The Stemma of the Aquitanian Versaria

Abstract

The repertory of versus that circulated in eleventh- and twelfth-century Aquitaine is preserved in nine versaria, which today form parts of four codices: Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, fonds latin MSS 1139, 3549 and 3719, and London, British Library, Additional MS 36881. Through a comparison of versions of several pieces that occur in two or more versaria, the historical descent of those pieces to their surviving witnesses is discernible and may be depicted schematically in a stemma codicum. The stemma has two functions. First, readings introduced by individual scribes can be isolated. Some of these readings are errors and thus are eliminated from consideration in the establishment of the text; others, however, are variants and their study can reveal the musical personality of the scribes who introduced them. Second, a group of pieces sharing the same stemma may be identified within the versus repertory. It is proposed here that these pieces were widely circulated as a group in Aquitaine throughout the twelfth century and therefore constitute a central repertory.

A phylogenetic analysis of Orlando Gibbons's Prelude in G

“…18 Musicologists have also long studied the variation introduced during transmission of musical works. 19 Stemmatic analysis has been used, for example, in studies of the Aquitanian Versaria 20 and the organ music of Christopher Gibbons (the second son of Orlando), 21 and the significance of serial recomposition in variant transmission has been discussed by Herissone. 22 Although phylogenetic methods have been shown to be valuable tools in the analysis of the transmission of textual sources, very little work has been done on applying these computer-based methods to musical text, 23 although such an approach has been used for studies of rhythm, 24 and cluster analysis has been applied to some manuscripts from the Well-Tempered Clavier II tradition, 25 and used to study the relationship between folk music melodies and population genetics.…”

“…His pieces (nos. [16][17][18][19][20][21] are preceded by 15 compositions by his older contemporaries, William Byrd (1-8) and John Bull (9)(10)(11)(12)(13)(14)(15). Gibbons' Prelude in G, the last item in the volume, proved to be an exceptionally popular piece 30 and it survives in 16 extant sources from the 17th and early-18th centuries (see Table 1).…”