John Stinson(La Trobe University): Threading through the Liturgical Labyrinth: Web Resources for Liturgical Music before 1500
Understanding and locating liturgical chant has been greatly facilitated in recent years by electronic tools. More than 400,000 chants have now been indexed, but it is still not as easy as one might hope to find the full text of a chant, its liturgical function in different liturgical traditions and the melodies to which this text was text of a chant, its liturgical function in different liturgical traditions and the melodies to which this text was sung. These difficulties are an integral part of working with resources which are most often original manuscripts belonging to liturgical usages in which ancient traditions, reforming demands for conformity and local performance practices were not always in harmony. This paper will demonstrate techniques of finding melodies for texts, texts for melodies and different liturgical uses for both texts and melodies in liturgical chant before the advent of printing. Melodic fragments at original pitch or at any transposition, color images of original manuscripts, full texts, rubrics and other liturgical indicators can now be located easily and quickly.
Michael Phelps(New York University): Dealing with Chunks of Chant: Motets, Poetry, and Liturgy
The celebration of the consecration of the high altar of the cathedral of the newly created archbishopric of Florence is most notable to students of music and liturgy for Dufay's motet Nuper rosarum flores. While the text of the motet is unique and specific to the Florentine celebrations of 25 March 1436, the structure of the motet is built upon a section of chant, Terribilis est locust iste, taken from the liturgical text from the introit of the Feast of the Dedication.
As there is ample evidence from surviving accounts that Dufay's motet was part of the ceremony during the liturgy of the consecration, it serves as a perfect example of the difficulties that confront historians when they are forced to confront the complexities of liturgy and ceremony. The focus of this paper will be two-fold: firstly, to discuss the way chant was used to link non-liturgical texts to liturgically centered celebrations; and secondly, to delineate the differences between our anachronistic use of the terms liturgical and extra- or para-liturgical.