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Two unnoticed pieces of medieval polyphony

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 October 2009

David Hiley
David Hiley
Affiliation:
University of Regensburg
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Extract

The two pieces introduced and briefly discussed in this article have so far remained unnoticed because of the manner of their notation. In each case pieces of two-voice polyphony were notated with the two voices separate, instead of in the score notation which has been usual since, roughly, the second half of the twelfth century. In the one case, the sequence Magnus deus in universa terra in a manuscript from Marchiennes of the fourteenth century, a second voice was added at the back of the book in which the usual melody had already been recorded. In the other case, the song Ad honorem regis summi in the so-called Codex Calixtinus, the two voices are notated successively, verse 1 of the text being given with the first voice, verse 2 with the second voice.

Type
Research Article
Information
Plainsong & Medieval Music , Volume 1 , Issue 2 , October 1992 , pp. 167 - 173
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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References

1 The best known source with a collection of organal voices notated without the corresponding vox principalis is manuscript 473 of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, from Winchester; see Holschneider, Andreas, Die Organa von Winchester (Hildesheim, 1967)Google Scholar. Other sources, with far fewer voces organales, survive from Chartres, Fleury and St Maur-des-Fossés; see Gushee, Marion S., ‘Romanesque Polyphony: A Study of the Fragmentary Sources’, Ph. D dissertation, Yale University (1965), UMI 65-9676Google Scholar, and an article by Wulf Arlt in the forthcoming collection of centennial essays for the Plainsong and Mediaeval Music Society.

The principal sources of polyphony in successive notation (a term aptly coined by Sarah Fuller) are from Aquitaine in the twelfth century; see Fuller, Sarah, ‘Hidden Polyphony: A Reappraisal’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 24 (1971), pp. 169–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Catalogue général des manuscrits des bibliothèques publiques de France (Ancienne série), VI. Douai (Paris, 1878), pp. 108–15Google Scholar. Douai 114 was included in the survey of graduals and noted missals conducted by the monks of Solesmes, Le Graduel Romain, under the siglum RIC 2. (The siglum is derived from the name of the founder and abbess of Marchiennes, St Rictrudis, whose Vita was written by Hucbald of St Amand.) See the brief description in Les Sources (Le Graduel Romain II, Solesmes, 1957), p. 48.Google Scholar

3 Facsimile in Paléographie Musicale, vol. 3, pl. 177A.Google Scholar

4 See the information on the breviaries Douai 136 and 143 (both later thirteenth century) in Leroquais, Victor, Les Bréviaires manuscrits des bibliothèques publiques de France, 5 vols. (Paris, 1934), 2, pp. 47 and 53.Google Scholar

5 The chromaticisms suggest comparison with the examples cited by Sachs, Klaus-Jiirgen, Der Contrapunctus im 14. und 15. Jahrhundert, Beihefte zum Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 12 (Wiesbaden, 1974), pp. 107–8Google Scholar: from Ugolino (edited in Corpus Scriptorum de Musica, 7/ii, Exx. 128–9) and from another Italian source of the fifteenth century (edited in Sachs, ibid., p. 108).

6 Facsimiles in Whitehill, Walter Muir, Garcia, J. Carró and Prado, Germán, Liber Sancti Jacobi. Codex Calixtinus, 3 vols. (Santiago de Compostela, 1944)Google Scholar; and José, López-Calo S. J., La Musica Medieval en Galicia (La Coruña, 1982).Google Scholar

7 Facsimiles of the Aquitanian and related sources have been published by Gillingham, Bryan, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, fonds latin 1139 (Publications of Medieval Manuscripts, 14; Ottawa, 1987)Google Scholar; Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, fonds latin 3719 (Publications of Medieval Manuscripts, 15; Ottawa, 1987)Google Scholar; Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, fonds latin 3549 and London, B. L., Add. 36,881 (Publications of Medieval Manuscripts, 16; Ottawa, 1987)Google Scholar; and transcriptions by Fuller, Sarah A., ‘Aquitanian Polyphony of the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries’, Ph.D dissertation, University of California at Berkeley (1969), UMI 70–13051.Google Scholar