A Byzantine Musical Handbook at Milan

Abstract

Professor Aug. Heisenberg, editor of the Byzantinische Zeitschrift, made a copy some years ago of a text of the Papadike or singer's manual preserved in the volume Codex Ambrosianus O. 123 supra (598 in the printed catalogue), and he has now very kindly passed this on to me for study and publication. Being at Milan in 1925, I verified his transcript, which of course proved to be quite accurate. The Papadike is the most familiar of the mediaeval treatises, and it has already been published in slightly differing versions by M. Paranikas, O. Fleischer and W. Christ. I have collated several manuscript copies, and in the present article it will only be needful to point out a few divergences in the Milan text. The number of MSS. containing the Papadike is very great, which shows it to have been the standard manual of the Round Notation; and probably the essential part was drawn up by the inventors of that notation. But the work was re-edited by many theorists, one of them, according to tradition, being John Cucuzeles (A.D. 1300), although we must reject the notion that he was the original author. Most of the copies, like ours, were made in the fifteenth century.