A Troper of South French origin.

Aquitanian point

27 ff

parchment

RISM B/IV 1: A 12th or early 13th century parchment Troper of South French origin meas. 160 x 105 mm. and containing 27 folios, which consist of 3 quaternios and an incomplete ternio (i.e. the last 3 folios were cut out, leaving stubs). The ternio is smaller than the rest, meas. 132 x 102 mm., and uses a rudimentary square notation. It is, moreover, in a different hand and employs blue as well as red initials; it is probably slightly later than the corpus, for it has 7 red four-line staves per page, but only contains monodies. The corpus (f. 1-24v) is clearly in Aquitanian point notation (oblongs, often joined in ligature) on dry-point staves, usually of four lines but varying, with g, c or f letters as clefs. The initials are all red and a red line divides the two parts in polyphony. There are rudimentary bar-lines, as in other mss of this period, and 8 or 9 staves per page. Monody alternates with polyphony, and in the corpus groups I and III are polyphonic (f. 1-14 and 17-23), groups II and IV mainly monodic (f. 14-16v and 23-24v), though no. 20 turns out to be in two parts in spite of its monodic appearance. There is a gap before f. 17, and evidently odd pages or perhaps a complete fascicle are missing. The binding is a piece of parchment 170 x 130 mm. which contains 15th century letters of the alphabet inside the back cover. There is no old foliation, but a modern red ink pagination at t.r.r. and t.l.v. has been crossed out and replaced by a modern pencil foliation at t.r.r. The ms was purchased by the British Museum on January 12, 1904 from P. Birb. It is generally considered by scholars that StM-D is not from St. Martial itself, but the polyphonic repertoire is largely concordant with StM-A, B and C.

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