• On music and the Jagiellonians
Tuesday, 22 October 2013 4 Comments
Barely had I posted about the arrival of a new collection of essays on early Polish music (New ‘Eastern European Studies’ series) than one of its editors, Paweł Gancarczyk, drew my attention to another volume that he has co-edited, with Agnieszka Leszczyńska, and which came out last year: The Musical Heritage of the Jagiellonian Era (Warsaw: Instytut Sztuki PAN, 2012).
It is, unfortunately, the case that many Polish academic publications, even when specially produced in foreign-language editions, rarely escape to wider audiences. Yet this collection of twenty seven essays, nineteen of which are in English, eight in German, has a range and line-up deserving of international appreciation. It shares a few authors with The Musical Culture of Silesia before 1742 (see preceding post) but it has a broader geographical and musical reach. Together, their forty eight essays are a fascinating insight by current authorities into several centuries of Poland’s musical and cultural history.
The Musical Heritage of the Jagiellonian Era
• Elżbieta Witkowska-Zaremba: Patterns of music education in Central Europe in the fifteenth century: codices with the Jagiellonian mark
• Jūraté Trilupaitiené: Musical culture of the Jagiellonian dynasty in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania: between sacrum and profanum
• Dominika Grabiec: Musical motifs in Christ’s Passion: the Mocking from the Holy Trinity Chapel at Lublin Castle and miniatures from the Cracovian Dominican meditations (ca. 1532)
• Hrvoje Beban: Inter arma (non) silent musae. Renaissance musical culture in Croatia during the reign of the Jagiellonian dynasty
• Elżbieta Zwolińska: Einige Bemerkungen zu den musikalischen Kontakten zwischen dem Hofe der letzten Jagiellonen und dem Habsburgerhause
• Eva Veselovská: Mittelalterliche Notationssysteme vom Gebiet der Slowakei aus der Wendezeit des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts
• Veronika M. Mráčková: Staff notation in sources from the convent of St George in Prague
• Jan Ciglbauer: Neumarkter Cantionale: Geistliche lateinische Lieder um 1470 und ihre Vergangenheit in mitteleuropäischen Handschriften
• Ian Rumbold: Austrian or Bavarian? Hermann Pötzlinger’s music book (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 14274): a new source of information
• Katelijne Schiltz: Rosen, Lilien und Kanons: Die Anthologie Suavissimae et iucundissimae harmoniae (Nürnberg, 1567)
• Christian Thomas Leitmeir: Teodoro Riccio’s Liber primus missarum (1579): a musical ambassador between Prussia and Poland
• Marc Desmet: Establishing a chronology of Jacob Handl’s printed masses. Evidence and problems
• Barbara Przybyszewska-Jarmińska: An overlooked fantasia for instrumental ensemble by Francesco Maffon. GB-Och MSS Mus. 372-376 as a vestige of Paweł Działyński’s diplomatic mission to England in 1597?
• Pawel Gancarczyk: Musical culture of the Teutonic Order in Prussia reflected in the Marienburger Tresslerbuch (1399-1409)
• Bartosz Awianowicz: The Graeco-Latin vocabulary of Petrus Wilhelmi de Grudencz
• Gioia Filocami: The musical taste of Archbishop Ippolito I d’Este between Hungary and Italy
• Thomas Napp: Upper Lusatia: cultural transfer and spatiality in early modern Central Europe
• Danuta Popingis: Das singende Uhrwerk zu Füßen von König Zygmunt August – ein Beitrag zur Herkunft des automatischen Glockenspiels im Rechtstädtischen Rathaus von Danzig
• Janka Petőczová: Musical culture in Bardejov (Bártfa, Bartfeld, Bardiów) in the mid-sixteenth century
• Agnieszka Leszczyńska: A common musical tradition: links between Upper Hungary and Prussia around 1600
• Marta Hulková: Musikalische Handschriften von der Wendezeit des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts in der Musikaliensammlung von Levoča (Leutschau/Lőcse)
• Magdalena Walter-Mazure: On how the nuns sang Vespers in fractus – alternatim practice in liturgical music of Polish female Benedictines
• Julia Miller: Luca Marenzio: questions of performance in Poland and Italy
• Reinald Ziegler: Claudio Monteverdis Publikation einer Messe und einer Vesper 1610. Zum transfer von Kompositionstechniken im konfessionsverschiedenen Umfeld, oder: Welche kompositorischen Impulse gingen von einem heute als epochemachend empfundenen Werk aus?
• Teresa Krukowska: Wie europäisch war des musikalische Repertoire der polnischen evangelischen Kantonalien im 16. Jh. und wie europäisch ist es heute?
• Anna Ryszka-Komarnicka: An episode from the reign of King Władysław II Jagiełło of Poland in Gismondo re de Polonia, a dramma per musica by Leonardo Vinci (1727)
• Marco Beghelli: An imaginary Poland in nineteenth-century opera
On Polish Music 
We live a stone’s throw (if you’ve got strong arms) from Stary Sącz which I’ve heard was the melting pot of very early polyphonic choral music in Poland … do you know anything about this? And are there recordings? It would be fascinating to hear the local equivalent of, say, the Eton Choirbook. Alas, choral music in churches round here is not so hot these days…
You’re right. You even have a long-standing annual festival of early music on your doorstep! From what I gathered (and that is piecemeal) there is little on record, although there may have been some pieces recorded on CD recently which I don’t know about. I do have an LP recorded in Tyniec (not in Stary Sącz!) in 1975, on Veriton SXV 741, called Początki Polifonii w Polsce. It was recorded by Capella Cracoviensis under Stanisław Gałoński. There are seven anonymous pieces from Stary Sącz: Ad veniam, Agmina militia, Homo quo vigeas, Non orphanum, Benedicamus I and II and Omnia beneficia. Górecki used one of the BDs for his Muzyka staropolska (I reference its sources in my book). Hope that’s some help!
There is also recently published CD recording “Filia praeclara” by Ensemble Peregrina (Divox Antiqua, CDX-70603). Robert Curry from Australia wrote a well-documented Ph.D. dissertation on Stary Sącz fragments: http://arrowprod.lib.monash.edu.au:8080/vital/access/manager/Repository/monash:5916
Thanks Pawel – that’s great to know!