nov10   Between July 4-8 the 45th International Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Music ‘Med-Ren’ will be held in Prague. The main areas to be considered are the musical culture of Central Europe and the Music and Reformation. A special session is devoted to late stylistic developments of Chant in 14-15th century Bohemia, Poland and Hungary. The session, with the participation of Zsuzsa Czagány, senior researcher of the Department of Early Music, is dedicated to the memory of Gábor Kiss, former head of the Department.

 

     The Programme of the Conference

 

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The University of Würzburg in cooperation with the Abbey Library of St. Gall organised the first music historical summer school Erste musikgeschichtliche St. Galler Summer School. Das mittelalterliche Kloster als musikgeschichtlicher Ort, Die mittelalterliche Handschrift als musikgeschichtliche Quelle that took place in the Abbey Library of St. Gall during the first week in July 2017. The Abbey Library of St. Gall preserves a unique collection of nearly 400 liturgical musical and historical manuscripts, date from the Early Middle Ages and serves as one of the most important basis for the research on early mediaeval liturgical music (cantus planus). Seven participants among them Anna Sanda, student research fellow of the Department for Early Music, took part in the summer school. The participants studied selected manuscripts with a particular focus on their content as well as on codicological and palaeographical features under the guidance of experts in manuscript studies (Prof. Dr. Andreas Haug, University of Würzburg; Prof. Dr. Michael Klaper, University of Jena; Prof. Dr. Lori Kruckenberg, University of Oregon, Eugene; Dr. Hanna Zühlke, University of Würzburg). The rich programme included guided visits by Dr. Cornel Dora to the Abbey and by Dr. Peter Erhart to the Archive (Stiftsarchiv) as well as a public lecture by Michael Klaper about Ekkehard IV. as “notator at compositor”.

 

nov10   The Czech Academy of Science’s music history working group and the Musicology Faculty of the Charles University in Prague held a conference on 10‒12 November 2016, as part of the Carolus Quartus celebrations for the 700th anniversary of Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia. The lectures, appropriately, covered aspects of 14th-century Bohemian music and art history. Three Department of Early Music researchers were invited. Zsuzsa Czagány traced the path taken by the 14th-century Nagyvárad Sequence, which survive in fragmentary form. Gábor Kiss analysed marginal notes in the Ulászló Gradual. Ágnes Papp placed in a broader context the psalter differences in the antiphoner of Arnestus de Pardubicz, first Archbishop of Prague, a contemporary of Charles IV. The conference, of a regional nature, was especially rewarding for its discussion of several common problems and of source materials touched upon at several points.

     Conference programme                   Photos from the event

 

Dolgozatok 2013 2014 borito  

The periodical appeared first in 1978, responding to the lack of a journal of a “workshop” nature at the Institute of Musicology. It graduated from an occasional publication into a yearbook, with 27 volumes appearing over 38 years. The editor of this double number is Gábor Kiss, assisted by Gabriella Gilányi, Gergely Loch, Zsuzsa Czagány and Ágnes Papp. See the Contents and Abstracts of the volume.

Further details

Introducing the series, music historian József Ujfalussy saw the natural course of all scholarly work including “publication of partial findings, collation with other findings and views, and resulting fruitful debate. The forums for this flow and exchange of views are journals.” The Institute of Musicology sought to remedy the lack of such a forum with volumes of studies that became a regular series. The yearbook became a place to announce findings and partial results in Hungarian musicology and debate these. By presenting often the first, most direct accounts in various fields, it charts the research in the Institute of Musicology over a period of some forty years.

Apart from such day-to-day partial findings, the series undertook to include the materials of occasional conferences. Although it has rested mainly on the contributions of researchers at the Institute of Musicology, it sometimes extended this sphere, and articles by foreign authors have appeared regularly in recent years. Although the nature of the series means it generally develops spontaneously, the series includes some thematic volumes, e. g. those in honour of László Somfai and László Dobszay, or the 2012 number marking the 35th anniversary of the series, which concerned the history of research and collection. The present volume seeks to celebrate the widest spectrum of research to mark the 40th anniversary of the foundation of the Institute.

 
maj19   Two lectures on the findings of the project “The cantus planus of Hungary within the general history of music. Aims, methods and prospects at the beginning of the 21st century”
Introduced by Zsuzsa Czagány
Bartók Hall, Thursday 19 May 2016, 10 a.m.

Krisztina Rudolf: Tract compositions with Tropes in the 15th century. The forms of the Tract Laus tibi Christe ‒ Filio Mariae in Bohemian, Polish and Hungarian sources

(Abstract)

The Tract is one of the few Gregorian genres not regularly presented iwith Tropes (furnished with inserts of text and music). That is one reason why it is surprising to find in the 18th-century gradual of Zagreb University such a Tract supplied with text inserts which is not part of the traditional repertory. According to spare details in the literature and information from available Bohemian, Polish and Hungarian sources, the Tract Laus tibi Christe may have been composed early in the 15th century. Having presented the sources, the lecture sums up its specific melodic and structural traits, its Central European parallels, and its presumed Utraquist links. This late medieval set of liturgical chants, found by chance, sheds light on a group of items unusual and innovative in their textual inserts and musical forms ‒ unique in the Gregorian repertory, although short-lived.

Anna Sanda: The transitional form of the office for Corpus Christi. Stages in the codification and office variations of a late medieval feast

(Abstract)

The offices for the late medieval feasts, as additions to the classic set, have usually survived in the usage of a region or group. An exception is one that shows awareness of certain office traditions apparent in the final form of the Corpus Christi office (Sacerdos in aeternum), to which the reputation of Thomas Aquinas as an author may have contributed much. The lecture summarizes some five decades of codification of the feast, presents the earliest surviving sources, and shows the stages by which the final office was crystallized. Starting from the literature discussing the versions, it focuses on the sources of a transitional office form (Sapientia aedificavit). Further additions to the decades-long discourse on office variants appear with examination of two more sources of the Sapientia aedificavit cycle: a pair of hitherto unknown 14th-century Zagreb‒Kalocsa sources (H-Bu Clmae 33 and Hr-Zu MR 43), and a late 13th-century Esztergom breviary (Cz-Ps DE I 7).