DIRECTIONS FOR CHANT RESEARCH IN THE 1990s: THE IMPACT OF CHANT DATA BASES

Abstract

I must apologize for the over-ambitious sound of my title: it is the echo of one given to me about ten years ago by Marian Green, the founding editor of the Journal of Musicology, who planned the inaugural issue of that journal to contain a series of articles in which the ?state of the art? of research in various fields would be defined. My very brief article was one among many that attempted to assess the most important contributions to research in its field and to look ahead to coming developments.1 As I reread the article now, I am struck both by its positive aspects and by what is omitted from it. I began by praising editions of chant that had recently been published by Karlheinz Schlager and Finn Hansen, and the various editions of texts then appearing in the series Corpus Troporum. I called attention to Jean Claire's study of antiphons for the ferial office ?particularly its emphasis on the apparently archaic, pre modal readings in which some sources preserve those antiphons.21 said I hoped there would be more study along this line ?further attempts to identify those manuscripts in which chants are allowed to retain pre modal (or non-modal) forms and distinguish them from those in which chants are edited with a relatively heavy hand into versions that conform to the theory of the modes. I called for an authoritative list of manuscripts containing the chants of the Divine Office, and along with that indices of