The musical readings of the Machaut manuscripts

Bullock, Alison Julia (1998) The musical readings of the Machaut manuscripts. University of Southampton, Doctoral Thesis.

Abstract

This dissertation is a study of the musical variants in the six manuscripts transmitting the complete works of the fourteenth-century poet and composer Guillaume de Machaut. It uses a combination of the techniques of textual criticism and musical analysis to evaluate the readings in the manuscripts, to determine whether their origin is scribal or compositional and to assess the implications for the transmission of the music from exemplar to extant manuscript.

After an introduction summarizing the major developments in textual criticism, the application of text-critical principles to early music in general, and the most important work on the Machaut manuscripts over the past century, the first chapter presents a case-study of a single piece, Machaut's ballade Donnez signeurs. It is concluded that the major revisions at the beginning of the piece resulted from the composer's uncertainty in working in a new style at a turning-point in his career.

Chapter 2 examines the readings in MS C (F-Pn fr. 1586), isolating variants that can be shown to derive from the composer and assessing the previously-proposed theory that the compilation of the manuscript was directly supervised by Machaut. The second part of the chapter is a study of the variants in ballade no.21, their implications for compositional procedure and for the chronology of the works in the unordered section of MS. There must have been multiple sources for the work, which has further ramifications for the copying of the Machaut manuscripts.

Chapter 3 considers the relationship between MSS Vg (US-NYw) and B (F-Pn fr.1585). It is argued that the currently-held view of a simple directional relationship between the two manuscripts is not supported by some variants.

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