The Musical Manuscripts in the Supplementum graecum

The subject of the proposed research project is the music of the Byzantine and post-Byzantine Greek Orthodox Church. Twenty liturgical music manuscripts of the Supplementum graecum at the Austrian National Library will be studied. The manuscripts of the Supplementum graecum are of great interest for the research of music in general as they date from the 12th to the 19th centuries; above all because until now the later manuscripts of the period between the 16th and 19th centuries have never been the central theme of a research project. These mansucripts are distinguished by a great variety of notational practices, musical traditions, genres and composers. With the help of the musical codices it will be possible to follow the evolution of the liturgical music books, as well as the different compositional styles and the phases of the development of the notation until the reform of 1814. The main stress of the research will be on the typological registration and classification of the manuscripts, the identification of their repertory and their melodic development. There will also be a description of the individual composers together with their personal and locally coloured style. Special topics will include the existence of "identical" manuscripts, the work of the copyists and their models, the melodic variants of individual chant books and the different performance practices involved. During these investigations, the Vienna manuscripts will at first be compared with one another, and subsequently with codices from Athens and Mount Athos, so as to be able to trace the development of the melodies throughout the centuries.

Subject of the project in question were the eighteen manuscripts in the Supplementum graecum of the Austrian National Library, which have hitherto not been dealt with scientifically. Therefore the project had aimed at examining and presenting the development of the post- and neobyzantine greek-orthodox musical manuscripts in the Supplementum graceum, starting with exemplary music-liturgical sources dating from the prime of Byzantine music (12th-15th century) till the churchmusic-reform at the beginnings of the 19th century and the subsequent codices and to publish the results in an independent publication. In addition an index, which brings more details than are included in the catalogue by Herbert Hunger and Christian Hannick, contains for the first time all the chants plus their composers, showing thus the concordance between the individual manuscripts, in order to make it possible to comprehend corresponding chants at one glance. In that way the corpus of the Supplementum graecum-manuscripts was made accessible to other scientist for further studies and comparisons, in order to bring this important collection of the Austrian National Library to the attention of a broader public for the first time and to see these codices in the context of other Greek as well as international libraries. The results of the project were published as an independent publication under the title "Post Byzantine Liturgical Chants throughout the Ages: The Musical Manuscripts in the Supplementum graecum of the Austrian National Library".