Notated manuscript as an “open text”

Abstract

The scientific concept of "open text" (U. Eco) is applicable to various humanities, including musical medieval studies, primarily to ancient Russian singing manuscripts. The liturgical purpose does not contradict the introduction of additions and corrections in the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic fields of them at all stages of the work, as well as after its completion. The updates ("ponowlenija") affect on the one hand, the structure of each manuscript, on the other – its hymnographic and singing texts highlighted for consideration in this article. They relate directly to the notated texts, which in their original presentation (without updates) appear as complete chants, and open, if we consider all the updates introduced into it later by the author of the manuscript or subsequent masters. At the same time the completeness of the chant and its openness do not contradict each other; both variants can be chosen for performance. In the article, the features of the plaintext are considered on the example of the manuscript of the 16th century of the collection of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra of the Russian State Library No. 420, demonstrating the active work on it of both the author and subsequent masters. The introduction of new elements concerns, in addition to the structure of the manuscript, the writing out of variants of the hymnographic text, the inclusion of new chants in place of existing or absent ones from the author of the manuscript; the use of unusual neumes, not characteristic of znamenny notation in general; the designation of "superfluous" chants; the "programming" of improvisational updates, in particular, in the genre of the "Mnogoletija (Perennial). Many aspects of additions and transformations allow us to speak about the active creative work of the masters with ancient Russian hymnographic and musical texts, the openness of which provided an infinite wealth of chants.