Local, International or Central European?

Abstract

, in his now classic Musik und Musikpflege im mittelalterlichen Schlesien (pub.), lists and describes fifteen sources of polyphony originating from fifteenth-century Silesia. These are records of simple polyphony ('organale Mehrstimmigkeit'), remnants of organ tablatures, and manuscripts containing mensural music. In the eighth and final chapter of his book, Feldmann focuses his attention on the two most important sources: the Głogów songbook ('Glogauer Liederbuch', PL-Kj Mus. ms.) and the Wrocław codex ('Breslauer Mensuralcodex', PL-Wu RM [olim: Breslau ]), which represent a period of 'blossoming' ('Blütezeit') of medieval music culture in Silesia. A number of new sources have been discovered since Feldmann's days, and the majority of those known to him have been reinterpreted to a significant degree. There has been a change in the approach to many historical-musical phenomena, which are now discussed within a wider cultural and geographical context. However, although research has clearly made much progress, the main source base which was known to Feldmann and its general assessment have not changed: we can still refer to three types of sources of polyphony in Silesia, among which two manuscripts from the last quarter of the fifteenth century stand out, namely the Głogów songbook and the Wrocław codex. The current state of the sources of polyphonic music in fifteenth-century Silesia is shown in the Table on p. f. The first group comprises manuscripts containing musica mensurabilis, and these will be the main subject of this paper. Apart from the Głogów songbook and the Wrocław codex, these are exclusively fragments, or single compositions in manuscripts containing non-musical material. In relation to Feldmann's list, we have an additional set of fragments from Göttingen (D-Gs XXX,), rediscovered and described by Martin Staehelin; although their prove