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Chant research at the turn of the century and the analytical programme of Helmut Hucke

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2008

Edward Nowacki
Edward Nowacki
Affiliation:
University of Cincinnati
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Extract

The end of a century, like the end of any era, is a time to take stock and lay plans. This is no less true of plainsong and medieval music than of any field of human endeavour. So it comes as no surprise to encounter in our professional literature exhortations to re-envision our subject and to contemplate its direction in the twenty-first century. Richard Crocker has been particularly cogent in recommending the abandonment of lost causes and the adoption of new or neglected research methods.1 The attempt to read the oldest melodic texts of plainchant as the trace of the sumptuous oral tradition that preceded them, however tantalizing, is ultimately unsatisfying in his view, perhaps even vain. In its place he urges us to cultivate a critical, evaluative understanding of chants composed in the era of musical notation, that is, as authoritative compositions of the time when they were copied rather than as witnesses to an obsolescent oral tradition. Putting this advice into practice would require more listening, performing and remembering of chants as they are and less speculation about how they got that way.

Type
Articles
Information
Plainsong & Medieval Music , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , April 1998 , pp. 47 - 71
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1998

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References

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17 Through spot-checks the author was able to satisfy himself that the differences between manuscripts Vat. lat. 5319 and Phillipps 16069 [now Bibl. Bodmeriana MS C 74] are negligible. The two manuscripts belong closer together than Vat. lat. 5319 does with the thirteenth-century manuscript Archivio di San Pietro F 22, which exhibits slight variants.

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20 Hucke evidently misread the melisma at the beginning of the second segment over (di-) sci(-pulus). In fact it is identical to the one over (di-) e(-bus) in staff 3. The error has been corrected in the example.

21 Compare, for example, the versions notated in staffless notation in St Gall, MS 339, in Paléographie musicale(Solesmes, 1889).

22 In Rome, as a comparision of the manuscripts Vat. lat. 5319 and Archivio di San Pietro F 22 shows, the formation of variants (albeit unessential ones) began to occur as late as the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

23 ‘Three’ (erroneously) in the original.

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27 It goes without saying that much new creation ocurred outside the central canon of chants for the Mass, but that is not the subject of this article.

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