An online digital facsimile of the Lugo Codex

At the time of this writing, the performance of medieval song has entered what might be described as a “popularity plateau.” While ensembles of high caliber continue to bring to life the sung repertoire of the fourteenth century and earlier, the medieval rage of the 1970s and ‘80s—and certainly the “Chant Craze” of the 1990s—has subsided, and medieval song has been relegated once again to the first unit of the standard music history curriculum in universities and conservatories. Save those rare instances where medieval music is still actively pursued as a “legitimate” repertoire—such as those fortunate schools that have early music departments or institutes—most singers who are interested in medieval solo song often do not venture beyond the repertoire’s “most likely suspects:” the same several dozen Cantigas de Santa Maria, the more-than-overdone Martin Codax cycle, the solo lais of Machaut, and the same two or three dozen troubadour chansons. While this description of the situation may be a somewhat gross generalization, it would appear to be the case that most students of medieval monody are unaware of the variety of song that is available to them. It might be easy enough to lay blame on the use and re-use of the same “masterwork” examples in music history textbooks (though, notably, there are new editions of standard history texts that incorporate fresh examples of repertoire). However, as digital archival and retrieval technology advances, and as more and more repositories of early repertoire are made easily available online, it is possible— indeed to be hoped—that voice students and teachers will become increasingly aware of the variety of extant medieval song. Such is particularly true when referring to the corpus of plainchant, since by seeing the myriad variants of chants in their original sources, a singer can broaden his or her vision of chant repertoire and most importantly, of chant performance, beyond the square notes of the Liber Usualis. If there is one possible obstacle to the widespread dissemination of very early vocal music, it is the seemingly daunting nature of its notation to students steeped in modern five-line staff notation. One strategy for initiating students into medieval notation can be to provide abundant source material that is diastematic, meaning that the notes are spaced on the page in approximate proportion to their intervals (from the Greek dia-, across; stema, an interval or gap). With this material, students can practice the transition from modern musical writing to neumatic notational systems, facilitating their future forays into medieval repertoire. The present project proposes to make such a collection of plainchant with diastematic notation available to anyone with Internet access, in a format that is easy to access and browse, and with search tools that facilitate the study and eventual performance of this music in either ritual or concert settings. Likewise, this project hopes to provide singers with an additional sense of the variety of chant traditions. This sense will help reinforce the notion of regional traditions of chant and early monophonic song, and it can illustrate to students of singing the continuum from which the modern "national styles of singing” emerged. Galicia, in northwest Spain, conserves only two complete medieval music codices: the Codex Calixtinus and the Lugo Codex. The former has been well-documented, and its music has often been performed; it remains one of the most important sources of the early Franco-Iberian polyphonic tradition. The Lugo Codex, on the other hand, is a chant manuscript that has been largely ignored by scholars and performers, despite assertions of its importance by several Spanish and international musicologists. The doctoral project described by this document is a digital photographic facsimile of the Lugo Codex, which is presented on the World Wide Web. The final digital media product, available publicly as a website at www.lugocodex.org and through the Indiana University Library system's online catalogue, IUCAT, at the permalink URL http://opus.music.indiana.edu/s/lugocodex/index.php, features an interface that consists of a database-driven search engine, allowing the user to search for text within an index of chant titles. The search results are linked to a collection of digital images of the manuscript in various resolutions. The project also includes a technical description of the technology employed in creating the facsimile and the website, as well as an overview of the techniques of digital restoration as they apply to sources of chant and specifically to the Lugo Codex. The goal of this project is to make this manuscript available to performers and scholars of chant who have access to the Internet through any graphicscapable browser and to serve for singer-scholars as an introductory case study of digital restoration of chant manuscripts.