The Materiality of Sound in Chant Manuscripts in the West: Scriptor, Cantor & Notator, Volume I

"Scriptor, Cantor & Notator" is an innovative multi-author project dealing with the complex interconnections between learning, writing and performing chant in the Middle Ages. A number of different methodological approaches have been employed, with the aim of beginning to understand the phenomenon of chant transmission over a large geographical area, linking and contrasting modern definitions of East and West. Thus, in spite of this wide geographical spread, and the consequent variety of rites, languages and musical styles involved, the common thread of parallels and similarities between various chant repertoires arising from the need to fix oral repertories in a written form, and the challenges involved in so doing, are what bring this wide variety of repertoires and approaches together. This multi-centric multi-disciplinary approach will encourage scholars working in these areas to consider their work as part of a much larger geographical and historical picture, and thus reveal to reader and listener more, and far richer, patterns of connections and developments than might otherwise have been suspected.

"Scriptor, Cantor & Notator" is published in two books. The first, "The Materiality of Sound in Chant Manuscripts" in the West, brings together articles on several different families of early music scripts in the Latin West and provides a vividly diverse picture of some of the best current scholarship on the various types of ancient and medieval musical notation.

CONTENIDO:

Methodology
-Concepts and Taxonomies of Music Scripts (Rankin, Susan)
Design, and the Historiography of Early Music Scripts (Varelli, Giovanni)
-Appunti metodologici sullo studio del canto liturgico (Albiero, Laura)
-Indeterminacy. New Aspect of Meaning in Gregorian Chant (Mascareñas Garza, Óscar)
-Guiding Silence. The Function of Melodic Interruptions in Medieval Chant (Lousberg, Leo)
-« Et gloriosus in saecula ». Paléographie des notations franques nord-occidentales (970?1120) (Goudesenne, Jean-François)

Manuscripts and Manuscript Fragments
-Reuniting Fragments and Reconsidering the Scribal History of the Beneventan Zone (Nardini, Luisa)
-Frammenti di un antifonario in notazione nonantolana (Roncroffi, Stefania)
-Notation in Transition? A Palaeographical Study of the Insular Missal EXcl 3515 (Mannion, Anne)

Regional Scripts and Repertories
-Notazioni neumatiche dei secoli XI?XII nella Biblioteca Capitolare di Verona. Riflessioni e spunti di ricerca (Cunego, Giovanni)
-La notation musicale dans la Catalogne médiévale. Autour des origines et son évolution (Garrigosa i Massana, Joaquim)
-The Scribe and the Notator as the Bearer of Identity. Bohemian Notation in Late Mediaeval Manuscripts of Central Europe (Veselovska, Eva)