Early Music, Vol. xlii, No. 4 © e Authors 2014. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1093/em/cau125, available online at www.em.oxfordjournals.org
559
Sarig Sela and Roni Y. Granot
Automatic extraction and categorization of Faenza
Codex figurations
T
he Faenza Codex (Faenza, Biblioteca Comunale,
117) contains a substantial proportion of the extant
corpus of instrumental Italian music from the early
15th century and is the largest unified collection incor-
porating evidence for instrumental ornamentation of
the Ars Nova. e manuscript contains diminutions
written in intabulation on well-known French and
Italian music, both secular and sacred. Its high level of
ornamentation (diminutions of up to 20 notes per one
skeleton note—see ex.1) reveals a very skilful orna-
mentation technique and sheds light on the develop-
ment from purely vocal to complex instrumental (or
instrumental mixed with vocal) music.
e main goal of this article is to provide an intro-
duction to a figuration dictionary, which references
the most frequently used figurations. e dictionary
is intended to help performers improvise or compose
diminutions of their own in the style of those in the
Faenza Codex. ere is plenty of evidence to suggest
that improvisation and cadenza-like elaborations,
especially on penultimate notes, were common as
early as the 13th century. David Fallows
1
and Judson
Maynard
2
discuss this tradition (whether called
embellishments, countering, elaborations, ‘cadentie’
or even diminutions at a later period) by, inter alia,
comparing songs that survive in two different forms,
plain and embellished. Yet when a modern performer
wishes to improvise or write down a diminution
based on a specific 15th-century compositional style,
there is little in the way of analytically deduced data
to serve as a starting-point. e main two instrumen-
tal manuscripts from the 15th century are the Faenza
Codex,
3
probably from the 1420s, and the Buxheimer
Orgelbuch,
4
from around 1460. We concentrate here
on Faenza, as its figurations are very elaborate and
versatile in comparison with those of other manu-
scripts of the late 14th and early 15th centuries.
Whilst there are several analytical publications
on Faenza 117
5
—such as Michael Kugler’s extensive
book on the codex
6
and Timothy McGee’s article on
ornamentation and national styles
7
—none of them
provides what is offered here: systematic orna-
mentation options grouped by boundary intervals
and ordered by frequency of occurrence. Such a
scheme for the representation of figurations fol-
lows a long tradition of treatises, published mainly
in the 16th and 17th centuries. ese dictionaries
were sometimes called ‘Cadentie’ and appeared in
later periods in works by Silvestro Ganassi (1535),
8
Diego Ortiz (1553),
9
Giovanni Bassano (1585)
10
and many others. ey were written in the form
of instruction books intended for performers and
composers.
Collecting statistical data systematically allowed
us to group figurations according to their bound-
ary intervals and in a hierarchical order according
to their frequency of occurrence. e use of com-
putational tools provides the means for large corpus
analyses as well as an unbiased way to extract figura-
tions, free from personal preferences for a particular
figuration driven by our ‘modern ears’, or any other
presuppositions such as the source of the music, its
Ex.1 A figuration can accommodate up to 20 notes per
one melodic skeleton note, as occurs in piece no.26
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