Calendar
Examine the two leaves of the calendar of the late thirteenth-century Breviary,
Music Library MS 752, UCB:
April, May, June;
July, August, September.
Understand the layout for each month and designations for grades of feasts. Look for unusual
feasts of saints, any reference to a particular church, and note the inclusion of a date in the margin.
Learn to recognize major classes in the typology of liturgical books. Because of the inclusion of texts for the different hours of the Divine Office you can recognize a breviary, or antiphonal (a choirbook with plainchant). Because of the inclusion of such texts as introits, graduals, and postcommunions you can recognize a missal, or gradual (a choirbook with plainchant).
Liturgical books are laid out in prescribed patterns delineated by hierarchical arrangements of scripts, initials, and decorations. What are the standard patterns for organizing a missal? a liturgical psalter?
OPTIONAL SUGGESTION: Andrew Hughes has put together a full-text full-music database of 3,000 liturgical manuscripts 1300-1500. Late Medieval Liturgical Offices is available at UC Berkeley on a computer in the Music Library. It is useful for such research as looking for offices of particular saints, looking for manuscripts of particular localities or monastic orders, looking for descriptions of liturgical manuscripts of a particular location that does not have a printed catalog. The full text and full chant files allow easy identification of manuscript fragments. Directions for using the database.
Click on one of two icons on the screen, either "Late Medieval Liturgical Offices: Texts" or "Late Medieval Liturgical Offices: Sources and Chant". Then use a "snorun" command to either view ("lookat") information or create a keyword in context file of a word ("klic"). Every command line must specify a file to search, or group of files (/y=*.51). Every command line must specify what to find, enclosed in single quotes (/f='Potitus'). I will be delighted to meet you at the Music Library to introduce you to the database.
Example of some searches in the "Text" database. Begin your search in the directory "data."
If you are in the "lmo" directory, change directory to "data" (type: cd data) to begin in \lmo\data.
To find all offices for St. Potitus, type: snorun klic /y=*.51 /f='potitus'
Allow 10 minutes to search all 64 files.
You will be able to see on the screen, and save to a floppy on the A: drive a file that lists
all mentions of the saint, within the context of the Latin words that surround it.
To print the information, you must go to a printer with either a floppy, or with your search e-mailed to
yourself (see instructions for mailing a file via Eudora taped to the right of the computer).
Example of some searches in the "Sources" and "Chant" databases. To search chant melodies, from the LMLO2 directory change to "chants" and again to "rhymed.off" (cd chants\rhymed.off ) or search the text of an entire antiphonal (cd chants\humberts.ant). Type the command: snorun lookat /y=*.v41 /f='1565' and you will locate all melodies with "do, sol, la, sol."
To search for UC Berkeley's manuscripts in the file of manuscript sigla starting with the letter "U" ( "MSS-U.34s"), from the LMLO2 directory change to "mss" (cd mss). Type the command: snorun lookat /y=MSS-U.34s /f='UCBC' For a complete list of manuscript sigla, look in Hughes's printed manual for Late Medieval Liturgical Offices: Sources & Chant (available at UCB at the Music Library Reserve Desk).
It is unfortunate that Hughes's database is still in a DOS system. The Web provides a much more friendly home to a small repository of chant manuscript descriptions entitled Cantus that is an example of liturgical manuscript description more easy to use but less powerful.
