Trent Codices

The Trent Codices are a collection of seven large music manuscripts compiled in the 15th century, currently kept in the northern Italian city of Trent. They contain mostly sacred vocal music composed between 1400 and 1475. Containing more than 1,500 separate musical compositions by 88 different named composers, as well as a huge amount of anonymous music, they are the largest and most significant single manuscript source from the entire century from anywhere in Europe.

Contents

The Trent Codices are kept at the Castello del Buonconsiglio, in Trent, Italy.

The Trent Codices consist of seven separate volumes, with the library sigla I-TRmn 87-92 and TRmd B.L. (usually called "Trent 93"); formally, in Italian, the designation for these documents is Trent, Castello del Buonconsiglio, Monumenti e Collezioni Provinciale, 1374–1379. They were copied over a period of at least thirty years, from about 1435 to sometime after 1470. The names of two of the scribes have been preserved: Johannes Wiser and Johannes Lupi, both clerks connected with the cathedral in Trent. However, some of the work of copying, especially for the earliest portions of the set, was not done in Trent: a study of the watermarks and other features of the manuscripts has shown origins in Piedmont, northeastern France, and Savoy-Basle, as well as towns in northern Italy such as Bolzano.

Unusually for manuscripts of this era, the Trent Codices are small: at approximately 9 x 12 inches (20 x 30 cm) they are the equivalent of a 15th century "miniature score". Since they are too small to use for singing, they may have been used as a score from which performance copies were made.

The earliest "layer" of the manuscript set, included in TRmn 87 and 92, contains single movements of the mass and motets, with works by such composers as Zacara da Teramo, Jacobus Vide, Johannes Brassart, and early works by Guillaume Dufay, whose music appears throughout the codices. There are also works by English composers, including John Dunstaple, giving some sense of the esteem in which their music was held. Most manuscript sources from the 15th century from England were destroyed by Henry VIII during the Dissolution of the Monasteries; the surviving music of 15th-century English composers comes largely from continental sources, such as this one from Italy.

Copyist Johannes Wiser wrote out most of the five manuscripts TRmn 88, 89, 90, 91, and 93, principally between 1445 and 1475. Not all of his copying was competent; he evidently possessed limited musical literacy, even though he held a post as an organist, since he left numerous mistakes. Much of the music he copied in these five books is by composers of the Burgundian School, including Dufay and Antoine Busnois, and there are a considerable number of unica (compositions which survive by name attribution only in a single source) as well as anonymous compositions. The Trent Codices are unusual for the time in including composer attributions as often as they do; most music of the era is anonymous, since scribes typically left out the names of composers.

History

During the 15th century, the area in which the music was copied was the southernmost part of the Holy Roman Empire, which during this era had an extensive musical establishment. Emperor Frederick III's cousin [[Sigismund, Archduke of Austria |Sigismund]], who was Duke of the Tyrol, had a large and sophisticated musical chapel at Innsbruck. The area around the Brenner Pass, including Innsbruck on the north and Trent on the south, was a crossroads through which many musicians traveling between Italy and the musically rich Low Countries would be expected to pass. It is reasonable to suppose that Trent, as a central location and a commercial center on a major trade and travel route, was a central musical repository as well. The Codices may have been the principal anthology of all the polyphonic music sung in all the chapels and courts in the Habsburg domains of northern Italy and southern Germany in the mid-15th century.

Six of the seven manuscripts, which had been archived for centuries in the library at the Cathedral of Trent, were not discovered until the middle of the 19th century. Their first discussion in the musicological literature was in 1885, by F. X. Haberl, in his huge monograph on Guillaume Dufay: Bausteine zur Musikgeschichte. The last of the seven manuscript books was not found until 1920.

The manuscripts are currently in two different locations. TRmn 87 through 92 are in the Museo Provinciale d'Arte, in the Castello del Buonconsiglio, and TRmd B.L. (93) is in the Biblioteca Capitolare, also in Trent.

Significance

The Trent Codices show the first interest in, and gradual development of the cyclic mass, the unified musical setting of the parts of the Ordinary of the Mass. Early in the set there are isolated movements, as was characteristic of composers at the end of the 14th century; then there are pairs of movements and parts of cycles; and then the Codices contain the earliest known three and four movement sets. All of the earliest unified sets are English. The last volumes in the Codices include numerous mass cycles by the composers of the generation of Dufay, during which time the cantus firmus mass had become a mature form.

References

• Adelyn Peck Leverett, "Song Masses in the Trent Codices: the Austrian Connection." In Early Music History: Studies in Early Medieval and Early Modern Music, ed. Iain Fenlon. Cambridge University Press, 1995. ISBN 0521558433
• Charles Hamm/Jerry Call: "Sources, MS, §IX: Renaissance polyphony", Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy (Accessed July 29, 2007), (subscription access)
• Allan W. Atlas, Renaissance Music: Music in Western Europe, 1400–1600. New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 1998. ISBN 0-393-97169-4