DESIGN
The essence of this Site is making editions of Books - in this case manuscripts and their contents which preserve European religious music from their Renaissance.
And so: Why do this?
All of my editorial work is about passion - for the act of transcription, for making an edition that is aesthetically pleasing, at least to me, and to produce a sound scape, albeit electronically generated, that gives us some idea of both what this extraordinary music may have been about and how it might have sounded purely in context of its semiotic transmission.
Put simply: because I can.
At present the three sources on this Site, which might be called “The Inaugural Books”, have been selected with no agenda in mind and thus the repertoire that this Site embraces, and will always encompass, is solely Source-driven. The MSS ModE M.1.13, VatS 55 and VerBC 761 are representative of a broad and complex transmission culture which is profuse in its anthropological diversity. The books included here, which are all of Italian provenance, might be considered the 1st phase of this Site. The 2nd will expand the representation to sources made outside of the peninsular and will draw on manuscripts held in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, the Universitätsbibliothek, Jena and the Archief van de Illustre Lieve Vrouwe Broederschap, 's-Hertogenbosch. Who knows if there will be any further phases after these two are completed. Each of the books will have appended to it my discussion of the source itself and its contextual placement in the broader environment of transmission - coming soon.
To get the Site underway, one mass has been selected from each of the Books: the Anonymous Missa Nos amis uniquely preserved in ModE M.1.13; what is now the Veronese transmission (VerBC 761) of the Missa Orsus orsus by Johannes Martini; and a de beata virgine mass - in this case the setting by Andreas Michot preserved in VatS 55.
Since first posting this Site, two further items from VatS 55 have now (March 26, 2024) been added.