Music manuscripts and education

As schoolmaster at St. Emmeram, Poetzlinger would have been responsible for teaching the boys not only to read and write Latin, but also to sing, in order to be able to participate on occasion in the liturgy in the monastery church. This would have involved primarily the singing of plainsong, but the survival of his collection of mostly polyphonic music may suggest that he also taught this repertory to his students. He may, for example, have taught them to sing the upper (discantus) parts of such music while he and his assistant sang the lower (tenor and contratenor) parts. (In many cases, however, the contratenor parts were not copied into his manuscript, even in cases where they are known to have existed, so two-part performance might have been the norm.) Whether the boys (or, indeed, the monks) then proceeded to perform such music in the monastery church or elsewhere is unknown. The fact that such practice was explicitly forbidden by the Melk Reformers who visited St. Emmeram in 1452 (see also » A. Melker Reform) at least raises the intriguing possibility that it may have taken place before that time. This is not to forget, however, that the main part of the manuscript originated in Viennese university circles, possibly involving musicians active at the Bürgerschule and Kantorei of St. Stephan (» G. Hermann Edlerawer). The existence of Poetzlinger’s music book also raises the question of whether it might have been normal practice for schoolmasters (or students expecting to become schoolmasters) at the time to compile such collections of polyphony, especially since a number of other such books – including » I-TRbc 87 part II, I-TRbc 88, I-TRbc 89, I-TRbc 90, I-TRbc 91, » D-Mbs Mus. Hs. 3154 and » D-Mbs Clm 5023 – that seem to have originated with schoolmasters (H. Battre, Johannes Wiser, Peter Schrott, Nikolaus Leopold and Johannes Greis, respectively) have survived from this general period.