Research interview: Carmina Burana online

How did the idea for Carmina Burana Online come about?

I had wanted to study this famous source for a long time. When I came to the Schola in Basel, I knew I was in the right place. Here we have musicologists who are also musicians and professionals in historical performance practice. The project would probably not have been possible in this form anywhere else.

There are neumes for around a third of the texts, albeit unruled, which only indicate approximately whether a note should be higher or lower. How is it possible to reconstruct the original melody from this?

We now know that the codex was written down at the beginning of the 13th century, but that some of the notation was done much later - this is something we discovered in this project. If a melody was notated a hundred years later, it is very difficult to recognize how it originally sounded. If you are lucky enough to have several parallel sources, you can sometimes recognize patterns because certain things are similar.

There are texts for which we are not sure whether the neumes correspond to melodies at all. And we are also not sure whether all these song texts were sung with fixed melodies at all.

The neumes were researched together with students at the Schola. How did they approach the task?

It is an exciting experiment. They and their professors have so many melodies from the Middle Ages in their heads, they have so much knowledge and experience that they can create music that is likely for this period. It's an exercise that they often do during their studies anyway, because there are so many incomplete sources from the Middle Ages, but also from the Renaissance and Baroque periods, that reconstruction is part of everyday life.

You will be putting the Codex Buranus and the parallel sources online in their entirety in an open access database for the first time. What challenges are you facing?

The Codex Buranus is unique and extremely valuable. It is one of the very first sources of Middle High German poetry and the largest collection of Latin songs of the Middle Ages. Despite the extensive research carried out to date on the texts of the Carmina Burana, there is still editorial work to be done in order to edit the texts in conjunction with the music. The texts, which are unique in the collection, are our particular focus, especially the bilingual songs and the liturgical games.

Is there a text that means a lot to you personally?

What always touches me is the topicality of the texts. Of course, social norms have changed, we no longer live in the Middle Ages - that is clear, and this is reflected in the image of women, for example. But they are often also about corruption, justice, the rich and the poor. They not only conveyed content in the sense of moral education, but also served as formal training, for example in learning Latin and poetry. In general, they are very beautiful texts whose rhymes and sounds need to be made audible, which of course happens best in a performance.