Tropes and Sequences in the Margins of non-Musical Carolingian Manuscripts, circa 800 – 1000

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Largely overlooked, if not entirely unknown, about a thousand musical marginalia lie in the empty spaces of Latin non-musical manuscripts of the early Middle Ages, where they are unlikely to come to the attention of music scholars. These marginalia, which I have for the first time systematically identified and newly described during my previous postdoctoral appointment, have the potential to bring us much closer to the composition, expansion and dissemination of new repertories and chants in the 9th and 10th centuries. Appearing in unpredictable places—empty flyleaves, blank spaces, lateral margins—in manuscripts of all sorts and written by individuals of all levels of competence, they provide invaluable and potentially transformative insight into the period before the well-known and calligraphic books of music of the late 10th and 11th centuries (i.e., larger notated antiphoners and graduals, and the newly-devised formats of tropers and sequentiaries). From this body of a thousand marginalia, “MARGICANTUS: Tropes and Sequences in the Margins of non-Musical Carolingian Manuscripts, circa 800 – 1000” isolates a corpus of almost two hundred 9th- and 10th-century entries of tropes and sequences, two genres whose origin can be safely tied to the early 9th-century Carolingian world. These sketches, trials, and individual marginal items expand our understanding of plainchant chronology, repertory and transmission, tensions between local and imported styles of chant, the uses of musical notation, and the extent and urgency with which in Carolingian times newer music embellished older liturgical practices. Blending classic methods of musicology and philology with current computer-based analysis and data management, MARGICANTUS sheds new light on the history of tropes and sequences, and therefore of Carolingian music. By doing so, it recovers some of the earliest layers of Western musical creativity in their full complexity, beginning from the margins.