No abstract

The cantus project, begun more than twenty years ago, provides observations about medieval musical sources for the Office and the melodies they contain in a web-based, freely available format. The record for a single chant has always contained information about the feast to which it belongs, its placement within that feast, its text, its mode and its appearance. Owing to the recent introduction of the music font Volpiano into cantus records, information regarding pitch is now also available. Wherever feasible, records now include melodic incipits encoded as strings of letters and dashes which appear as note-heads on a five-line staff in Volpiano font. Melodic incipits increase the appeal of cantus as a research tool.

Andrew Hughes' Late Medieval Liturgical Offices afforded chant scholarship more melodies than it knew what to do with. Until now, chant scholarship involving 'Big Data' usually meant comparing individual feasts to the whole corpus or looking at general trends with respect to 'word painting' or stereotyped cadences. New research presented here, using n-gram analysis, networks, and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) looks to the nature of the gestural components of the melodies themselves. By isolating the notes preceding, and proceeding from, the naturally occurring semitones in the medieval church modes, we find significant recurrence of particular phrases, or riffs, which we propose could have been used to help 'build modes' from the inside out. Special care needed to be brought to the question of assumed B-flats that were not given explicitly in the manuscripts represented in Hughes' work. Understanding modes not as 'scales' but as a collection of associated smaller musical gestures, has resulted in a set of recurring riffs that appear as the identifiers of their larger contexts and confirming the influence of an earlier, oral / aural culture on these late medieval chants where musical literacy was expected.

No abstract

The basis of this study comes from the great responsory repertory in the twelfth-century French monastic manuscript, Paris 12044 from Saint-Maur-des-Fossés. A computerised database containing each component phrase was used to create a more accurate melodic taxonomy of responsories than has hitherto been available. Building on the research of W.H. Frere, H-J. Holman, and others, it is possible to obtain clearer insight into formulaic composition in an oral culture. This is achieved by comparing the use of recurrent, or ‘standard’, musical material in Paris 12044 to that found in several other manuscripts. The presence of standard material in a respond melody is found to be linked to the consistency of form and tonal structure.