Gripla - 01.01.2003, Page 14

12
GRIPLA
None of the Skálholt inventories refers specifically to the Chytraeus
edition of the Buchanan psalter. Yet is highly probable that they all denote the
Buchanan/Olthof volume first published in 1585, since the transmission of
Olthof s music in Icelandic manuscripts is far more extensive than has pre-
viously been acknowledged.12 A closer examination of the sources has re-
vealed that the Buchanan/Olthof psalter was a significant resource for sacred
and secular singing — both monophonic and polyphonic — in seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century Iceland. Table 1 (pp. 31-42) lists the appearances of
music and texts derived from the Buchanan/Olthof psalter in Icelandic manu-
script sources.13
Judging from the surviving manuscript evidence (eighteen manuscripts
containing musical notation have thus far come to light), Icelanders treated
Olthof s compositions with far greater flexibility than did their continental
counterparts. In Iceland, performances of these pieces could involve only a
single melodic line (most frequently the tenor, although two sources transmit
single bass lines), or consist of singing in two or four parts. Besides being
sung to Buchanan’s Latin paraphrases, Olthof s tunes were sung to Icelandic
translations and to a variety of newly fashioned Icelandic texts, many of
which were written by leading poets and scholars of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. These contrafacta frequently appear without notation in
manuscript sources, in which case a rubric above the text often serves to iden-
tify the melody as that sung to Buchanan’s Latin original. That performances
of Olthof s music were not always dependent on a musical score suggests that
an oral tradition played a role in the transmission of these settings, as it did in
the hymnody that appears in many of the same manuscript sources. The spe-
12 In a 1939 article, the Norwegian scholar Erik Eggen was the first to identify the Buchanan
psalter as the source of two four-part pieces in AM 102 8vo (see Table 1 and my discussion
of this manuscript below), but he appears to have been unaware of the much broader re-
ception of the volume in Iceland (Eggen, “Islandische Volkslieder,” in Zeitschríft fiir Musik
106, 935-936). Apart from a contemporaneous response by the composer Jón Leifs in which
he dismissed Eggen’s findings as irrelevant, the article does not appear to have drawn much
attention (see Jón Leifs, “Musik in Island,” Zeitschríft fiir Musik 107, 266-268).
13 Table 1 is a comprehensive listing only of notated music from the Buchanan/Olthof psalter in
Icelandic sources. Due to the large selection of manuscripts consulted, it can also be viewed
as representative of cases in which Icelandic texts refer directly to the original melodies, but
without notation. The use of second or third-generation texts to Olthofs music (i.e., when a
rubric refers to an Icelandic text which in tum refers to a melody from the Buchanan psalter)
is only rarely included in Table 1. Tracing the composition of texts further than this is an
enormous task and has not been attempted here.