The Istanbul Antiphonal (about 1360) (review)

Abstract

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.