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Music and Performance in The Later Middle Ages
Music and Performance in The Later Middle Ages
Introduction
10 pp
This book is concerned with late medieval polyphonic songs preserved in two manuscript collections, one transmitting music composed before 1400 and one after that date: the Chantilly codex (Chantilly, Muse Cond 564, abbreviated Ch564) and the Oxford manuscript, Canon. Misc. 213 (Ox 213). My goal is to discover more about the historical circumstances of late medieval musical performance by examining works in these two manuscripts, moving beyond a more traditional musicological focus on works of music and their composers to include consideration of the activities of performers, listeners, patrons, and scribes as well. I hope to show that extending our inquiry in this way will allow us to perceive heretofore unrecognized evidence for medieval music-making recorded on the pages of surviving manuscripts. Manuscripts are unique by definition, in that each one represents the work of a particular scribe or scribes, following a set of decisions made concerning the specific book at hand. Even so, many manuscripts surviving from the Middle Ages to the present day share certain characteristics. Some of these characteristics can be seen as contributing to a given books chances for survival. For example, deluxe volumes copied on parchment, especially if decorated with painting or calligraphy, especially if they belonged to library collections or institutions that themselves have survived to the present day, were more likely to be kept intact and not destroyed outright or erased or dismembered so the parchment could be reused.
Performance contexts for sacred music, for the Mass or Offices, can be reconstructed using historical information about liturgy, about the architecture of liturgical spaces, and about church personnel, attested by pay records or the personnel files documenting benefices. For secular music the sources of external documentation are much more limited: unlike so many medieval churches and cathedrals, medieval domestic or court buildings have not survived, and even when recorded, the scripts of entertainments were never as consistently enacted as were liturgical services. As a result, much of our information for imagining the performance of nonliturgical medieval music has come from more indirect sources, such as fictionalized descriptions of music-making. Christopher Page has demonstrated how useful fictional depictions of musicmaking can be for informing our sense of performance norms.
our period, from sources including historical chronicles, narrative poetry, and treatises. One of these was the metrical romance Cleriadus et Meliadice, surviving in nine manuscripts (and five early printed books), brought to musicological notice the year before by Christopher Page.