Hymnal, with a Guidonian hand, in Latin, decorated manuscript on parchment and paper [France, fifteenth century] 150 leaves (plus a paper endleaf at front and back), complete, collation: i4 (parchment), ii-xii10, xiii2, xiv12, xv9 (last perhaps cancelled, but text continuous), xvi7 (first cancelled, but text continuous), xvii6 (also with a half-page loose leaf, probably once pasted over a correction, now loose in gathering), single column, 4 lines with music on a 4-line red stave, the main text with two professional late gothic bookhands, capitals touched in iridescent yellow, small initials in red or blue, and occasionally soft green, one initial on fol. 117r in blue with red penwork, a full-page Guidonian hand diagram on verso of first parchment leaf in red, black, blue and yellow, with full gamut on palm and additional notes on this page and surrounding leaves, additions dated 1556 on fols. 134v-151r (with Italian inscription at end), ink stamps “Ex Bibliotheca Attica” in three places (inside front board, on fols. 4v, and there smudged, and 151v), some small worm damage to leaves at ends, small smudges and spots, else good to excellent condition, 116 by 84 mm., early limp parchment binding strengthened by modern tape inside boards, cracking along spine edges The diagram of the hand at the front of this volume is a notably rare record of the most important method of teaching medieval music. It takes its name after its probable inventor, Guido da Arezzo (d. after 1033), a music scholar who was assigned the task of training singers for the cathedral of Arezzo. He developed the ancestor of the modern system of precise pitch notation through lines and spaces (the stave), and a method of sight-singing based on the syllables ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la (here added to the joints and tips of each finger). Guido is described by a near-contemporary as using the joints of the hand as an aid in teaching this hexachord, and clearly the notations here were intended to be copied onto the student’s actual right hand, with this charming diagram intended as a permanent record for a perhaps forgetful owner to use to renew his crib-sheet before class. They are written from the ut at the top of the thumb to the mi at the base, across the upper part of the palm from fa-ut to fa-ut, up the little finger and from there in ever-decreasingly smaller circles anti-clockwise across and around the other three fingers towards the la-sol in the middle of the fore-finger. Such records of the teaching of medieval music are far from common in manuscript. The fundamental study of them remains that of J. Smits van Waesberghe, Musikerziehung: Lehre und Theorie der Musik im Mittelalter (1969), pp. 126-43, which records twenty-five examples. Only one other has come to the open market in living memory, in a comparable miniature choirbook sold by Sotheby’s, 8 July 2008, lot 24, for £27,500.
Hymnal, with a Guidonian hand, in Latin, decorated manuscript on parchment and paper [France, fifteenth century] 150 leaves (plus a paper endleaf at front and back), complete, collation: i4 (parchment), ii-xii10, xiii2, xiv12, xv9 (last perhaps cancelled, but text continuous), xvi7 (first cancelled, but text continuous), xvii6 (also with a half-page loose leaf, probably once pasted over a correction, now loose in gathering), single column, 4 lines with music on a 4-line red stave, the main text with two professional late gothic bookhands, capitals touched in iridescent yellow, small initials in red or blue, and occasionally soft green, one initial on fol. 117r in blue with red penwork, a full-page Guidonian hand diagram on verso of first parchment leaf in red, black, blue and yellow, with full gamut on palm and additional notes on this page and surrounding leaves, additions dated 1556 on fols. 134v-151r (with Italian inscription at end), ink stamps “Ex Bibliotheca Attica” in three places (inside front board, on fols. 4v, and there smudged, and 151v), some small worm damage to leaves at ends, small smudges and spots, else good to excellent condition, 116 by 84 mm., early limp parchment binding strengthened by modern tape inside boards, cracking along spine edges The diagram of the hand at the front of this volume is a notably rare record of the most important method of teaching medieval music. It takes its name after its probable inventor, Guido da Arezzo (d. after 1033), a music scholar who was assigned the task of training singers for the cathedral of Arezzo. He developed the ancestor of the modern system of precise pitch notation through lines and spaces (the stave), and a method of sight-singing based on the syllables ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la (here added to the joints and tips of each finger). Guido is described by a near-contemporary as using the joints of the hand as an aid in teaching this hexachord, and clearly the notations here were intended to be copied onto the student’s actual right hand, with this charming diagram intended as a permanent record for a perhaps forgetful owner to use to renew his crib-sheet before class. They are written from the ut at the top of the thumb to the mi at the base, across the upper part of the palm from fa-ut to fa-ut, up the little finger and from there in ever-decreasingly smaller circles anti-clockwise across and around the other three fingers towards the la-sol in the middle of the fore-finger. Such records of the teaching of medieval music are far from common in manuscript. The fundamental study of them remains that of J. Smits van Waesberghe, Musikerziehung: Lehre und Theorie der Musik im Mittelalter (1969), pp. 126-43, which records twenty-five examples. Only one other has come to the open market in living memory, in a comparable miniature choirbook sold by Sotheby’s, 8 July 2008, lot 24, for £27,500.
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.jpg "Quelle: Christie's")
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