IMC 2014: Sessions

Paper -a:
Gregorian chant is something that traditionally is thought of as belonging to the Middle Ages with a revival during the 19th century. In reality, Gregorian chant continued its life also between the Middle Ages and the revival. The paper aims at demonstrating how this tradition was upheld in one particular abbey: the Birgittine abbey of Maria Refugie in Uden, the Netherlands. The abbey library holds a collection of liturgical manuscripts for mass and office from late 15th century until the middle of the 19th century used in the abbey. In order to discuss and explain how this consistent tradition of music could be maintained but also varied, terms from sociology as legitimization and symbolic universe, the concept charisma and tenacious structures are used.

Paper -b:
As substantial, 10th-century sources of tropes and sequences, St Gallen’s Codices 484 and 381 have been the subject of numerous investigations. Most recently, Wulf Arlt and Susan Rankin have observed the codices’ primary scribe -referred to as ∑ - in his roles as scribe, notator, and collector. This paper expands upon this prior research by examining ∑’s characteristics as a reader of verse.

In addition to its collections of tropes and sequences, Codex 381 contains a repertory of processional hymns (versus), also copied by ∑, and comprised largely of versified texts. An examination of these settings - in particular, the relationships between specific melodic parameters and aspects of the quantitative Latin verse - reveals clear tendencies in their approaches to melodically articulating verse. The settings show an awareness of and an attentiveness to multiple aspects of the texts’ verse structures, including syllable quantity, metrically prominent syllables, caesurae, and line endings.

By comparing the settings within Codex 381 with versions appearing in other manuscripts from St. Gallen (such as Codices 196 and 338), this paper will demonstrate that certain melodic articulations of verse are most evident in ∑’s work. While it is not possible to determine unequivocally whether these melodic features originated with ∑, certain melodic parameters that affect the articulation of verse in performance - such as the placement of elongated pitches and the adjustments of melodies to the texts of differing strophes - vary among settings, and could well have been influenced by individual scribes.