Designation of two liturgical settings of the Ars Nova. The ‘Sortes’ Credo is the most widely disseminated Credo setting of the period. It carries the designation in three of its 11 sources (F-Pn n.a.fr.23190, F-APT 16bis, E-Bc 971); I-IV 115 calls it ‘de rege’, and the other seven manuscripts transmit it without caption. A Gloria headed ‘sortes’ in Solsona, Archivo diocesano, MS 109 appears without designation in I-IV 115. In F-APT 16bis it carries the designation ‘depansis’. Since the ‘Sortes’ Credo was contained in the same gathering of the Solsona manuscript as the ‘Sortes’ Gloria, the possibility of a misattribution cannot be ruled out.
An identification with the organist Steve de Sort, an Augustinian traceable at the royal court of Aragon between 1394 and 1406, was proposed by Gómez but has met with scepticism on stylistic grounds. A second proposed identification (Tomasello, 1991), with Nicholas Sortes, canon of Laon and procurer of the Bishop of Tournai at Avignon (d 1376), is less problematic chronologically but is hampered by the fact that no evidence to connect Nicholas Sortes with musical activities is available.
Meanwhile, there are sufficient grounds to doubt whether designations such as ‘sortes’, occasionally found in the margins of French and Spanish sources of the 14th and early 15th centuries, should be considered composer attributions at all, at least a priori and in the absence of corroborating evidence. Such designations appear to have served primarily as mnemonic devices in order to distinguish textually identical compositions from one another. This being the case, ‘sortes’ may refer not to a composer but to an as yet undetermined feature of the compositions in question.
H. Anglès: ‘Cantors und Ministrers in den Diensten der Könige von Katalonien-Aragonien im 14. Jahrhundert’, Musikwissenschaftlicher Kongress: Basle 1924, 56–66
F. Ludwig: ‘Die mehrstimmige Messe des 14. Jahrhunderts’, AMw, vii (1925), 417–35, esp. 426
L. Schrade: ‘The Mass of Toulouse’, RBM, viii (1954), 84–96, esp. 88, 90–91
H. Stäblein-Harder: Fourteenth-Century Mass Music in France, MSD, vii (1962) 57–9, 143–7
M. del Carmen Gómez: ‘El Manuscrito M.971 de la Biblioteca de Catalunya (Misa de Barcelona)’, Butlletí de la Biblioteca de Catalunya, x (1986), 164–5, 167–8, 173–4, 180–82
A. Tomasello: ‘Notes biographiques sur quelques musiciens?’ Aspects de la musique liturgique au Moyen Age: Actes des Colloques de Royaumont de 1986, 1987 et 1988 (Paris, 1991), 269–72
M. del Carmen Gómez: Manuscrito 2 de la Biblioteca de Orfeó Català (Misa) – Manuscrito 109 del Archivo Diocesano de Solsona (Fragmentos del Ordinario): Estudio y Transcripción, Polifonía de la Corona de Aragón (Siglos XIV y XV), Ars Nova de la Corona de Aragón, Polifonía Aragonesa, viii (Zaragoza, 1993), 18
KARL KÜGLE