AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

Friday morning, 13 November
Ars AntiquA Ars novA
rebecca Baltzer, university of texas, Austin, chair
THE COMPLETE RECONSTRUCTION OF THE STARY
SACZ MANUSCRIPT AND ITS PLACE AMONG OTHER
THIRTEENTH-CENTURY NOTRE DAME MANUSCRIPTS
Katarzyna Grochowska
University of Chicago
The discovery, in Stary Sacz, Poland, of manuscript fragments preserving thirteenth-century
Notre Dame polyphony was announced four decades ago. Yet, even though included in
collective publications or mentioned in detailed scholarly articles, the manuscript is scarcely
known to musicologists. The main cause for such indifference is the fragmentary form in
which the manuscript is preserved. Like many medieval parchment sources, it was cut and
reused as binding material. Additionally, access to the manuscript has been inhibited by the
strict entrance rules to the Clarist Convent in Stary Sacz, its rightful owner. For forty years,
this situation precluded the complete reconstruction of the manuscript. Furthermore, even
some of the most basic attributes of the manuscript such as its dimensions, compilation and
content have remained unconsidered. Because of the manuscript’s fragmentary nature and
incomplete reconstruction, it has not been systematically included among the body of the
thirteenth-century Notre Dame manuscripts, and for this reason discussion of it in the scholarly
literature has led to only a fragmentary appreciation of it.
Using PowerPoint images, I will present the complete reconstruction of the Stary Sacz manuscript,
made possible thanks to the sustained generosity of the Convent’s Mother Superior. I
will discuss important features that allow the precise placement of the Stary Sacz manuscript
within the context of other thirteenth-century Notre Dame manuscripts. Its dimensions, established
on the basis of eleven surviving folios, position it among the relatively numerous
Notre Dame pocket-size manuscripts. Its content and particularly its motet fascicle situate it
within the small circle of Parisian motet sources. Although the motet fascicle preserves four
unica, it resembles early motet collections in which the works of Philip the Chancellor hold
pride of place. However, one feature of the motet fascicle stands in sharp contrast to coeval
polyphonic sources: the ordering of the motets. The twenty-four Stary Sacz motets are divided
into two roughly equal-sized groups, which in turn are arranged into successive liturgical
cycles. Heretofore, the motets’ arrangements have always been ordered either as one single
liturgical cycle or alphabetically, where in both cases compositions were thought to have been
assembled by numbers of voices. I will show through a detailed analysis of the manuscript and
the music how the Stary Saczy motets point to previously unconsidered criteria that drove
the arrangement of the pieces, namely the intrinsic qualities of the motets’ melodic lines. My
conclusions underscore the significance of the Stary Sacz manuscript as, among other unique
features, the only thirteenth-century Notre Dame source in which melody largely guides the
ordering of its pieces. Though preserved in peripheral geographic territory, the Stary Sacz
manuscript is central to an understanding of the musical criteria that may have played a role
in the compilation of early Notre Dame manuscripts.