Didactic manuals and music education in the 18th century

This research project studied several interrelated aspects of music teaching in Slovenian territory in the eighteenth century, based on new points of departure in the most up-to-date interpretations of the history of the eighteenth-century music. Special attention was paid to those that support modern perspectives on the past as a conglomerate of relatively specific cultural (musical) practices, each with its specific rules of agency that are the sine qua non of the existence of these same practices, and are at the same time the aim of today’s historical research and the basis for describing the interrelations of these practices. The research was based on a detailed analysis and contextualization of a selected model: two recently discovered manuscript manuals from the eighteenth century extant in Novo Mesto. These are examples of specific teaching materials originating in Slovenian territory: Compendium cantus choralis de clavibus and Fundamenta zu dem Clavier oder Orgel. They represent a most welcome base for research into an important segment of music teaching practices in Slovenian territory at the time and their direct functional connection with contemporary musical practices, which are very clearly denoted in sociological, geographical, and other cultural terms.

The research project was carried out as planned. It went through all of the proposed phases:  from data collection to systemization of materials and detailed studies and analyses of the two pre-selected model music manuals. The general investigation was concerned with all types of original printed and manuscript sources found in Slovenia connected with learning music during the “long” eighteenth century. The sources were classified and placed into the context of local cultural life. The main result of the project is, however, the online monograph titled Piano and Organ for Beginners (Radovan Škrjanc: Osnove klavirske in orgelske igre. Ljubljana, 2012. ISBN 978-961-254-421-8) concerning one of the two thoroughly studied manuals. This book offers the results of the core study performed within this project. It offers to modern readers the full facsimile of manuscript no. 511 from the Franciscan monastery in Novo Mesto titled Noten-Buch darinnen die Fundamenta zu dem Clavier oder Orgel enthalten, a critical transcription of the theoretical and music part of the manual, a translation into Slovenian with commentary, and five comprehensive analytical contextualizing studies putting the source material into the wider frame of central-European music teaching practices. These chapters deal with the position of this manual for beginning keyboard players within the general development of keyboard teaching in the eighteenth century, gives a survey of all the eighteenth-century music manuals found in Slovenian archives and libraries (by Metoda Kokole), presents theories on possible authorship and dating, analyses theoretical parameters and pedagogical aspects of this manual in comparison with other such eighteenth-century sources, and comments on compositional aspects of the music in the second part of the original manual by comparing the pieces with keyboard compositions from other parts of Europe. According to data acquired through comparative analyses of the paper, script, and music itself, this manual was compiled gradually from c. 1770 onward by various authors and musicians active in the Franciscan province of St. Cross with its center in Ljubljana. A practical side-product of this research is an edition of selected pieces from this manual to be used in music schools as a useful tool and to promote heretofore little-known national musical heritage. The second model case was manuscript no. 501, the Compendium cantus choralis, which was also critically transcribed and translated and is now available as the second online monograph (Jurij Snoj, Kompendij koralnega petja. Ljubljana, 2012. ISBN 978-961-254-420-1) within the series titled Slovenian Musical Heritage (http://ezb.ijs.si/sgd). The Compendium was written by two scribes in the late eighteenth century and is clearly meant to instruct beginners in practical monastic plainchant singing. This project has provided a useful model for further research on music teaching in the eighteenth century and earlier periods.