The Rhenish Heritage of the Preetz Antiphoner

Abstract

This paper examines the fifteenth-century antiphoner Preetz, Klosterarchiv Reihe V G1, from the former Benedictine convent of Preetz in the diocese of Lubeck. Scribal evidence and elements of the convent’s musical repertoire together indicate that the community’s musical roots lead back to the Rhineland. The convent appears to have maintained its own scriptorium that developed a distinctive adaptation of an earlier Rhenish notational tradition. A previously unknown office for St. Blaise represents the oldest layer of the convent’s repertoire. Its hagiographic narrative prose texts, the modal ordering of its antiphons, its adaptation of established antiphon melodies into the form of the ‘double antiphon’, and the non-formulaic composition of its responsories confirm that the office for St. Blaise belongs to the second stratum of office composition (c. 850-1050.) The office appears to have been adapted from a secular cursus to Benedictine usage, possibly indicating that the predecessor of the Preetz community was a secular foundation that later adopted the Benedictine rule. The addition into the Preetz antiphoner of the proper office Universa plebs fidelis for St. Matthias that originated in Trier may reflect a final phase of Rhenish musical influence that took place during the Bursfeld Reform of the late fifteenth century.