Ivrea, Biblioteca Capitolare, LX: Graphic creativity and semiotic strategies in an eleventh-century notational crossover
Alessandra Ignesti, University of Pavia.
G.16 Victoria's Room, The Victoria Rooms, Queens Road, BS8 1SA
Northern Italy has always been an area of intense exchanges, especially in the Middle Ages. Separated from the rest of Europe by the Alps, the towns and monasteries on opposite sides of the mountain range were nonetheless connected by a constant transfer of people and goods through the several passes and pilgrimage routes, in turn fostering all kinds of cultural interactions. Layered liturgical repertories and chant notations merging different families of music scripts are revealing of multidirectional exchange of notational systems and musical knowledge. This is especially true for the early medieval period (ca. 900-1100). During this era, trans-European networks of singer-scribes developed strategies for the written transmission of the official chant corpus for the Mass and the Office—and the burgeoning non-official chant corpus of tropes and sequences as well—demonstrating a high degree of graphic creativity. Ivrea LX, a Gradual, Troper, and Sequentiary likely compiled in Pavia in the early eleventh century is a case in point in that it transmits a diverse corpus of chants with both local and transregional concordances notated with a music script that can be described as a hybrid. Mostly modeled after the Breton script, one of the main notational families in Latin Europe, the neumes of Ivrea LX appear as the result of local reception and adaptation of this notational ‘canon’ opening a window onto the needs and practices of singer-scribes in northern Italy. Previously analyzed by Charles Downey and Michel Huglo, the notation of Ivrea LX presents persisting ambiguities that point to context-specific use of a few special neumes, whose systematic analysis can provide fresh insights into symbolizing strategies for music writing. This research seminar presents work in progress developed in the context of the ERC-funded project SCRIBEMUS. Scribes of Musical Cultures. Decoding Early Technologies of Music Writing in Latin Europe (ca. 900–1100) led by Giovanni Varelli.
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