TEXT FROM THE FEAST OF THE INVENTION OF ST. STEPHEN

MOST OF A MEDIEVAL VELLUM MANUSCRIPT LEAF FROM A NOTED MISSAL IN LATIN, RECOVERED FROM A BINDING

Published by 12th century, Italy

About this Item

300 x 192 mm. (11 7/8 x 7 1/2"). Double column, 33 extant lines of text and music in a rounded gothic hand. Rubrics in red, staves in red and yellow, one one-line initial and two two-line initials in red. With several interlineal and marginal notations in later hands. â Recovered from a binding and thus with about half of one of the columns (neatly) trimmed away, some fading (primarily to the partially trimmed column), light stains, wrinkling, and scattered wormholes, but overall a well preserved specimen that is almost entirely legible. Once part of a large noted Missal, this recycled specimen contains the text of the "invention" (i.e., the finding, in the year 416) of the relics of Saint Stephen, who had been stoned to death in 36 A.D. and who, as a result, became the very first Christian martyr. The leaf retains a substantial portion of this original text and includes an early form of neumes that demonstrates important developments in Medieval musical notation. When neumes first appear in the ninth century, they are the only thing occupying the area above a musical text and are thus described as "in campo aperto" (literally, "in an open field"). The earliest forms are also described as adiastematic because they appear more or less in a straight line, thus acting merely as an "aide memoire" for singers who would have already committed the melodies to memory. Later neumes (like those used for the present leaf) are diastematic, meaning that they reflect changes in melodic direction by being placed in a higher or lower vertical position above the text. Here, the notes also contain a variety of stems (as opposed to mostly single dots) to help further clarify the melody, and, crucially, they are organized around two lines: a clearly visible red line, representing the "F" pitch, and a (now very faint) yellow line, which would have stood for the "C" pitch. These lines represent a significant step toward the development of the staff--one of the most important advancements in the history of Western musical notation--which allowed singers to actually "read" the melody and find the relative pitch of each note without having to rely solely on memorization. Seller Inventory # ST19579c

Bibliographic Details

Title: TEXT FROM THE FEAST OF THE INVENTION OF ST. ...

Publisher: 12th century, Italy