Ein System für mittelalterliche Musikhandschriften?

Abstract

Our comfort with and fashionable orientation towards other disciplines – even the natural sciences – can induce us to think about a similar system for classifying medieval music manuscripts. However, only a completely impersonal narrative of manuscript history from their beginnings to the end of the Middle Ages, as given here, can convincingly show that artificial oppositional models force too many viewpoints into one system and are unsuccessful in matters of such complexity. The priority in classifying and describing different types of manuscripts must therefore most probably remain with the traditional principles that were to serve contemporary users and have been preserved in the research history. Therefore there is no reason to turn away from them.