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| Pictures of Old Hispanic chant manuscripts available online; Old Hispanic chant manuscripts, codicology, palaeography, notation | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Apr 2 2015, 01:10 PM (771 Views) | |
| Raquel Rojo Carrillo | Apr 2 2015, 01:10 PM Post #1 |
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Dear All, I was delighted to learn yesterday that the digitised images of two of the Old Hispanic chant manuscripts preserved at the British Library are now available online! Both of these sources used to belong to the Abbey of Santo Domingo de Silos, a monastery in the area of Burgos, which is today very well-known in Spain because of the tremendous success of a Gregorian chant recording by their choir that earned a platinum CD in the 1990s (see this link for more details). For centuries the Abbey of Silos has done a remarkable job in preserving an important group of Old Hispanic chant manuscripts saving them from any possible threats (from parchment-eating animals to wars), and they still guard more than half a dozen of these sources as special treasures of the library of their monastery. The two Silos manuscripts now available online were acquired by the British Library by the end of the nineteenth century, and since then this great library has taken very good care of these sources. If you would like to have a look at how an Old Hispanic chant 'score' looked like check out the following links: GB-Lbl Add MS 30845 contains the liturgy for the saints' and litanies offices of the ordinary time, that is from after Eastertide to before Advent. It has musical neumes from beginning to end. Its notation is 'vertical' but in some cases it tilts towards the right, though never as pronouncedly as the 'horizontal' neumes of the later Toledan sources. Here's an image of this manuscript: ![]() GB-Lbl Add MS 30851 contains an Old Hispanic psalter (though with some psalms missing), canticles, hymns, part of a liber horarum or book with the small hours, and the music for common of saints, quotidian and votive offices. This source has less items with musical notation than 30845, and its notation is vertical. I would recommend to look at the pictures from folio 182r onwards to see the pages with the biggest quantity of neumes. Here's a picture of this manuscript: ![]() There are other Old Hispanic chant sources available online and we can share links of them in future posts! Edited by Raquel Rojo Carrillo, Apr 2 2015, 01:16 PM.
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| Raquel Rojo Carrillo | Apr 23 2015, 08:13 PM Post #2 |
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Many of the Old Hispanic chant sources are fragments, and I would like to share with you the pictures of one that is held at the British Library with the shelf mark Add MS 11695. The four folios (leaves) of this fragment belonged to an antiphonary and have been since long preserved with the beautiful late-eleventh/early-twelfth century Beatus of Liébana, Commentary on the Apocalypse, as its flyleaves and probably ever since the Old Hispanic rite was suppressed. Both the fragment and the Beatus codex used to belong to the Abbey of Santo Domingo de Silos. One of the fragment’s folios has chants for Advent. Their notation is of the ‘vertical’ type, though if you compare it with that of the other British Library Old Hispanic manuscripts online (Add MS 30845 and Add MS 30851), you can easily see that each source was written by very different scribes, perhaps even at different times and places. The antiphonary to which these four folios originally belonged must have been quite a big codex, and its opulent illustrations evidence that it was copied in a thriving scriptorium, very possibly located in some place of Northern Spain, near Burgos (the area in which the aforementioned Abbey is located). In fact, its folio 4 has in its recto side (front) the largest known miniature for the monogram ‘VPR’ which stands for ‘vespertinus’, the first chant to be sung in the daily office; and, in its verso side (back) it displays the largest first word of a chant of this genre, a very decorated ‘Lux’. This fragment is also one of the two sources preserving the vespertinus chant for the weekdays of Advent. You can see it at the bottom of its folio 1 recto, after a VPR monogram which is smaller than that in folio 4 recto. Its transcription is: Main section: ‘Iubilate domino omnes gentes quia ecce veniet salvator omnium deus’ Verse: ‘Laetentur celi et exultet terra [qu]ia ecce’ This chant is responsorial—the ‘[qu]ia ecce’ at the end of the verse is a repetition cue that indicates that the last part of the main section must be chanted again. This format of chant—main section - verse - repetition of last part of the main section—is the most commonly found in the vespertini chants. However, there are also vespertini that have up to nine verses, each of which is normally followed by the repetition of the last part of the main section, as well as vespertini that consist of just one section and that seem to have been chanted without repetitions since they do not present any repetition signs or cues. These different formats of chants of a same genre seem to have been deliberately conceived to fit the type of liturgical day. For example, vespertini of only one section appear in weekdays of Lent, a time of retreat, and vespertini with many verses appear in celebratory solemnities, such as Christmas and the feast of Saint Mary. Edited by Raquel Rojo Carrillo, Apr 23 2015, 08:17 PM.
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| Raquel Rojo Carrillo | May 7 2015, 02:06 PM Post #3 |
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Dear All, Another important group of Old Hispanic chant sources which is available online is preserved at the Real Academia de la Historia of Madrid. They are three manuscripts that used to belong to the Monastery of San Millán de la Cogolla, in La Rioja, at the North of Spain, just about 90 km from the Abbey of Santo Domingo de Silos (where the manuscripts that are preserved at the British Library came from). Today I will give just a short comment on the most modest of these three manuscripts: Codex 60 (E-Mah Cod. 60). It seems to not have belonged originally to the the Monastery of San Millán de la Cogolla since its script and notation are very different to those found in the two other Old Hispanic manuscripts that came from this same place: both text and music are less carefully written in E-Mah Cod. 60, and the neumes are more tilted than those found in the other codices preserved in the Real Academia de la Historia. Furthermore, of these three manuscripts E-Mah Cod. 60 is the only one presenting 'intermittent notation', which consists of the occasional omission of certain neumes (normally neumes depicting just one note, that is 'puncta') that were supposed to be over certain syllables of a chant, as suggested by the appearances of the same chant in other sources which do present all of the neumes. E-Mah Cod. 60 is also one of the very few manuscripts of this liturgy that has the name of its copist included: the presbiter Munnio, as can be seen at f. 48v of this source. Unfortunately, Munnio did not include the copy-date for this manuscript; most scholars date it as a tenth century manuscript, a few others believe it was copied in the ninth century, and another few propose the beginning of the eleventh century as its production date. Although there is no definitive proof for any of these dates my guess is that it must have been copied in the eleventh century since it shares certain similarities in its script and notation with other Old Hispanic chant sources from that time that do include their dates. E-Mah Cod. 60 was originally a manuscript transmitting the passion and mass of Saints Cosme and Damián (see its ff. 42r to 48v), but a scribe used the spare folios of this source to add the Old Hispanic litanies office (specifically ff. 28v to 29r and 48v to 50r). The litanies office was a set of three to four consecutive weekday offices with penitential and rogational character. These offices were chanted at least twice a year (before Pentecost and before Saint Martin), though some Old Hispanic calendars include litany offices in September, before Saint Cyprianus, and in December, before Saint Mary. Furthermore, there is an earlier evidence of an attempt to establish monthly litanies (litany offices?) in the canon VII of the XVII Council of Toledo (year 694), which prescribed litanies to be celebrated every month of the year. E-Mah Cod. 60 only has musical notation in the litanies office. The picture below is of its f. 28v, containing its beginning; I have used red boxes to signal some of the places in which the neumes have been omitted as is typical in Old Hispanic chant manuscripts with intermittent notation. Enjoy!
Edited by Raquel Rojo Carrillo, May 29 2015, 02:18 PM.
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| Raquel Rojo Carrillo | May 29 2015, 03:45 PM Post #4 |
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The Biblioteca de la Real Academia de la Historia (Library of Spain's Royal Academy of History, in Madrid) preserves one of the largest Old Hispanic chant manuscripts that has reached us: Codex 30 (E-Mah Cod. 30). It is a liber misticus, or codex that 'mixed' different types of materials in one volume—a misticus would contain not only the chants, but also the readings and prayers, for the secular services of the liturgical day. The secular services were the vespers, the matutinum (the Old Hispanic rite’s equivalent to today’s laudes service), and the mass. This wealth of contents impedes any misticus from transmitting the material for the whole liturgical year. Instead, the extant manuscripts of this type show that they could only cover part of the year. For instance, despite the great number of folios and large size of E-Mah Cod. 30 (around 230 folios of approximately 38 x 28 cm, one of the largest Old Hispanic chant codices), it only contains from the office of Saint Acisclo (on 17 November, the day in which the Old Hispanic rite's liturgical year began) to the office of Carnes tollendas ('meat removing'), which served as the farewell of the alleluia before the Lenten fast. The same as E-Mah Cod. 60, E-Mah Cod. 30 used to belong to the Monastery of San Millán de la Cogolla, at the North of Spain. However, the codicological differences between these manuscripts suggest that they were copied for and at different places. E-Mah Cod. 30 is much larger, its parchment is thinner and of better quality, what is preserved of its colourful decorations evidences a wealthy origin, and both its script and notation were written with better care than those in E-Mah Cod. 60. Unfortunately, all of the folios that had illustrations in E-Mah Cod. 30 have been partially or completely torn out, leaving the great majority of the offices of this source without their decorated headings nor their initial chants. In the picture below we can see its folios 113v and 114r. The first of these folios (113v) lost the miniature and heading for the office of the Nativity of the Lord (Christmas) but at least the first chant of the office, the vespertinus Paravi lucernam, was not lost with the decoration as occurs with most of these vespers opening chants in this manuscript. Folio 114r has the verses of the vespertinus followed by a chant of another genre, the more melismatic sono In splendoribus. ![]() As can be seen in this picture, the notation of E-Mah Cod. 30 is of the vertical type but very different from that in E-Mah Cod. 60 and GB-Lbl Add MS 30845. It is closer to the 'straighter' musical scripts of GB-Lbl Add MS 30851 and the flyleaves of GB-Lbl Add MS 11695. Don Michael Randel, among other authors, noted in his The Responsorial Tones for the Mozarabic Office (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 64, that E-Mah Cod. 30's notation 'shows signs of incipient diastematicism. The dry point line which runs through almost all of the notation in this manuscript clearly has no fixed function (…). The manuscript was simply ruled uniformly; and for reasons of space, text with notation were copied on alternate lines, the neumes falling on the blank lines. Nevertheless, the impulse towards diastematicism is clear'. Many authors, including Randel, and the Real Academia de la Historia, give tenth century as the date for this source; there are some authors—among them was the renowned paleographer Millares Carlo in his latest works—understand it as an eleventh century source. Edited by Raquel Rojo Carrillo, May 29 2015, 04:02 PM.
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8:25 PM Jul 11