Transmission of polyphonic music in the northern Low Countries around 1400: Egardus’ Gloria Spiritus et alme in the Utrecht fragments, NL-Uu 37.I

The Utrecht university library houses a collection of music fragments (NL-Uu 37.I) which are dated around 1400. Coming from four different sources, the fragments contain sacred and secular polyphonic music alike. Previous research associated them with Bruges (Strohm 1985) or the culturally active court at The Hague (Janse 1986); my own research on the fragments now suggests that they have ties to Utrecht instead.

Eighteen pieces of the repertory contained in Uu 37.I are unica; only four pieces have concordances in other sources. The outstanding number of unica itself no doubt tells us something about the transmission of the repertory - other sources with comparable content and dating contain a much smaller amount of unica (Kügle 1997). Moreover, a closer consideration of the pieces with concordances may reveal details about the process of transmitting and copying music in the northern Low Countries.

In this paper I shall focus on the troped Gloria Spiritus et alme composed by Magister Egardus which has concordances in two fragment collections originating from Padua, Italy (Cuthbert 2006). I will tackle the question why two geographically quite distant institutions - one in the northern Low Countries, the other in northern Italy - were in possession of the same piece, and explore the differences and similarities between the three versions of this piece. Specifically, I shall consider the layout of the pages, the copying sequences of the individual voices, and the quality of text and music scripts. The results of this comparison and their evaluation in light of the common music-copying practices at the time will contribute to a better understanding of the communication between institutions, revealing both general standards and local approaches towards the copying of polyphonic music.