Contextualising Hermann Pötzlinger’s music book

The ‘St Emmeram’ Codex (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 14274) is known to have been created by Hermann Pötzlinger, a student at Vienna University in the late 1430s who subsequently became master of the school attached to the Benedictine monastery of St Emmeram in Regensburg. However, it has remained unclear what Pötzlinger was doing (and where he was doing it) in the years immediately following his graduation in 1439, during which he and others were copying the music in this manuscript. This article suggests that he may have acted at that time as subcantor at the song school attached to the civic school in Vienna, where Hermann Edlerauer (for whose music Clm 14274 is almost the only surviving source) was cantor, and that this was the determining context in which he compiled his music book. The music this manuscript contains may or may not have been performed in the collegiate church of St Stephen’s Vienna and/or later at the church at St Emmeram; but in any case, it should perhaps be seen primarily as a collection of teaching material.