Carmina Burana, vom Codex zum Klang.

Conference. SCHOLA CANTORUM BASILIENSIS. Research Department.

The Carmina Burana song-collection is widely known through Carl Orff’s famous cantata and through the sound-world recreated by ‘historically informed’ performers since the 1960s. At its core lies a thirteenth-century manuscript, the Codex Buranus, preserving a large collection of Latin and vernacular poems with musical notation. Celebrated for its lyrical, satirical, and dramatic texts, this manuscript is a key witness to medieval song culture.

The SNSF-funded Carmina Burana Online project (based at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis) is preparing a comprehensive study and digital edition of its texts and musical notation. The questions, challenges, and new insights emerging from it – both scholarly and performative – will be explored in this conference. We will consider the Carmina Burana both from within its historical and cultural context and as a modern object of study.

Central themes include the different types of poetic and musical compositions it contains; their notation; strategies of analyzing and editing them, and the specific challenges associated with creating online editions in the context of digital humanities. Combining scholarly analysis and performance practice, the conference opens new perspectives for reviving the Codex Buranus in sound. It incorporates three especially commissioned concerts, focusing on Latin songs, German songs and the Passion Play respectively. These feature students and teachers of the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, as well as invited performers. All showcase the results of taking knowledge-based practical exploration and experimentation as a point of departure.

2 0 – 2 2 N O V E M B E R 2 0 2 5

M u s i k - A k a d e m i e B a s e l,

N e u e r & K l e i n e r S a a l