Conference Agenda

Frate Cherubino Cavallino, sometime during the second decade of the seventeenth century, signed his name at the conclusion of a musical panegyric dedicated to Alvise Grimani (di Zuanne), the Archbishop of Candia (present-day Crete) from 1605 until his death in 1620. The manuscript, cataloged as P.D. C 837/25 at the Biblioteca del Museo Correr in Venice, Italy, is understood to be the only surviving musical work from nearly five hundred years of Venetian rule over Crete. A testament to cultural spread from Italy during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the manuscript’s musical settings are the only known example of early baroque monody composed in the eastern Mediterranean, and its poetry serves as a barometer of Tridentine reform efforts across the Stato da mar, or overseas Venetian territories. Despite a lack of source material pertaining to music-making in early modern Venetian Crete, this manuscript has received no detailed study until now.

My paper examines the manuscript for a glimpse into the secular musical life of Latin Crete. Drawing on additional archival documentation, I present a microhistory of just one specific slice of society in the homonymous capital city (Candia) of the island during Venetian rule as part of a broader scholarly effort to elucidate musical and cultural practice between Greek and Venetian in early modern Crete. Contributing to recent scholarship in art history and literature, I argue that the manuscript brings earlier theories of cultural “cross-fertilization” on the island (Holton 1991) into renewed focus and invites a more targeted approach to the religiously, linguistically, and politically complex region. While Italian in style, the manuscript is distinctly Venetian Cretan in genesis, to which I argue reflects a specific environment of secular music making within the mendicant houses of Candia. In particular, my codicological analysis of the manuscript illuminates the varied abilities of its creators, raising questions of decorum and education within the convent walls and simultaneously highlighting issues of labor and leisure. Ultimately, my paper humanizes abstractions of the global in early modern Venetian Crete while telling a story of style and locality that would otherwise remain untold.

This paper will introduce two new discoveries from the earliest extant collection of polyphony, the Winchester Troper (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, 473), a pocket-sized musician's book made at the English royal capital of Winchester in the 1020s–30s. The new finds represent the first discovery of polyphony or 'organum' from this famous book in almost sixty years.

On the final page of the Winchester Troper, two 'organa' for sequences—long, ecstatic melismas representing the musical highpoint of the medieval Mass—were copied. Far from any of the rest of the main scribe's work and concluding the book with the parting words sic fiat ('let it be'), this isolated entry has always generated a certain mystery. The two polyphonic or 'organal' voices are labelled 'the lament of the barren woman' and 'obedient Simon', and were until now thought unrecoverable, since their principal melodies (the chants to which they relate) could not be identified. Through an unexpected chain of associations, however, those melodies can be found, and that process—and discovery—forms the subject of this paper.

Reconstructions of the sequences and polyphony will be provided and their underlying principles discussed. The new discovery raises questions about historical and liturgical priorities at Winchester before the arrival of the Normans. It also increases the number of reconstructable polyphonic sequences from before the twelfth century by over a quarter; sequences, not part of the Gregorian chant corpus but rather 'medieval' compositions proper, offer unique insight into early medieval ecclesiastical music and the creative processes that lie behind the earliest collection of recorded polyphony.

Mon superat saltus is a poem ascribed to Hildegard in two manuscripts closely associated with her creative work. The poem has gone almost completely unnoticed in the massive literature on the composer and has never been published. Given the circulation of many of Hildegard's song texts without music--indeed, more textual than music sources survive for Hildegard's songs--and the fact that Barbara Newman has already identified four lyric texts that may originally have had now-lost melodies associated with them, one immediately wonders whether Mons superat saltus is another example of what Newman calls "songs without music." This paper uses Mons superat saltus as a catalyst for examination of Hildegard's song texts, with special focus on the so-called "Miscellany" that includes so many of those texts. With Mons superat saltus placed in the context of Hildegard's song texts, the paper then explores the new poem's thematic subject, lyrical style, and presentation in its manuscript sources. Among other things, the paper will show that circulation of song texts was considerably wider, and lasted longer, than previously recognized; it will also suggest new reasons for the transmission of Hildegard's song texts in their "Miscellany" format.