SCRIBE is
a program for the encoding, storing, analysis and printing of medieval
music. Its encoding language
is based on the common names of neumes
and ligatures; its has an integrated
database into which all encoded music
may be stored and searched, and from which data may be exported
for further analysis using other
database programs and for interfacing
with other notation programs such as SCORE.
This program was originally limited to
notational styles based on square notation, and with it a complete annual
cycle of Gregorian chant was encoded
as well as a substantial number of 14th century secular works. This material
may now be searched using the La
Trobe University Medieval Music Database.
A Demonstration Version of SCRIBE is available
from our FTP
server. Applications for registration
of the program should be addressed to J.Stinson@latrobe.edu.au
The SCRIBE database now contains some 6000 musical scores from the middle ages and the early Renaissance period. These scores are to be made available to authorised users of the database in the following formats:
Bibliographic data from the Fourteenth-century Music Project can beintegrated with the SCRIBE scores. When the site is fully developed anyone of the 6000 scores will be able to be accessed by keyword (i.e. anyword in the text), melodic motif, liturgical function, composer, genre,manuscript and folio.
SCRIBE is a professional research tool for use with music written in any form of square notation, from medieval plainsong through the most complex ars subtilior to mensural notation of the sixteenth century. It enables you to encode any musically significant element of notation, to search the data you have entered for any of those elements, and to retrieve, print or export the results of your search. SCRIBE has been designed specifically for the scholarly research on music written in square notation: it is not an adaptation of a program conceived for modern notation. While its output by plotter or laser printer is of publishable quality, SCRIBE is not just a program for printing music: its most important features are its ability to deal with complex ligatures, its precision of music and text alignment, its integrated database and its ability to export data for further processing in other programs.
Within SCRIBE, data can be interrogated for any of the elements of notation (pitches, neumes, motifs and melodic fragments, mensuration signs, clefs, accidentals, staff lines, coloured notes, etc.), any text set to music, any descriptive information (composer, manuscript source, genre, etc) or any comments with which you have annotated the data. It enables you to analyse the encoded music by providing comprehensive statistical information about pitch, notes, text and their relationship, and enables searches for melodic patterns, syllables, words and larger fragments of text and sequences of notes. If the data is plainsong, you can search for any feast, hour or item in all or selected manuscripts; in polyphony, texts, melodies and note-note-shapes can be searched by composer, genre, voice and manuscript.
SCRIBE assumes that the user has a basic familiarity with square notation. The mnemonic codes used for entering the music are mostly abbreviations of the customary names of neumes combined with numbers which identify the position of neumes on the staff. This makes data entry relatively simple for those already familiar with square notation; and for those less familiar with it, the mnemonic codes are available on the screen at the same time as the music is being entered. Immediate graphic confirmation of the encoded notation and text is given, and the score is progressively built up on the screen so that visual checking is possible during input. The program checks for syntactical accuracy, and will not permit invalid codes to be entered. Ease of entry and accuracy of stored data have been high priorities in the design of the program. Text is entered along with the music, and great precision in relating the text to the music is possible.
SCRIBE enables you to see the music encoded in its original form in square notation, or in modern round notation without translating the data, but simply by changing the display. It is not a program for automated transcription of mensural notation into its modern equivalent, but it will show encoded music in stemless, round noteheads with slurs indicating ligation. Black, red, void and red void notation are supported.
Few of SCRIBE's research functions have been automated: the design of the research is left to the user, and the interpretation of the results is left as open as possible. Some internal interpretations are essential to SCRIBE's functions: for example, the pitch of each note is calculated by relating its position on the staff to the clef entered - the note on the lowest line of a four-line staff will be interpreted as 'D' if the C clef is on the top line. It can compute the first, the last, the highest and the lowest pitches and hence the range and the final of the piece. But the interpretation of this information - for example, the attribution of the piece to a mode - is left to the user. In this way SCRIBE has been designed as a tool of maximum flexibility.
SCRIBE's export feature makes it possible to use external database programs (dBASE, Foxpro or any other database which can import data in either fixed-length or delimited format) for further research and analysis. This feature has been used for the statistical analysis on modal behaviour, the comparison of melodic variants, the compilation of dictionaries of melodic fragments related to individual words and syllables and the definition of style in different melodic repertoires. Exported data can also be translated into other music printing programs such as SCORE, with either square notation or modern notation.
SCRIBE has been developed in the DOS environment, but will run within Windows; using Soft PC or other IBM-emulation programs, SCRIBE will run on a Macintosh. It will use extended memory when available. The current version needs some 360K of RAM. Data storage is efficient: a database of 5,400 items needs 6 Meg of hard disk space.
The SCRIBE Database is a database of medieval music which can be searched by text or melody and which will return musical information in the form of both a modern score and a colour facsimile of an original manuscript. In contains a complete annual cycle of liturgical chant taken from original medieval sources and complete works of selected composers from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries.
The sources of the liturgical chant used in this database are a fourteen-volume set of corali for Dominican use now in Perugia, the two exemplars on which these corali were based (London, British Library, Additional 23935 and Rome, Santa Sabina, Ms XIV L1) and the Poissy Antiphonal, now in the possession of the State Library of Victoria (Ms *096.1 R66A). These seventeen manuscripts are closely related to each other, and constitute a reliable source of the state of the liturgical melodies in use in the fourteenth century by Dominicans throughout Europe. To this foundation collection selected other manuscripts have been added: the laude from Cortona, Biblioteca Comunale Ms 91; the liturgical chant from Cyprus found in manuscript Turin, Biblioteca Nazionale J. II. 9.
The SCRIBE database has been integrated with other related databases so that the results of searches can also include data about concordant texts and melodies from information available through the Cantus project at the University of Western Ontario, the resources available at the University of Regensburg.
The transcriptions into modern notation have been produced from the data entered into SCRIBE from the original manuscripts. They are available in two forms: as JPG images of the first line of the work, and as PDF files of the complete work. The JPG images are presented along with the essential textual data relating to the work (full text, liturgical function, Corpus Antiphonalium Offici number, when the works are liturgical; composer, manuscript source, full text, in the case of fourteenth-century ars nova works). This data is made available freely for purposes of individual research and study. The images themselves are copyright and may not be reproduced in a publication without the written permission of the author. The PDF files are more suited to practical use: they may be printed at any enlargement without detriment to the definition of the notation. These files are available on request from J.Stinson@latrobe.edu.au
The SCRIBE database consists of a complete transcription of the annual cycle of Gregorian chant in the Dominican rite from early fourteenth-century sources. It comprises some 5,388 complete melodies, and is the only computerised database to contain a complete cycle in which the text, pitch and neumes of the original are available for scrutiny. Two features of the Dominican chants need to be highlighted: they have undergone two reform processes (the Cisterican reform of the 1170's and the Dominicans' own, 1244-1256); and they were bound by strict rules for copying liturgical books. The 'reforms' mean that their melodies sometimes were deliberately altered from those found in the ancient sources; the rules meant that text, pitches and neumes were required to be transmitted faithfully from the exemplars to each copy. Thus the Dominican melodies show a remarkable consistency from one source to another, while their differences from other sources sometimes reflect thirteenth-century musical taste and normative views of modal characteristics.
With the assistance of published indices by Bryden & Hughes, Steiner and Hesbert, the SCRIBE database has related the Dominican chants to a wide network of universally available catalogues, original manuscripts and modern published editions. In addition, the office chants have been carefully collated with the contents of the Poissy Antiphonal, an early fourteenth-century Dominican source now in the State Library of Victoria. The notation of the melodies has been encoded from original sources by use of the program SCRIBE, and this data used to produce modern transcriptions in which the original notation is preserved and relevant bibliographical data included. These transcriptions are produced in PostScript, then rasterised to .JPG files for Web accessibility or converted to PDF format for cross-platform access. Through the collaboration of the State Library of Victoria, colour images of the Poissy Antiphonal have been incorporated into the database. The result is that in response to a search for any word in the liturgical text, and fragment of melody or any element of the liturgical description of the work, the SCRIBE database will return the complete text, the complete liturgical description of the work in both Latin and English, a transcription into modern notation in which the original notation is preserved, a colour image of the folio of the Poissy Antiphonal on which it is found, brief references to modern editions, the earliest located source of both text and melody and concordances with published and indexed manuscripts.
A version of the SCRIBE database is now available as one of the library services of La Trobe University. In September 1997 two sections of the database were mounted: a comprehensive index of the Poissy Antiphonal and the Dominican gradual. Together, these constitute an index to Gregorian chant based on Dominican sources, with cross-references to modern editions and recordings. The provide a unique research tool: there is no other service which enables the retrieval of original sources, modern transcriptions and bibliographical cross-referencing from both textual and melodic data.
The materials supplied to the library consist of two kinds of files: a text file which contains all of the data to be indexed, and image files of the musical sources. The image files are of two types: colour images of each folio of the Poissy Antiphonal in the State Library of Victoria; and images of the first line only of a transcription of the music into modern music notation, bibliographical cross-references and complete liturgical identification of the source melody. The images of the transcriptions into modern notation were prepared by John Stinson from data originally encoded in SCRIBE and then translated into the standard notation program Score. From this were produced the EPS files if each item, which were then rasterised into JPG files for mounting on the Web.