Journal of the Alamire Foundation

The earliest form of musical notation, neumes, uses discrete or connected symbols to represent one or several pitches in a musical gesture. The next major stage in notation’s development, square notes, presents the reader with a notation made up of variously shaped note-heads and stems or ligatures. The transition between these two forms of notation is the focal point of this study, which compares the virga, the clivis, and various alterations to represent liquescence, in three distinct geographical/scribal regions across Europe. Samples of notation were only taken from manuscripts that can be securely dated within a quarter-century, from 900 to 1500. Results of the comparison show that the transition from neumes to square notes begins first in northern France, at the beginning of the twelfth century. The Germanic and central European areas begin this transition slightly later. In all regions studied, the transition was complete by the end of the thirteenth century. Some reasons for this transition, including the role of the musical manuscript in liturgical culture and the function of notation for the singer, are discussed.

This paper examines the fifteenth-century antiphoner Preetz, Klosterarchiv Reihe V G1, from the former Benedictine convent of Preetz in the diocese of Lubeck. Scribal evidence and elements of the convent’s musical repertoire together indicate that the community’s musical roots lead back to the Rhineland. The convent appears to have maintained its own scriptorium that developed a distinctive adaptation of an earlier Rhenish notational tradition. A previously unknown office for St. Blaise represents the oldest layer of the convent’s repertoire. Its hagiographic narrative prose texts, the modal ordering of its antiphons, its adaptation of established antiphon melodies into the form of the ‘double antiphon’, and the non-formulaic composition of its responsories confirm that the office for St. Blaise belongs to the second stratum of office composition (c. 850-1050.) The office appears to have been adapted from a secular cursus to Benedictine usage, possibly indicating that the predecessor of the Preetz community was a secular foundation that later adopted the Benedictine rule. The addition into the Preetz antiphoner of the proper office Universa plebs fidelis for St. Matthias that originated in Trier may reflect a final phase of Rhenish musical influence that took place during the Bursfeld Reform of the late fifteenth century.

The new sequence emerged in the decades around 1100 as a poetic and musical renewal of a long-established proper chant of the mass. These new specimens of the genre demonstrate not only that their poet-composers turned to accentual verse for technical and formal inspiration and away from pre-existing melodies as the structural source and supplier for the text, but also that they sought out different approaches to modality, melodic vocabulary, and text-music relationships in their musical settings. A close analysis of the melodic and textual variants as well as the transmission history of Celeste organum demonstrates that how new sequences were known in their earliest iterations and how they initially functioned liturgically often differed significantly from later instantiations. In many cases, the most innovative melodic features of the new sequence appear to have been unsuccessfully transmitted. These ‘disruptions’ suggest conscious redacting of received models in order to make the pieces conform better to the musical style of the early sequence and the established context of the Gregorian mass. Furthermore, medieval Picardy appears to have been an important region for the production, circulation, and reception of the new sequence in its earliest phase of transmission.

Orlando di Lasso’s motet Nunc gaudere licet, which possibly began life as a drinking song during the Munich ducal wedding of 1568, ends with a musical and textual quotation of the start of the well-known introit Gaudeamus omnes. In the 16th century there was a tradition of quoting the sacred Gaudeamus omnes in secular contexts (whether as an expression of joy or with parodistic or blasphemous intentions). The introit is quoted in folly literature, which exhibits human errors satirically with moralising purposes. In Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools, Gaudeamus is quoted and appears on two of the illustrations (attributed to Albrecht Dürer) that were included in the first edition (Basel, 1494). This article attempts to interpret the Gaudeamus omnes quotation in Lasso’s motet against this background.

This essay examines the practical processes involved in the 2008 recreation of Daphnis, Pastorale, a drama first performed by the students of the Jesuit College of Namur in 1728. The recreation necessitated new approaches to stage design and action, as well as contemporary solutionsor the casting and linguistic content. Daphnis, Pastorale is a form of Jesuit college music-drama characteristic of the francophone regions of Europe, and is the only known surviving example of its kind from Belgium. This work is all the more rare in that it uses French sprinkled with loan-words, rather than the neo-Latin typical of Jesuit drama. The process of constructing a historically informed performance of this unique member of the Jesuit music-drama repertoire reveals a reciprocal three-way relationship among knowledge gained through primary research, academic study, and informed experimentation.