Changes in Old Hispanic Notation in the Tenth and Eleventh Century

UID/EAT/00693/2013The Leon Antiphoner, The "Book of Hours of Ferdinand I" and the "Breviary of the Queen Sancha" are three Old Hispanic musical manuscripts that represent an ideal testbed for musical palaeographical analysis. The three manuscripts are securely dated, being the león Antiphoner written at the beginning of the tenth century and the other two manuscripts dated respectively to 1055 and 1059. The dating of Leon 8 is a recent discovery based on the decoding of two cryptographic inscriptions and the reattribution of a royal monogram to King Sancho I. The three manuscripts have in common: I) the Old Hispanic liturgy; 2) the style of musical notation - the so calle "vertical" neumes; 3) melodies; 4) a connection with the Leon-Astur royal family. In this proposal I discuss the palaeographical differences in the notation of these manuscripts and the changes that occurred in the Old Hispanic vertical notation in a chronological gap of c. 150 years, that is, form the beginning of the tenth century to the middle of the eleventh century - a few years before the abandonment of Old Hispanic liturgy and notation due to the imposition of Gregorian liturgy in Iberian peninsula (in 1080).The study of the notation of Old Hispanic manuscripts has not attracted much scholar attention because of its complexity and because of the lack of later pitched versions that could give a clue toward and understanding of the musical meaning of the Old Hispanic neumes. The few attempts of systematic paleographical analysis were made by Herminio Gonzalez-Barrionuevo who focus just on few manuscripts produced after 1080, containig Gregorian chants but writtens with Old Hispanic neumes. The research I propose has an innovative methodological approach because it focuses on the examination of the Old Hispanic neumes in terms of their own mode of functioning, that is, when they were used to represent Old Hispanic melodies. Furthermore, this overview on the development of Old Hispanic notation is now possible because of my recent secure dating of the León Antiphoner to 900-905, while previous hypothesis ranged from the first third of the tenth century through the eleventh. Presentation in the ‘Cantus Planus’ Study Sessionpublishersversionpublishe

Written and Oral Transmission in Old Hispanic Chant

UID/EAT/00693/2013Old Hispanic Chant was the liturgical repertory sung in the Iberian peninsula before the imposition of the Gregorian liturgy (ca. 1080). Old Hispanic notation is not pitch-readable, it cannot be transcribed into a score, and we have lost, probably forever, the ability to sing it at the right pitches. Surviving Old Hispanic musical manuscripts date approximately from the tenth to the thirteenth century and, among them, the León Antiphoner is by far the most complete, and therefore the most studied. Due to the quantity of music it preserves, the Antiphoner has been widely used as the basis of comparison for the musical analysis of Old Hispanic melodies (Randel, Hornby and Maloy). Prior to this research, the Antiphoner was considered to be written by a single music scribe and, consequently, cross-musical comparisons between Old Hispanic manuscripts treated the Antiphoner as a whole and homogeneous witness of early Iberian notation. The research I present demonstrates the presence of at least four main music scribes and several later hands in the Antiphoner. By means of paleographical analysis of neume shapes, duplicated chants, and customary neumatic patterns, I describe the characteristics of the notation and the individual peculiarities of the Antiphoner’s music scribes. I focus on both the four main music scribes and some of the later hands, discussing their neumatic preferences and the interventions to the original layer of notation. From a methodological point of view, the originality of this research consists in treating the Antiphoner as a complex witness in which there are traces of multiple layers of musical transmission. Understanding its scribes’ habits can help to clarify the extent to which orality and scribes intervened in the dissemination (and modification) of the Old Hispanic melodies found in the Antiphoner. This information can be of great help when we compare these same melodies in other Old Hispanic manuscripts. Within the bigger picture of Western sacred music, Old Hispanic Chant is the most completely preserved pre-Gregorian repertory, and has few Gregorian contaminations. Its study may unveil important information about Western liturgical chant before the Carolingian reform.publishersversionpublishe

an elitist code for Visigothic scribes

UID/EAT/00693/2013publishersversionpublishe

Encoding Old Hispanic Neumes

UID/EAT/00693/2013authorsversionpublishe

layers of interventions on the notation

UID/EAT/00693/2019publishersversionpublishe

Plainchant Fragments in Braga and Guimarães (11th – 15th century)

DL 57/2016/CP1453/CT0085 UIDB/00693/2020 UIDP/00693/2020Solange Corbin was the first scholar to regard the lozenged punctum employed as mi-sign (“special punctum”) as the main characteristic of a “Portuguese notation” derived from Aquitanian notation. Even though Corbin’s findings were later partially revised, the special punctum is still regarded as a graphical feature mostly peculiar to Portuguese manuscripts. This palaeographical study investigates the use of the special punctum and the changes that occurred to Aquitanian notation in 104 fragments dated from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries in the archives of Braga and Guimarães. This research demonstrates that the special punctum was the preferred scribal device employed to convey semitonal information, but that it was not systematically employed. Over the course of four centuries Portugal witnessed the coexistence of two parallel systems for notating plainchant. While both systems employed the typical elements of Aquitanian notation on a single line without clefs, one was perfectly diastematic while the other conveyed no indications of semitones.publishersversionpublishe

De notación hispánica a notación aquitana: escribir música en la Iberia medieval

This article focuses on the peculiarities of the Old Hispanic and Aquitanian musical notations, as found in Iberian liturgical manuscripts from the 10th to the mid-16th centuries, and it proposes some reconsiderations of previous scholarship on Iberian music palaeography. Specifically, this palaeographical survey engages with two changes that occurred in music writing in the Peninsula in the period under consideration. Firstly, the Old Hispanic notation was replaced by Aquitanian notation at the end of the 11th century. Subsequently, the graphical appearance of Aquitanian notation changed due to the influence of the Gothic script. These two changes developed in quite different ways: the first was swift and rapid whereas the second was slow and gradual. In this overview, I present some previously neglected sources as illustrative examples of Aquitanian notation. These sources have been studied for the first time recently and are now available for consultation in the “Portuguese Early Music Database”.Este artículo se centra en las peculiaridades de las principales muestras de notación musical hispana y aquitana conservadas en los manuscritos litúrgicos peninsulares de los siglos X a mediados del XVI, proponiendo reconsiderar el estado de la cuestión desde el campo de la paleografía musical peninsular. Específicamente, esta aproximación paleográfica se orienta alrededor de los dos cambios principales que marcaron la escritura de música en la Península en el período bajo consideración: la substitución de la notación hispánica tradicional por la notación aquitana a finales del siglo XI, y el cambio gráfico que muestra la notación aquitana por influencia de la escritura gótica. La forma en la que ambos cambios se desarrollaron fue considerablemente desigual; precipitada y rápida en el primer caso, lenta y gradual en el segundo. En esta visión de conjunto, se presentan como ejemplos ilustrativos de notación aquitana fuentes que habían pasado desapercibidas hasta hace poco y que están ahora disponibles para su consulta en la “Portuguese Early Music Database”

Plainchant fragments in Braga and Guimarães

UIDB/00693/2020 UIDP/00693/2020publishersversionpublishe

Music Encoding Conference Proceedings

UIDB/00693/2020 UIDP/00693/2020publishersversionpublishe

Encoding Armenian Neumes

UIDB/00693/2020 UIDP/00693/2020Chant notations are found across a large geographical area encompassing Europe and part of the Middle East (including the Levant and the historical Armenian lands). The Neumes Module represents a collective endeavour on the part of the MEI Community to capture into a machine-readable format the meaning of chant notations. In recent years intensive efforts were devoted towards improving the applicability of the MEI Neumes Module, first applied almost exclusively to St Gall notation (aka ‘East Frankish notation’), and recently extended to include the encoding of Old Hispanic, Aquitanian and square notations (MEI Neumes Module, version 4.0). With this paper we aim to contribute towards expanding the interoperability of the MEI Neumes Module by testing it against the Armenian neumatic notation. From an encoding point of view, Armenian notation shows a higher degree of complexity compared to the neumatic notations so far tackled by MEI. Indeed, unlike all the neumatic notational systems hitherto dealt with by MEI, with the Armenian system we possess no information on either the melodic contour or the number of pitches associated with the neumes. Therefore, one of the fundamental elements of the current Neumes Module cannot be applied to the encoding of Armenian neumes: the ‘neume component’ , that is, a ‘sign representing a single pitched event, although the exact pitch may not be known’. Moreover, encoding Armenian neumes will serve to take even further the recent tendency to encode the visual appearance of the neumes rather than their semantics. In this paper we outline the challenges of encoding Armenian notations with MEI and propose a solution applicable to future projects aiming at the digital analysis of the Armenian chant repertory.publishersversionpublishe