oa Range, Repertoire, and Recipient in the Alamire Manuscripts

The careful selection of repertoire in many of the Alamire manuscripts is well-known. Far from being haphazard collections of music, many manuscripts display evidence of conscious choice of content in terms of genre, underlying theme, or composer. For at least one recipient of multiple manuscripts, Frederick the Wise, repertoire was also carefully monitored to avoid duplication among his manuscripts. Still to be determined, however, is whether much thought was given to the performing forces (other than number of voices) that a collection might require, specifically in regard to the range of the written notation. Investigation into this question shows that, while Alamire and his scribes paid some attention to notated range while copying music, other factors took precedence in preparation of their productions. One of these was the re-use of repertorial pods: clusters of compositions that appeared in multiple manuscripts. Further consideration of these pods suggests that the problematic Mechelen choirbook, despite remaining in the city where it was produced, may have been intended for the Emperor Maximilian to mark the attainment of his grandson’s majority.