I have been distant due to "Life Happening," and want to tell you all that I'll be more active. Thank you for being understanding!

The University of Basel (Switzerland) offers a free Online Course about how to decode Medieval Musical Manuscripts and has been digging deep in the libraries treasures for this course. Among others there was a manuscript from the early 14th century that was never transcribed into modern musical notation until now. Exclusively for the Online Course it was sung the first time in 700 years by professional musicians and taken on video. Have a look here: https://youtu.be/gQRgjb3YB5I and find out more about the free online course here: https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/from-ink-to-sound

The project is Wiki Score - http://wiki-score.org/ - and there are quite a few transcriptions going on. It's pretty easy to collaborate - just use an ABC editor (like EasyABC) and follow the instructions on the website and you're good to go. For those who aren't familiar with ABC, trust me, you'll love it - writing music is like 5 times faster with it than with Sibelius, Finale etc.

Many of the pieces have NEVER been transcribed or played, and have a very interesting musicologic value to them. And as I'm sure you understand, preserving this kind of legacy is very hard if not done in a collaborative, global scale.

Come help us out! Pugnani's "Demetrio a Rodi" is a huge piece and needs more capable hands!

Hi everyone. I'm working on an exam paper on medieval plainchant and I'm looking for a good example from a manuscript that shows adiastematic neumes. Does anyone know of a good source that is available online?

I have a book of tunes that was printed in 1863, "The Musician's Omnibus". The typesetting and fonts are typical of the period. As most of the tunes are dance tunes, there are lots of repeat signs. The repeat signs have four dots (one in each space) instead of the usual two. Is that typical of the time period, or just really unusual? As they are all that way, It doesn't seem to MEAN anything different.

I'm working on an app for typesetting music in the style of early 17th century Italy. Part of my task is composing a good font. It would make my life so much easier if I could find a good exemplar of all known glyphs used by a particular publisher.

Any pointers? Thanks!

I've been trying to find more information on how Kilmer translated the writing. Does anyone know where I can find specifics? How accurate do you think her work is?

http://www.openculture.com/2014/07/the-oldest-song-in-the-world.html

I am currently translating an old antiphonal leaf, and although thats going swimmingly, I know nothing about the musical notation that throughout the document.

http://gyazo.com/f8b673f24cd59daddfaa54364c69e1f0

http://gyazo.com/46e22db813806e3ac057d44b051f333d

Symbols like this are all through out the page, sometimes along the side, other times more embedded in the lines. Any idea what it means?

http://gyazo.com/0599bde774cea6d98a4008c8644afee4

Theres also this guy, not nearly as common, I've only seen it show up 2 or 3 times

It's a youtube video that romanticizes the crusades and templar order. The chant itself is called in it "Chant of the Templars".

My questions are:

• How close is this interpretation to the one that was chanted in Templar orders?

• Can you recommend some similar pieces, or other pieces that sound rather dark or melancholic?

Here's the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uv_2x6JmuaE

Hello!

I am a theorist looking to engage in a corpus study of melismatic chants. I'm looking to see what specific vowels were chosen as the subject for melismatic elaboration and if perhaps certain "vowel paradigms" can be reconstructed in order to perhaps examine the coloristic tendencies of chant practice (the eventual goal is to construct a "timbral" analytical tool that could be used to analyze, say, the great organum from the Magnus Liber).

So, I need sources! I understand that Graduals and Alleluias are common places to find highly melismatic moments, but I don't know my chant sources very well. What manuscripts house the largest surviving repertoire of Graduals and Alleluias (or other melismatic chant types), are there any good critical editions out there for chant repertoires?

Thank you for your time!

TL;DR: GO HERE NOW

Hello

I am a music theorist. Yesterday, the email list SMT-announce sent out the following message.

Dear Humanities Advocate,

Last year, the House Budget Committee called for the complete elimination of funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities in its budget resolution. By sending messages to elected officials, advocates like you helped to defeat the proposal and preserve critical funding for the humanities.

Now, you can help ensure a brighter future for federal humanities funding by urging your elected officials to join a bipartisan effort to support NEH. By signing on to House and Senate Dear Colleague letters, your Members of Congress can demonstrate support for NEH funding to the appropriations committee members that hold the agency’s future in their hands.

Click here to send our message to your elected officials today. They are waiting to hear from you.

It is critical that you act now. The deadline for Representatives to sign on to the House letter is Monday, March 31, and the deadline for Senators to sign on to the Senate letter is Friday, April 4.

Best regards,

Stephen Kidd, Ph.D.

Executive Director

National Humanities Alliance

Part of the purpose of the NEH, as expressed in the NEH's own definition, is to spport "the history, criticism and theory of the arts" (National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act, 1965, as amended). Therefore, supporting drives such as these is a vital part of the artistic community as a whole. I hope my fellow musicians and music lovers will join me in supporting this initiative.

This post has been cleared with the mods.

I thought it might be helpful to create a discussion thread in which we write about problems and solutions we have had/found when using white mensural notation. No doubt someone else has had the same problem so this thread is all about sharing the knowledge. Transcription/Performance/Interpretation/Analysis or just your own thoughts, everything and anything right or wrong about white mensural notation.

Hello everybody!

Due to the nature of this community, I have come to the conclusion that there needs to be some positive changes towards the growth of our collective knowledge and the growth of our community as a whole. I have no misconceptions with regard to the specialized nature of our community and understand that growth can be difficult due to very few being involved in this particular area of music. However, I'm sure we can make it more fun and interesting to even the layman.

This being said, I would like to use this thread towards brainstorming suggestions to improve the overall participation rate of the community in its entirety. I have a couple suggestions which I will list here shortly. I'm doing this because I don't this community to just be the archive which it seems to have become. We scour the web to find as many free digital resources as possible and honestly, I'm running out of manuscripts to place within our resources page. This community currently has access to possibly the largest repository of digitized manuscripts worldwide and now it is time to put these resources to use!

The first idea that had popped into my head was to transcribe manuscripts (with text and voices) into modern notation. I know a good majority of the Portuguese Early Music Database hasn't been transcribed yet. It could be fun! Transcribe the music into Finale, share with the rest of the participants, and see what the community has to say about your particular choice to transcribe!

Secondly, there could possibly be a weekly workshop on early performance practice.

Lastly, discussion on the application of discant, modes, early polyphony, etc. and if/how they can be integrated into modern compositional techniques.

I'd love to see what everyone can bring to the table with this discussion and thank you all for subscribing to my community! I never thought it would grow this large!

-covenant-

Where may I find the sheet music to Antoine de Fevin's Requiem d'Anne de Bretagne? I've searched the internet high and low but to no avail.