Journal of the Alamire Foundation

In contrast to the codicology of text manuscripts or liturgical manuscripts, a systematic typology of manuscript sources of Renaissance music is lacking. This article is a first attempt to develop criteria which could be relevant for such a typology. Function and performance context are obviously among such criteria, but so are size, material, and decoration. By combining all textual and contextual parameters into a table and discussing the results, it becomes clear that no single criterion is sufficient to define a certain type of manuscript: institutional manuscripts can be big or small, lavish or simple; manuscripts whose primary function appears to be representation (rather than practical use) can range from enormous choirbooks to tiny chansonniers, from highly private to highly public objects; finally, there are books whose external appearance provides little or no clue as to what their function may have been. A Quellenkunde of the polyphonic manuscript has yet to be written.

Although compiled in the first decade of the sixteenth century, the manuscript Panciatichi 27 is the first source that contains polyphonic settings of the Requiem almost certainly by an Italian composer. And, apart from Du Fay’s lost Requiem mentioned in his will and the analogous mass by Ockeghem composed in the late fifteenth century, the polyphonic pieces in Panciatichi 27 (six or seven sections of the Requiem, including no fewer than three Dies irae sequences) are among the oldest manuscript witnesses of polyphonic Requiems that have come down to us. The anonymity that shrouds these pieces is unusual, considering that all the other known Requiem settings of the time are attributed to Franco-Flemish composers. How is it that such a compositorial ‘debut’ by an Italian composer or composers occurs in a manuscript such as Panciatichi 27, a source that also contains secular music? The answer may lie in the book itself, the product of a mercantile and civic mentality that seeks to appropriate for itself the musical culture that was hitherto a prerogative of the elite; the Requiem Mass thus undergoes a sort of ‘democratization’ that permits its flourishing even on behalf of the citizens of the middle and lower classes.

The present study explores the contrafacta and source melodies for Alleluia verses, prosas, and hymns in honour of St. Nicholas that appear in two fifteenth-century trade confraternity manuscripts from Paris. A close examination of this material demonstrates that the liturgies of Parisian lay communities were carefully constructed, using both text and melody to achieve symbolic spiritual associations between St. Nicholas and Christ, and drawing on some of the most widely disseminated popular folklore about the life of this saint.

In comparison to other European regions, the active approach of middle-class citizens to the performance of liturgical music was characteristic for the Utraquist Bohemia. The Codex Franus is one of the most important testimonies to civic patronage around 1500 there. Its heterogeneous repertory raises questions concerning performance practice within the Utraquist liturgy, as well as the popularity of imported Franco-Flemish polyphony.

According to his contemporaries, Gilles Joye was one of the most important composers of his age. However, he has been the focus of relatively little biographical research. New documents reveal that Joye, who also went by the name of vanden Abeele came from the small Flemish town of Courtrai. After a period as a singer at the church of Our Lady in his home-town, he subsequently made a career for himself at the Bruges church of St. Donatian and at the Burgundian court chapel. In Bruges he gained quite a reputation for his secular way of life, becoming well known as a rebel and a pleasure-lover. Even though he had been ordained a priest at a very tender age, he did not observe celibacy. By cleverly exploiting his social networks, Joye managed to acquire many ecclesiastical benefices. However, these did not suffice to support his high standard of living: the enormous debts he incurred would pursue him to his dying day. No more than five of Joye’s compositions have survived, all of them secular songs. Their sophistication and frivolity seem to reflect his lifestyle.

The final years of the life of the fifteenth-century musician and writer Johannes Tinctoris are—perhaps surprisingly in view of his high reputation—very poorly documented, especially in the period following his departure from the Aragonese court in Naples around the early 1490s. Although scholars have had some indication that he enjoyed links with the collegiate church (ex-monastery) of St. Gertrude, Nivelles, in the later part of his life, final confirmation of this from the extant records of St. Gertrude’s was lacking. The recent discovery, however, of a small number of references to Tinctoris, and also to his near-contemporary Marbrianus de Orto, in the surviving obit records of the church, now held in the Archives ecclésiastiques du Brabant, enables us to construct a little more detail of his relationship with Nivelles in the 1490s and early years of the sixteenth century. In addition, these records provide for the first time a likely calendar date for Tinctoris’s death.

‘Media change’ is increasingly vital in musicology, as institutional and financial pressures encourage exploration of potential tools for research, teaching, and publication based in modern information technology. Musical research could accordingly profit greatly from a closer engagement with developments in other humanities fields, which have long grappled with the issues of virtuality and concrete implementation of electronic resources. The lessons learned from decades of media studies allow one to avoid naïve technological determinism which posits an opposition between book and computer. The real issue is not whether one format or medium is superior, but rather how future forms of publication can be responsibly designed by those who will rely most heavily upon them.

To facilitate informed judgments concerning existing and potential editorial/publication approaches, early music editions are historicized and contextualized in three case studies: the ritualized physical space of the academic library; the strongly print-/book-influenced models of editions in the popularizing network context of the World Wide Web; and the conceptual quandaries and limitations involved in developing new ‘dynamic’ online editions. In each case—including digital publication—‘materiality’ can be seen as an overriding factor in how editions are discovered, acquired, read, performed. The new digital edition thus treads a fine line. Physical, conventional, and social aspects of interactivity play an important role in shaping online publication, but this is not the same as the simplistic idea that electronic editions have intrinsic characteristics determined by their status as virtual entities. Rather, the fundamental elements of online music editions are shaped in the process of design and implementation, too often in practice without regard to their musicological integrity and future usability. It is imperative, therefore, for practitioners and scholars to become more actively engaged in the ongoing development process of such edition systems.