The Krasiński Codex

East meets West
Edward Breen visits the Swiss countryside to witness a recording session of Polish medieval music from the Krasiński Codex, and hears from those who have helped facilitate the project
Gramophone January 2025

If you’ve ever spent a summer evening in the main square of Kraków and stopped for a glass of wine near St. Mary’s Basilica, you probably will have heard the Hejnał mariacki, a trumpet call played every hour from one of the towers. Legend has it that this tune, mentioned in the city’s records as early as 1392, ordered the opening and closing of four city gates. It feels like a slice of medieval life until it suddenly breaks off mid-melody. One legend suggests this recalls the moment a trumpeter was shot during a thirteenth-century invasion. However, my tour-guide explained that this story is fanciful; the most likely explanation for the trumpetus interruptus was that another player situated on the city wall would simply respond when the gate was closed. That vision of late-medieval Kraków has stayed with me: the trumpets, the towers, the old city with its beautiful gates and fabulous wine. In such a place, it is tempting to feel the past is closer than it really is even if it has been filtered through a legend. History is a slippery thing.

Fortunately, there is more to the preserved soundscape of Kraków than this legend: there is also the polyphonic music. In the first quarter of the 15th century a scribe in Kraków compiled a manuscript that contains some theological writings and more than forty pieces of polyphonic music. Pieces from local sources alongside Italian and French works create a precious snapshot of indigenous Polish music and of the foreign music that passed through this cultural centre in the early 1400s. A lingering glance through these pages reveals different styles of notation that reflect the varied provenances of each piece. Sometimes our scribe uses red notes to show changes of mensuration (time signatures basically), sometimes he uses void notation (notes with holes in, like a polo mint) to show the same feature. But what binds these pieces together (if you forgive the codicological pun) is that they all have Latin texts, even when they obviously didn’t originally. Some pieces celebrate the Jagiellonian dynasty, which ruled Poland between 1386 and 1572. This “Krasiński Codex”, as it is commonly known, is the most important source of Polish music in the late Middle Ages. It’s housed in the Biblioteka Narodowa (National Library), Warsaw, Poland (PL-Wn) under shelfmark MS III.8054.

When I heard that a new edition and recording of this manuscript by musicians and academics associated with the early music powerhouse Schola Cantorum Basiliensis was being created, I journeyed to Switzerland to hear their sessions and find out more. Meeting Marc Lewon, Agnieszka Budzińska-Bennett and Jane Achtman of Ensemble Dragma was a joy. They are the driving force behind this publication, a partnership with The Adam Mickiewicz Institute. They are joined by other performers but the intellectual thrust of the project is theirs.

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To read the full text of this feature please visit Gramophone (January 2025)