Borrowing of Monophonic Melodies in Secular and Sacred Polyphony around 1500

This project is a follow-up of the FWF Stand-alone project Borrowing and Citation of Monophonic Secular Tunes in Late 15th-Century Song (Project Nr. P 22365-G18), carried out at the Paris-Lodron- Universität Salzburg between April 2010 and October 2013 under the leadership of Univ.Prof. Dr. Andrea Lindmayr-Brandl. The preceding project concerned itself with mapping out the migration of French monophonic tunes within polyphonic chansons from the last decades of the 15th century until the first two of the sixteenth. For this purpose a relational database has been created (http://chansonmelodies.sbg.ac.at) listing, commenting and offering in transcription all relevant melodies. The present project should be understood as a logical continuation and completion of the former, in that it aims at extending the timeframe until the mid 16th- century and including in its survey masses and contrafacta based on the melodies already collected and, possibly, on others. This will allow a reasonably complete overview of how and to what extent the new context has a bearing on melodic contour, rhythm, modality, accidental usage of the borrowed melody in particular, but also how the employment of these often simple tunes affects and progressively changes the refined tonal language of late medieval/early Renaissance song writing and mass composition. Besides, although the database is mainly concerned with French melodies, arrangements of Italian and Dutch melodies turning up in the same sources as their French counterparts will also be considered, since these belong stylistically to the same musical culture and are transmitted in some cases under different titles and in both languages. With the inclusion of sacred polyphonic arrangements and contrafacta, the project gains a new perspective, if one considers the structural transformation and symbolic re-interpretation the melodies are subjected to when forming the basis of a liturgical composition or an (often) devotional contrafactum; besides, the sheer number and richness of masses and contrafacta based on non-courtly tunes renders the database as it is of necessity incomplete, thus making a generic extension of it a sensible endeavour. Along with a notable extension of the existing database, the main goal of this project is the preparation of a monograph on quotation and citation in 15th- and 16th-century polyphony and its relation with monophonic repertoires. This will at least be partly analytically oriented and will address fundamental questions on the diffusion and polyphonic arrangement of certain groups of melodies, while at same time investigating the possible reasons (contextual? structural?) for the lack of polyphonic treatment for many others. This book will be submitted as my Habilitationsschrift.

This project represents an ideal sequel and an extension, both chronologically and as regards content, of the FWF-project P 22365. The late 15th century witnesses a great surge in the employment of pre-existent, 'popularizing' melodies as a basis for polyphonic chanson and mass compositions. Although specific studies have been devoted in the past decades to the analysis of this artistic phenomenon, no comprehensive exploration of the repertoire had until recently been attempted. The fully searchable relational database prepared in the previous project and containing a transcription of the relevant melodies and lists of concordances and variants has been accordingly extended, and several peer-reviewed articles have since appeared, some of them in open access. Moreover a monograph on an important monophonic chansonnier of the early 16th century (the so-called "Chansonnier de Bayeux") is in preparation. Many of the polyphonic arrangements of monophonic melodies are anonymous, though a substantial number is also attributed to such important composers as Josquin Desprez, Loyset Compère, Henricus Isaac and Antoine de Févin. Although the focus of the project is not author-centred, analysis and comparison of the different arrangement strategies may help better gauge and refine our understanding of the compositional processes at work for some composers setting themselves the task of reworking supposedly pre-existent material, often of a very simple nature. Besides, the wide circulation of many of these tunes raises the question of what constituted a 'repertory' in the late Middle Ages and the possible role of memory in its transmission. Moreover, given that the melodies under consideration, thanks to their frequent concordances with two contemporary monophonic chansonniers, are also often associated with narrative strophic texts, the results of this research endeavour potentially open up new perspectives for the study of specific literary genres lingering between the 'courtly' and the 'popular'. This has the potential of providing a broader and richer picture of music and literary history between the late 15th and the early 16th century. The database makes available for interested scholars and laypeople alike a large amount of monophonic repertory previously not directly accessible as such and lays the foundation for further research in the topics of borrowing, citation, compositional approaches, as well as questions of literary genres as emerging in texts and poems accompanying the music. Furthermore, thanks to its internal linking to the "Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music" (DIAMM), one of the most important electronic resources for source studies of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the database has increased its visibility and international diffusion within the academic community and all those interested in the secular musical repertoire of this age.