Texts and Voices Lost and Found. Recovering, Reconstituting, and Recreating Musical Fragments (c.1100-c.1600)

This project focuses on incomplete musical sources from the medieval and early modern periods and their historical contexts, with the aim of investing them with significance beyond their condition as fragmentary cultural artefacts. It develops across two parallel lines of research: 1) medieval musical-liturgical fragments and 2) incomplete sources of polyphony. The purpose of Line 1 is to characterise all the known extant chant fragments dating from between the late 11th and the early 16th century preserved in heritage institutions in Coimbra and related sources from Évora. Its methodology involves the indexation and study of the full contents of all fragments, including notational and scribal characteristics, text scripts, and liturgical use. The purpose of Line 2 is to reconstruct missing voice-parts in order to recreate incomplete polyphonic works. The methodology for this line of research is based on prior analysis of the techniques and style of a sample of comparable complete works, leading to the creation of a lexicon of polyphonic structures, or musical types, and of a large set of analytical observations. This will inform the reconstruction of missing voice-parts. Line 2 involves the study and reconstruction of one incomplete set of partbooks containing 43 motets copied at the Monastery of Santa Cruz in Coimbra in the 1570s.

By the end of the project, the following goals will be achieved: greater and enhanced knowledge of early Coimbra chant and polyphonic repertories, uses and practices, through the recovery, reconstruction and recreation of incomplete or fragmentary sets of sources, which will become permanently available on the Portuguese Early Music Database (PEM) at http://pemdatabase.eu; analytically-probed and detailed historical and contextual profile of the sources and repertories under consideration; advanced training of students and young scholars in the fields of codicology and palaeography, source and repertorial studies, chant and liturgy, and analysis of polyphonic music; a lexicon of polyphonic music style and techniques with a prospective for pedagogical use; and a collection of scholarly and practical editions of previously unknown repertories available in open access on the newly-developed platform Lost&Found project.