Foreign polyphony in Central European sources (c. 1420–c. 1460)

A cornucopia of polyphonic music survives in fifteenth-century Central Euro­pean sources, but much of the transmitted music was not created in the area itself. Peter Wright was a leading researcher of these sources and their contexts. This study seeks to clarify what we still need to know about the avenues of transmission, the modalities of reception, and possibly the end­users, of the foreign compositions in the Austrian region. The transmission of Western European music to the area was often mediated by sources lost today. The uses of the music can occasionally be gleaned from the structure and scribal status of the repertories. Examples given concern the Aosta codex, secular song in the St Emmeram codex, English antiphons, cantors’ music at Salzburg and the ‘twin collection’ of Codex Trent 93*-I and the Bolzano fragment, possibly an inaugural set of liturgical music for the chapel of Bishop Georg Hack of Trent.