In connection with the Hungarian Science Festival, the ‘Momentum’ Digital Music Fragmentology Research Group held its annual chamber conference on 17 November 2021 in the afternoon in the Bartók Hall of the Institute for Musicology. Like the event held almost exactly a year earlier, the presentations of the meeting were complemented by two roll-up posters, providing a visual summary of the group’s research trips in Hungary and abroad, its latest discoveries, and the current state of electronic and digital processing of its results. The conference papers were organized around two main focal points: (1) the databases and electronic repositories built by the research group, which form a kind of digital ecosystem summarizing the three-way processing of medieval notated fragments based on the results of classical fragmentology (Fragmenta Manuscriptorum Musicalium Hungariae Mediaevalis), music paleography (Hungarian Neume Catalogue) and comparative melodic history (Melodiarium Hungariae Medii Aevi Digitale), (2) the 15th-century manuscript of Demetrius de Lasko, digitized by members of the research team in September this year in the library of the Franciscan convent of Šibenik. The first topic was developed in an introductory paper by Zsuzsa Czagány, who presented the research group’s websites and the databases built behind them, followed by Gábriel Szoliva, who spoke about the hymn database published as part of the Melodiarium Hungariae Medii Aevi Digitale. The first presentation of the second half of the conference (Zsuzsa Czagány) dealt with the possessor entries of the Liber Demetrii de Lasko, the names of persons and places becoming digitally visible recently, and the conclusions that can be drawn from these concerning the changes of ownership and the migration of the manuscript in the 15th century.
The second presentation (by Gabriella Gilányi) analyzed two fragments of a 12th-century notated troper-proser, which have survived as flyleaves of the manuscript. The fragments are unique both from a music paleographic and a melodic-historical point of view. On the one hand, they preserve the earliest example of medieval Hungarian (Esztergom) music notation, which is older than the first notational layer of the Pray Codex, and on the other hand, they contain the torso of the Christmas trope Laudem Deo dicam, which is a rarity not only in medieval Hungarian but also in Western plainchant sources.
Between and during the conference presentations, the members of the research team – Eszter Göbölösné Gaál, Borbála Tóka and Mózes Enyedi – sang from the sources and musical repositories related to the research. In addition to the Latin monophonic plainchant, they also sang polyphonic and Protestant Hungarian versions of them.
