Very busy weekend- what with rehearsals, the consecration of a bishop, meeting performers for a commission, sending out emails, and juggling the projects I have to do for the semester, I guess another short post about Oxford 213 will have to suffice. I found something pretty interesting about it just this Friday, so I wanted to share it anyway.
In addition, I forgot to mention in the last blog post that DIAMM requires users to create an account before they can view images. The good thing is, account creation is free. (And very worth the while.)
While looking at the copy of Dufay's ballade J'ay mis mon cuer, I noticed some repeated 'e's at the ends of certain words. These are 'pense-e', 'honoure-e', and 'pare-e' (seperated syllables denoted by dashes). Interestingly, these agree across all three voices, and my first thought on seeing these were to wonder "do they specify vocal melismatic passages?". Now, for 15th century repertoire, this question is a lot less straightforward- so I went looking for other examples to see if this repeated across other words. And they did- some can be found on folio 89 (check out that 'puissan-ce' in the topmost (cantus) voice, though this is the only voice in which text underlay is specified), folio 83v (with 'desire-e' and 'journe-e' agreeing across all three voices), and folio 1 (this one is a Gloria rather than a secular work, but nevertheless the 'volun-tatis/vo-lun-tatis' (in cantus and contratenor respectively), 'glori-fi-ca-mus' (in the contratenor) and 'pa-tris' (in the cantus) are spaced out).
Since these are all parts of words that were seperated across a stretch of space on the page, I think that these instances are more likely to be vocal, and melismatic in nature. The fact that these are specific to only some works, and that the copyist of this manuscript probably wrote the words before the music1, makes it more plausible that these indications were most likely intentional- at least to me. However, I should likely see if others have alternate interpretations of the seperated syllables- these may be interesting to read and figure out. In any case, these are interesting for my current study because they may indicate some level of compositional intent:2 if the seperated syllables occur in specific places and in specific songs (at least, for the secular ones), they could potentially be used for affective or structural purposes, and I will have to do my due analysis to find out if that's the case. Luckily, I'm already planning to do this with J'ay mis mon cuer, so stay tuned for some updates later down the line on this topic!
In addition, these seperated syllables are interesting for another reason: they give some insight into how words may have been pronounced, at least for the Middle French examples. So that's quite a bit to unpack in some very small details.
1. Graeme M. Boone, "Dufay's early chansons: Chronology and style in the manuscript Oxford, Bodleian Library, Canoni misc. 213" (Harvard University, 1987). Pages 4-6 are informative in this regard, though my friend Sam pointed out that reasons 1 to 4 given by Boone do not necessarily indicate a 'text first, music later' procedure to the copying of music in this manuscript. However, the fifth point regarding ink flow on the page can't be tested by either of us at the moment, so I'm taking Boone's word for it unless evidence or readings turn up with different conclusions regarding this.↩
2. I say 'compositional' intent due to a couple of reasons: firstly, that the singular scribe was likely careful in copying from what he referenced (see the section "The copyist" in Fallows's introduction to the facsimile of Oxford misc. 213), that there were manuscripts or perhaps work examples of the music to copy from to begin with, which leads me to believe that the spacing might be faithful to what the composers of these pieces may have intended, at least to some extent.↩