Trinity’s Lost Treasure: An Unexamined Gradual in Trinity University’s Special Collections

The Trinity University Special Collections contains an anonymous early Renaissance Gradual manuscript, gifted to the university by the estate of a well-traveled major donor. There is no other information regarding the bequest. The manuscript lacks archival tags and bibliographic records, and scholars outside the Trinity community are unaware of the item. As a result, the manuscript sits untouched. Gradual manuscripts are records of historical liturgical practice, and also serve as reflections of local usage, allowing a glimpse into traditions that have long been lost. This project examines and catalogues the content of this resource and seeks to situate it through analysis of its contents, marginalia, physical condition and treatment, and liturgical associations. Comparison study of notation and script suggest a preliminary compilation date of approximately 1480-1520, in the early Renaissance. Marginalia and certain spellings locate the manuscript for at least a period of its existence in Spain, and the inclusion of certain chants indicates an association with the Dominican Order. The initial transcription of the chants unique to this collection as well as digitization of its folios should encourage further research. While many details of this manuscript remain unexplored, this thesis enables information on this unattributed treasure to circulate in the academic world, so that the Trinity manuscript can be studied alongside and with reference to contemporary manuscripts worldwide

Studying large plainchant corpora using chant21

We present chant21, a Python package to support the plainchant formats gabc and Volpiano in music21, and two large corpora of plainchant. The CantusCorpus contains over 60,000 medieval melodies collected from the Cantus database, encoded in the Volpiano typeface. The GregoBaseCorpus contains over 9,000 transcriptions from more recent chant books in the gabc format. Chant21 converts both formats to music21, while retaining the textual structure of the chant: its division in sections, words, syllables and neumes. We present two case studies. First, we report evidence for the melodic arch hypothesis from the GregoBaseCorpus. Second, we analyze connections between differentiæ and antiphon openings in the CantusCorpus, and show that the systematicity of the connection can be quantified using an entropy-based measure

Oral and Written Transmission in Ethiopian Christian Chant

Of all the musical traditions in the world among which fruitful comparisons with medieval European chant might be made, the chant tradition of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church promises to be especially informative. In Ethiopia one can actually witness many of the same processes of oral and written transmission as were or may have been active in medieval Europe. Music and literacy are taught in a single curriculum in ecclesiastical schools. Future singers begin to acquire the repertory by memorising chants that serve both as models for whole melodies and as the sources of the melodic phrases linked to individual notational signs. At a later stage of training each one copies out a complete notated manuscript on parchment using medieval scribal techniques. But these manuscripts are used primarily for study purposes; during liturgical celebrations the chants are performed from memory without books, as seems originally to have been the case also with Gregorian and Byzantine chant. Finally, singers learn to improvise sung liturgical poetry according to a structured system of rules. If one desired to imitate the example of Parry and Lord, who investigated the modern South Slavic epic for possible clues to Homeric poetry, it would be difficult to find a modern culture more similar to the one that spawned Gregorian chant.African and African American StudiesMusi

Finding What You Need, and Knowing What You Can Find: Digital Tools for Palaeographers in Musicology and Beyond

This chapter examines three projects that provide musicologists with a range of resources for managing and exploring their materials: DIAMM (Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music), CMME (Computerized Mensural Music Editing) and the software Gamera. Since 1998, DIAMM has been enhancing research of scholars worldwide by providing them with the best possible quality of digital images. In some cases these images are now the only access that scholars are permitted, since the original documents are lost or considered too fragile for further handling. For many sources, however, simply creating a very high-resolution image is not enough: sources are often damaged by age, misuse (usually Medieval ‘vandalism’), or poor conservation. To deal with damaged materials the project has developed methods of digital restoration using mainstream commercial software, which has revealed lost data in a wide variety of sources. The project also uses light sources ranging from ultraviolet to infrared in order to obtain better readings of erasures or material lost by heat or water damage. The ethics of digital restoration are discussed, as well as the concerns of the document holders. CMME and a database of musical sources and editions, provides scholars with a tool for making fluid editions and diplomatic transcriptions: without the need for a single fixed visual form on a printed page, a computerized edition system can utilize one editor’s transcription to create any number of visual forms and variant versions. Gamera, a toolkit for building document image recognition systems created by Ichiro Fujinaga is a broad recognition engine that grew out of music recognition, which can be adapted and developed to perform a number of tasks on both music and non-musical materials. Its application to several projects is discussed

The bilingual motets of the old corpus of the Montpellier Codex.

The bilingual motets of the old corpus of the Montpellier Codex (Montpellier, Faculté de Médecine, H 196) are collected in the third fascicle of this thirteenth-century codex. These eleven motets provide a sample group for the study of interrelationships among the contents of a manuscript. Elements of the music, text, and tenor sources work together to unify each individual motet as well as the eleven motets in the fascicle. While the motets of Mo have been studied in detail, this small collection has been neglected, perhaps because of its simultaneous presentation of sacred and erotic love. It is this trait, however, that makes this fascicle a striking example of the medieval penchant for interrelationships in seemingly unrelated material. Singing simultaneous praises to the Virgin in Latin and to Marion in French seems unusual today, but in the medieval period this juxtaposition of sacred and erotic love was acceptable

Early cistercian polyphony: a newly-discovered source

This paper presents a two-voice hymn to St. Bernard, found by the author in the Arouca Monastery. This hitherto unpublished hymn, which can be dated around 1225, is the most ancient polyphonic work found so far in Portugal, and one of the oldest examples of polyphony copied in Cistercian manuscripts. To explain its presence in Arouca, the author examines both the local and the international context; the problem of polyphonic practice in the Cistercian Order receives special attention, and several related compositions are transcribed. The musical style of the hymn is then discussed and its peculiar, conservative character put into relief against the background of European polyphonic practice. The interpretative transcription offered is then justified at length.Este artigo debruça-se sobre um hino a S. Bernardo, a duas vozes, encontrado pelo autor num manuscrito do Mosteiro de Arouca. Trata-se não só de uma composição inédita, como da mais antiga música polifónica documentada em território português, datável de c. 1225, sendo também um dos primeiros exemplos de polifonia conservada em manuscritos cistercienses. Para explicar a sua presença em Arouca, o autor foca primeiramente o contexto local, e seguidamente o contexto internacional, no que se refere à prática de música polifónica no seio da Ordem de Cister. Algumas outras composições ligadas aos cistercienses são apresentadas em transcrição. O estilo da peça é então analisado, identificando-se o seu peculiar carácter conservador relativamente ao panorama geral da música polifónica na Europa Ocidental. Finalmente, a transcrição interpretativa do hino é musicologicamente fundamentada

Assigning Rhythms to Troubadour Poems

Dissertation (Ph. D.)--University of Kansas, French and Italian, 1973