ABSTRACT
The Archive of the Episcopal Ordinariat of the Diocese of Basel has recently come into possession of a comprehensive manuscript which has been in the private collection of the Gressly family from the town of Solothurn. This manuscript, which has not been examined by musicologists, constitutes a notable new source of eleventh-century liturgy in the region of the Upper Rhine, and it is presented in this paper for the first time.
The manuscript is in good condition, and it contains 380 folios of which the first part (folios 1-51) is a notated Antiphonale missarum followed by a calendar; sacramentary, lectionary and rituale with orders for particular liturgical actions. This multifaceted corpus requires an interdisciplinary approach for a thorough explication. In this paper, it is primarily the musical aspect which will be discussed. Not only does the manuscript give rise to observations concerning the form of transmission and the relationship to tradition of the individual segments, it also throws up numerous questions regarding the motivation underlying the selection of the original repertory when the manuscript was completed, and also in its extended form resulting from the several later additions. A special challenge is presented by the fact that, while on the one hand the paleographic characteristics indicate the region and time in which the manuscript must have been written down, on the other hand, there are no clear-cut pointers to local usages in the repertory, making it difficult to draw conclusions regarding a specific and identifiable place of origin and following this, to the connecting links with the compiler and scriptorium responsible for the production of the manuscript.
