I – SONGS FROM NON-LITURGICAL SOURCES
This is the website of the textual and musical philological database of the earliest medieval Latin songs called Corpus Rythmorum Musicum: the printed and cdrom edition of the I series (songs from non-liturgical sources) has been published by SISMEL Florence in 2007, including digital reproductions of the manuscripts that here cannot always be displayed for copyright reasons. From 2011 the data of the next editions (computistic poems, rhythmical hymns) will be uploaded as they will be produced and processed by the research team to music. It presents for the first time, in print and in a digital format, texts along with the relevant music. It deals with the first Latin compositions in verses that are no longer quantitative, but rhythmic – that is to say based upon accentual and syllabic criteria. This tradition begins in the fourth century with the Psalmus responsorius of the Barcellona Papyrus and the Psalmus contra Donatistas by Augustine. It finds its first mature systematization in the Carolingian era before exploding a few centuries later into the outpouring of European lyric song (both in Latin and the vernacular) that reaches high points in texts such as the Carmina Burana up to the Fleurs du mal. From within this tradition, which forms the precursor to modern western poetry, the Corpus firstly collects those verses that have a musical tradition – that is to say those in which we find neumatic notation in the codices that record the songs; we can define this material, in a certain sense, as the first "songs" from a European lyric tradition that have left a written trace.
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