: the melodies of the Jewish hymn Aleinu (“We Must Praise the Lord of All”) and a nearly identical Sanctus.

Aleinu, like the more famous Kol nidrei, belongs to a small group of chants that are revered as if they were part of the Sinaitic revelation. Although no “melodies from Sinai” are notated be­fore the eighteenth century, they are commonly considered to be of medieval origin. Among these melodies, Aleinu stands out for two reasons: it closely resembles a fourteenth-century San­ctus, and a twelfth-century Hebrew chronicle claims that thirty Jewish martyrs sang Aleinu while being burned at the stake in 1171. Two questions arise: did the martyrs sing the traditio­nal chant, and was the Sanctus derived from it?

Abraham Idelsohn mentioned the “conspi­cu­ous similarity” of Aleinu and Sanctus without discussing the details (1926). Eric Werner im­plied, but did not show, a relationship (1959). Hanoch Avenary’s brief but iconic encyclo­pe­dia entry sought to establish musical parameters for the “melodies from Sinai” as a genre, ac­cepting in principle their medieval origin (1972). He examined extremely melismatic ex­am­ples of Aleinu and other chants, calling them “fantasias” (1968). Geoffrey Goldberg pre­sented additional “fan­tasias” (2003) and gave an excellent summary of, but did not investi­gate, the historical issues surrounding Aleinu and Sanctus (2019). Finally, Jonathan L. Fried­mann dis­cussed the history of the term “melodies from Sinai” without evaluating the music (2019).

Despite the centrality of Aleinu and Sanctus in their respective traditions, nobody has yet com­pared them systematically. This lecture fills the gap, showing that a close reading of the chronicle casts doubt on the historicity of the martyrs’ singing of Aleinu, while a musical ana­lysis reveals that the chants are not so closely related as had been thought. Offering a new ap­praisal of an old interreligious puzzle, this comparative study enhances our understanding of the history of both Jewish and Gregorian chant.

 

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Kolb, Paul (Alamire Foundation)

https://www.alamirefoundation.org/en/people/

Notational Paradoxes in Liturgical Polyphony

By the late middle ages, plainchant and mensural notations had gone their separate ways: notes were shaped and grouped differently, they were described using different terminology, and they represented (in chant and polyphony) two different ways of making music. In a num­ber of surviving manuscripts of liturgical polyphony, however, chant-style notation can be found in both monophonic and polyphonic contexts, with or without explicit rhythm. Fo­cus­ing on manuscripts from German-speaking lands ca. 1500, this lecture will examine nota­tional features that both highlight as well as blur the distinction between chant and poly­phony. Fre­quently chant incipits were given rhythmic significations as well as simple divisi at ca­dences. Within sections of polyphony the cantus firmus is sometimes highlighted visually with chant-style notation. Sometimes rhythmic chant incipits continue uninterrupted into sections of poly­phony. The back-to-back placement of two visually distinct types of notation highlights their implicit musical difference while paradoxically breaking down the stylistic distinctions between chant and polyphony.

 

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Kőnig Julianna (HUN-REN Research Centre for the Humanities, Institute for Musicology / HAS ‘Momentum’ Digital Music Fragmentology Research Group, Budapest)

Julianna Kőnig (1999) graduated from Ferenc Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest with an MA in Musicology in 2023. Currently she is a doctoral student at the Department of Musico­logy at the same institution. In 2021 she joined the ‘Momentum’ Digital Music Fragmento­logy Research Group established at the HUN-REN Research Centre for the Humanities, Institute for Musicology, Department of Early Music History. She is involved in fragment research and in the building of the online chant database Melodiarium Hungariae Medii Aevi Digitale. Her main interests are the Lamentations in medieval Hungarian sources, which is also the subject of her doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Zsuzsa Czagány.

https://ldzf.zti.hu/en/; http://fragmenta.zti.hu/en/

The Hungarian Medieval Lamentations

Among the many defining moments of the medieval liturgy of the time to prepare for Easter, one of the most spectacular musical genres is the Lamentation. The Lamentations are lessons for the first Nocturn of Matins on Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. These stand out from syllable lessons because their melody contains florid passages, peculiarly the Hebrew letters (Aleph, etc.). In my presentation, I will discuss the Hungarian medieval La­mentations, which tradition seems to be unique in the central Europe region. Not only because of its melody but also because of the text selection and usage. I am going to present the melodic and textual characteristics of Hungarian Lamentations.

 

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Kritikou, Flora (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens)

https://en.music.uoa.gr/staff/faculty_members/flora_kritikou/

Between Texts and Liturgy: Western Elements in the Ecclesiastical Repertory of Cyprus (15th–16th c.) 

The repertoire formed in Cyprus during the Frankish and Venetian periods seems to have be­gun to be recorded in the fifteenth century. Among the numerous compositions of famous musicians, such as John and Thomas Kordokotos, Hieronymus Tragodistis, Constantine Flangis, but also many anonymous composers of the Cypriot tradition, there are settings which could be considered at least particular as being outside the so-called ‛common tra­dition’ of chant. These settings seem to serve specific liturgical needs, which, however, are usually covered by other compositions in the traditional Byzantine repertoire. The aim of this lecture is to study and present those Cypriot works that lie outside the traditional liturgical com­position, and to investigate the possible Western influence on the use of other texts in­stead of the traditional ones. This lecture is part of the research project ῾The liturgical reper­toire of Cyprus’ which is carried out by the Department of Music Studies of the NKUA, the University of Cyprus an῾d the University of Sorbonne and is funded by the French School of Athens.

 

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Lacoste, Debra (University of Waterloo) - Bain, Jennifer (Dalhousie University)

https://uwaterloo.ca/music/profiles/debra-lacoste

https://www.dal.ca/faculty/arts/school-of-performing-arts/faculty-staff/our-faculty/musicology/jennifer-bain.html

Projects, Platforms, and Partnerships: Linking Digital Chant Tools 

As Cantus Planus turns 40, it is appropriate to reflect on the Cantus Database’s nearly four decades of digital development in medieval chant research. Now funded through the DACT partnership project at Dalhousie University, the Cantus Database and Cantus Index online research tools have showcased new features and continued growth in an expanded mandate, now including the contents of graduals and processionals with the original Office chants, as well as in linking together nineteen (and counting) chant databases. Arguably the longest-running digital chant resource, the Cantus Database has migrated through multiple operating systems and platforms, each offering expanded features. Its catalogue, the Cantus Index, continues to connect new partners, including the recent collaborations with Medieval Music Manuscripts from Austrian Monateries (Veselovská and Haltrich), Usuarium (Földváry), BENEDICAMUS (Bradley), and Melodiarium Hungariae Medii Aevi Digitale (Czagány). Updates to software platforms over the years have allowed for new visualisations with more advanced analyses of the data; the increase in partnerships has already contributed to a higher degree of sustainability through collaborative engagement among database managers and developers of digital tools; and the flourishing of new online projects based on the concept, structure, and metadata of the Cantus Database promises to both ensure the legacy of this digital chant research tool and brighten the future for at least the next 40 years! This presen­tation will highlight recent developments in the Cantus Database and Cantus Index projects, including new applications for research, increased contents, protocol development, and mana­-gement structures that promote sustainability and interoperability.

 

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Lagergren, Karin (Linnaeus University / Alamire Foundation)

https://lnu.se/en/staff/karin.lagergren/

The Birth of a Liturgy: The Offices Cantus sororum and Stabat Virgo and the Birgittine Order

The origins of medieval liturgies are seldom something that scholars can trace. This is espe­cially true for the Order of the Birgittines where there exist no sources to Birgittine sisters’ office liturgy the Cantus sororum from ca the first 70 years of the Order’s existence. Accord­ing to tradition and Birgitta’s revelations, her confessor master Petrus of Skänninge created the Cantus sororum entirely on his own building on earlier existing liturgies and chant re­per­toires. Recent studies have rather pointed to that this office was created during a much longer time and probably completed in the 1420s and at the latest in 1430 when the dedication of the abbey church took place. But how this process was carried out has not been possible to study in detail. However, recent studies of the rhymed office Stabat virgo dolorosa has revealed in­teresting results on how these two liturgies might have been worked out in conjunction with the Cantus sororum. Stabat virgo dolorosa was observed for the feast Compassio Mariae and is believed to have a Swedish origin, possibly Birgittine, and was completed before 1417. Three of its great responsories bear close resemblance to chants in the Cantus sororum and both offices share the hymn Rogatus Deus, which is a contrafact of Vexilla regis. Study of these sources makes it possible to discuss how at least parts if the Cantus sororum emerged.

Intertwined with the nun’s performance of Cantus sororum, the performance by the Vadstena brethren of Stabat Virgo exemplifies a deep theological web in Birgittine spirituality. In its heart lay the example of the Virgin Mary—to be observed and followed.

This presentation will present a comparative analysis of Matins responsories in the two Of­fices and discuss the two liturgies in its Birgittine spiritual context. 

 

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Lingas, Alexander (City, University of London / Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies, Cambridge / St Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary)

https://www.svots.edu/people/dr-alexander-lingas

Ps 23:7–10 (LXX) as a Chant of the Byzantine Rite

In some modern churches celebrating the Byzantine rite it is customary to preface the already dramatic service of Paschal matins with a dialogic performance of Psalm 23:7–10 at the door of the church. The earliest witnesses to this practice are, as Bertonière noted in his 1972 study of the Greek Easter Vigil, a few manuscripts of the 12th century. Thereafter it has remained a minority tradition despite repeated censure. The 14th-century manual of Byzantine court ceremonial of Pseudo-Kodinos, for example, states that although many churches had come to use it, performance of the dialogue was explicitly not the practice of the Great Church of Hagia Sophia.

This lecture will set this optional Byzantine Easter dialogue within the broader context of sung worship in medieval Greek and Latin Christendom. Although a paschal use of Ps. 23:7–10 was foreshadowed by its quotation in the Gospel of Nicodemus, patristic authors and liturgical texts from across the late antique Mediterranean linked this passage more closely to the feast of the Ascension. The rite of Old Rome rite went on to apply it also to the Virgin Mary, while the traditions of Jerusalem and Constantinople employed it regularly as a Great Entrance chant. Closer in spirit and format to the later paschal tradition was the use of Ps 23:7–10 to mark the consecrations of churches in the Greek East and Latin West. 

I will argue that that Ps. 23:7–10 was eventually incorporated into Greek Paschal services as part of a general tendency in both Byzantine and Latin Christianity during the later Middle Ages to elaborate the commemoration of Christ’s Passion and Resurrection with mimetic rituals. By the fifteenth century we find it being used at the same moment not only in Greek churches (set, in some cases to ecstatic chant), but also in the local Latin rites of northern Italy.

 

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Lousberg, Leo (Utrecht University)

https://www.uu.nl/staff/LAJLousberg

Signal Tones, the Art of Interruption as Practiced by Radbod of Utrecht (c. 910) and Hildegard von Bingen (c. 1150) 

Radbod and Hildegard, composing 400 kilometres apart along the Rhine with a time difference of 240 years, in their compositions utilized a limited set of neumes as acoustic codes to convey affect, logic, and loci in their sung texts. These neumes are signal tones.

Signal tones interrupt the melodies of Gregorian chant by enharmonic (microtonal) and chromatic material (sharps, flats), timbral accents, portamenti, and repercussive sounds. 

Radbod and Hildegard’s compositions exemplify elements of an ancient musical and meditative tradition that survived Guido d’Arezzo’s reforms for nearly three centuries across significant parts of Europe.  

The presentation gives an impression of the interpretants and the tools of this tradition as it appears from Radbod’s and Hildegard’s compositions. 

 

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Maessen, Geert (independent scholar)

G. Maessen studied architecture and philosophy. He is a braille music expert at Dedicon and leader of Gregoriana Amsterdam. He developed Fluxus notation for Gregorian chant. He provided the radio program Bonum est for the Concertzender. He initiated computational research into the lost melos of the Mozarabic rite. More information at www.gregoriana.nl

A New Interpretation of the Special Signs in the Dijon Tonary

The Dijon tonary (F-Mof H 159) dates from the early eleventh century. It is the oldest pre­served manuscript with the complete mass repertoire in diastematic notation. The manuscript has a double notation; traditional a-diastematic neumes and (diastematic) tone letters a to p over two octaves. In addition to the tone letters, the manuscript has special signs (1 in ap­pro­xi­mately 100 notes) for the sub-semitonal tones b, e, h, j and m, or, si, mi, la and higher up again, si and mi.  

Since the discovery of the manuscript in the nineteenth century, there has been debate about the meaning of these signs. Jacques Froger has suggested that they are rhythmic signs. Most scholars, however, think they refer to ‟microtones”: tones ‟between” the sub- and super-semitonal tones. In this lecture I will show that the main argument for the microtone hypothesis is inconclusive while most other arguments also support my new hypothesis: the signs re­pre­sent sub-semitonal tones and warn to take these tones high enough. 

For this hypothesis I analyzed the signs in the largest subset of the Dijon tonary (the offerto­ries). Comparison with a-diastematic neumes showed that the neume letters s and a (indicat­ing ‟uphold”) correspond most often to the special signs. Furthermore 98 percent of all signs appear to stand in identical melodical contexts. Comparing all instances of these contexts (with and without signs) showed that contexts with signs are substantially more often fol­lowed by neumes indicating tone repetitions (tristropha, bistropha, trigon ...) than the same contexts without signs. Based on ethnomusicological and paleographical evidence I will de­fend that instead of the special signs these specific neumes indicate microtonal inflections, and that the signs are most likely designed to distinguish the sub-semitonal tones from these inflections. 

 

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Mahrt, William Peter (Stanford University)

https://cap.stanford.edu/profiles/viewCV?facultyId=55691&name=William_Mahrt

Dynamic Parallelism in Gregorian Chants

The poetry of the psalms has neither rhyme nor meter, but rather parallelismus membrorum— each line of the psalm is constituted by two parallel statements, usually grammatically com­plete and complementary in one way or another. Scholars of literature have studied this since the eighteenth century, but often viewing them as equal statements. However, Robert Alter, in The Art of Biblical Poetry, has challenged this equality, showing rather, that there is a dynam­ic relation between the two members of the psalm verse. the second often exceeding the first with greater force. 

Musical scholars, however, have been satisfied to point out that the two parts of the psalm tone are equal. The present study considers discrete melodies of chant in which dynamic par­allelism of the text can be seen as the foundation for an even more dynamic relation between the melodies setting the parallelism. Examples of such melodies will be sung, showing the various ways that the “parallel” statements purposefully differ, by distinctions of pitch, melod­ic contour, melismatic elaboration, or even change of mode. 

 

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Mannaerts, Pieter (Alamire Foundation and KU Leuven)

https://www.alamirefoundation.org/en/people/

The Codex Eyckensis, a New Eighth-Century Source for the Study of litterae significativae

Although the early-eighth-century gospel book known as the ‘Codex Eyckensis’ is the oldest ma­nuscript preserved in Belgium and has been studied intermittently since the 1890s, it has not yet claimed its place in liturgical history, and much less so in the history of plainchant. The codex is now thought to have been copied in the Benedictine abbey of Echternach, and a case can be made for its use by the Benedictine nuns of Aldeneik abbey from the late ninth century onwards. The gospel book does not contain any neumatic or other musical notation but presents a set of 26 litterae significativae in the passions of Mark and John. In this lecture, I propose a first examination of these letters.

After a brief examination of the palaeographical criteria that allow a preliminary dating of the litterae, I will argue that the comparison with contemporary and pre-eleventh-century insular and continental sources provides insufficient context for the understanding of the litterae si­gni­­ficativae in the Codex Eyckensis. Rather, a closer look at how and where precisely the let­ters are used will shed a new light on their meaning and use as indications for both per­for­mance and intertextuality. This view is supported by elements from the late-antique and medi­eval in­ter­punction systems known as distinctiones and positurae, and by relevant passages in the Epi­stola ad Lantbertum (‘Quod singulae litterae’, c.885–890) of Notker of St Gall. Build­ing on the pioneering research of Michel Huglo (litterae significativae) and Charles Atkinson (the role of accentuation and punctuation in the genesis of neumatic notation), my lecture thus pro­poses a renewed and enlarged context for the study of litterae significativae and their origins.

 

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Markham, Elizabeth J. (University of Arkansas)

https://uark.academia.edu/ElizabethMarkham

'Modal Modulation' by Way of Melodic Double-Entendre Cued in Vocables and a Neumatic Script for Early Japanese Buddhist Chant 

Certain neumatic notations for early Japanese Buddhist chant and non-lexical vocables for courtly instrumental musics are “modally analytic” of items in originally Tang Chinese (618–907) mode-keys they record. These systems graphically or sonically stake out discrete spatial units bounded by hierarchically strong notes of a Sino-Japanese mode-key; they evidently assume their Japanese singer’s active modal thinking while moving up and down through the total diatonic pitch-space used. Other early East Asian monodic melody in liturgical and se­cular musical repertories also rooted in the Tang Chinese modal system back the spatial ap­proach to modal note-sets, but suggest more. Scribe, singer, instrumentalist and scholar were seemingly aware of the modal function of each and every note, point by point through a melody; intricate cueing and manipulating of segments of the note-set that can then differ in modality from the primary mode-key apparently represent a temporary but definite move to a secondary mode-key. Drawing now on a diagram in a Buddhist theory tract, my lecture at­tempts to lay out on graphic adjustment in a widely-used, pitch-specific neumatic system and methodical vowel-switching in the vocables how this seems to be working. It asks whether such moving away for a time from the primary mode-key to a modal alternative available in the note-set of that mode-key deserves to be boldly referred to as “modal modulation” and whether deliberate delaying an eventual moving away by courting modal ambiguity over stretches in shared segments of the modal note-set can be cast as a sort of melodic double-entendre or musical punning akin to homophonous kakekotoba (掛詞) pivot words in Japanese poetry.

 

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Matsuhashi Kiko (Tokyo University of the Arts, Department of Musicology)

Kiko Matsuhashi holds a PhD from the Tokyo University of the Arts. She is currently a Re­search Assistant at Tokyo University of the Arts and a lecturer at Oberlin University (in Tokyo). Her research interests focus on religious music and its boundaries in and out of li­turgy. She is currently working on congregational music studies in Japan and Asia and a project on Masses under the influence of Josephinism in the 18th, 19th centuries.

Vernacular Congregational Singing in Catholic Churches before the Second Vatican Council

The Second Vatican Council encouraged the “active participation” of the congregation and the liturgy and music were translated into vernacular language. However, there was already a long history of vernacular congregational singing before that. 

Through the examination of Japanese early congregational hymnbooks, it becomes clear that two German hymnbooks, those of Cologne Archdiocese (1908) and Fulda Diocese (1891) had a great influence on the first Japanese congregational hymnbook, Kokyo-kai Hymnbook (1918). Through the comparison between German and Japanese texts of individual hymns in the Kokyo Hymnbook, I argue that the Japanese texts were not mere translations of the origi­nal texts, but rather emphasized the meanings of the liturgical event or Christian doctrine over individual piety. This indicates the importance of vernacular congregational singing to mis­sion­­a­ries in the Catholic churches. Congregational singing had a positive impact on the mis­sions, especially in non-Romance language regions.

This tradition of vernacular singing originates from a liturgical movement in the late-eigh­teenth-century Enlightenment, especially in the German-speaking region. Many hymns were translated into German and many melodies were incorporated from the protestant chorale or adapted from Gregorian chant. The new hymnbooks contained hymns with metrical rhythm that were easy to sing along and remember. Although the liturgical movement of the late-eighteenth-century Enlightenment is thought to have not been accomplished until the Second Vatican Council, this research shows that vernacular congregational singing spread widely at the time and resulted in a great impact on the work of early-twentieth century missionaries

 

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Maurey, Yossi (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

https://huji.academia.edu/YossiMaurey

Revealing Lazarus in Medieval France

One would think that being a friend of the Lord (amicus Dei) and raised from the dead by Christ on the fourth day, would secure Lazarus a place of honor in the pantheon of medieval devotion. After all, this was the last miracle Christ performed before his own Passion, antici­pat­ing his resurrection. Only a very small number of churches, however, were dedicated to Lazarus. In medieval France, there were just three, all consecrated in the twelfth century. 

Medieval exegetes, moreover, were more partial to the sisters of Lazarus, Mary and Mar­tha. And yet, over the course of the twelfth century, Lazarus became the patron saint of Autun and its diocese, and the titular saint of the city’s new cathedral. What was the sudden appeal of the saint in twelfth-century Autun, where he was hitherto known to locals exclusively through scripture, never meriting the sort of steadfast veneration he received in places such as Cyprus and Constantinople. What musico-liturgical strategies were deployed to elevate Lazarus from someone whose only claim to fame was that he was resurrected (he did not perform a single miracle)?

 

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Mazzoletti, Chiara (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)

A PhD student at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, working inside the ERC ‘Sound­space’ project; she completed her Bachelor (2019) and Master (2021) degree in Musicology at the Università degli Studi of Pavia-Cremona, also took a Piano diploma at the Conserva­torio G. Nicolini of Piacenza (2022); she is completing a second-level Master in Gregorian Chant at the Scuola Universitaria della Svizzera Italiana (Lugano). Currently she is the di­rector of the Schola Cantorum ‘Cantus Fugiens’ of Barcelona. 

Exploring the Uniqueness of the Eleventh-Century Lucca Missal: A Paleographical and Liturgical Study

In the Biblioteca Capitolare Feliniana in Lucca, with shelf mark 606, is preserved a Missal da­table to the eleventh century, with musical notation, undoubtedly from a Benedictine monastery. This codex, certainly written in Lucca, is important for several reasons: it is the oldest and—at the moment—the only existing example of adiastematic neumatic notation for the area around the city, a flourishing cultural center in medieval central Italy. The earliest folios also contain the oldest surviving martyrology for the Tuscan region, and interesting comparisons are made with the sanctoral contained in the body of the Missal. Six folios present Beneventan notation that, according to Thomas Forrest Kelly's studies, is aligned with the notation of the late ele­venth-century Beneventan codices but that has nothing in common—on a palaeographic level, only on a liturgical level—with the Lucchese notation of the main body of the codex, which is lacking but worthy of specific study. This one is varied and interesting, deserving of punctual comparisons with other notations close to it both chronologically and geographically, as well as with apparently distant notations, such as those that developed in the same centuries in the Catalan-Narbonnese area, for example. A comprehensive study has been conducted, examin­ing its notational and liturgical aspects, as well as the formularies, leading to interesting find­ings in all respects that make this manuscript unique.

 

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Medina de Seiça, Alberto (CESEM, Universidade Nova de Lisboa)

Alberto Medina de Seiça is a research fellow of CESEM (Centre for the Study of the Socio­logy and Aesthetics of Music at Lisbon Nova University) and a managing editor of the project “Thematic History of Music in Portugal and Brazil”. Editor of the Portuguese Early Music Database and a member of the Scientific Committee for the Catalogue of the Musical Archive of the House of Braganza’s Museum-Library.

Chant Manuscripts from the Ducal Palace ('Arquivo Musical do Museu-Biblioteca da Casa de Bragança'): A Survey of the Cataloguing Process

Among the array of music collections in Portugal, the one housed at the Ducal Palace in Vila Viçosa stands out for its remarkable richness and diversity. In 2017, the Centre for the Study of the Sociology and Aesthetics of Music (CESEM/NOVA FCSH), in collaboration with the Foundation of the House of Braganza (FCB), launched a comprehensive musicological cata­logue project. This initiative aimed to catalogue both the vast number of handwritten and printed scores held within the Archive and disseminate related knowledge through scientific and artistic events.

In my presentation, I will focus on the chant manuscripts within the Archive collections. These manuscripts encompass different typologies, including variations in notational forms, techniques of writing and materials used (parchment, stencil, and paper), reflecting the broad temporal span of their production, ranging from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century. The com­munication will delve into the most relevant features of these chant collections and the chal­lenges encountered in cataloguing this heterogeneous ensemble.

 

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Merlin, David (Università degli Studi di Padova / University of Vienna)

https://unipd.academia.edu/DavidMerlin

The Year of the Praying Sicks. Religious Practices in Austrian Hospitals During the Later Middle Ages with an Attempt to Reconstruct the Liturgical Year in the Civic Hospital of Vienna

My lecture offers new insights into the religious practices of Austrian hospitals during the later Middle Ages. Furthermore, based on existing documents, I intend to present a recon­struction of the calendar of Offices and Masses celebrated yearly in the Civic Hospital of Vienna in the fifteenth century.

Medieval hospitals were institutions dedicated to individuals with temporary or permanent disabilities. They offered an abode for the body and salvation for the soul. The inmates were involved in paraliturgical and liturgical forms of worship on a daily basis. Regulations were in place for both private and communal prayer. The celebration of daily and festive masses, funeral services, as well as the Hours, were crucial in this context. Processions played a significant role, representing a moment of communal life within the hospital or a visible manifestation of the community in the town’s public space

The liturgical services were open to participation by all and, in many cases, funded by benefactors. In this context, two complementary phenomena harmonized: wealthy (and healthy) individuals donated to obtain prayers to save the souls of the living and the dead, while praying and engaging in other religious practices served as a means of physical as well as spiritual healing for the inmates.

 

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Morandi, Nausica (Università degli Studi di Padova)

https://www.unipd.it/en/contatti/rubrica/?ruolo=1&checkout=cerca&persona=MORANDI

A New Musico-Litugical Source of the Officium stellae

My lecture analyses a recently discovered source of the Officum stellae, the musico-liturgical drama of the Epiphany, attested by about fifty sources between the tenth and the fifteenth century. The new source, unknown from previous studies, is a fragment of the late eleventh century (or early twelfth century) of the Universitätsbibliothek of Leipzig coming from the Cistercian mo­nastery of Altzella, Cella Sanctae Mariae. The fragment shows some very interesting features and attests a tradition of the drama that is not confirmed in other known sources, regarding both texts, with some unica, and music. My contribution will deepen these peculiar character­istics, relating the German fragment to the tradition known to us of drama from the point of view of the tradition of the texts and of the dramaturgical and musical choices.

 

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Nishimagi Shin (Institute for European Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Waseda University, Tokyo)

https://www.irht.cnrs.fr/fr/annuaire/nishimagi-shin

La tradition manuscrite du Dialogus de musica (c. 1000): une perspective revisitée

Le Dialogus de musica (c. 1000, Italie) est la plus ancienne source abordant certains aspects fondamentaux de la théorie musicale occidentale : la notation alphabétique selon le système A-G, l'échelle du gamma à .aa., la distinction entre les modes d'après la note finale, les notes initiales et l'ambitus modal, etc. Ce petit traité, transmis par plus de cinquante manuscrits, figure parmi les plus diffusés au Moyen Âge, après le De institutione musica de Boèce et les traités de Guy d’Arezzo. Malgré son importance, il n’a pas encore bénéficié d’une édition critique, et l'accès à ce texte s'appuie toujours sur la leçon germanique éditée par Gerbert (1784). Dans la perspective d'une édition critique du Dialogus de musica, j'ai collationné l'ensemble des manuscrits attestés dans le RISM B III 1-6. Une étude approfondie des variantes du Dialogus de musica devrait permettre de mieux éclairer les traditions et la transmission encore mal connues de ce texte.

 

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Orio, Francesco (NOVA University, Lisbon / Universitat de Barcelona)

https://cesem.fcsh.unl.pt/en/pessoa/francesco-orio-2/

The Gradual E-Bbc ms1805: A Study of Notation, Liturgy, and Catalan Identity 

The manuscript E-Bbc Ms. 1805, datable to the first half of the twelfth century, is a Gradual of  the Romano-Frankish rite with late Catalan-Narbonnese semi-diastematic neumatic notation, found in the church of Sant Romà de Les Bons in Andorra, and now preserved in the Biblio­teca de Catalunya (Barcelona). This report is based on previously conducted studies that paved the way for further investigation, especially of certain aspects such as the provenance of the manuscript, the presence of unique pieces, an in-depth neumatic study, and codicologi­cal issues that can only be reconstructed through meticulous liturgical investigation. In parti­cular, it was pointed out that the manuscript may have probable French origins—and not Ur­gellensian as per the bibliography—since it presents some particular liturgical and melodic features, such as the concordance of the post-Pentecost Alleluias with witnesses from the Per­pignan area, the presence of a verbeta to St. John the Baptist found in witnesses from the same area, as well as the transformation of some melodic cadences of 2nd mode typical of the Aqui­­taine, that differ from the other Hispanic manuscripts. In addition, an in-depth study of the notation has highlighted several issues both of a melodic nature—a neume previously con­sidered bisonic is actually trisonic, with all the consequences that this entails—and of the identity of the Catalan region, since it appears that, although the probable antigraph of this Gra­dual was notated with Aquitanian neumes, the copyist decided to use a mixed notation. Fi­nally, meticulous liturgical investigation has led both to the discovery of probable unique pieces (at the current state of studies) as well as to the reconstruction of the Gradual's original fascicle structure (the current one is particularly disturbed), which in fact makes it possible to establish how the manuscript is the work of a single copyist.

 

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Papp Anette (Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary, Budapest)

Anette Papp graduated (1997) at the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music in sacred music, se­con­dary school vocal music and choir conducting. In 2003, she obtained her doctoral degree (dis­sertation: The medieval relations of the so called Protestant ‟graduale” antiphons, under the supervision of László Dobszay). She received her habilitation degree from the Liszt Fe­renc Academy of Music in 2019. She started teaching hymnology and ‟gra­dual” (Hun­garian Protestant native Gregorian) at the Department of Sacred Music of the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music in 1998. Since 2008 she has been teach­ing as an associate professor at the Faculty of Theology of the Károli Gáspár Reformed University. Since 2018, she has been the Head of the Department of Hymnology at the aformentioned Faculty.

Gregorianischer Gesang in der Praxis der sächsichen Unitarier in Siebenbürgen

Die Quelle mit der Kennzeichnung MSU 1042 ist ein im Jahr 1622 verfasstes deutsch­spra­chiges Handschrift, das für die Nutzung der sächsischen Bevölkerung in Klausenburg zusam­men­gestellt wurde. Dieses Graduale wurde auf Anweisung des Bischofs Valentinus Radecke vom sächsischen Kantor Lorenz Budaker erstellt. Bei der Zusammenstellung des Bandes spielte der aus Danzig stammende Valentin Radecke eine entscheidende Rolle, der ab 1615 Bischof der unitarischen Kirche in Siebenbürgen war. Während seiner Tätigkeit in Sieben­bürgen veröffentlichte Valentinus Radecke zwei Sammlungen, in denen auch gesungene Stücke enthalten waren. Der erste Band ist ein gedrucktes Gesangbuch, der zweite ein hand­schrift­liches Graduale. Beide Bücher sind die ersten, wahrscheinlich lückenlosen Werke der antitrinitarischen Sachsen und passen in die Bemühungen des Bischofs zur Kirchenkon­so­li­dierung. Während das Gesangbuch keine Noten enthält, enthält das Graduale – wenn auch in geringerem Umfang – auch notierte Titel. Die Darstellung behandelt die notierten Stücke des sächsischen unitarischen Buches. Diese Stücke bieten Einblicke in die musikalische Praxis und den religiösen Ausdruck der sächsischen Gemeinschaft in Klausenburg während des 17. Jahrhunderts, und tragen so zur historischen und kulturellen Erforschung der Region bei.

 

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Parkes, Henry (University of Nottingham)

https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/humanities/departments/music/people/henry.parkes

Early Medieval 'Night Antiphoners' and the Logistics of Nocturnal Chant

From the ninth century on, booklists frequently refer to a special musical book type associated with the night: the nocturnale, antiphonarium nocturnale or antiphonarium de nocte. Most mu­­sicologists will have some idea of what such a book would have contained. But how was it actually used? Two suppositions seem to prevail: either the book was reserved for the private use of a cantor who taught the chants to everyone else (what we might term an early-medieval paradigm) or it was placed on a lectern for all to see (a late-medieval paradigm). Both para­digms can be supported by historical evidence.

Nevertheless, the designation 'night antiphoner' focusses the issue in important and as yet un­explored ways. To what extent were music books actually available to singers when they sang the night offices, and what evidence is there for the provision of the lecterns, lamps and candles that might enable the consultation of written materials? Conversely, what can be said about practices of memorisation in connection with these offices, and about the role of written documents in the memory process?

Using a variety of customaries, commentaries, rules and statutes, all from before the thirteenth century—the moment when lectern-based singing supposedly took off—my lecture takes a fresh view of these relationships. Whilst generalisation is impossible, there emerges a strong sense of the daily interdependency of reading and recall. That is to say, neither paradigm fully holds up, whether the notion of a lifelong 'verbatim memory' or a practice of cantare super librum.

 

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Peattie, Matthew (University of Colorado Boulder)

https://www.colorado.edu/humanities/matthew-peattie

An Edition of Recall Notation?   

This presentation discusses a novel approach to editing early nuance-rich notation, with an emphasis on texts from Laon Bibliothèque municipale 239. This notation is not pitch-readable and can be understood as ‟recall notation”—notation that prompts a singer a to remember and recreate melodies that have already been committed to memory. Today, nuance rich notations are typically presented in parallel editions (such as the Graduale triplex and Graduale novum) in which the pitch content is presented in quadratic notation, and the neumatic notation is re­created above or below. One remarkable element of this notation, of great interest to perfor­mers, is that it records detailed indications of relative weight, intensity, and duration, as well as some indications of vocal expression that provide a window into the rich sound world of the medieval singer. Many of these nuances are difficult to translate into quadratic or modern notation. I argue that this notation is best understood in its original aural environment, and that a modern edition should be conceived of not as a text to be read, but as a tool to facilitate recall and aural learning. This short presentation discusses a multilayered digital edition that enables performers to actively engage with late ninth-century recall notation in its proper con­ceptual environment.  

 

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Phillips, Thomas (University of Bristol)

Writing his PhD, focusing on the Saint Alban’s processional (see below). His PhD is funded by the AHRC South West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership.

New Discoveries in Bodleian Library, Laud Misc. 4: Unraveling the Transmission of the Office of St Alban

The Office of St. Alban, Anglorum protomartyr, is believed to have been written by Abbot Leofric of St. Albans c. 995, making it the earliest English music by a named composer. This office survives in a mid-eleventh-century St. Albans miscellany, New York, Morgan Library, MS. M. 926 (M. 926). The music is written with Anglo-Saxon neumes in campo aperto, there­fore transcriptions of the chants can only indicate melodic direction and not precise inter­vals. Previous studies have identified melodic cognates of a number of antiphons from the St. Alban office in Scandinavian sources (Bergsagel, 1972; 1975), but the responsories have been altogether neglected. Recorded towards the back of the twelfth-century St. Albans processio­nal (1167–1183), Bodleian Library, MS. Laud Misc. 4 (LM4), are incipits of numerous re­spon­­sories in Anglo-Norman neumes on staves taken from the St. Alban office and repur­posed for processional use. These responsories are not only attributed to St. Alban in LM4, but many more saints in the sanctorale, all of which are among the most important feast days in the St. Albans calendar. 

In this lecture, by comparing the melodic contour of the Anglo-Saxon neumes in M. 926 with the Anglo-Norman neumes in LM4, I propose that partial reconstructions of the pitched melodies of these responsories can be made. As well as LM4 preserving the melodies from the original Anglo-Saxon office, I also show that there is evidence of newly composed melodies for some of the same texts, which was supposedly done so to conform to post-Conquest Norman chant traditions. The preservation of these chants and their use for saints of the highest rank at St. Albans provides an insight into how the St. Albans liturgists were actively engaged in elevating Alban’s status from Anglorum protomartyr to that of biblical importance.

 

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Poliakova, Svetlana (CESEM-IN2PAST, NOVA University, Lisbon)

Svetlana Yurievna Poliakova is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Musicology at the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences, Universidade Nova de Lisboa (FCSH/NOVA). Since 2003, she has been a researcher at the Center for the Study of Sociology and Aesthetics of Music (CESEM) at FCSH/NOVA, within the Early Music Studies group. She is a founding member of the International Society for Or­tho­dox Church Music (ISOCM) at the University of Joensuu, Finland. She founded and directs the Pra­­voslava Chamber Choir (since 2002) and the Romanos Melodos Academic Choir (FCSH, Depart­ment of Musicology; since 2011), both dedicated to the performance of Eastern sacred music reper­toires.

The Lenten Hymnography: In Search of Parallels to Old Russia Sticheraria

The present lecture considers Russian Sticheraria of the movable cycle as witnesses to the in­tersection of regional traditions of the Byzantine rite. These manuscripts represent the oldest generation of Rus­sian notated codices. However, their appearance in the twelfth-thirteenth centuries is already far from the beginning of the Byzantine manuscript tradition, corres­ponding to the period of transition from a multitude of local practices to standardization. Old Russian Sticheraria reflect the complex picture of a transitional period. They are notated with a variety of Paleo-Byzantine notation, and many of their characteristics are not yet standar­dized. They are more consistent with each other than any pair of Greek Paleo-Byzantine Sti­cheraria. At the same time, they have many differences among themselves. It can be assumed that both the similarities and differences developed through the exchange of expe­rience in the field of liturgical practice and the manuscript tradition of a number of Greek and Slavic monastic, cathedral, and parish centres. The contacts could have been both direct and indirect, simulta­neous and asynchronous, occurring over tenth-thirteenth centuries. To identify possible local connec­tions, the lecture proposes examining the intersections of stichera prosomoia and idiomela apocrypha and other atypical cases in the stichera sequences of Old Russian and Greek Sticheraria, as well as Old Russian, Greek, and Slavic Triodia on the material of the services from the preparatory Sundays to Palm Sunday.

 

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Praßl, Franz Karl (Kunstuniversität Graz)

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Karl_Praßl

Chromatic Semitones, Music Theory and the Seckau ‘Graduale Magnum’

The fact that the resulting chromatic semitones in chants with a modal change ‘cannot be no­tated’ in the Guidonian system has preoccupied music theory since the introduction of diaste­matic notation. But musical practice was also increasingly affected by this. The notators of antiphonaries and graduals often developed their own strategies based on the principle of par­tial transposition in order to elegantly circumvent the problem. This lecture will show how the ‘first hand’ in the Seckau Graduale Magnum from around 1500 (A-Gu 17) set the partial trans­positions and how this relates to comparable sources. 

 

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Rossil, Helen (musicologist, free scholar)

https://dk.linkedin.com/in/helen-rossil-a62897291

Experience and Agency in Traditional Danish Hymn Singing

Despite extensive efforts of Danish ecclesiastical authorities in musical standardization during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, certain minor religious groups in Denmark, mainly rooted in nineteenth century’s Pietist revivalism, preserved and transmitted an old way of singing, which was unaccompanied, orally transmitted, and only led by parish clerks (the teachers) or was not led at all. Audio recordings from the period 1927–1995, documenting four different communities, prove that the vocal style of these groups was closely connected to a social and confessional identity.

This lecture will show how the analysis of sound recordings can be conducted by following a diachronic and a synchronic axis: by investigating melodic development and motivic migration through history, aspects of tradition and collective memory can be illuminated; by investigating issues of texture, especially of unison and heterophony, it is possible to regard the musical organization as a reflection of social organization, which also sheds light on religious and confessional values of the specific communities. The lecture will give examples of how Orthodox-Lutheran identity and the ambivalence of strong community (internally) and conflict (externally) can be expressed in hymn singing.  

 

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Roundtable Session: Beyond Online – Digital Resources and the Question of Editions

Digital image libraries, with their easy online access to manuscript sources, as well as data­bases such as the Cantus Database and others in the Cantus Index network, have developed into indispensable study materials for chant musicology. Among the audiences of these digital resources are singers of medieval chant, who might be skilled enough to read a variety of neu­matic and staff notations directly from images of their original sources without any inter­me­diary transcription. Editions might be desired, however, for a variety of uses, and philolo­gists might wish to use online chant data as a starting point for pursuing and realizing edited works.

Questions arise, then, about the decisions that must be made when working with medieval sources and adapting the digital data that has been compiled about them into another format. Attitudes towards finding a lost original chant repertory have changed over the last 50 years, with different approaches in the Stockholm Corpus troporum philological practices, those of René-Jean Hesbert’s AMS and CAO, and Dom Froger’s Graduel romain. Probably amplified by the need in Catholic churches for practical editions for daily use in church services and monasteries, the highly-nuanced landscape of chant in the high Middle Ages, when language and chant melodies varied according to place and time, were not adequately represented in editions. Moreover, new composition, adding chant to the hypothetical original nucleus, has continued even until today.

Even with Dom Botte, Hartmut Möller and Michel Huglo’s (constructive) critiques, which concerned the problem of a single edition of a repertory, a systematized methodology for edi­tions of such diverse corpora is lacking. How can we approach published editions of chant? Should we rely on our predecessors’ tools to render liturgical texts and music in a single edi­tion? If so, how will we assimilate different cultural contexts? Which criteria will we use to choose sources, and for which aim? Will any particular notation be privileged? How can one represent in an edition the specific ontology of pieces as detailed in a database, such as, for example, the rewriting by Agobard of Lyon of the Responsory Descendit de caelis  (Cantus ID 006410 and 006411), which is either two compositions or one? What aim should a critical edition have? Is it the same goal when we deal with furnishing materials for perfor­mers?

This session will explore practical ways of using databases like Cantus or PEM for perfor­mance, while considering how to approach textual and melodic variants as scholars of me­dieval chant look past the artificial recreation of chant in older, print editions to new metho­dologies practiced by scholars of philology and history that will bring chant studies fully into the twenty-first century.

Participants:

Lacoste, Debra (University of Waterloo https://uwaterloo.ca/music/profiles/debra-lacoste) Introduction

Eben, David (Charles University, Prague https://uhv.ff.cuni.cz/en/people/ac/eben/) The 'Melody ID' and the 'Ideal Type'

Goudesenne, Jean-François (Institut de recherche et d’histoire des Textes (CNRS), https://www.irht.cnrs.fr/fr/annuaire/goudesenne-jean-francois) Twelve Chants: Examples in the Mass and Office involving modifications in the ID, data comparisons, and new evidence in oral-written chant transmission

de Bakker, Anna (Dalhousie University https://theconversation.com/profiles/anna-de-bakker-1241149) Singing from the Sources: Using the Cantus Ultimus portal to find and view manuscript images

Peattie, Matthew (University of Colorado Boulder https://www.colorado.edu/humanities/matthew-peattie) An Edition of Recall Notation?

Hoefener, Kristin (CESEM, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, https://novaresearch.unl.pt/en/persons/kristin-hoefener) Teaching through Performance: ESMAE Students Collaborate on a Concert Program Featuring Hieronymite Liturgical Manuscripts in Porto

 

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Sanfratello, Giuseppe (University of Catania)

https://www.disum.unict.it/assegnisti-di-ricerca/sanfratello.giuseppe

'Multipart Chanting' in the Ionian Islands: Sources, Revival, and Performers

This lecture offers an overview of the Byzantine liturgical chant of the Ionian Islands (Greece), with a focus on the musical practices of the cantors.

The decline of the traditional church music of Corfu will be illustrated in comparison to the vitality of that transmitted in Zakynthos and Kefalonia. On the latter island, for instance, bet­ween the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, there was an im­portant increase in the production of liturgical melodies by local composers who partly con­tinued to use the neumatic notation (i.e. ‘New Method’), and partly the staff notation (in this very case, pro­ducing new forms of harmonisation that are called ‘European music’ by the locals). 

Moreover, the musical transcriptions in neumatic notation of the ecclesiastical repertoire of Zakynthos made in the nineteenth century by the cantor Theodoros Kourkoumelis or Kothris (ca. 1790-1881) represent the source of today’s practices of ‘continuation’ of this musical tradi­tion, thanks also to the efforts of Panagiotis Marinos, a cantor who harmonises in four vocal parts the melodies transmitted in Kothris’s manuscripts, following the local traditional ‘multi­part’ singing practice.

Lastly, by observing these liturgical-musical practices, one could notice that each choir, can­tor or conductor feels that they are part of a transmission process sustained by the cycle of the calendar and their attachment not only to tradition and the performance context as such, but also to the symbolic value of the faith that unites them and makes them actively participate in community chanting, in an interplay between written and oral musical sources.

 

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Shaffer, Melanie (University of Bristol)

PhD in Music at the University of Colorado Boulder (2020), on music and text relationships in thirteenth-fourteenth century music and interdisciplinary approaches to music manuscripts. From January 2021, NWO project “Making a Martyr in Medieval Iberia,” at Radboud Uni­versity, Nijmegen. In August 2024, she moves to the University of Bristol, as a UKRI-funded International Research Fellow.

The Old Hispanic Graeci

Across manuscripts containing chants of the Old Hispanic rite are found thirteen Greek chants, including the Agios and Trisagion along with chants for saints' feasts. This lecture focuses on a study of the text setting, examining how well the musical and textual syntax align. Graeci for saints’ feasts, almost entirely found in a single manuscript (the Leon anti­phoner) show much less facility in matching music to text. I query what this observation may mean for the antiquity and circulation of these chants—i.e. how familiar were people with them—and the motivation for writing and copying them at different institutions. 

 

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Škoviera, Samuel (Institute of Musicology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences / Charles University in Prague)

S. Škoviera studied Archaeology at Comenius University in Bratislava, musicology and gene­ral linguistics at Charles University in Prague, where he specialized in the history of the Gre­gorian chant. He is a PhD student at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, and in the In­stitute of Musicology, Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava, focusing on the church sing­ing of Byzantine rite churches. He is also an active singer, especially as a cantor (leading singer) in the cathedral of the Greek Catholic Church in Bratislava and in various churches in Prague.

Database for the Byzantine Liturgical Tradition: Challenges and Perspectives 

The Digital Humanities plays an increasingly important role in the field of chant research. In particular, research on medieval Gregorian chant and other Western liturgical traditions is now almost unimaginable without databases such as Cantus Index. In recent years, many projects have emerged that use databases to explore various aspects of chant and liturgical singing in Western Europe in general (e.g., Cantus Ultimus, Differentiae Database, etc.). However, few such projects exist in the field of the Eastern liturgical tradition. One of the most extensive such projects explores the Novgorod-Moscow tradition of Znamenny chant (znamen.ru). Unfortunately, it lacks the necessary flexibility to search or otherwise work with the collected data. Moreover, this database is exclusively limited to the Eastern Slavonic tra­dition, thus omitting all others that share the Byzantine liturgical repertoire. One of the rea­sons why a database for the Byzantine rite similar to the Cantus Index does not exist is pro­bab­ly linguistic. In contrast to the West where the only liturgical language is Latin, it is stan­dard for each nation in the East to use its own language (e.g., Medieval Greek, Church Sla­vo­nic, Serbian, Arabic, English, Finnish, etc.). This lecture will attempt to show the prob­lems that arise in designing such a database and will propose a possible architecture for it. The main challenges include incorporating the liturgical peculiarities of the Byzantine Rite, in­tegrating multiple levels of a liturgical piece (text, verse structure, melody), working with dif­ferent mu­sical notations, hierarchical arrangement (nesting) of polystrophic liturgical pieces, such as the canon or kontakion, working with contrafacta and variants, and of course, linking different linguistic versions of a single liturgical piece.

 

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Stamler Ábel (ELTE Research Group of Liturgical History, Budapest)

BA in Iranian studies, MA in religious studies, PhD in religious studies (dissertation: Ritua­lized Mysticism. An analysis of the 'myths' and initiation ordines of contemplative monasti­cism and their perspective on the history of spirituality. Doctoral advisor: Déri Balázs.) Editor-in-chief of Magyar Szemle, Award Winner of 2023–2026 Art Scholarship Program of the Hungarian Academy of Arts.

Servitium includendorum. An Analysis of Initiatory Rites of Mediaeval Contemplative Anchorites

In Catholic theology, the privilege of the redeemed (beati) in the heavenly homeland (in pa­tria) is to see the essence of God (visio beatifica), while in earthly life (in statu viatoris) any direct, essential knowledge of God is in doubt. Traditionally, Moses and St. Paul are pre­sumed to have been found worthy of this. These teachings and related issues are examined primarily in contemporary theological and philosophical scholarship through the so called visio beatifica-debate, theological epistemology, and theological anthropology; accordingly, it approaches the subject primarily from a theological and philosophical point of view.

The study of the medieval initiation ceremonies of anchorites, incluses or recluses, namely the content and structure of the liturgical ceremony can lead to interesting results in this matter. At the top of the medieval epistemological hierarchy is contemplation, and at the bottom is sensory perception. Sensory perception is tied to the contingent world, while contemplation is just about getting rid of contingents. How can we grasp contemplation as the ultimate goal of an ordine that primarily affects the senses? How does the rite use the senses on the path to contemplation? What are the structural and content characteristics of the initiation of the an­chorites? What normative goals does the order envisage? Can ritual death mean gaining the privileges of the beati? In my presentation, I will try to find answers to these questions as they are closely related to the issues of medieval epistemology and liturgical theology.

 

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Stebbing, Jack (University of Cambridge)

https://www.mus.cam.ac.uk/staff/jack-stebbing

Two Newly Discovered Organal Sequences in the Winchester Troper

Two organa, rubricated 'sq planctus sterilis' and 'sq simon oboediens', are found on the final page of the Winchester troper (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, Ms 473), separate from the main cycle of sequence organa but copied by the same (main) music scribe. These organa have always been considered puzzling, due to their isolated position in the book and the fact that their principal melodies are thought lost. I will newly identify those principal melodies, thereby adding these two organum-sequence pairs to the corpus of the earliest extant practical polyphony. Reconstructions will be provided and discussed, the principal voices based on instrumental letter notations in Corpus 473 in conjunction with other fixed-pitched and semi-diastematic sources, the organa based on the neumatic notations and guided by principles from relevant theory treatises, especially the Enchiriadis and Paris treatises and Guido’s  Mi­cro­­logus. Alongside purely musical considerations, the discovery raises questions about the historical and liturgical priorities at Winchester and adds to our understanding of the compila­tion of the Winchester Troper.

 

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Šter, Katarina (Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Institute of Musicology)

https://mi.zrc-sazu.si/en/sodelavci/katarina-ster-en

The Power of a Random Source: Discubuit Iesus and Its Slovenian Translation

Our insight into (music) history depends on the sources we have and know. Sometimes, an assumption may be confirmed by many sources; at other times, there is only one source. A thin line between the existence (i.e., preservation) and non-existence (i.e., non-preservation) of one source – however randomly it may be preserved – may influence or even change how we see and interpret broader music history.

Such is also the case of the chant Sedil ie k'misi Iesus, a Slovenian translation of Discubuit Iesus. The latter is a thirteenth-century chant of presumably Cistercian origin with an eventful transmission (hi)story with various melodies, text versions and translations, serving even as one of the crucial Reformation songs. This lecture will present the context of the Slovenian chant in connection with the Catholic Restoration, activities of the Corpus Christi Confrater­nity and the Ljubljana and Gornji Grad (Oberburg) bishop Thomas Chrön (Tomaž Hren).

The lecture will also demonstrate that the history of music in Slovenia would have looked com­pletely different without this chant. The existence of this – until now uniquely known – chant in Slovenian adds an intriguing and complex layer to the history of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Inner Austria, particularly in the Slovenian lands. The power of a single source might not be in providing definitive answers, but rather in prompting us to re­evaluate and reinterpret what we thought we knew. What other such sources might be waiting to be discovered? And if there had been such sources, how might they have shaped our under­standing of music history?

 

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Suba Katalin (ELTE Research Group of Liturgical History, Budapest)

MA in Medieval Art History from Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, PhD candidate in art history at the same university with an interest in medieval textual sources and liturgical spaces in Hungary in the eleventh century. Contributor to USUARIUM database in the ELTE Research Group of Liturgical History.

Chants of the Mass in the Early Printing Period: A Textual Approach and Quantitative Survey

The presentation aims to introduce the latest developments and enrichments of the USUARI­UM database regarding the liturgical chants of the Mass in the Late Medieval – Early Modern period, as well as to shed light on the methodology of the latest data collection campaign be­hind it. Additionally, the presentation will offer a glimpse into some of the preliminary find­ings of the ongoing research.

One notable recent update to the USUARI­UM database is the Texts menu, which now offers a comprehensive overview of which texts were chanted in various liturgical assignments across medieval Europe. A significant breakthrough in the current data collection effort lies in its co­verage, with over 200 sources processed to represent the different traditions of Europe in an even distribution.

After collecting the raw material from the sources, we standardized the full texts of the chants, recorded their biblical sources, and incorporated the reference numbers of the Cantus Index, where applicable. After this standardization process, we were able to implement different quantitative methods, including statistical tools which count occurrences and express the po­pu­larity of a chant. 

However, not only numbers and graphs deserve to be presented: the research has also brought out smaller curiosities that provide insights into the question of liturgical continuity, biblical source preferences of different chant genres and overall, the creative processes behind liturgy-making in the Middle Ages.

 

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Szoliva Gábriel OFM (HAS ‘Momentum’ Digital Music Fragmentology Research Group, Budapest)

Gábriel Szoliva OFM (1981) is a Franciscan friar and Roman Catholic priest. He graduated from the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music as an organist and church musician MA in 2016, and received his PhD in musicology in 2021. As a researcher he focuses on source studies, hymnology, musical palaeography and musical fragmentology. He is currently a co-resear­cher of the academic project Digital Music Fragmentology.

https://ldzf.zti.hu/en/, http://fragmenta.zti.hu/en/

Sapientia aedificavit – The Earliest Surviving Noted Example of the Archaic Office of the Feast of Corpus Christi Found in Zagreb

Around 1692, the printings of the Cathedral of Zagreb (now kept in the Metropolitanska knjižnica, Zagreb) were bound with fragments of medieval parchment manuscripts. The bookbinder used for his work at least 22 codices as raw material. All these manuscripts can be researched and reconstructed, as most of their surviving fragments are still in the Metropolitan Library on covers of host volumes. Among these fragmentary manuscripts, the sanctoral part of a two-volume 13th-century noted breviary was identified in 2019. It originates from the scriptorium of the Cathedral of Esztergom. This Breviarium notatum Strigoniense (BNS II) was supplemented in the Middle Ages with a quire that reveals a noted example of the Of­fice Sapientia aedificavit sibi domum, the archaic version of the Office for the Feast of Corpus Christi. The fragmentary folios of this peculiar quire are also in Zagreb today, glued onto book covers, and proved to be the earliest surviving noted example of the preliminary Office. The quire was copied probably in France not much later than the promulgation of the feast (1264). In the lecture, the author presents the reconstruction of the supplementary quire of BNS II and the latest results of its codicological, liturgical, and musicological research.

 

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Tóka Borbála (HUN-REN Research Centre for the Humanities, Institute for Musicology / HAS ‘Momentum’ Digital Music Fragmentology Research Group, Budapest)

Borbála Tóka (1995) graduated in 2021 with an MA in Musicology from the Ferenc Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest. Since 2021, she has been a research assistant at the HUN-REN Research Centre for the Humanities, Institute for Musicology Budapest, and she is also a member of the academic project ’Momentum’ Digital Music Fragmentology Research Group. Since 2023, she has been studying paper and parchment restoration with restorers Veronika Szalai and Veronika Bartha.

https://ldzf.zti.hu/en/, http://fragmenta.zti.hu/en/

Ex parte enim cognoscimus – Secrets of the Restoration of a Notated Manuscript Fragment

The plainchant tradition of medieval Transylvania has been the subject of extensive research among Hungarian chant scholars for a long time. The “Momentum” Digital Music Fragmen­to­logy Research Group established in 2019 at the Department of Early Music History of the Institute for Musicology in Budapest paid also special attention to the fragments of Tran­syl­vanian provenance. The latest research focuses on the fragments of a fifteenth-century Tran­sylvanian antiphonal: the six fragmentary folios of the manuscript found so far are currently preserved in collections in Hungary, Slovakia and Romania. So far, we have only been able to discuss one restored fragment. As a member of the research group and a future restorer, I re­cently contributed actively to the restoration of another piece in this important group. This fragment covers a sixteenth-century print kept in the Franciscan Library of Gyöngyös. In my presentation, I would like to discuss the examination of the notated manuscript fragment and its host volume from a restorer's perspective, to demonstrate how this work can be linked to the work of the research group. Through the documentation of uncovering and restoring the fragment, I aim to provide insight into the work and workshop of a restorer.

 

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Troelsgård, Christian (University of Copenhagen)

https://research.ku.dk/search/result/?pure=en%2Fpersons%2Fchristian-troelsgaard(635c6474-694e-4db1-a246-d30200215fb6)%2Fcv.html

Elementary Chant Education in Late Byzantium

The contribution rests on my and Maria Alexandru’s ongoing preparation of a critical edition of 'The elements of the Papadike’ for Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae, Corpus Scriptorum de Re Musica.

Examination of a high number of manuscript sources has enabled us to establish a precise image of the formation and development of the ‘Papadike’, a didactic tradition of ecclesi­a­stical chant that extends from the thirteenth century and well into the Post-Byzantine era.

The Elements of the Papadike consist of didactic prose, neume lists, exercises, and diagrams. The detailed study of these materials has revealed some interesting connections between the Byzantine tradition of scholarly treatises on ancient music and grammar, ecclesiastical chant, and the oral teaching of music.

These new insights into the Papadike materials contribute to a more detailed picture of chant instruction in Late Byzantium.

 

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Utidjian, Haig (CESEM, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa)

Haig Utidjian, PhD is an orchestral conductor, chorus master and musicologist. He has served as Chief Conductor of the Orchestra and Chorus of Charles University in Prague since 2001. He is a Senior Deacon of the Armenian Church, and a pupil of Archbishop Zareh Aznaworean of blessed memory, with research interests in the musicology, theology and ico­no­graphy of the Armenian Hymnal and in the works of St. Gregory of Narek.

On the Armenian versions of the Phōs hilaron

The purpose of this lecture is to present very recent research on Loys zuart‘ (the Armenian equivalent for one of the oldest hymns in Christendom, Phōs hilaron). This multi-pronged investigation commences with the verbal text (which subtly differs from the Greek original), explores the addition of two Alleluias in later practice, and examines the earliest neumated sources at our disposal. This naturally leads to an assessment of the extant melodies for the hymn (several of which have fallen into abeyance and remain unpublished) from apparently diverse traditions, embracing Constantinople, Venice, Vienna and the Caucasus.

The versions are examined, com­­pared, and contrasted—both with reference of neumated sources and in respect to their va­ry­ing degrees of melismaticity and modal characteristics. Aspects of performance practice em­bracing now defunct intonational and rhythmic nuances are also discussed. Finally, we exa­mine a single reference in an Armenian source that bespeaks a now largely unknown mu­sical borrowing from the Byzantine tradition that was obscured in recent centuries by success­sive layers of elaboration and variation. Throughout, examples will be provided in the form of excerpts in the (undeciphered) Armenian mediaeval neumatic notation, the “new” (Limōnčean) aneumatic system, and Western staff notation. These examples substantiate our conclusions, demonstrating surprising interrelationships between major variants. Sung illustrations will al­so be employed. 

 

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Utkin Anna (Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music, Budapest)

Anna Utkin was born in Budapest. She completed her studies in Moscow: graduated from the Moscow City Pedagogical University as a music teacher in 2013, earned a master degree in the field of musicology at the Moscow P. I. Tchaikovsky Conservatory in 2018. In Moscow, she worked as an internship department assistant at the Moscow P. I. Tchaikovsky Conser­va­tory. In 2020 moved back in Budapest, since 2021 working on PhD research at the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music.

The Hungarian-language Greek Catholic Chant Tradition (until 1950): Between Politics and Faith 

In the sixteenth–eightteenth centuries, a new chant tradition emerged in the territories of to­day’s Belarus and Ukraine (then part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth). Originating from the Eastern Slavonic chant tradition, it underwent the influence of certain Western cul­tural elements. This regional variant of the chant tradition was preserved and disseminated by the Carpathian Rusyns. Today it is utilized in the services of the Greek Catholic Church in Eastern Europe, the USA, and other regions.

The national awakening and state-building processes in the nineteenth–twentieth century Eastern Europe necessitated the adaptation of Eastern rite texts into local languages, including Hungarian. Hungarian liturgical translations began to appear in the late eighteenth century. Eventually, by the early twentieth century, there was an increasing demand for a Hungarian-speaking Greek Catholic Church, which consequently led to the development of a Hungarian-language chant repertoire.

In 1906, the first official Greek Catholic chant book, the Tserkovnoje Prostopinije by J. Bok­say and J. Malinics, was published simultaneously in Church-Slavonic and Hungarian ver­sions. This formally marked an inauguration of Hungarian-language church singing by the first Hungarian-speaking Greek Catholic diocese: the Eparchy of Hajdúdorog, established in 1912. 

This lecture discusses political, historical, and compositional challenges associated with the creation and adoption of the Greek Catholic chant tradition in the Hungarian language.

 

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Varga László Dávid (HUN-REN Research Centre for the Humanities, Institute for Musicology / HAS ‘Momentum’ Digital Music Fragmentology Research Group, Budapest)

László Dávid Varga (1999) graduated as a musicologist in 2024 at the Ferenc Liszt Academy of Music, Budapest and started his doctoral studies at the same institution. He is also working as a research assistant at the HUN-REN Research Centre for the Humanities, Institute for Musicology, Department of Early Music History and is a member of the ‘Momentum’ Digital Music Fragmentology Research Group led by Zsuzsa Czagány. His research focuses on the Old Roman sources in relation to the Gregorian (Frankish) repertory, and most recently on both melodic and textual relations between different liturgical genres.

https://ldzf.zti.hu/en/, http://fragmenta.zti.hu/en/

Attitudes Toward Genre, Orality and New Composition in the Melodic Tradition of Responsory-Communions

Based on my upcoming Master thesis, my proposed lecture focuses on an interesting ’multi-genre’ problem. There are 34 responsories in the two extant Old Roman antiphonaries (V-CVbav B 79, GB-Lbl Add. 29988) which share both their text and melody with Mass-communions. After Bradford Maiani’s dissertation written in 1996 dealing with these chants and their possible origins, I am using the phenomenon to revisit the field of questions about chant transmission—with comparing the Old Roman versions with their gregorian/frankish counterparts—rather than to study whether these melodies were originally communions or responsories. It can be observed that the Roman practice, even after the advent of writing, employed the duplication of communion melodies for newer responsories with the same text, while Gregorian often considered the creation of newer melodies to be salutary. The need for this, however, does not seem to have been uniform everywhere in the Frankish Kingdom or generally in Europe. The examination of these chant melodies in a wide range of plainchant sources show that we can define some regions where the duplication of melodies was the common practice even in the fourteenth century, while in others the need for new composition displaced the previous Roman practices considered archaic by some.

 

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Veselovská, Eva (Institute of Musicology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences)

Eva Veselovská works at the Institute of Musicology of the SAS in Bratislava (since 1999). She specializes in research on medieval notated fragments and medieval notations, focusing on com­plex source research on manuscripts from the ter­ri­tory of Slovakia and of Slovak prove­nance abroad. She is the founder of Cantus Planus in Slovakia – Slovak Early Music Data­base (http://cantus.sk), a national database of medieval music from the territory of Slovakia and co-founder of the Austrian database Medieval Music Manuscripts from Austrian Mo­nas­teries (https://austriamanus.org).

A New Ecosystem of Early Music: Medieval Fragments of Premonstratensian Origin from Slovakia

This lecture deals with a group of medieval musical fragments of Premonstratensian origin, contained in the bindings of municipal administrative books in the Košice City Archives and in the Slovak National Archives. No complete musical codex of Premonstratensian prove­nance survived from the medieval period from the territory of Slovakia. For this reason, these newly discovered fragments are important evidence of the lively and original scribal tradition of the Premonstratensians in the Late Middle Ages. 

The Košice fragments include recycled parchment folios of a notated antiphonary (or Vespe­rale), a sequentiale, a missal, and an additional antiphonary documenting the late medieval liturgical and musical practice of a Hungarian Premonstratensian convent (Jasov, Leles). The mixed system of Messine-Esztergom notation from the last third of the fifteenth century also points to their Hungarian (present-day Eastern Slovakian) origin.

This homogeneous and exciting medieval material consists mainly of fragments of the anti­phonary (Vesperale) of Premonstratensian origin (shelfmarks Antiphonary H III/1 B. No. 2, H III/2 ar 5, H III/2 mac 13, H III/2 mac 14, H III/2 mac 16, H III/2 mac 17, H III/2 mac 18). Both the liturgical and the musical content of the fragments oscillate around the basic circle of Esztergom liturgy, while several regional and variant chants are also documented (Transyl­vania, Eastern Slovakia: Spiš). 

Three other fragments, Sequentiale H III/2 mac 41, Missal H III/2 pur 13, and Antiphonary H III/2 pur 15 in the Košice City Archives may presumably also come from the Jasov or the Le­les convent. 

Amongst the Premonstratensian material from Slovakia there is also interesting fragment group from the Slovak National Archive (locus credibilis of the Premonstratensian monastery in Leles). The fragments of four notated manuscripts present a scribal tradition characterised by peculiarities of contents and notation. The medieval fragments were preserved in covers of the convent administrative documents (Acta anni – varia). They are from four different litur­gi­cal books: a sequentiary from the second half of the fourteenth century; a missal copied bet­ween 1350 and 1375; an antiphonary from 1350 –1375; and a notated psalter from the end of fourteenth or beginning of fifteenth century. 

In sum, the Premonstratensian fragments in the Košice City Archives and in Slovak National Archives are important witnesses to the late medieval scribal tradition of this canonical order from the territory of Slovakia. 

 

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Vlhová-Wörner, Hana (Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sci­ences) – Voigt, Konstantin* (Universität Freiburg i. Br. / Universität Würzburg) * in ab­sentia

Hana Vlhová-Wörner: https://www.smnf.cz/en/team/hana-vlhova-woerner/

Konstantin Voigt is Professor of Musicology at the University of Freiburg. He works on music and music-theory of the Middle Ages andLate Antiquity and has recently finished his Habilita­tions­schrift on twelfth century Latin monophonic songs. He worked for Corpus monodicum and held positions at the Universities of Vienna and Würzburg, to where he will return in autumn 2024.

From West to East: Benedicamus Splendor patris and Sanctus Deus pater, iudex

The influence of French repertoires on Czech liturgical music in the thirteenth century is a new­ly identified, but distinctly characteristic aspect of the Prague music traditions of the High Middle Ages. Traces of French repertory were first recognized in the collection of Mass Ordi­nary tropes recorded in the so-called Dean Vitus troper from the late twelfth century, pur­chased for the St Vitus’s Chapter in 1235. More recently, distinctive French and Aquitanian influences have also been identified in tropes to the Benedicamus Domino, chants for the Office, troped lessons and sequences. A model case of transfer and domestication of chants of foreign origin is Benedicamus Splendor patris (attested in the Sicilo-Norman tradition and in Prague around 1300) and Sanctus Deus pater, iudex iusticie (known today from Prague sources since 1235 exclusively). These two chants are closely connected, as their shared melodies and text segments clearly testify. 

But what history preceded their inscriptions in Prague sources and which of these songs served as a model for its imitation? The answer to these questions opens up a new discussion on the models of repertory transfer in the High Middle Ages, the ways in which “foreign” chants were adapted in their new destinations, and finally, on the music object identity asso­ciated with the change of the genre.

 

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Vuori, Hilkka-Liisa (National Library of Finland / University of Helsinki)

DMus Hilkka-Liisa Vuori is a teacher, researcher and a singer of Gregorian chants. She teach­es in the University of Arts, Sibelius Academy church music department, and in a Kallio congregation in Helsinki. Since September 2022, she has been working in the National Li­brary Finland as a manuscript researcher in a four-year project.           

In Search of the Origins of the Missal F.M.I.26 – A Case of the Communion Lutum fecit

This lecture is part of a four-year-project Tradition and variation – Medieval Chant in the Dio­cese of Turku, which explores the mass melodies used in Finland in the Middle Ages. There are two musicological researchers, Jorma Hannikainen and Hilkka-Liisa Vuori, and two ap­proaches to the topic from different angles and time periods. Vuori’s material consists of the earliest notated Missal fragments (twelf–thirteenth century) used or written in Finland, now pre­­served in the Fragmenta membranea collection of the National Library of Finland. Hanni­kai­nen concentrates on larger fragments and whole manuscripts from the fifteenth and six­teenth centuries.

In our project, we hope to deepen the understanding of the liturgy and its development in me­di­e­val Finland. Was the liturgy musically Dominican in the flourishing period of the diocese (fourteenth and fifteenth centuries) as previous research has assumed? What musical tradi­tions do the fragments of the earliest books, from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, rep­re­sent? How fast or slow was the change from the Gregorian chants to the music of reforma­tion? At this point in our investigations, we are mainly concentrating on comparative studies of individual fragments and manuscripts, and we will be able to provide only very preliminary answers to these questions.

 

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Webb, Megan (University of Bristol)

Working on liturgical manuscripts associated with Seligenthal, M. Webb has recently started her PhD at the University of Bristol, funded by the South, West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership.

Identifying Scribes and Hands in BL Add. MS 16950, the Seligenthal Gradual

In 1232, the Bavarian Duchess Ludmilla founded the small Cistercian convent of Seligenthal within the city of Landshut, close to the border of the diocese of Regensburg. By 1260 this was a thriving women’s monastic community, and in 1262 the female-run, in-house scriptoria had produced a large gradual, BL Add. MS 16950, otherwise known as the Seligenthal Gra­dual. The choirbook was made specifically by women, for women within the medieval monas­tic sphere, and is ample ground for unearthing palaeographical remnants of the women that produced and used it.

In my lecture, I will provide a simple overview of the scribal and artistic contributions that can be witnessed across the Gradual, beginning with the main scribes that produced the manu­script, and continuing with other collaborative traces in a variety of hands. Evidence will in­clude colophons, illuminations, drawings, inscriptions and forms of supplementary musical notation. The level of detail these elements provide ranges from the full identification of scribes through name and hand-drawn portraits, to simple, anonymous markings in the chant notation.    

Through the varying levels of palaeographical and codicological engagement with the Gradual, I aim to draw an initial map of the hands that shaped the manuscript across the span of the convent’s early history. With further investigation, I hope that my preliminary findings can be expanded to eventually reconstruct images of the women that interacted with the Gradual, and in turn provide insight into the convent’s intertwining spiritual, musical and liturgical identities.    

 

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Wendling, Miriam (Alamire Foundation)

https://www.alamirefoundation.org/en/people/

Using Polyphonic Sources for Plainchant Research

A distinct Spanish version of the communion chant Lux aeterna, from the Mass for the Dead, survived into the second half of the sixteenth century. It is melodically different from its more common Roman counterpart and has a textually different versicle. At least a dozen sources of this chant survive in manuscript, print, and three polyphonic settings. An analysis which treats cantus firmus records alongside chant sources shows the structural points within the chant and the extensive range of variation between the sources, including characteristics such as the open­ing interval, the amount of melismatic material, and the pitch level of the versicle. This analysis allows us to draw some conclusions about the temporal and geographical spread of the chant’s variants.

 

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Wride, Emily (University of Bristol)

https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/en/persons/emily-wride

Notational Diversity in the Old Hispanic Toledo Corpus

The extant Old Hispanic manuscripts associated with Toledo (c.1100–1400) preserve the ma­te­rials for two different strains of the Old Hispanic liturgy. The two strains, known as tradition A and tradition B, are thought to have been practised at different parishes in the city, pre­su­ma­bly by different groups of people. In previous scholarship, Jordi Pinell identified the dif­fe­rences in the liturgical structure of the two traditions. More recently, Emma Hornby and Re­bec­ca Maloy have identified some recurring melodic contours that are unique to each tra­dition. 

In this lecture, I will add a further dimension to our understanding of the differences between the two traditions by undertaking a notational analysis of the extant sources. Thus far, the no­tation in the Toledo manuscripts has all been considered to be ‘horizontal’ Old Hispanic nota­tion—so named for its horizontal inclination on the folio. However, I will show that this um­brella term in fact encompasses two distinct notational practices in the Toledo manuscripts, one for each tradition. To demonstrate this, I will examine the use of fundamental notational shapes, such as the virga, as well as look at the neume vocabulary more broadly. Through this notational comparison I will highlight the diversity of notational understanding in Toledo, and ultimately show that the manuscripts of the two traditions were indeed written by two separate groups of people.

 

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Wride, Emily (University of Bristol) – Jones, Marcus (University of Bristol)

https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/en/persons/emily-wride

https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/en/persons/marcus-jones-2

SCRIBEMUS, one year in: Research Updates and Perspectives

The paper is a research update on Giovanni Varelli’s ERC-funded project SCRIBEMUS, Scribes of Musical Cultures: Decoding Early Technologies of Music Writing in Latin Europe (c. 900–1100), presented by two affiliated postdocs, Marcus Jones and Emily Wride. The project aims to elucidate the first spreading of musical notation in Latin Europe, one year after its start in June 2023. Feedback from the Cantus Planus community on the various stages reached so far will be greatly welcomed. Moreover, the core of the paper will be a discussion of innovative research perspectives, with a new reading of some of the most important families of neumatic notation, aiming at sparking a scholarly debate and exchange of ideas. Lastly, the project team will be presented, namely its postdocs and collaborators, in musical palaeography, ecclesiastical history, and digital humanities for musicology, revealing the interdisciplinary nature of SCRIBEMUS.

 

 

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Zoia, Giorgio (Kalicantus Ensemble)

MA in Classics and PhD from the University of Padua, Palaeography Diploma from the State Archives of Venice.

Saints and Celebrations in Treviso before the Council of Trent, and Continuity

The Ordinarium divini officii of Treviso cathedral is a paper manuscript consisting of 157 folios written in 1524 by the beneficed clergyman (mansionarius) Clemente a Stadiis, at that time master of plainchant; at present the manuscript is in the Capitular Library of Treviso (press-mark ms. I.B.1). Another manuscript contains many notated chants for the office and for the Mass in Treviso: it is a monastic antiphonary dating back to twelfth century, now in the Archbishop’s Library of Udine (press-mark ms. 84). The third member of this company is the antiphonary of Treviso, also in the Capitular Library (press-mark ms. A).