(Stand: 25. Juli 2007) ANDERSON, Michael Alan ... - Universität Wien

MEDIEVAL & RENAISSANCE MUSIC CONFERENCE 2007 – WIEN, 7.-11. AUGUST ABSTRACTS
Weise nur mehr ein relativ geringer Teil der ursprünglichen Handschriften erhalten
geblieben ist, werden diese Fragmente heute als die ältesten musikalischen Quellen der
Stadt Wien angesehen.
Gerade hinsichtlich ihrer über die Hausmusikgeschichte des Schottenstiftes Wien
hinausgehenden Bedeutung und ihrer klaren Abgrenzung zu anderen benachbarten Klöstern
der damaligen Zeit, ist es naheliegend, sich näher mit diesen Fragmenten auseinanderzusetzen.
Ein mittlerweile abgeschlossenes Forschungsprojekt ging in den letzten Jahren
vor allem der Frage nach, woher die musikalische Tradition der sogenannten „Schottenmönche“,
die alle in Irland selbst geboren sein mussten, kam: direkt aus Irland oder
von einem anderen Ort des europäischen Kontinentes? Auch wenn die direkten Vergleichshandschriften
in anderen Bibliotheken nur mehr spärlich erhalten geblieben sind,
können doch wesentliche Fragen auch heute noch beantwortet werden. In diesem Sinn
wird im Rahmen dieses Vortrages versucht, die in den vergangenen Jahren erzielten Forschungsergebnisse
und deren Auswirkung auf die mittelalterliche Musikgeschichte Wiens
zusammenzufassen.
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DE FORD, Ruth (Hunter College and Graduate Center, CUNY)
Who devised the proportional notation in Isaac’s Choralis Constantinus?
Freitag/Friday, 10.8., 10.15 Uhr, MuWi, HS 1
Isaac’s Choralis Constantinus has been renowned as a source of complex proportional notation
since the 1530s. Sixteenth-century theorists beginning with Sebald Heyden drew examples
from it even before it was published, and it has played a prominent role in studies
of mensural notation ever since. Although the work has been interpreted as a key to
Isaac’s mensural usage, much of its unusual notation may be the work of Heyden, not
Isaac. Many of its proportion signs appear in no other works of Isaac, and some exist nowhere
else outside of theoretical treatises. The unconventional signs are concentrated in a
handful of numbers that make up only about one percent of the collection. They apply to
commonplace rhythms that were normally notated in much simpler ways. As a liturgical
collection, Choralis Constantinus is not the type of work a composer would normally choose
to display notational complexities of a purely theoretical nature, but Heyden would have
had both the opportunity and a plausible motive to edit Isaac’s notation for his own purposes.
He was the leading authority on music in Nuremberg, where the music of Choralis
Constantinus was collected and edited for publication two decades after Isaac’s death. The
second edition of his De arte canendi, the earliest surviving source for two of the complex
numbers, appeared in 1537, the year in which Johannes Ott announced the forthcoming
publication of Isaac’s work. (Various complications delayed the appearance of the publication
until 1550-55.) Heyden generated many of his examples by altering the notation of
existing works. If he subjected the Isaac examples to this treatment, he would surely have
encouraged Ott to adopt his revised notation in the print. The question of who devised the
unusual proportions in Choralis Constantinus has implications both for the broader interpretation
of Isaac’s notation and for the relationships among manuscript sources of the
collection, including Berlin, Deutsche Staatsbibliothek, Ms. 40024, and Vienna, Österreichische
Nationalbibliothek, Ms. 18745.
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