medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
I learned in Another Place of the work being done on the Music of the Sarum
Office by William Renwick of the grandly-named Gregorian Institute of
Canada. The first fruits are available as PDF files at:
http://www.humanities.mcmaster.ca/~renwick/sarum-downloads.htm
All that has been completed so far are the Psalter and the First Sunday in
Advent.
This work is intended to complement Nick Sandon's wonderful edition, The Use
of Salisbury (Antico Edition). Nick Sandon intends to cover the Office, of
course, but it has already taken him twenty years to complete just the Mass
Propers of the Temporale. He was a comparatively young man when he started,
but the observer could be forgiven for fretting about the prospects for the
Office, hence the current project.
I have a few issues with this new project. Rather than start from first
principles, the editor is essentially conflating Procter and Wordsworth's
Sarum Breviary with the music in Frere's facsimile of the Antiphonale
Sarisburiense. The rubrics are in Latin. I would be happier with that if I
could be sure where they came from - presumably Frere's Use of Sarum (in
places I suspect the editor of having written them himself and translated
them into Latin...) A more sensible starting point might have been a
16th-century printed Breviary, and the 16th-century printed Antiphonale.
(Nick Sandon is working from a wide range of printed and MS sources, to
produce a version typical of the late 15th and early 16th centuries.) The
notes, staves and text underlay as they appear on the PDF pages are
peculiarly ugly. There is no bibliography, and the list of source
abbreviations in the preface is incomplete - so you have to guess the
answer! The footnotes (in English) are grouped together at the end of each
fascicle, rather than being on the same page. I can already see problems
with pagination. It would probably have been better to have started by
producing a bilingual edition.
John Briggs
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