Borrowing of Monophonic Melodies in Secular and Sacred Polyphony around 1500

This project is a follow-up of the FWF Stand-alone project Borrowing and Citation of Monophonic Secular Tunes in Late 15th-Century Song (Project Nr. P 22365-G18), carried out at the Paris-Lodron- Universität Salzburg between April 2010 and October 2013 under the leadership of Univ.Prof. Dr. Andrea Lindmayr-Brandl. The preceding project concerned itself with mapping out the migration of French monophonic tunes within polyphonic chansons from the last decades of the 15th century until the first two of the sixteenth. For this purpose a relational database has been created (http://chansonmelodies.sbg.ac.at) listing, commenting and offering in transcription all relevant melodies. The present project should be understood as a logical continuation and completion of the former, in that it aims at extending the timeframe until the mid 16th- century and including in its survey masses and contrafacta based on the melodies already collected and, possibly, on others. This will allow a reasonably complete overview of how and to what extent the new context has a bearing on melodic contour, rhythm, modality, accidental usage of the borrowed melody in particular, but also how the employment of these often simple tunes affects and progressively changes the refined tonal language of late medieval/early Renaissance song writing and mass composition. Besides, although the database is mainly concerned with French melodies, arrangements of Italian and Dutch melodies turning up in the same sources as their French counterparts will also be considered, since these belong stylistically to the same musical culture and are transmitted in some cases under different titles and in both languages. With the inclusion of sacred polyphonic arrangements and contrafacta, the project gains a new perspective, if one considers the structural transformation and symbolic re-interpretation the melodies are subjected to when forming the basis of a liturgical composition or an (often) devotional contrafactum; besides, the sheer number and richness of masses and contrafacta based on non-courtly tunes renders the database as it is of necessity incomplete, thus making a generic extension of it a sensible endeavour. Along with a notable extension of the existing database, the main goal of this project is the preparation of a monograph on quotation and citation in 15th- and 16th-century polyphony and its relation with monophonic repertoires. This will at least be partly analytically oriented and will address fundamental questions on the diffusion and polyphonic arrangement of certain groups of melodies, while at same time investigating the possible reasons (contextual? structural?) for the lack of polyphonic treatment for many others. This book will be submitted as my Habilitationsschrift.

No additional funding sources recorded.