Using the Past, Shaping the Present: Tracing the Tradition of Specific Polyphonic Repertories in Bohemian Utraquist Sources (c.1450-1540)
Abstract
The specific religious situation in Bohemia during the 15th and 16th centuries, with the dominance of the Utraquist church, had an important impact on the development of musical repertories used within liturgical practice. Surviving sources document this development and preserve its many different musical forms.
From ca.1470 we find not only standard collections of plainchant within chantbooks, but also groups of monophonic and polyphonic sacred songs (cantiones) together with cantus fractus, polytextual motets, mass ordinary settings in organum-like style, and contemporary Franco-Flemish polyphony as well. My study focus on the layer of repertory which originated before 1450 (or was written later in a retrospective style) and was notated tenaciously with the black mensural notation.
This corpus of polyphonic pieces is being understood as a typical and very specific feature of the musical culture of the Bohemian Utraquists. Although it has been studied in detail by Jaromír Černý who spoke about a "Utraquist edition" of polyphonic music implemented into the Bohemian liturgical practice in the 1470s or 1480s, this topic needs a re-evaluation corresponding to the current view on the period in general.
Today we can deal with more information concerning sources and their dating as well as with recent literature which presents actual concepts of the history of the 15th Century Bohemia (e.g. Husitské století 2013 - Hussitism and Utraquism as a late medieval church reform within the Apostolic succession), development of liturgical practice (Holeton 2011 - continuous tradition of specific Bohemian liturgy since 14th Century) or history of art (Bartlová 2015 - specific face of the Bohemian art in the 15th Century).
The main aim of my study is to discuss establishing of the polyphonic repertory from ca 1400 till ca 1485 (Speciálník Codex) whose copying and use is then connected exclusively with the Bohemian Utraquist sources, and to decifer reasons for conserving the musical past in the period between ca. 1470 and 1540 in Bohemia.