‚Komponist‘ und ‚Komponieren‘ im frühen Mittelalter zwischen Umbruch und Kontinuität

Since around 800 in Europe, new music has been constantly created to an ever increasing degree, so that the early 9th century has the character of an epochal shift in music history. The creation of new music, first of broadly liturgical chants, is testified, on the one hand, by manuscripts transmitting texts and melodies, and on the other hand by literary sources (chronicles, lives of saints, etc.) which speak of the production of new musical items. It has often been doubted whether these creative processes can be qualified as acts of ‘composing’ in the modern sense of the word. In this essay, however, the main question will be what can be learned by the existing sources, if one asks what kind of information they offer regarding an early-medieval attitude towards ‘composers’ of music and the nature of their activities. In addition, it seems that this discourse had its beginnings mainly in the 9th century, and that it retained certain traits, and remained faithful to a restricted number of ideas (such as questions of auctoritas and legitimization) until around 1100. At the same time, the sources considered here give many (and surprisingly variegated) insights into the compositional process and its contexts. On such a phase of continuity then followed in the 12th century, another epochal shift that brought with it a new plurality.