cantusplanus.at is the central web platform for chant research in Austria. The websites provide information on medieval music manuscripts and liturgica without musical notation from Austrian libraries. The starting point for this undertaking was the cataloguing project Medieval Music Manuscripts and Fragments of the Austrian National Library (ÖNB, 2008-2015), which successfully and comprehensively fulfilled a desideratum of medieval music research in Austria. Many previously unknown sources could be newly indexed. For a considerable number of already known sources, new findings were added or older ones corrected. The results of this research form the data basis for cantusplanus.at.
Parallel to the indexing of the ÖNB collections, medieval music manuscripts from other Austrian libraries and archives were documented. Thus a comprehensive online database with about 3000 liturgical and music-liturgical manuscripts was created. The rudimentary information gives a first impression of the quantity and quality of the source material in Austria. In addition, some detailed studies on various monasteries and churches in Austria (St. Florian, Klosterneuburg, Mondsee, German Order, Priesterbruderschaft Ferschnitz, and generally on the orders of the Benedictines and Augustinian canons) have been edited.
The follow-up project CANTUS Network. Libri ordinarii of the Church Province of Salzburg dealt with liturgy and music in the medieval metropolitan region. The XML-TEI based edition and analysis project had the goal to transcribe all Libri ordinarii, medieval rulebooks for the liturgy, of the old church province Salzburg, to mark them semantically with TEI and to publish them in a synoptic online edition. Extensive analysis methods are available here as well as complete digitized versions of secondary sources (antiphonaries, graduals, breviaries or missals).
In order to be able to compare the normative texts of the Libri ordinarii with the concrete music manuscripts of liturgical practice, a comprehensive image database of medieval music manuscripts from Austrian libraries and archives was started. Currently, images of about 100 codices are available here in high technical quality. The images can be used online in a IIIF-based image viewer (Mirador).
In the project Chant Manuscripts of the Central Library of the Viennese Franciscan Province in Graz, 54 late medieval and early modern chant manuscripts, chant organ books and rare chant prints were digitised. The approximately 18,000 images produced were enriched with metadata and made available online via a IIIF interface for the virtual library Europeana and for www.cantusplanus.at. The data are archived long-term in the ACDH repository ARCHE. Part of the project was an automated transcription of the chant texts and rubrics using the AI-supported application Transkribus.
In cooperation projects with the University of Alicante and the Polytechnic University of Valencia, methods and tools from the research field of Music Information Retrieval are being developed in order to capture chant manuscripts automatically with the help of AI. The inventory and referencing of the contents is automated by advanced techniques including Handwritten Text and Music Recognition.
Together with the data from the preceding projects, the HTMR project will provide comprehensive normative and music-practical information for further analysis of the chant text repertoire and the melodies of medieval music manuscripts.
Robert Klugseder