Gripla - 01.01.2003, Side 28

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GRIPLA
four parts could hardly have been expected to take place outside the environ-
ment of the Latin schools, where there might have been a large enough group
of literate young men to attempt the task. Presumably the discant part would
have been sung by boy sopranos, as it was on the continent. But here the Ice-
landic Latin schools were at a distinct disadvantage. Although treble voices
broke significantly later in the eighteenth century than today (at over 17, on
average), students at Skálholt and Hólar seem generally to have been between
the ages of 15 and 23, while in Germany Latin schools admitted boys aged
7-24.59 The Icelandic schools must therefore have faced a more or less con-
stant shortage of upper voices for performing music in more than two parts.
The survival in two sources (Rask 98 and JS 643 4to) of only the lower
two voices indicates that performing the tenor and bass parts together was
considered a viable option. From a musical standpoint this is most unusual.
Since the effect of the Olthof settings largely depends upon their four-part
realization, a performance of the lower voices by themselves would suggest a
minimum level of musical discemment.60 Such a practice only makes sense
when considered in the context of other polyphonic singing in Iceland during
this period. In this case, it must have been the firmly established tradition of
singing two-part note-against-note polyphony — as evidenced by the cantus
planus binatim settings found in Rask 98 and AM 102 8vo61 — that en-
couraged the appropriation of new pieces as part of its continued cultivation,
59 S. Daw, “German Lutheran Choirs of Bach’s Time: Their Constitution, Performance Practice
and Repertoire,” Organists’ Review, April 1973, 14; cited in Andrew Parrott, The Essential
Bach Cltoir, 13. Listings of Skálholt students in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are
printed in Hannes Þorsteinsson, Skólaraðir frá Skáihoitsskóla, Hólaskóla og Hólavallarskóla.
“ German adaptations of single voices from the Buchanan/Olthof psalter made use of the
discant part, not the tenor. The German hymn tune Wend ah deinen Zorn, lieber Gott, mit
Gnaden, which appears in several German hymnals including J.A. Freylinghausen’s Geist-
reiches Gesangbuch (1741), is an adaptation of the discant part to Olthof s 0 potens rerum
Deus. See Widmann, “Die Kompositionen der Psalmen von Statius Olthof,” 292 and 299.
61 Cantus planus binatim — ‘doubled plainsong’ — is a term taken from a 1404 treatise by
Prosdocimus de Beldemandis, Expositiones tractatus pratice cantus mensurabilis magistri
Johannis de Muris. It is commonly used to denote the simple, mostly note-against-note non-
mensural polyphony found in continental sources from the fourteenth century and beyond. A
substantial number of such pieces are found in Icelandic sources from the fifteenth to the
eighteenth century. See John Bergsagel, “The Practice of Cantus Planus Binatim in
Scandinavia in the 12th to 16th Centuries,” in Le polifonie primitive in Friuli e in Europa, eds.
Cesare Corsi and Pierluigi Petrobelli, 63-82.