The Most Significant Musical Source of the Premonstratensian Abbey in Jasov: An Adiastematic Fragment of an Unknown Breviary, Shelfmark KF of Inc 164

Abstract

Slovak medieval musicology saw its remarkable revival at the beginning of the third millennium. It could draw on the fundamental research on medieval Latin sources carried out by the codicologist Július Sopko in the 1980s and on the specialized articles of the musicologists Konštantín Hudec, Richard Rybarič, Ľubomír Vajdička, and Zuzana Czagányová. Systematic in-depth research on medieval notated sources held by Slovak archives, museums, and libraries was started by the musicologist Eva Veselovská of the Institute of Musicology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava in collaboration with Rastislav Adamko and the author of this study, both lecturers at the Department of Music of the Faculty of Education of the Catholic University in Ružomberok. Thanks to the twenty-year-long research – tracking down, digitalizing, studying the sources, and making them accessible – a number of monographs, catalogues, scholarly studies, and specialized articles have been published on this topic. In this study, we will zoom in on a recently discovered fragment with staveless notation, deposited in the archive of the Premonstratensian Abbey in Jasov in eastern Slovakia. The original manuscript was used in a diocesan environment. The textual and neumatic analysis and comparison of the chants of the Jasov fragment and the comparative sources has revealed a high percentage of their reciprocal similarity and we may consequently presume that the original breviary from which the respective bifolio was removed originated in a South German region and was probably later imported to the territory of Slovakia.