Palaeographic Description of the "Alphabet of Singing" from the Manuscript Collection of the 16th Century

The purpose of the work is the palaeographic analysis of the alphabet of singing from the manuscript collection of the 16th century and revealing of the characteristic features of its formation. The research methodology includes the system analysis, which promoted the comprehension of manuscript singing alphabet lists. For the determination of temporal and quantitative characteristics of the studied material statistical and chronological methods were used. The comparative analysis made it possible to establish the logical regularities of alphabet lists formation. The importance of the publication is connected with a growing interest to the musical heritage of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. The urgent issue is the fundamental research of the collections of liturgical singing, which are deteriorating from year to year and the risk to loose the valuable material is increasing. The research novelty is determined by the fact that the singing alphabet from the manuscript of the 16th century was analysed, its palaeographic description and comparative analysis of neume signs were carried out. Conclusions. The palaeographic analysis of the singing alphabet made it possible to identify common features in the formation of neume signs. Certain differences with other alphabets in similar manuscript collections are also determined. Neume signs were introduced into alphabet in accordance with their use during the singing practice. As a rule, the signs, which were considered the most important in the performance of church chant, were introduced into the alphabet. The most of the singing alphabet of the 15–17 centuries despite certain differences are very similar in the composition of neume signs. The distribution of neume signs into four groups was performed in the following way: from the simplest that have no subvariants to compound that are divided into groups and subgroups. The question of decoding of the neume notation that goes with liturgical texts is left unsolved. It is possible to solve this problem by combining efforts of Ukrainian medieval scholars and active cooperation with scientists of the Western European countries.