A stock of musical materials for a particular use (from Lat. reperire: ‘to find’, hence repertorium: ‘storehouse’, ‘repository’).
(1)(a) The stock of works that an artist or group of artists (ensemble, orchestra, company etc.) has in readiness to perform at a given time; (b) the stock of roles or parts that a singer (e.g. in opera) or instrumentalist (e.g. concerto soloist) has in readiness to perform, the scores that a conductor has in readiness to conduct, or the operas or ballets that a director or choreographer is in a position to realize; (c) more loosely, the sum total of works, roles or parts that an artist has in readiness for performance throughout his or her career (not all of which are necessarily available for performance at any given time).
(2) All the items that are available for performance in a given locality (e.g. all the folksongs known to the inhabitants of one village or region; all the plainchants in use at a given church or religious house).
(3) The totality of works, roles or parts known to have been written (or at least available in print or for hire) for a given instrument, voice-type or ensemble (e.g. ‘violin repertory’: see Violin, §I, 3–5).
(4) The total compositional output of a given time and place (e.g. Renaissance Ferrara; 18th-century Mannheim; the Second Viennese School).
(5) A subset of some larger repertory (a) having a particular function (e.g. lamentation) or character (e.g. an older stratum, such as dhrupad compositions within the North Indian singer's repertory, or the earliest layer within the 13th-century French motet repertory; ‘light’ songs and ‘serious’ songs), or (b) extant in sources of a particular type (e.g. 12th- and 13th-century Parisian polyphony as against the total performance repertory at Notre Dame, Paris (including plainchant), of that period).
(6) The term ‘standard repertory’ describes the collection of works commonly found in the programmes of Western-style orchestras, choirs and opera companies (and to a lesser extent ensembles and recital artists), containing selected works of the period roughly from Haydn to Richard Strauss and Debussy.
(7) In opera (as in the theatre generally), a particular manner of organizing programme-planning based on holding a relatively large number of productions in preparation at the same time (as opposed to the stagione system, where only one or two operas are kept in readiness for performance, in short seasons, at any particular moment). The repertory system, generally favoured in German opera houses, is particularly appropriate for a resident company with a regular opera-going public but is not suitable for most international opera houses, where casts are drawn from a widespread community of singers.
The concept of repertory entails a fundamental sense of ‘otherness’, of difference. Hypothetically, all the music of a given, culturally isolated community would not constitute, for the members of that community, a repertory, but rather all the music it knows – its musical ‘universe’. Only to an outsider (e.g. an early folksong collector, a modern ethnomusicological field-worker), by reference to his or her larger universe, would that music constitute a repertory. Thus ‘my/our’ repertory implies an awareness of ‘his/her/their/your’ repertory.
Repertoriality is governed principally by four factors: function, capacity, market and manipulation.
At the heart of repertory definition is the notion that particular types of music serve, or lend themselves to, particular social functions. Music for funerals may be typologically different from that for coming-of-age ceremonies or weddings, music for jubilation different from that for confession. Music for the private domain may differ from that for the public, and music for the concert from that for a dramatic context. Acoustics and types of space constitute an environmental function: thus, music for outdoors may differ from that for indoors, music for reverberant cathedral or hall from that for courtly chamber, and both of these from that for domestic parlour. These distinctions may determine such musical elements as mode, type of rhythm, tempo, type of texture, choice of instruments and/or voices, dynamic levels, style of performance and so on.
In the strictest sense of (1) above, repertory is broadly related to the human capacity of an individual or group to encompass works, roles or parts physically and mentally, to master them technically, present them publicly and in certain cases memorize them (see Memory, memorizing and Performance). Integral to these are personal physique (lung capacity, arm strength, length of fingers etc.), age and state of health. As such, the factor of human capacity could be said to be relatively ‘value-free’. However, other determinants, such as the musician's personal preferences, independence of mind, imaginative faculty and sense of enterprise are in practice likely to ‘colour’ the selection of a repertory. In parallel with human capacity, the repertory of a given instrument or ensemble is governed by its instrumental capacity; hence the repertories for solo flute, oboe and clarinet are conditioned by their very different acoustics and mechanics; likewise the repertories for string quintet and brass quintet and so on.
Composition and performance exist in a constant dialectical relationship with listener response. The 12th-century minstrel must have fashioned a repertory in accordance with the known tastes of the courts he expected to visit, and the requirements of the ceremonies and festivities (sacred and secular) in which he took part. The Renaissance church composer was governed by the exigencies of church liturgy, and the demands of the prelates for whom he worked; the 18th-century court musician by the commands of the king, prince or duke whom he served; the 19th-century musician by the commissions he or she received, the sales of published sheet music, the requests of the salons entertained, or the box-office receipts of concert halls. The modern artistic organization is subject to the same forces. In a reverse market sense, the repertory of a given court, town, city or church, may be determined in part by the type and calibre of singers and players available to it, hence the music that it can tackle, or that its composers are at liberty to write.
Repertory can be manipulated, consciously and unconsciously, in a variety of ways. The personal likes and dislikes of a prince or duke will prescribe and proscribe certain kinds of music at his court. That is, they will dictate the repertory experienced by all the other members of the court, and will determine the historical record, namely the contents of the surviving scores and partbooks from that court. An organization can manipulate audience receptivity by certain kinds of advertising, marketing and programme-building. Public education can change perceptions and thus influence the body of music that audiences will tolerate. Censorship is a pervasive means of manipulating a repertory accessible to a state or country. The religious and political beliefs of a society, or of that society's most powerful leaders, may forbid some kinds of music and promote others, as occurred in Nazi Germany (see Nazism and Entartete Musik) and in the Soviet Union (see Marxism and Socialist realism). In this sense, repertory is subject to prevailing ideology. When such forces as ideology and influence are largely hidden, they can give rise to the formation of a canon that is a paradigmatic set of works deemed to represent the ‘greatest’ products of a given society (see Canon (iii)).
Repertory is also perceived and used largely as a lexicographic entity, notably in senses of definitions (3) and (4) above. Catalogues claim to give information about, and collected editions to present in notation, ‘all the items known to survive from x’. That was the spirit of Friedrich Ludwig's catalogue raisonné of 1910 entitled Repertorium organorum recentioris et motetorum vetustissimi stili … (‘Repertory of organa of more recent style and motets of earliest style …’), and the spirit likewise of the post-1960 enterprise Répertoire international des sources musicales (RISM), which aims to catalogue all sources, printed and manuscript, up to 1801. Both are actualizations of definitions (3) and (4) above. Similarly, Constantin Brǎiloiu's Vie musicale d'un village: recherches sur le répertoire de Drăguş (Romanie), 1929–32 (1960) is a realization of definition (2); and Israel Adler's Oeuvres du répertoire de la communauté portugaise d'Amsterdam (1965), part of the series Early Hebrew Music, instances the body of synagogue music for voices and instruments belonging to a community within a larger community.
The term ‘corpus’ (‘body’) has been used with similar intent in scholarly publications, as in the American Institute of Musicology's Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae series (CMM) and Alexis Chottin's Corpus de musique marocaine (1931–3). There may be subtle differences of intention among these titles, some implying comprehensiveness, others representative selection, others merely magnitude. Two further terms clearly disown comprehensiveness: ‘Collection of …’ and the German Denkmäler der … (‘Monuments of …’). Wherever selection is involved, questions of criteria ensue which may uncover preference or bias of the sort raised in (iv) above.
Although ‘repertory’ is a distinctively Western term, the concept of repertoriality exists in many other cultures, and has existed over a great span of time, embodied in other terms and phrases. In China at the Tang court (618–907 ce), for example, ‘The term têng ko … had been applied from Han times [206 bce–220 ce] onwards to a repertory of pieces performed in a raised and roofed hall on ritual ceremonial occasions and at festal banquets’ (Picken). Likewise, the mbira players of the Shona people ‘have repertories of composed pieces … which have been passed down orally and aurally from generation to generation …. Some virtuosi report that they know as many as a hundred pieces’ (Berliner). Both usages are akin to definition (1) above. Indeed, the concept of repertoriality is a universal, marking self-awareness at a personal or group level; that is, the sense of totality (the contents of a repertory) entails consciousness that something else exists that does not belong to the repertory.
L. Picken: ‘T'ang Music and Musical Instruments’, T'oung Pao, iv (1969), 74–122
P. Berliner: The Soul of the Mbira: Music and Traditions of the Shona People of Zimbabwe (Berkeley, 1978)
L. Treitler: ‘Transmission and the Study of Music History’, IMSCR XII: Berkeley 1977, 202–11
L. Treitler: ‘Oral, Written, and Literate Process in the Transmission of Medieval Music’, Speculum, lvi (1981), 471–91
J. Kerman: ‘A Few Canonic Variations’, Critical Inquiry, x (1983–4), 107–26
W. Weber: ‘The Eighteenth-Century Origins of the Musical Canon’, JRMA, cxiv (1989), 6–17
K. Bergeron and P. Bohlman, eds.: Disciplining Music: Musicology and its Canons (Chicago, 1992)
IAN D. BENT and STEPHEN BLUM