| Abstract | Papers -a and -b:
The repertory on which we shall focus in these two papers will be drawn from the Lenten Mass Proper - most probably the laudes. The melodic substance of Old Hispanic chant is hidden behind a veil of untranscribability. It is possible, however, with some of the formulaic chants, to come to clear conclusions about their melodic grammar without knowing the precise pitch outline. These conclusions enable us to discuss the history and transmission of the repertory - this is the focus of Hornby's paper.
Understanding the melodic grammar of Old Hispanic chants also enable us to explore the way in which text and music interact, and the role of melody in the creation of theological meaning within the liturgy. The texts, their meanings and resonances, and the significance of the melodic substances in articulating those meanings is the focus of Maloy's paper.
Paper -c:
Recent work has been devoted to the processing of the rich fund of musical fragments still extant in a vast number of European libraries and archives. But the penetration of these sources in the scholarly literature is still very incipient, maybe because it still remains to be demonstrated how fragments ought to contribute to the broad questions musicologists have been asking other than by the exceptional register of a rare or otherwise unknown piece. This paper will argue that the analysis of melodic variants is one of these issues for which fragments can be extremely helpful and very consistently employed. Through an investigation of the Gradual fragments identified in the Archives Départamentales of the Haute-Garonne, the Tarn-et-Garonne and Aude, compared with the complete books preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (Pa 776, 780 and 903) and in the British Library (Harley 4951), this paper will attempt to present a general view of the extent and procedures of musical variation in 11th and 12th century Aquitaine. Differently from broad comparisons among a small number of very distant sources – in which case it is very difficult to interpret the rationale of variation – it is hoped that, by delimiting a precise context for analysis and attempting to take into account as many sources as are available, a less abstract and better documented picture of a specific corpus of variants will be achieved.
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