Manuscript Music Culture in the Renaissance

The word “manuscript” means “handwritten”--from the Latin “manus,” meaning “hand” and “scriptum,” meaning “written.” A musical manuscript, therefore, is handwritten music (this is why we use “manuscript” paper when we want to write music by hand). During the Renaissance period of European musical history, as more and more music was composed using notation, enormous quantities of music were written out and circulated, particularly for polyphonic repertoires, which were very difficult to memorize in large quantities.

Today, we are going to look at some fifteenth-century manuscripts, and to think a little bit about what we can know about them from their format and the material conditions of their survival. Be aware that “manuscript” can be abbreviated as MS, and that “manuscripts” (plural) as MSS.

First, here is a blog post showing some decorative letters from a large choirbook, copied in France. This particular book is a gradual, the name given to a book that collects together all of the music that is sung in a Mass, specifically, the chant. As you might then expect, this music is monophonic, and written in square notation that has little indication of the rhythmic durations. Even though this book was compiled during the fifteenth century, it represents and collects older repertoires of music and does not make use of the most cutting edge rhythmic notation possibilities. Importantly, too, I want you to think about the size of this book and of the notation within it. As I said above, this is a choirbook format. That means that it was placed on a lectern so that the whole choir could gather around and sing from a single copy of the music--you can see an image showing how the principle worked here (this example is from a sixteenth-century decorated manuscript). Music such as this would be copied in a large scriptorium, a professional copying workshop, typically run by monks or nuns within the confines of a convent.

Second, here is a Kyrie setting written by Josquin de Prez, as copied early in the sixteenth century. This is technically also choirbook format, because multiple singers can sing from the one page, though you can see that the ensemble is smaller just in the fact that the music itself is notated at a smaller scale. This is a polyphonic piece written in four vocal parts, but instead of being presented in score, each part has its own space on the page. Look carefully: note that the first voice has a G or treble clef, and that the text is only loosely associated with the syllables. “Kyrie” (with a very elaborate “K”) appears under the key signature, while “eley” appears towards the end of the third system, and “son” right before the first double bar and the switch to the “Christe.” The second voice (shown at the bottom of the left hand page) is written in a C3 clef, as is the third voice (shown at the top of the right page). The fourth voice is written in C4. This notation is much closer to modern notation. We have key signatures, clefs, time signatures, and far fewer ligatures.

Here, in contrast, is a courtly manuscript containing a section of frottola (a light, secular genre) arranged for instruments. You can see the word “altus” decorating the second part, which is written with an F or bass clef. The bird illustration and the blank space shows the value of this manuscript: it is valuable, decorated texts that are more likely to have survived, as scrappy old music would not have seemed as valuable to collectors over the centuries.

Next week we are going to look at some printed sources; bear in mind that even after the invention of musical moveable type and widespread publication, manuscript cultures persisted for centuries in large institutions (where scriptoriums continued to flourish), in places where published works were hard to come by, and in circles surrounding composers, where new music would be regularly performed, long before it reached the printing press (if it ever did).