Mondsee-Vienna Music Manuscript

Mondsee-Vienna Music Manuscript

The so-called Mondsee-Vienna Music Manuscript is one of the most important monuments of the medieval art of song. It contains 31 spiritual and 57 profane songs as well as 12 meistergesang. It is a source of the greatest value for musicology. No less than 47 of the 100 works have been specifically attributed to Hermann von Salzburg, with additional texts originating from Heinrich von Mügeln and Peters von Ardberg. This songbook is not only a musicological source for the song style of the compositions by Hermann von Salzburg and the only codex with 3 concordances for the four surviving "tones" by Heinrich von Mügeln, but is also a primary source of the highest worth for the various forms of secular-vernacular polyphony in the German language area ca. 1400. Of the 83 compositions with Gothic notation consisting of 4 or 5 red lines and the consistently arbitrary employment of note forms and marks distinguishing verse-endings, 27 are spiritual, 54 are secular, and 2 are meistergesang.