CORPUS RITHMORUM MUSICUM

The CRM represents the first complete critical edition of the Latin rhythmic music poems of the IV-IX centuries; it is available on the free access site of the Corpus rithmorum musicorum and, with the reproduction of the manuscripts, in a printed edition with CD (Sismel 2007). The collected texts represent the first Latin compositions in rhythmic versification, a textual tradition that begins in the fourth century and finds a first arrangement maturing in the Carolingian age, and then developed into grandiose dimensions in the European, Latin and vernacular lyric of the following centuries. Of this typology of versatility, from which modern western poetry is born, the Corpus collects in a first phase the lyrics that present a musical tradition, that is the ones whose codes sung their traces in a neumatic notation: they could be defined in a certain meaning the first “songs” of European culture that music has come to us.