Catalogue of the medieval music manuscripts in the OeNB

The research project of the Austrian Academy of Sciences Medieval Musical Sources of the Austrian National Library, Vienna is funded by the FWF Austrian Science Fund. The project, scheduled for six years, aims to create descriptions of all medieval manuscript and fragment sources with musical notation. This refers primarily to liturgical sources with plainchant, but also includes sources containing secular monophonic or polyphonic music. The manuscripts of music theory are already to be found in the RISM volumes. To date we have identified 365 codices and 668 fragment sources that feature musical notation. We have permission to make photographs of manuscripts and publish them on our website. Currently 22.000 manuscript images and 2.000 for the fragments are available online. The specific method of describing the various manuscripts was developed in the course of the project. The codicological and palaeographic specification is based on the principles most commonly used. For the description of the contents, however, we developed a new approach that differs completely from former cataloguing projects (i.e., the specific identification of the responsories for the night office for Sundays and Ember Days in Advent according to René-Jean HESBERT, or the analysis of the responsories of the Officium defunctorum according to Knud OTTOSEN; furthermore, the listing and identification of the late medieval liturgical offices according to Andrew Hughes). The description of the mass in particular will aim at the scholarly investigation of the Alleluias of the Sundays and weekdays after Easter and Pentecost (classification of David HILEY and Peter WITTWER). Furthermore, we mean to include the complete sequences into the respective descriptions not only in the rather confusing manner customary previously, indicating only the AH volume and number, but also by quoting a text incipit and the name of the liturgical occasion. Besides this, reference will be made to the mass formats of particular feasts, processional chants, tropes and other special liturgical features. Among the 108 codices with full descriptions are some well-known manuscripts that have already been sufficiently reviewed in the relevant literature, for example the Klosterneuburg gradual-sacramentary (A-Wn 13314), the gradual-antiphoner of St. Peter, Salzburg (A-Wn sn2700) or the Lorsch sequentiary A-Wn 1043. In the course of our research, some codices have been ascribed to other regions and some former attributions to a region have been corrected. The widespread network of scholars of related medieval disciplines forms an essential basis for the research work. There was an active exchange of information with the Commission for Paleography and Codicology of Medieval Manuscripts in Austria, the Institute of Musicology of the University of Vienna, the Otto Pächt Archive and, in particular, the scholars of the Austrian National Library. In cooperation with my colleagues Eva Veselovsk and Ana Cizmic, we undertook to describe a collection of Bohemian and Moravian manuscripts, scarcely known to the scholarly public in Western Europe. Among these manuscripts we encountered the so-called Kuttenberger Cantionale and some other Hussite sources from Praha (Prague), Kutn Hora (Kuttenberg) and Cslav (Tschaslau). Remarkable is also a group of Cistercian Codices from the monastery of Staré Brno (Maria Saal). A larger corpus of manuscripts from the Carthusian monastery Krlovo Pole (Königsfeld) near Brno is also particularly interesting.