Jänner 2010 - Institut für Musikwissenschaft - Universität Wien

Institut für Musikwissenschaft Institutsbericht 2008 / 09
This conference celebrates the 500th anniversary of the delivery, in 1509, of an extraordinary
series of cycles of choral music for the proper of the mass commissioned by the authorities of
Constance Cathedral from the great Flemish composer Heinrich Isaac (c. 1455–1517). The
conference aims to situate Isaac’s contribution to the mass-proper genre by examining
polyphony of the proper of the mass in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in analytical,
liturgical, theological and contextual terms.
It is the first musicological conference exclusively devoted to mass-propers. Music for the
mass-proper lies at the heart of the origins of polyphony itself in the European tradition: the
earliest significant surviving body of European polyphony, the Winchester Troper (dating
from c. 1000) consists largely of settings of this kind, as does the first repertory with fixed
rhythm, the Parisian polyphony of the Magnus Liber Organi. The tradition of composed
polyphony for the mass-proper continued strongly into the 16th century, as Isaac’s collection,
and numerous others, demonstrate. Although early mass-proper repertories (Winchester,
Magnus Liber) have long attracted scholarly attention, the composition of mass-propers,
particularly from the 15th century onwards, is generally a neglected field, confined to
individual studies, and much repertory remains entirely unkown. A major aim of the
conference is to create a synthetic understanding of continuities and developments within
mass-proper traditions.
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