2/17/2023 0 Comments Polyphonic music library![]() ![]() The last page of the manuscript features an exquisite Guidonian hand, devised by theorist Guido d’Arezzo to propagate a method of sight-singing with the six syllables ut, re, mi, fa, sol, and la. It was previously owned by the Benedictine Admont Abbey, near Salzburg, and was purchased by the Sibley Music Library in 1936. The largest music library affiliated with any college or university in North AmericaĪ 12th century collection of early medieval theoretical music treatises, written in Germany or Austria. Combined with the notation itself, this makes it likely that whoever wrote the music was based in that region.Located inside the Miller Center on Gibbs Street This odd comment, a reference to the Saint’s Day for Maternianus, alludes to the fact that unlike most monastic houses, which celebrated Maternianus on April 30, a handful of communities in north-western Germany did so on December 1. In addition, however, an unknown scribe had added a Latin inscription at the top of the page which when translated reads: “which is celebrated on December 1”. This is partly because the type of plainchant notation – sometimes known as Eastern Palaeofrankish – was most used in Germany at that time. Who wrote the music, and which monastic house it came from, remains a mystery, but through meticulous detective work Varelli has been able to pin its likely origins down to one of a number of ecclesiastical centres in what is now north-west Germany, somewhere around Paderborn or Düsseldorf. “The chant notation essentially gives the direction of the melody and when it goes up or down, the organum notation consistently agreed, giving us also the exact intervals for the chant.” “When I tried to work out the melody I realised that the music written above was the same as the one outlined by the notation used for the chant and that this sort of ‘diagram’ was therefore a two-voice piece based on the antiphon for St Boniface”, Varelli said. The fact that it was an early example of music for two parts had probably gone unnoticed because the author used a very early form of musical notation for the polyphonic piece, which would have been indecipherable to most modern readers. This suggests that even at this embryonic stage, composers were experimenting with form and breaking the rules of polyphony almost at the same time as they were being written. Varelli’s research suggests that the author of the newly-found piece – a short “antiphon” with a second voice providing a vocal accompaniment – was writing around the year 900.Īs well as its age, the piece is also significant because it deviates from the convention laid out in treatises at the time. Treatises which lay out the theoretical basis for music with two independent vocal parts survive from the early Middle Ages, but until now the earliest known examples of a practical piece written specifically for more than one voice came from a collection known as The Winchester Troper, which dates back to the year 1000. Polyphony defined most European music up until the 20th century, but it is not clear exactly when it emerged. Varelli specialises in early musical notation, and realised that it consisted of two vocal parts, each complementing the other. He discovered the manuscript by chance, and was struck by the unusual form of the notation. The piece was discovered by Giovanni Varelli, a PhD student from St John’s College, University of Cambridge, while he was working on an internship at the British Library.
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