I am searching for the author and / or origin of the melody of the canticum "Puer natus in Betlehem Alleluia".
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I am searching for the author and / or origin of the melody of the canticum "Puer natus in Betlehem Alleluia".
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Dear Krisztina,
I prefer to answer now on the main thread of this conversation, but my last word is 12th century is as far as we get, and I find it rather thrilling that we could find links to the tenor taken from Alleluia «Christus resurgens» already in that period (meaning earlier than the Notre Dame school and earlier than the Beauvais manuscript).
Today, they publish handbooks made so badly that the students cannot even learn to use Friedrich Ludwig's repertorium, because it is extremely useful to study the links between the repertories which he found by his numerous studies all with the original manuscripts at the preserving library. I just wonder with his experience, how he would design such concordances today, if he chose to integrate also earlier sources. It would be far more important to learn this than to "advise" them old recordings which might have a sentimental value for my generation. Medieval music nowadays has become almost as boring like recordings of Baroque music which suffer from false and unquestioned habits (the notorious misunderstanding of Dorian as d minor, bad intonation of rough intervals like thirds and sixths systematically misunderstood as harmonic proportions with meantone intonation), while in the 1990s a lot of knowledge was involved to reconstruct medieval music with many unsolved questions. That is, why I often insist to remind them. My approach is still to encourage a rather fresh approach among interested musicians.
Also for Ensemble Binchois, they usually integrate pieces of Ms. 289, when they do a concert with an Aquitanian program today, take just this recording as an example (concert in Milan from May 2019):
The reconstruction of the short versus «Virgine nato» is well done and does not care about the "clean readings" of Saint-Martial A (f.39v) by musicologists.
I also wonder here, why always Ms. 289 and not the other ones of the Siculo-Norman school which are usually imprecisely classified, because you need to study the manuscripts of the Saint Martial school based at Limoges and I insist on this presumably obsolete term, because all the doubts about it had been disapproved by recent research. Then you understand that the Sicilian scribes tried hard to imitate the sequentaries (untroped responsoria collections, prosulae collections and sequentiae), they did understand Benedicamus domino versus, but often a prosula or simple versus was rubrified as «conductus». Even Aquitanian lectionaries and preces collections had been imitated, but the latter referred often to Norman ceremonies.
Sometimes it also helps to consult the good old Analecta volumes and simply look for the texts instead of the music and the one closest to the repertory in discussion here is Dreves' volume 20, although the editor looked at the repertory through the glasses of Notre Dame and later collections.
What comes close to it is no. 111 on page 99:
Dreves, Guido Maria, ed. (1895). Cantiones et Muteti. Analecta hymnica medii aevi. Vol. 20. Leipzig: O. R. Reisland.
This is from archive.org, but you can use DFG license to use more search functions. Dreves' reference is an antiphonary of Bobbio, preserved as Ms. F 14 (F I 4?) at the Biblioteca reale of Turin. Thus, the text can be at least dated back to the 13th century! The verses are basically the same, but the conclusive verse only comes after three rhymed verse pairs and is: Natus est nobis parvulus / Iesus Marie filius. The refrain is very likely taken from the Latin-Occitan versus «In hoc anni circulo» (F-Pn lat. 1139: ff.49r-50r): Nato nobis parvulo / De virgine maria (conclusion of the first stanza).
But reading its verses you understand that it is very close to the new Marian cult which developed within the genre versus in Aquitaine, but also in Sicily, where the new church provinces were established under king Roger II. We have letters by Gregory the Great addressed to the bishop of Siracusa, but Latin Christians were attracted by new Norman foundations, after the Normans had conquested the Fatimid Taifa kingdom based at la Cuba close to Palermo (where the Norman court resided until the Capella palatina with the surrounding palace had been finished).
But meanwhile I had time to search the Aquitanian versaria properly and there is neither a versus starting «Natus est» or «Puer natus est». there are two versus beginning «Nata est» or «Natus est», but they are both composed as tetrardo based on G and are in no way related to what you are looking for.
Dear Agnieszka, all versus quoted here are without any exception monophonic, not even hidden polyphony or a later added vox organalis, and anyway the focus on the monophonic repertory of Saint Martial A-D which clearly dominates the oldest layer of StM-A as well as all Siculo-Norman versarium troper prosers, is underexposed. It is still waiting for proper studies.
Pour répondre à votre question sur l'auteur du "Puer natus in Bethléem" il semble qu'on doive l'attribuer à Théodoricus Petri (1550-1617), étudiant finlandais à l'université de Rostock.
Ce cantique de Nöel fait partie de ceux que l'on trouve dans le recueuil Piae Cantiones, tel que le célèbre "Gaudete, gaudete".
we're looking for much earlier source than "Piae cantiones" and also of a monophonic version
aa, maybe in my example 1. means simply the first strophe. Still, 2nd mode is also not entirely convincing.
Sorry for messing it up, my former post preceded the last two by Agnieszka, but hopefully I fixed it now.
You are right the cadences on E are interesting, but I would not call them "unconvincing" just because they appear in a Dorian tune. But the cadence here is exactly as I remember the Aquitanian one. Thus, 12th century seems the earliest we can get!
Oliver, I think they mean II. as Dorian plagal, no? Krisztina: where is your transcription from? What a funny story: a well known piece with very obscure origins, it seems...
It is a tricky question, I usually decide it from the local perspective of a suitable tonary, but the beginning (as an intonation of the incipit) is definitely an argument for plagi proti or tonus secundus.
But in case of Ma 289 and BL Egerton 2615 you deal with a clausula which is part of «Alleluia Christus resurgens» which is due to the subject composed in autentus proti, but not every clausula on its own has necessarily the same tonality like the cantus from which it has been taken. In case of a Benedicamus tropus it is as well the question of its cantus.
Dear Oliver, maybe we misunderstood each other. I'm talking only about a monodic piece (nothing about clausulae or so).
No, on the contrary we hit the nail right on its head!
There are also motets composed over the same tune with three different texts at the same time (every genre, whatever you like!), while the 4-part clausula in F (ff. 7v-8r) is just a 4-part clausula. But in case of manuscripts in libellum structure of Palermo and of Beauvais, liturgical dramas are right in its focus (some pages which precede the tonary in case of Palermo). The libellum structure is well known since the manuscripts at Limoges written by Roger and Adémar de Chabannes... Thus, you have a troper, a sequentiary, and in case of Palermo also a conductus collection etc. Both compositions «Natus est» have a Nativity subject and are rubrified as conductus, in case of Palermo it was transcribed as monophonic by David Hiley, this was rather a meloform tropus over the cantus. In case of the Aquitanian version on the CD, my memory is too vague, but it is possible that the refrain was notated as hidden polyphony and sung as two part.
The text «et moritur mors» (both present in Palermo and Beauvais as you rightly quoted here) is taken from the Alleluiaverse «Christus resurgens», even if the classical Parisian clausula choose «jam non moritur» and «mors» separately as cantus sections. Now if you click at «Catalogi dei tenores» and scroll at the end of the section, you find the cantus (this is a very useful page of my Italian colleague Davide Daolmi):
http://www.examenapium.it/meri/ludwig/index.html
«non mo-ri-tur mors» do-fa-sol-la-sol-fa mi-re do-re re do
In Palermo (the third time is & with a custos, f. 145r):
«et mo-ri-tur mors | et moritur mors | et [moritur mors]» re fa-sol mi mi re | re fa-sol la-sol fa mi-re | re [fa-sol mi mi re]
In Beauvais (f. 49v):
https://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Egerton_MS_2615
«et mo-ri-tur mors | et moritur mors | et moritur mors» re fa-mi-do re | do fa-mi-sol la | re fa-mi-do re
And this time "and death dies" means birth!
In Palermo you have the antagonism between the cadence on mi and the one on re...
Returning finally to Krisztina's «Benedicamus» tropus, the case is not so evident like in the Bendom tune of Saint-Maur-des-Fossés D-A C-D, but you have the same antagonism (it was the antagonism between re and do in the cantus which is clearly a plagis proti melos). But the antagonism between the cadence on mi and the one on re seems rather an autentus proti melos, if you ask me.
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