Online resources
A hallmark of the Project has been its use of computer-aided data collection and analysis, often based on bespoke tools and databases which are specially suited to the onerous and necessarily precise methodology for describing liturgical material. Some of these, which may have applications for others who study liturgy and chant, are being made available here.
The Chantword Dictionary
Click here to go directly to a tutorial, or here for information on obtaining the Dictionary.
Some of the melodies of the later medieval liturgical offices employ tunes and formulae known to us, sometimes from the standard repertory. More frequently, though, versified offices possess newly composed melodies which defy categorization or analysis without careful consideration. There is a need, for reasons that are obvious, for the ability to find and compare melodies in thousands of office chants that have scarcely been looked at, let alone edited, or made available in a manner that can be searched comprehensively and easily.
Searching for brief melodic motives and musical echoes within whole melodies is even more frustrating, partly because one does not know exactly where musical motives - even conventional and recognisable formulas - begin or end. This process might also allow us to provide a context upon which to base the 'meaning' of a tune, not by explicitly linking the word with other occurrences of that word, but rather with liturgical occasions, seasons, and even particular feasts. In some cases an implicit meaning caused by the juxtaposition of particular words may also allow the identification of textual topoi. This process means working with words in one sense, but really involves dealing with musical motives that are clearly defined, in some composition or other, by the articulation of a word. The segmentation carries some disadvantages, of course, but within the databases in which the words and chants are encoded there are methods of glueing individual motives together to create musical 'topoi', longer phrases and complete melodies. To complement the concentration on the minutiae of an office implicit in this method of analysis, it is useful also to examine each word and motive in the context of an office as a whole.
A concordance of complete texts and melodies, analogous to the concordances available for literary texts, is required. Such a database is now available that remedies - to some extent - the deficiencies of memory and can help us transform impressions into reliable and more scientific results, that can be reproduced and checked by others with access to the databases and some knowledge of the processes required. The tool is a dictionary of nearly 90,000 words, with the melodic motives that set them: every single word in the repertories mentioned. I call the concatenation of text and music a chantword and the melodic motive associated with a discrete word a melodyword. These words form the data for a sophisticated database, which allows a huge number of comparisons to be made and statistics to be compiled. (excerpted from Andrew Hughes, 'REX sub Deo et lege')
After several years of development following its introduction, the Chantword Dictionary will be made available for download shortly.
Late Medieval Liturgical Offices (LMLO)
Volume I of this work contains texts of some 1500 liturgical offices, tools to survey and analyze them. Volume II lays out a method of describing liturgical material and supplies inventories of some three thousand manuscripts. A database of several thousand chants, encoded in a computer-readable format, permits anyone (not just musicologists) to study the melodic material, to conduct searches and to compare disparate material.
Originally published with the printed volumes from 1994-1996 by the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, the data from LMLO are now online.
The Chantword Dictionary
Click here to go directly to a tutorial, or here for information on obtaining the Dictionary.
Some of the melodies of the later medieval liturgical offices employ tunes and formulae known to us, sometimes from the standard repertory. More frequently, though, versified offices possess newly composed melodies which defy categorization or analysis without careful consideration. There is a need, for reasons that are obvious, for the ability to find and compare melodies in thousands of office chants that have scarcely been looked at, let alone edited, or made available in a manner that can be searched comprehensively and easily.
Searching for brief melodic motives and musical echoes within whole melodies is even more frustrating, partly because one does not know exactly where musical motives - even conventional and recognisable formulas - begin or end. This process might also allow us to provide a context upon which to base the 'meaning' of a tune, not by explicitly linking the word with other occurrences of that word, but rather with liturgical occasions, seasons, and even particular feasts. In some cases an implicit meaning caused by the juxtaposition of particular words may also allow the identification of textual topoi. This process means working with words in one sense, but really involves dealing with musical motives that are clearly defined, in some composition or other, by the articulation of a word. The segmentation carries some disadvantages, of course, but within the databases in which the words and chants are encoded there are methods of glueing individual motives together to create musical 'topoi', longer phrases and complete melodies. To complement the concentration on the minutiae of an office implicit in this method of analysis, it is useful also to examine each word and motive in the context of an office as a whole.
A concordance of complete texts and melodies, analogous to the concordances available for literary texts, is required. Such a database is now available that remedies - to some extent - the deficiencies of memory and can help us transform impressions into reliable and more scientific results, that can be reproduced and checked by others with access to the databases and some knowledge of the processes required. The tool is a dictionary of nearly 90,000 words, with the melodic motives that set them: every single word in the repertories mentioned. I call the concatenation of text and music a chantword and the melodic motive associated with a discrete word a melodyword. These words form the data for a sophisticated database, which allows a huge number of comparisons to be made and statistics to be compiled. (excerpted from Andrew Hughes, 'REX sub Deo et lege')
After several years of development following its introduction, the Chantword Dictionary will be made available for download shortly.
Late Medieval Liturgical Offices (LMLO)
Volume I of this work contains texts of some 1500 liturgical offices, tools to survey and analyze them. Volume II lays out a method of describing liturgical material and supplies inventories of some three thousand manuscripts. A database of several thousand chants, encoded in a computer-readable format, permits anyone (not just musicologists) to study the melodic material, to conduct searches and to compare disparate material.
Originally published with the printed volumes from 1994-1996 by the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, the data from LMLO are now online.