A young teacher’s music in mid-fifteenth-century Bohemia: the peculiar case of Crux de Telcz (1434–1504)

ABSTRACT Crux de Telcz (Crux of Telč, or Kříž z Telče) was one of the most prolific scribes of late medieval Bohemia, active in the second half of the fifteenth century. In various roles, Crux contributed to several dozen manuscripts, which present an extraordinarily broad range of contents in various genres. This study analyses items with musical notation and the texts of sacred and secular songs in manuscripts copied or used by Crux. These are chiefly notated records of monophonic and polyphonic cantiones with texts in Latin and Czech, and to a lesser extent plainchant melodies belonging to the realm of Latin liturgical repertoire. Yet one of Crux’s manuscripts (Třeboň A 4) also bears witness to an early use of white mensural notation in Bohemia. In recent years, it has been possible to refine Crux’s biography substantially, with the result that most of his musical copying activities can be shown to have been made in the period while he was active as a teacher. His manuscripts thus offer important insights into ways in which sacred songs and new polyphonic works were disseminated in the fifteenth century, chiefly within literate and pedagogical circles.