Introduction
THE CAO-ECE PROJECT. A SURVEY AND NEW PERSPECTIVES
Twenty-nine years have passed since the publication of the first experimental volume of the series Corpus Antiphonalium Officii Ecclesiarum Centralis Europae (CAO-ECE).1 The research concept2 drafted on László Dobszay’s initiative at the Department of Early Music History of the Institute for Musicology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the edition plan based on it was considered revolutionary at the time. It implied more than simply compiling and editing the set of items of individual, often randomly selected medieval Office sources. In fact, it undertook the reconstruction of the entire medieval officium divinum tradition of the Central European ecclesiastical centres and combined for this purpose the traditional research methods of music history with the potential of up-to-date computer technology. Within the scheme of Hungarian musical medievistics worked out by László Dobszay and Janka Szendrei CAO-ECE also focused ‒ in agreement with the main research aspirations of the last third of the 20th century ‒ on the elaboration of the pars temporalis items of the Office at the beginning (cp. series “A”): the Preliminary Report printed in 1988 was followed by three Temporale volumes (1990 Salzburg,3 1994 Bamberg, 4 1996 Prague5). In the late nineties, however, with the arrival of a new generation of researchers educated in the workshop of Dobszay and Szendrei, scholarly interest took a new course, turning more and more, alongside the Temporale, to the examination of the medieval cults of saints from liturgical and music historical points of view, and to the monographic treatment of the local and Central European Offices of saints (historiae). This made the extension of the CAO-ECE program, the elaboration of its Sanctorale section necessary (series “B”). The first volume of the new cycle published in 2002 comprised the Sanctorale of the Prague Office.6
The next phase of the renewal of the program involved the form of presenting the material. According to the original concept, the “ideal” set of items established by scrutinizing the individual sources was separated in the volumes from the notes listing the differences of the sources (the latter being placed after the tabular sections), which made orientation among the sources and the accurate definition of the differences difficult. This traditional arrangement changed for the first time in volume I/B, the Sanctorale of the Salzburg Office, 7 where the tabular list of chants and the notes pertaining to them appeared on the same page. In the two subsequent Sanctorale volumes (VII/B Transylvania-Várad,8 IV/B Aquileia9) the presentation of the material did not change substantially; differences can only be found in the inner arrangement and the layout of the notes.
The principle of placing tables and notes on the same page, first realized in the edition of the Sanctorale of the Office, has been retained in the present volume as well. The structural traits of the Temporale and the parallel placement of the two sets of items in the main table belonging to the two sub-traditions of the Cracow Office printed in the present volume (KRA1, KRA2) justified arranging the material on two pages; as a result, the order of presenting and numbering the notes has become simplified.
Although CAO-ECE essentially depended on the use of the computer, it appeared for a long time exclusively in the form of printed books. The new trends in international musicological techniques, which emerged in the early 21st century, introduced into research the latest achievements of electronic and digital technology ever more powerfully. With their help chant- and databases were created that can be accessed on the internet and also linked with each other. CAO-ECE was, however, unsuitable for being integrated into them due to its special manner of treatment and edition. Although Gábor Kiss made the first online version of the program in 2001, this did not end the relative isolation of CAO-ECE. The majority of the databases are based on “indexing”, that is compiling the tables of contents of the various sources more or less mechanically. But the system of CAO-ECE is more than indexing the selected Office sources. Though the row of items shown in the main table, which represents a given tradition in its purest form possible, suggests drawing up the index of a great number of sources and summing up the lessons thus gained, its principal aim is not to record mechanically the contents of the sources, but to reveal the liturgical contents unfolding and being repeatedly reinterpreted in the process of the comparison of the various sources. The system subtly differentiates the essential from the inessential and conveys, as necessary, more or less of the material of the sources. Consequently, the Office chants appearing in the CAO-ECE system can only be compared with the list of items of other systems in a restricted manner and the established numerical system cannot be used in other databases either.
Thanks to the growing international demand for compatibility after 2010 and the support given by the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund and the National Research, Development and Innovation Office (the successor to the former from 2014 onwards), the first steps could be taken to leave behind the earlier isolation of CAO-ECE and to make it suitable for entering into relations with foreign chant databases with similar aims, first of all with CANTUS and CANTUSINDEX, and be thus available and utilizable for international research. In 2015 researchers at the Department of Early Music History of the Institute for Musicology launched with international cooperation the internet page Hungarian Chant Database, which complements the inventories treated in the CAO-ECE system with the identification numbers of CANTUS, so it is directly linked to the European source material appearing in it.
Naturally the integration is only partial; it does not mean giving up the original aim of the CAO-ECE nor its established structure. By importing the figures of the CANTUS database a bridge between the two systems is built: an opportunity is created for the liturgical items of the CAO-ECE lists to be searched in all online databases of CANTUS and, vice versa, for including the CAO-ECE hits into the CANTUS lists.
The present volume contains the identification numbers of CANTUS for the first time in the history of the publication series CAO-ECE: the separate row of figures in the sixth column of the main table is linked to the items of main line of the published Cracow Office (KRA2).
In the years since 1988 the concept, research aspects and technical lay-out of CAO-ECE have changed, becoming enlarged or simplified in several respects. The essential aim has remained, however, unchanged: to become acquainted with the diocesan Office traditions of the Central European region as thoroughly as possible, to publish the “ideal” set of items reconstructed by means of the comparative analysis of the individual sources and at the same time to display the individual differences of the various sources. We hope that by releasing this volume, renewed in both content and form, we are acting not only for the benefit of the narrower Hungarian musicological fraternity but for the international scholarly community as well.