A French 13th-century chante-fable. The only surviving example of the genre, its sole source is F-Pn fr.2168. It tells, in prose, the romantic story of the love of a count’s son for a foreign girl-captive. Interspersed in the narrative are verse sections (laisses) written in lines with equal numbers of syllables, all sung to the same double phrase of melody (a relic of narrative singing; ...
Article
Gianluca D’Agostino
Designation attached to a three-voice Gloria in manuscript F-APT 16bis; the piece is also transmitted in I-IV 115. The Apt manuscript is now thought to contain music from the court of the antipopes at Avignon in the late 14th century. It is not clear whether the word refers to the name of a composer or to something else; it is now known that ‘Bararipton’ was a mnemonic used in medieval logic for one of the categories of syllogisms. However, any possible musical meaning of the word remains a mystery.
The Gloria seems to be in discant style, with text underlay following the typical French pronunciation of Latin. The lower parts are rhythmically linked and run both in parallel and in contrary motion. The preponderance of 8-5 and 5-3 chords is interrupted, sometimes at closing cadences, by 6-3 chords. Likewise, the sequence of 8-5–6-3–8-5 chords often gives way to parallel 5ths between cantus and contratenor. (The Gloria is ed. in PSFM, 1st ser., x, ...
Article
Thomas B. Payne
(Lat.: ‘songs of Beuren’)
The title given by Johann Andreas Schmeller to his complete edition (1847) of the poems in an early 13th-century German manuscript (now D-Mbs Clm 4660) that had come in 1803 from the Benedictine abbey of Benediktbeuern, about 50 km south of Munich. Since then the manuscript has been known by that title even though it is now generally agreed that it probably did not originate in Benediktbeuren and may have come from Seckau in Carinthia or the Tyrol. The manuscript is perhaps the most important source for Latin secular poetry of the 12th century; there are in addition some Latin sacred lyrics, German poems, liturgical plays and a satirical ‘Gamblers' Mass’. Several of the poems have music in unheighted neumes – a style of notation that is relatively rare at so late a date. The melodies must, for the most part, be reconstructed from concordances in the St Martial and Notre Dame repertories. Orff's cantata ...
