Winchester Troper

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The Winchester Troper includes perhaps the oldest large collections of two-part music in Europe, along with the Chartres Manuscript which is approximately contemporaneous or a little later. It consists of two English manuscripts dated circa 1000. One can be found in Oxford, in the Bodleian Library (MS Bodley 775), the other in Corpus Christi, Cambridge (MS473), but were copied out at, and originally used at Winchester Cathedral.

In the second of these manuscripts there are over 160 examples of 2-part organum pieces. There seem to have been three scribes responsible for copying these works into the MS - two are unknown but one is thought to be Wulfstan the Cantor, who is also (possibly) responsible for some of the composition.

The music contained in the troper was long considered to be indecipherable, as there are only rudimentary indications of pitch and duration by the use of a form of notation known as neumes. However, recent scholarship, originally by Andreas Holschneider in Die Organa von Winchester, 1968, followed in the 1990s by Mary Berry, Christopher Page and others has allowed the music to be performed. (A recent CD of Christmas pieces from the troper can be found on "A medieval Christmas" on the Herald AV Publications label, HAVPCD151, sung by the Schola Gregoriana of Cambridge, directed by Mary Berry.)

This troper is also notable for containing the entire liturgical drama Quem quaeritis, with music. This is the oldest extant medieval play with music, though it survives in other, earlier tenth-century manuscripts as well.^[1]

The title troper refers to the practice, common in the Middle Ages of adding an additional section, or trope to a plainchant or section of plainchant, thus making it appropriate to a particular occasion or festival.