Journal of the Alamire Foundation

The relatively high number of chant books with notated cantus fractus after 1470 as well as their monumental and splendid appearance erroneously gives the impression that rhythmic chant performance only found its way into the liturgical repertory in Prague after the Hussite Wars (1419-34). But the first sources of rhythmically performed plainchant from Prague are much older, dating back to the 1380s. Additional evidence for this can be found in the so-called Jistebnice Cantionale from the 1420s or early 1430s, a source for the Hussite liturgy with numerous Hussite songs that includes vernacular sequences and Patrem chants notated in cantus fractus. Based on the recently confirmed Prague origin of the manuscript and its close connection to the Prague intellectual elite, the presence of the vernacular repertory suggests that a related, Latin repertory would have existed previously, presumably cultivated in the early fifteenth century. Inscriptions in the cantionale display the scribe’s struggles to notate rhythm precisely, which indicates that he was dealing with an entirely new idiom for which he lacked reliable written models.

This study examines the peculiar dissemination of the English (French?) song Angelus ad virginem subintrans in central European sources from the fourteenth to the early sixteenth century. We know of one new composition which uses the text of the song’s first stanza while substituting the English melody with one based on a locally wellknown musical idiom. This composition exists in two further versions that are adapted to slightly different performance practices. There is also a seemingly different song on the same subject, whose melody however quotes the beginning of the English song. A closer examination of the continental versions and their settings reveals that there may be interconnections in rhythm and institutional origins of all the songs under discussion.

This article presents an initial survey of the cantus fractus repertory in medieval musicalliturgical sources from South Tyrol, a German-speaking region in northern Italy that borders Austria. Most of the cantus planus and cantus fractus sources found in South Tyrol lay previously unknown in the region’s archives and libraries, and were not catalogued or indexed. A research project carried out over the last fourteen years by the Free University of Bolzano/Bozen, devoted to chant sources of the eleventh-nineteenth centuries preserved in the region, has brought to light a considerable corpus of both manuscripts and prints. Nine medieval manuscripts contain chants-mainly Glorias, Credos, and tropes-fully notated as cantus fractus. In addition to these, the article discusses some chants with notational features that suggest rhythmical performance.