The Ranums' Panat Times

Marc-Antoine Charpentier's autograph manuscripts, known as the "Mélanges"

Charpentier's autograph manuscripts are known as the "Mélanges" or "Meslanges," a name given them in the mid-eighteenth century when they were catalogued and bound for the Royal Library.

My Musings about Charpentier's manuscripts focus on paper, watermarks, the way he classed his scores, and chronologies one can deduce from combining these elements.

Relatively recent Musings

The Wedding Contract as a Creative Process: The format of a typical notarial contract, and some parallels that can be drawn with the format of Marc-Antoine Charpentier's autograph manuscripts

Three interrelated pieces on Charpentier's Mélanges:

•  "Order" in Charpentier's manuscripts: are they really "out of order"?
•   What did cahiers 8, 9, 10 look like in Charpentier's lifetime?
•  Some comments about C. Jane Gosine's article on Charpentier's handwriting
•  Musings on the Acts of the Charpentier Conference held in 2004

Older Musings

•  A Roundtable on the Charpentier chronology (my planned answers to some puzzles that Catherine Cessac asked us to attempt to solve at the Charpentier conference in Versailles, 2004)
•  The Mémoire of 1726 that inventoried Marc-Antoine Charpentier's manuscripts
•  Re: Marc-Antoine Charpentier's autograph scores, known as the "Mélanges" or "Meslanges" : did he compose these pieces, or did he copy other peoples' music into these notebooks?
•  A Musing on Laurent Guillo's article, "Les papiers à musique imprimés"
•  Montaigne's choice of paper: does it shed light on Charpentier's practices?
•  On what did I base my conjectures about the papers used by Charpentier, post-1687?
•  The watermarks of the papers used by Marc-Antoine Charpentier
•  The treble clefs used by Charpentier: what can they teach us?
•  The "gros cahier": what do its contents suggest?

Note: This page is faulty and will not be updated: for an up-to-date version of the page, see: ..\manuscripts_masterpage.htm