The reconstruction of the musical stratum of the Frankfurter Dirigierrolle.
Lead Research Organisation:
Durham University
Department Name: Modern Languages and Cultures
Abstract
I aim to produce a complete reconstruction of the musical stratum of the 'Frankfurter Dirigierrolle' ('Frankfurt Director's Roll'). The Dirigierrolle (Frankfurt, Stadt- und Universitätsbibliothek, Ms. Barth. 178) is a 14th-c. manuscript scroll used by the director of the large-scale Passion Play as performed at Frankfurt am Main in the early years of the 14th century. It is a skeletal text, containing stage directions; the first lines of each speech; and the incipits (the first few words) of the 161 musical items of the play, mostly liturgical plainsong, sung by a large cast of soloists and groups; there are also several instrumental items.
These incipits are often cryptically brief. Many do not indicate the kind of chant involved (e.g. antiphon, responsory, psalm-tone); there is virtually no musical notation whatever. The challenge of the project is to reconstruct the chants (including their music) in a reliable way, based on local liturgical traditions, on the specific dramatic tradition of the Hessian plays, and that of the medieval German religious theatre as a whole.
It is particularly unfortunate that the music of the Dirigierrolle has not been investigated in detail, because the Dirigierrolle, along with the other plays of the Hessian Group (the Frankfurt, Alsfeld and Heidelberg Passion Plays, and several smaller plays) have recently appeared in a major new 'synoptic' edition by Johannes Janota. Unfortunately, like so many editions of medieval German religious theatre, this otherwise splendid edition does not itself deal with the music of the plays. A commentary volume on the Dirigierrolle deals with the chants of the text cursorily, working only from secondary literature, and without reference to the whole corpus of medieval German religious theatre. The opportunity has been missed to give the scholarly community an edition which deals with the musical stratum of the plays in the light of what we now know about liturgy, music and the performance-tradition of medieval German theatre. This is what my reconstruction aims to remedy.
I have already had relevant experience in the reconstruction of the music of German Passion Plays: I have recently completed a full reconstruction of the music of the 'St Gall Passion Play', a play from the central Rhineland which is textually closely related to the Dirigierrolle and the other Hessian plays. In this monograph I not only investigated the rich local liturgical uses of three medieval German dioceses - Worms, Speyer and Mainz (the use of Frankfurt). I also developed reliable methods for approaching the complex problems involved in attempting such reconstruction, and a detailed critical understanding of the few scholarly attempts at doing so which have been made so far.
I also established that the music of medieval German plays not only has an intrinsic interest, but that a fuller understanding of it brings important insights into other aspects of the plays and the manuscripts which preserve them. For the Dirigierrolle these would include clues to the correct manuscript readings: in a number of cases editorial readings can be corrected or improved in the light of information provided by the musical stratum of the play. A full understanding of the musical items (for example their length and musical difficulty) will also allow a detailed insight into the musical forces needed to perform the play, an area still very imperfectly understood.
The Hessian Plays are an important object of study in medieval German literary and cultural studies, and the prestigious new edition has given added impetus to scholarship on them. I believe that a chant reconstruction will fill a gap in our understanding of these culturally significant texts.
These incipits are often cryptically brief. Many do not indicate the kind of chant involved (e.g. antiphon, responsory, psalm-tone); there is virtually no musical notation whatever. The challenge of the project is to reconstruct the chants (including their music) in a reliable way, based on local liturgical traditions, on the specific dramatic tradition of the Hessian plays, and that of the medieval German religious theatre as a whole.
It is particularly unfortunate that the music of the Dirigierrolle has not been investigated in detail, because the Dirigierrolle, along with the other plays of the Hessian Group (the Frankfurt, Alsfeld and Heidelberg Passion Plays, and several smaller plays) have recently appeared in a major new 'synoptic' edition by Johannes Janota. Unfortunately, like so many editions of medieval German religious theatre, this otherwise splendid edition does not itself deal with the music of the plays. A commentary volume on the Dirigierrolle deals with the chants of the text cursorily, working only from secondary literature, and without reference to the whole corpus of medieval German religious theatre. The opportunity has been missed to give the scholarly community an edition which deals with the musical stratum of the plays in the light of what we now know about liturgy, music and the performance-tradition of medieval German theatre. This is what my reconstruction aims to remedy.
I have already had relevant experience in the reconstruction of the music of German Passion Plays: I have recently completed a full reconstruction of the music of the 'St Gall Passion Play', a play from the central Rhineland which is textually closely related to the Dirigierrolle and the other Hessian plays. In this monograph I not only investigated the rich local liturgical uses of three medieval German dioceses - Worms, Speyer and Mainz (the use of Frankfurt). I also developed reliable methods for approaching the complex problems involved in attempting such reconstruction, and a detailed critical understanding of the few scholarly attempts at doing so which have been made so far.
I also established that the music of medieval German plays not only has an intrinsic interest, but that a fuller understanding of it brings important insights into other aspects of the plays and the manuscripts which preserve them. For the Dirigierrolle these would include clues to the correct manuscript readings: in a number of cases editorial readings can be corrected or improved in the light of information provided by the musical stratum of the play. A full understanding of the musical items (for example their length and musical difficulty) will also allow a detailed insight into the musical forces needed to perform the play, an area still very imperfectly understood.
The Hessian Plays are an important object of study in medieval German literary and cultural studies, and the prestigious new edition has given added impetus to scholarship on them. I believe that a chant reconstruction will fill a gap in our understanding of these culturally significant texts.
Organisations
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ORCID iD |
| Peter Macardle (Principal Investigator) |