University of Coimbra begins recovery of manuscripts with hundreds of years

The University of Coimbra has kept them for hundreds of years and they are now being recovered so that they can fulfill their original function: to become music and be a heritage of all. This is the story of the new life of musical manuscripts that are kept by the General Library of the University of Coimbra (BGUC).

It is not possible to tell your story without talking about "Mundos e Fundos - Methodological and Interpretative Worlds of Musical Funds", a project by the Center for Classical and Humanistic Studies of the Faculty of Letters of the University of Coimbra (FLUC), which works in the identification and study of musical heritage preserved in archives and libraries (and in their cultural and literary context). "Mundos e Fundos" does not forget also the training of people capable of working with these sources philologically and musically, making them accessible to a wider scientific and artistic public. It was through this project that some of the manuscripts, now in recovery, began to be worked on from a musicological, research and interpretation point of view. According to Paulo Estudante, one of the coordinators of "Mundos e Fundos" and professor at FLUC, "some manuscripts, whether from the 16th or 17th century, were in need of urgent intervention, because, among other things, they had suffered a lot of humidity and aggressions and the boiling paint was corroding the paper itself. We were losing musical notes when handling manuscripts ".

Thus, and thanks to the financial effort of the Rectorate of the UC, BGUC and the Center for Classical and Humanistic Studies of the Faculty of Letters of the University of Coimbra, the process of recovering the manuscripts was initiated. In November last year they started to leave, in small contingencies of six manuscripts, to a restoration workshop - to Deltos, in Cuenca (Spain). Each four months, a shipment that has already been restored arrives and another one is sent. The objective, according to Paulo Estudante, is "to consolidate the manuscripts so that they can be handled for much longer". We do not want to transform the old into a new one, but "to have manuscripts that allow us to work, for us and for future generations". For now, the plan is to restore, in a first phase, 16 manuscripts - a collection called Cartapácios, from the 17th century - which should be completed by the end of 2020. In a second phase, it is planned to intervene some manuscripts from the 16th century, which are "larger documents, with other types of problems", says the professor.

For the Director of BGUC, João Gouveia Monteiro, giving dignity to these materials is a priority task. "There is a very valuable collection of choral music from Santa Cruz that is practically unreadable and that it was very urgent to restore, under sentence of being lost forever," he says. "Today is a happy day", says the official when referring to the arrival of the first shipment of recovered manuscripts.

Also the Vice-Rector for Culture and Open Science of the UC, Delfim Leão, is satisfied with the beginning of the process and emphasizes that tangible heritage is being transformed into intangible. "The first step is the recovery of the materials, the tangible part; after curing and taking care of their survival for the future, they are digitalized and the process of studying this documentation begins, transferring them to modern notation. Here they are prepared for the its ultimate goal, which is to return them to the public in the form of a spectacle and, at that moment, we will have completed the phase of approaching this documentation, transforming a tangible heritage into an intangible one, because from that time on it belongs to everyone ", denotes.

The transformation of manuscripts into music is precisely being done by 'O Bando de Surunyo, laboratory arm of the Mundos e Fundos project. The ensemble , formed in 2015, brings together professional singers and instrumentalists, many of whom specialize in ancient music (prior to the 19th century) and have planned to launch their first CD this year (more information on the group's YouTube channel and Facebook page)

The recovery of these manuscripts is still part of open science, one of the bets of the current rectory. According to Delfim Leão, "there is a whole process in a cycle, which is constantly renewed, and which substantiates well what open science intends: which is to call upon all agents, formal or informal, to the way of doing and understanding science". After being digitized, the documents will be a "research support that will allow people who would not have contact with this material, to have it, anywhere in the world", denotes the Vice-Rector and adds that when these texts are transported to their "spectacle and performance aspects they are appropriate for the whole community ".