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Trent 91; first steps towards a stylistic classification (revised 2019 version of my 2003 paper, originally circulated to just a dozen specialists). Probably unreadable in a single sitting but useful as a reference guide, the original has been modified in some wording, by mention of three new-ish concordances and by correction of quite a few errors. There is also now a Trent 91 edition index on pp. 69-72. [Type the company name] Musical examples have been imported from the older version. These have been left as they are apart from the Appendix I and II examples, which have been corrected. [Type the document Additional information (and also errata) found since publication date: 1. The Pange lingua setting no. 1330 (cited on p. 29) has a concordance in Wr2016 f. 108r, whereti it is tle]textless. (This manuscript is sometimes referred to by its new shelf number Warsaw 5892). The concordance - I believe – was first noted by Tom Ward (see The Polyphonic Office Hymn[T 1y4p0e0 t-h15e2 d0o, cpu. m21e6n,t se suttbtinigt lneo] . 466). 2. Page 43 footnote 77: the fragmentary concordance for the Urbs beata setting no. 1343 in the Weitra fragment has now been described and illustrated fully in Zapke, S. & Wright, P. ‘The Weitra Fragment: A Central Source of Late Medieval Polyphony’ in Music & Letters 96 no. 3 (2015), pp. 232-343. 3. The Introit group subgroup ‘I’ discussed on p. 34 and the Sequences discussed on pp. 7-12 were originally published in the Ex Codicis pilot booklet of 2003, and this has now been replaced with nos 148-159 of the Trent 91 edition. 4. Most of the Sequences discussed on pp. 7-12 are now also available in the very thorough edition cited below, and which gives excellent background information on the chants and texts concerned. Gozzi, M. (ed), Sequenze (Codici Musicali Trentini del Quattrocento I, Trento, 2012). Trent 91; first steps towards a stylistic classification (revised version) Robert J. Mitchell I wish to thank Bonnie Blackburn and Peter Wright for their generous advice on previous drafts of this paper, and also the Trento libraries for permission to include photographic material. Trent 91 (henceforth referred to as 91) is the youngest of the seven Trent Codices, and its contents appear to have been completed in Trento at some time during the mid-1470's. We owe much of our detailed knowledge of this manuscript to the recent findings of three scholars. The late and very talented Adelyn Leverett did much work in outlining 91's origins and the liturgical background of its contents, Peter Wright has done admirable research on its paleography, and Martin Just has added to general understanding of the closely related Glogau partbooks with a recent stylistic study of Choralbearbeitungen - or, in our words, functional chant-bearing polyphony intended for use at Mass, Vespers and the Office.1 Such music (together with cyclic Masses) makes up the greater part of the 91 repertory, which is the subject-matter of the current study. The value of the research cited is such that before the 1990’s the present paper would have been barely feasible. The 91 chant settings do not even make up a self-contained repertory by themselves. There is ample evidence that 91 preserves only part of an extensive body of chant settings (composed ca. 1455-70 in Austria) which are shared between the manuscript in question and Glogau plus - arguably - one or two pieces in 89. Together they appear to constitute a serious attempt at setting much of the Proper and Ordinary to polyphony, and were possibly intended for use in Friedrich III's court chapel at Wiener Neustadt.2 At least some of the similar batches of chant settings in 91 too, must constitute some kind of core around which other groups of pieces were gathered, and the same is probably true of the Glogau portion of the repertory. The questions to be addressed are as follows. Firstly, how do 91's contents compare in structure and style, and does comparison give us sufficient grounds for dividing them into groups which are perhaps composer batches? Secondly, what is the significance of such a method, both for the manuscript in question and the conditions in which its repertory was put together? Thirdly, where does such a method lead, and what might be the next steps in associated research? However, before beginning to answer these questions a few cautionary points seem necessary. Firstly, stylistic analysis is an inadequate tool and one which can result in insecure conclusions. Merely because two pieces of polyphony are found in the same manuscript and are structured alike or sound similar, this does not always mean that the two are necessarily the work of the same named or anonymous composer. Identified nests of works and batches of opera dubia only tend to stay together - by virtue of necessity - for as long as the reasons defining them as entities remain valid. Consequently the world of fifteenth-century studies is fairly littered with 'attributable’ batches of music whose common features are often quite sketchily defined, and whose alleged common properties are equally open to question. Several examples spring to mind. Over the past two generations Dufay has had numerous works attributed to him, which is going to cause considerable trouble for parts of a new edition. Similarly Binchois, Busnois, Ockeghem and Touront have all been the subject of the same sort of attention over the years (the latter composer's case being partly my own fault).3 We specialists tend to use nests of works as a study aid, too, to help us grope our way around repertories which are only just beginning to reveal their secrets. 1 These studies are respectively Leverett, A., A paleographical and repertorial study of the manuscript Trento, Castello del Buonconsiglio, 91 (1378) (Ph. D. dissertation, 2 vols, Princeton University, 1990); Wright, P., 'Paper evidence and the dating of Trent 91' in Music and Letters vol. 76 (1995), pp. 487-508, 'Johannes Wiser's paper and the copying of his manuscripts' in I Codici Musicali Trentini II (1996), pp. 31-54, and Just, M., 'Polyphony based on chant in a late fifteenth-century German manuscript' in Kmetz, J. (ed), Music in the German Renaissance; Sources, Styles and Contexts (Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 129-151. For all primary- and secondary-source sigla used in this study, see the Bibliography. 2 See Leverett, op. cit., I, pp. 81-111. 3 For a list of anonymous works with Touront-like features see Mitchell, R., The Paleography and Repertory of Trent Codices 89 and 91... (Ph. D. dissertation, 2 vols, Exeter University, 1989), I, pp. 177-184. After due consideration, nos 10, 11, 13, 14 and 15 in this list are all works which seem better regarded as truly anonymous than as Touront opera 1 © Robert J. Mitchell 2014 Time may well produce a sounder alternative to this accident-prone identification method, but until neural computer memory or something similar starts to produce sound results, we have little else to guide us. How might one safely identify batches of music in 91 without producing conclusions which are questionable? The answer seems to be to proceed carefully; in short, to list and group those works which clearly share basic features, or to do the same to those which have more than elementary links, or to associate those whose positioning in small batches seems significant. This approach might at least provide sound foundations for further study. As luck would have it too, with most of 91's contents we are dealing with a large corpus of music which is - in terms of fifteenth-century polyphony - written relatively simply. In addition, many of the chant settings concerned may share a common background which (as Adelyn Leverett showed) finds many reference points in the Passau Rite. Therefore there appears to be firm ground on which to attempt an elementary sorting process, and the previously mentioned groundwork studies by Leverett, Wright and Just also give us the advantage that such a process is the next logical step for research on 91. However, my feeling here that 'the time is right' is balanced with an equal awareness that the method of enquiry could be much improved. My second cautionary point is that we lack an established grammar for dealing with fifteenth-century polyphony. Margaret Bent has recently illustrated this in a paper which shows weaknesses in the basic way that we discuss fourteenth- and fifteenth-century musical structures.4 Since many of my terms of reference in the following pages will be as simple as possible, some of the issues that she raises do not affect us here. However, it is worth making the point that further work of the type done here on 91's chant settings is perhaps not really possible without a formal complete edition or a considerable amount of additional explanatory material. Consequently although my conclusions should be easy to follow, the actual task of finalising a sort on 91 for possible composer-batches is not one that I relish. This is why I entitle this paper "...first steps towards a stylistic classification". Given our current state of knowledge, anything more ambitious at the present time would be unrealistic.5 Thirdly, the general title 'chant setting' covers a huge range of music, and I will occasionally have to refer to monophonic material that is not strictly chant (i.e. in settings of leisen) and also to pieces that are best classified as cyclic Masses, or as cantus firmus motets, or as Vespers hymns and the like.

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