The Leiden Choirbooks are both functional books and archives. They contained the College’s repertoire and the singers sang from them daily. Contrary to modern-day practice, the parts were not organized in a convenient score: each part had its own particular place on the page. In addition to this, the scoring system in those days was different. In order to be able to sing the works nowadays, a modern edition of the choir books has to be made.

A modern edition by the Egidius Kwartet

At the beginning of the seventies, K.Ph Bernet-Kempers and Chris Maas published a modern, popular-science edition of the first choirbook. This was included in the Monumenta Musica Neerlandica series (part IX), a publication by the Royal Society for Dutch Music History.

There are no modern editions of the other books, so the Egidius Kwartet itself has to decipher and transcribe the pieces chosen for performance and recording. This is the task of the quartet’s artistic director Peter de Groot. The Egidius Kwartet will compile a final score of the selected works.

The research method

A classic ‘problem’ in making this type of transcription is how to set the notes to the text. Peter de Groot will do this using to the ’diplomatic’ method: the words and syllables will be sung exactly as they stand in the manuscript.

There are numerous manuscripts of some of the pieces circulating all over Europe. The manuscripts sometimes vary, and so the quartet keeps to the Leiden version, whilst of course comparing and checking against the concordant sources.

Please contact >> us for any questions or ideas.

For this enormous and time-consuming project, the quartet receives support from the NFPK+ (Dutch Fund for the Performing Art).