Music manuscripts that survive from the medieval period are “incomplete witnesses to sound.”[1] We know there is much more that was produced than we have access to now, and we must remember that without the original performer, the notation of music is more of a shorthand than a prescription.[2]
Although the codex is the main form in which music from this period survives, music was also written in book rolls (rotulus) and circulated as unbound sheets and quires or gatherings.[3] The size of these codices, book rolls, and loose ephemera varied. These particular leaves are measured at approximately 42cm by 25cm. Illustrations and decorative letters on the actual pages of music and on the covers and bindings of books determined the prestige of the manuscript.[4] As can be seen in the Exploring the Leaves pages, the decorative value of this manuscript is minimal as the only ornamental features are the large, but plain, red and blue capital letters. The first printed graduals arrived with the printing press in Germany in the latter half of the 15th century.[5]
The actual writing of music depended greatly on the competence of the scribe. To write the original score or to copy something notated, “an early medieval music scribe needed to recall the melody in his own head, and then, to balance this inner knowledge with and against any written exemplar he used as he made his own notational inscription.”[6] Even with the development over the centuries of musical notation (see Medieval Musical Notation), this subjectivity in copying musical manuscripts would still have remained important.
Recent scholarship has worked to catalog, describe, edit, and digitize medieval music manuscripts.[7] Projects like the US-based Digital Scriptorium and UK-based Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music make available these otherwise hidden and unreadable pages to anyone with an internet connection.[8] This new virtual realm for medieval music makes detached leaves and fragments, like the ones explored on this site, important again.
[1] Emma Dillon, “Music Manuscripts,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Music, edited by Mark Everist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011): 291.
[2] Dillon, “Music Manuscripts,” 291.
[3] Dillon, “Music Manuscripts,” 295.
[4] Dillon, “Music Manuscripts,” 294.
[5] Michel Huglo and David Hiley. “Gradual (ii).” Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press, accessed April 21, 2015, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/11577.
[6] Susan Rankin, “Calligraphy and the Study of Neumatic Notations,” in The Calligraphy of Medieval Music, edited by John Haines (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2011): 48.
[7] Dillon, “Music Manuscripts,” 317.
[8] Dillon, “Music Manuscripts,” 317.