The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries saw an unprecedented increase in the production of manuscripts transmitting music repertoires with a new diversity of styles, genres, and subject matter, copied in both music-only anthologies, and in miscellaneous collections that interweave song, text, and illuminations. The website offers new possibilities for mediating the scholarly and public experience of this richly evocative music within its original context.
The project has three goals:. Programming of the mensural notation transformation scripts Martha E. Thomae, McGill University. Website design, architecture, and programming Elizabeth Koshelev, Brandeis University. Office of the Provost, Brandeis University. Thanks are also extended to the following individuals and organizations for their advice and support of this project, and for the provision to the general public of open source standards and tools:.
The first stage of this project focused on a representative sample of 61 three- and four-voice motets from the French repertoire dating from c. Presented here are 24 motets from the eighth fascicle of the Montpellier Codex, probably copied early in the fourteenth century; 17 motets from Roman de Fauvel copied c. Mensural notation was developed in the thirteenth century in order to more precisely denote rhythm in polyphonic music, and was the notation system that continued to be used for choral music until c.
Mensural notation presents particular difficulties for encoding since it is a context-based notation. In other words, whereas the shape of a note and its duration are in a one-to-one relation in notation from the common practice period, this is not the case with mensural notation, where the same note shape can be used in different contexts to denote different durations.
Thus the process of encoding mensural music is considerably more complex than encoding modern notation, especially because no currently available commerical music notation software offers the possibility of notating music in scored-up mensural notation. The process for encoding mensural music developed during the course of this project is summarized below.
