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Notes 59.4 (2003) 918-921



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Notae Musicae Artis: Musical Notation in Polish Sources, 11th-16th Century.Edited by Elz(dot)bieta Witkowska-Zaremba.Cracow: Musica Iagellonica, 2001. [574 p. ISBN 8-370-99106-8. $100.]
Musica Scripto: Kodeksy Menzuralne II Polowy XV wieku na wschodzie Europy Lacinskiej: Musica Scripto: Mensural Codices in Eastern Latin Europe in the Second Half of the 15th Century. By Pawel Gancarczyk. Warszaw: Instytut Sztuki Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 2001. [296 p. ISBN 8-385-93834-6. € 25.56.] Music examples, facsimiles.

The study of medieval music notation has been limited by the relatively small number of studies in English on this subject (such as The Notation of Polyphonic Music 900-1600, the ubiquitous textbook by Willi Apel [Cambridge, Mass.: Medieval Academy of America, 5th ed. 1961]), and these address only a small corpus of well-known manuscripts. Many fine, and often expensive, facsimile editions do exist, but they usually reproduce individual manuscripts. Notae Musicae Artis is particularly welcome, therefore, because it includes 130 black-and-white and color plates (on glossy paper), and shows a great variety of notated manuscripts ranging from eleventh-century Gospel books with neumes to sixteenth-century vocal polyphony, tablatures, and theoretical treatises. It is also the first overview of all known medieval and Renaissance Polish musical notations. The volume is composed of six essays addressing complete and fragmentary medieval music manuscripts of Polish origin, now preserved both inside and outside of Poland. The study of these manuscripts is part of a large project intended to identify and catalog all sources pertaining to the history of music in medieval and Renaissance Poland. More than a thousand sources from more than sixty libraries survive (there is a partial list on pages 557-64), and even if some of these have been known to scholars for more than a century, this book is the first to consider this body of evidence as a whole.

In the first essay, "Musical Notation in Theoretical Texts of the 15th and 16th Century," the editor of the book discusses, with remarkable clarity, the surviving treatises of musica plana and musica mensurabilis. These treatises were prepared mainly for teaching at monasteries and the University of Cracow. Here notation is construed as the written representation of musical sound, and classified as follows: numerical recording of intervals within the Pythagorean system; pitch notation within the framework of musica plana (here pitch systems are separated from coniuncta and accidentals); [End Page 918] neumatic notation and the tabula brevis; musica mensuralis and the organization of time; the generation of melody from a verbal text (as in the treatise Musica enchiriadis) and vocal counterpoint; and Greek and Daseian notation. Many of the treatises used in Poland came from the West. They include, above all, Johannes de Muris's Musica speculativa, but also those of Boethius, the Musica enchiriadis, Guido d'Arezzo, and Johannes Cotto (also known as Affligemensis or Cotto), which were widely copied before the interregnum of the homegrown treatises linked to the Joannes Olendrinus (Hollandrinus) tradition noteworthy for discussions of coniuncta. In the sixteenth century a new wave of treatises by Nicolaus Wollick, Johannes Cochlaeus, Gaffurius, and Ornithoparcus arrive in Poland. One fascinating treatise by Nicolaus Polonus describes three ways to sing a unison and includes an unambiguous visual representation of vocal vibrato (p. 27).

Nino Albarosa's brief contribution in Italian, "Repertori Gregoriani in campo aperto in Polonia," considers the graphic features of the earliest neumed manuscripts now in Poland. These include some eleventh-century manuscripts from northern France or the Low Countries and the Rhineland, a Gospel book of ca. 1130 from the cathedral of Plock, two twelfth-century breviaries from Wroclaw, and a twelfth- century homiliary from Cracow. The neumes show influences from St. Gall and Messine neume types.

Janka Szendrei, the leading authority on Hungarian neumed manuscripts, was invited to visit libraries in Poland and contributed here a pioneering survey of Polish staff notations, "Staff Notation of Gregorian Chant in Polish Sources from the 12th to the 16th Century" (translated by David Hiley). As she admits, this was challenging, for the...

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