Trent Codices

[2] Unusually for manuscripts of this era, the Trent Codices are small: at approximately 9 x 12 inches (20 x 30 cm) they are the equivalent of a 15th-century "miniature score".

Since their small size and numerous errors would make singing from them difficult or impossible, they may have been used as a source from which performance copies were made.

Not all of his copying was competent; he evidently possessed limited musical literacy, even though he held a post as an organist, since he left numerous mistakes.

[5][6] Parts of the Trent codices were written with a corrosive ink which has eaten through the paper causing, among other things, centers of noteheads to fall out.

Emperor Frederick III's cousin Sigismund, who was Duke of the Tyrol, had a large and sophisticated musical chapel at Innsbruck.

[7] The Codices may have been the principal anthology of all the polyphonic music sung in all the chapels and courts in the Habsburg domains of northern Italy and southern Germany in the mid-15th century.

Their first discussion in the musicological literature was in 1885, by F. X. Haberl, in his huge monograph on Guillaume Dufay, Bausteine zur Musikgeschichte.

Publication of the contents of the manuscripts had already begun in Austria as part of the series Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich (DTÖ).

At the back of a monophonic breviary (Biblioteca Comunale 1563, but permanently housed at the Museo Provinciale d'Arte) is a single folio, presumably from a much larger manuscript ca.

[11] This library also houses a remarkable collection of so-called cantus fractus, or rhythmicized chant, which has recently been published.

[13] The series Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich published in 1900, the seventh year of its existence, volumes 14 and 15 bound together, which contain the first of several selections from the Trent Codices.