St. Martial, though not a major saint outside of France, was the object of particularly widespread and fervent veneration in eleventh century Aquitania. This veneration was particularly evident in the Limousin region. St. Martin of Tours, widely venerated throughout Europe, is one of the saints whose feasts were amongst the earliest provided with tropes throughout Europe. Given the importance of St. Martin in all of France, and St. Martial for eleventh century Limoges, the trope repertory included in contemporary manuscripts with their feasts typically is substantial. In the case of St. Martial, this is even more so in manuscripts copied around the time of the abortive attempt from 1028 to 1031 to replace St. Martial's traditional mass with the mass composed by Adhémar de Chabannes. It was during this period that attempts were made to assert the apostolicity of St. Martial. In some manuscripts copied during this period, Martial is provided an expansive repertory equal in size only to that of Easter or Christmas.
In many of the Aquitanian manuscripts, some of the repertory between the feasts of the two saints is shared. In others it is clear that repertory was borrowed from the feast of one saint and reassigned to the newly important St. Martial. Using the extant tenth and eleventh century Aquitanian tropers, the issue of the expansion and transmission of St. Martial's repertory will be explored and in fact, it will be shown that most of the pieces for St. Martial found in Aquitanian sources are taken from St. Martin's celebration.
Sarah Davies (New York University): A Gift of "Gütter" Dances and Motets: Reassembling the Basel-Amsterdam Lute Book
A finely copied, calligraphically intriguing manuscript in German lute tablature, opening with a colored pen and ink drawing of a woman offering a book to a lute-playing gentleman, presents a rich opportunity for a multi-faceted investigation of an under-studied Renaissance instrumental source. Basing my methodology on that established by Colin Slim and other key scholars in the field of source studies, I will endeavor to expand my inquiry by calling on the expertise of colleagues outside musicology. Accessing the specialized knowledge of those who work in history and art history, folk studies and language, I anticipate finding clues to the source's possible dating, origin, scribe, owner, choice of repertoire and purpose.
In this pursuit, I have chosen to challenge a current assessment that "Für die Identifizierung des Schreibers und Künstlers sowie des Besitzers...fehlt jeder Anhaltspunkt" [Kmetz, 1988]. Originally planned with 200 works, many citing the lutenists Wolff Heckel and Matthaeus Waissel, the lute book has been difficult to evaluate up to now, since it has only recently been recognized as a divided source. It was in the possession of the Chur Staatsarchiv when, in 1880, it was taken apart and sold to Amsterdam (Toonkunst Bibliotheek (Ms. 208.A.27: 153 pieces) and Basel (University Library, F.IX.39: the drawing and first 7 pieces); in the latter case it only came to light years later within a collection of letters. Still lost are forty intabulated songs and motets from the manuscript's first part, but all 100 passamezzi, galliards and "good" German dances making up its second part are still intact.
I hope to show that this source may have issued from a woman's pen between 1565-75, possibly as a wedding gift to a musical husband, and that it may have originated in the highest aristocratic circles of patronage surrounding Johann of Nassau, William the Silent and the House of Orange
Kevin N. Moll (East Carolina University): "Déjà Vu All Over Again": Deep Structures in the Missa dum sacrum mysterium of Johannes Regis
Each of the two surviving masses of Johannes Regis (d. 1496) offers in its own way a telling glimpse into constructive procedures of cyclic composition during the fifteenth century. This paper explores various aspects of Regis's mass based on the "L'homme armé" tune, a work which exploits in a manner quite typical of the time the structurally unifying potential of a repetitive cantus firmus allied with a "motto" opening. A significant innovative factor, however, is that the composer consistently states the pre-existent melody quasi-canonically at the interval of a fifth so that the cantus firmus sounds in the tenor and contratenor simultaneously. From this perspective it is also notable that the cantus firmus voices are underlaid with words belonging neither to the L'homme armé tune nor to the liturgical items being set, and this texting, too, constitutes a kind of unifying pattern throughout the mass. In what is perhaps an even more unconventional gambit, Regis in this particular mass also develops a series of melodic-contrapuntal formulae involving the superius and bassus, i.e., in addition to any usage of the cantus firmus per se. Such passages recur in slightly varied form in at analogous points different movements. These correspondences, most noticeable in the Gloria and Credo, lend yet another element of deep coherence to the cycle.