Conference Agenda

Historically characterised as bishops’ books, there has often been debate on how pontifical manuscripts should be defined and studied, as variations in content greatly affect our understanding of who interacted with these manuscripts. In the continued exploration of pontifical content, musical notation has been a largely neglected factor in examining the relationship between content, transmission, and use. In this paper, I discuss the use of digital tools for establishing musical relationships between English pontifical manuscripts produced up to the thirteenth century. Specifically, I address the methodological challenges of establishing concordance when assessing manuscript relationships.

In the early stages of the project, I indexed over 1200 individual instances of notation across roughly twenty-five pontifical manuscripts and fragments. This corpus contains a vast but inconsistent repertoire of notated chants, situated within a network of manuscripts demonstrating a wide variety of liturgical content. Because of this, manuscripts demonstrating textual or liturgical compatibility might have a more ambiguous relationship musically, in which a chant is present in multiple manuscripts, but not all instances are notated. I approach these manuscripts through a tripartite model for establishing concordance, assessing manuscript relationships through overlaps in text, melody, and liturgical context. This presents a multi-layered approach in which manuscripts might demonstrate different levels of concordance based on different configurations (i.e. text-melody, text-liturgy, text-melody-liturgy, etc.). I determine the quantifiable ‘weight’ of manuscript relationships based on these concordances and identify significant textual and melodic variants within this repertoire.

Through an overview of the chant data collected on these manuscripts, I present findings such as the most significant manuscript pairings, most and least common melodies, unique notational occurrences, and any potential geographical trends. I explore best practices for utilising existing online chant databases to assess textual and melodic concordance, as well as methods for assessing melodic similarity across notational systems with differing levels of pitch specificity. Considering these figures, I discuss the methodological challenges in quantifying similarity in early medieval chant scholarship more broadly, and explore how network analysis tools such as Gephi can be used to visualise these musical relationships, thus improving understanding of melodic transmission between the English pontificals.