The musicography of the Manuscrit du roi

grantor: University of TorontoAfter more than one hundred years of scholarship on the music of the troubadours and trouvéres, as yet little work has been done on how their melodies were copied down. Fundamental questions remain unanswered: What were the musical sources for the extant manuscripts and how were the latter assembled and copied? In what basic ways did musical scribes' writing styles differ and what various note shapes were used? This study, the first of its kind, provides foundational insights into these questions by examining the famous thirteenth-century "Manuscrit du Roi" (Paris, B.N. F. f. fr. 844) and related manuscripts. The musicography of 844 is the graphic study of its musical signs and the tools and movements which produced them. I first discuss various possible exemplars and their influence on the organization and layout of the lyric chansonniers. I then outline different categories of medieval square-note shapes based on quill-nib size and angle of writing, and place 844's twenty-eight different hands in a musicographic context. Finally, I return to the question of how the 'notator' treated his exemplars by examining the morphology of the 'plica' and fifty instances of scribal erasure in 844.Ph.D