The Worcester Fragments: a paleographical examination
<p>The Worcester Fragments represent the largest extant collection of polyphonic music from thirteenth-century England, with over a hundred compositions (many of them unica) across more than sixty manuscript fragments. Musicologists have known about the fragments for over a century, but the ma...
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| Format: | Thesis |
| Language: | English |
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2017
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| _version_ | 1797094463404769280 |
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| author | Nyikos, EI |
| author_facet | Nyikos, EI |
| author_sort | Nyikos, EI |
| collection | OXFORD |
| description | <p>The Worcester Fragments represent the largest extant collection of polyphonic music from thirteenth-century England, with over a hundred compositions (many of them unica) across more than sixty manuscript fragments. Musicologists have known about the fragments for over a century, but the majority of their attention has been devoted to the remnants of one volume with surviving medieval foliation. Moreover, the tendency has been to conflate the many fragments into one ‘Worcester Repertory’ as though they represent the output of a single scriptorium at one point in time, with the result that the connections between the individual sources and the differences in manuscript production and musical repertory that they represent have been incompletely examined in scholarship.</p>
<p>This thesis seeks to explore how the various manuscripts that make up the Worcester Fragments were originally created, from the preparation of the page to the original phase of copying to later additions in the fourteenth century and beyond, in order to establish a complete history of the Worcester Fragments, from their creation to their demolition and later rediscovery. It might have been titled ‘The Worcester Fragments: A Biography’ for this is not a the study of a codified manuscript that was created at a single point in time, but rather, the story of a number of sources that changed and evolved both in presentation and content, as they passed from maker to user to secondary user to binder and eventually to historian and reconstructer in a long and colourful life of usage. In considering both the history of the transmission of music and the history of the manuscript itself as an object of use and reuse throughout the centuries, a more nuanced understanding of the manuscript is proposed, not as an organised work conceived of and produced in a short period of time, but as a more fluid source, one that has proven to be adaptable, heterogeneously compiled and innovatively updated over time. Through a paleographical and musical re-examination of these various fragmentary sources, the dissertation will propose a new interpretation of the Worcester Fragments, one that separates independently-produced sources by the ‘workshops’ they represent and establishes the chronological timeline in which they were copied. Identifications of compositions will be made, a comprehensive script analysis of the fragments is given here for the first time and both a relatively unknown piece of music and a very famous one will be re-set in a new context of creation and interpretation. Finally, the dissertation will explore the history of the fragments beyond the thirteenth century and re-examine the possibility of a Worcester provenance in the light of the latest discoveries.</p> |
| first_indexed | 2024-03-07T04:14:25Z |
| format | Thesis |
| id | oxford-uuid:c8ee5d33-032a-464c-a62e-237007f21743 |
| institution | University of Oxford |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-03-07T04:14:25Z |
| publishDate | 2017 |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | oxford-uuid:c8ee5d33-032a-464c-a62e-237007f217432022-03-27T06:55:31ZThe Worcester Fragments: a paleographical examinationThesishttp://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_db06uuid:c8ee5d33-032a-464c-a62e-237007f21743Manuscript fragmentsMusicEnglishHyrax Deposit2017Nyikos, EI<p>The Worcester Fragments represent the largest extant collection of polyphonic music from thirteenth-century England, with over a hundred compositions (many of them unica) across more than sixty manuscript fragments. Musicologists have known about the fragments for over a century, but the majority of their attention has been devoted to the remnants of one volume with surviving medieval foliation. Moreover, the tendency has been to conflate the many fragments into one ‘Worcester Repertory’ as though they represent the output of a single scriptorium at one point in time, with the result that the connections between the individual sources and the differences in manuscript production and musical repertory that they represent have been incompletely examined in scholarship.</p> <p>This thesis seeks to explore how the various manuscripts that make up the Worcester Fragments were originally created, from the preparation of the page to the original phase of copying to later additions in the fourteenth century and beyond, in order to establish a complete history of the Worcester Fragments, from their creation to their demolition and later rediscovery. It might have been titled ‘The Worcester Fragments: A Biography’ for this is not a the study of a codified manuscript that was created at a single point in time, but rather, the story of a number of sources that changed and evolved both in presentation and content, as they passed from maker to user to secondary user to binder and eventually to historian and reconstructer in a long and colourful life of usage. In considering both the history of the transmission of music and the history of the manuscript itself as an object of use and reuse throughout the centuries, a more nuanced understanding of the manuscript is proposed, not as an organised work conceived of and produced in a short period of time, but as a more fluid source, one that has proven to be adaptable, heterogeneously compiled and innovatively updated over time. Through a paleographical and musical re-examination of these various fragmentary sources, the dissertation will propose a new interpretation of the Worcester Fragments, one that separates independently-produced sources by the ‘workshops’ they represent and establishes the chronological timeline in which they were copied. Identifications of compositions will be made, a comprehensive script analysis of the fragments is given here for the first time and both a relatively unknown piece of music and a very famous one will be re-set in a new context of creation and interpretation. Finally, the dissertation will explore the history of the fragments beyond the thirteenth century and re-examine the possibility of a Worcester provenance in the light of the latest discoveries.</p> |
| spellingShingle | Manuscript fragments Music Nyikos, EI The Worcester Fragments: a paleographical examination |
| title | The Worcester Fragments: a paleographical examination |
| title_full | The Worcester Fragments: a paleographical examination |
| title_fullStr | The Worcester Fragments: a paleographical examination |
| title_full_unstemmed | The Worcester Fragments: a paleographical examination |
| title_short | The Worcester Fragments: a paleographical examination |
| title_sort | worcester fragments a paleographical examination |
| topic | Manuscript fragments Music |
| work_keys_str_mv | AT nyikosei theworcesterfragmentsapaleographicalexamination AT nyikosei worcesterfragmentsapaleographicalexamination |