Medieval manuscript the Chantilly Codex

From Avignon this musical style spread to Southern France, Paris and Northern Spain. In the beginning of the 15th century it reached England and established itself there too. Ars subtilior music was exclusively secular. Its songs were telling of courtly love, war, chivalry and even praise of public figures.

The majority of what we know about ars subtilior French composers comes from a single invaluable and extremely rare medieval manuscript the Chantilly Codex. It is the most important source of information, because we don’t know anything else about many of these music creators, including their biographies, dates of life and death. Brief texts that accompany the music and some of its lyrics allowed us to discover great composers of that time like Solage, Borlet, Grimace, Trebor, Senleches and others. The Chantilly Codex contains 112 polyphonic pieces, mostly ballads, motets, and rondeaus, that represent the most popular courtly dance styles of its time.

A new musical style

In the end of the 14th century a new musical style emerged. Specialists call it ars subtilior. It is of extremely complex and experimental nature, hard to sing and produce and with super refined musical notation. Obviously, only a small circle of true composers and music lovers could enjoy this musical style.

Overall, it was the avant-garde music of the late medieval period. However, as a specialist and web analyst I find some controversy in this issue. Even though the ars subtilior music is highly refined, it was not merely a dead-end artistic movement. Even more, it seems that some of ars subtilior music was widely known and distributed because many of the devices first used by its composers became standard compositional techniques in the Renaissance.

The center of ars subtilior was Avignon when it was a residence of a Pope who was fighting the opposing fraction in Rome headed by another Pope.

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Priceless document

What’s so special about this document, you may ask? Well, first of all, it is the single largest primary source of music of the early Italian Renaissance that took place in the 14th century, known to the experts and specialists as Trecento. This treasure contains of 216 parchment folios, richly illuminated and in good condition. All complete pieces of music are preserved. 353 compositions in the Codex are all secular and belongs to the famous composers of the Trecento such as Francesco Landini, Bartolino da Padova, Niccolò da Perugia, Andrea da Firenze, Jacopo da Bologna, Lorenzo da Firenze, Gherardello da Firenze, Donato da Cascia and others.

The document is priceless. Imagine, that somewhere in the 27th century new generations of people would discover something similar, like all-star catalog of all truly famous composers of the 20th century. And that would be the only book around at this distant future!

Truly invaluable manuscript

In the middle of the 15th century through the ways unknown to us, famous organist Antonio Squarcialupi got hold of truly invaluable manuscript. On his death bed Antonio passed this manuscript to his nephew, then the latter passed it to his inheritors. So the document was still in the family until it found its way into the estate of Giuliano de’ Medici, who gave it to the Biblioteca Palatina in the early 16th century. And at the end of the 18th century the manuscript passed into the ownership of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana.

Although the manuscript still says in gold letters that its owner is Antonio Squarcialupi and even bears currently his name as the Squarcialupi Codex, originally, it had nothing to do with him. The manuscript was compiled in the Florentine monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli, probably in the beginning of the fifteenth century. At least this is what the archives of my local web analytics company claim.

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