Musical fragmentology in Hungary began in the 1970s, connected to the beginnings of fragmentology as an independent discipline. In effect, it can be said that the first success of institutionalized fragmentology in Hungary was locating and classifying medieval liturgical sources with music notation. The theoretical father and first researcher of fragmentology in Hungary was László Mezey. In 1974 he created the Fragmenta Codicum study group of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. It was the workshop that first begun to systematically process and publish Medieval manuscript fragments from Hungary, parallel to similar initiatives around Europe.1 Mezey was the first who formulated the thesis that the value of a fragment as a source goes beyond its fragmentary nature and provides researchers insight on the whole source.2 The Fragmentum Codicum workshop remains active to the present day (since 1998 it is known as Fragmenta et Codices), and published the manuscript and fragment catalogues of six collections in Hungary between 1983 and 2007.3
The one and only catalogue of medieval music fragments published in Hungary proceeded the first Fragmenta Codicum volume by two years: Notated sources of the Hungarian Middle Ages [A magyar középkor hangjegyes forrásai] by Janka Szendrei was published in 1981.4 The catalogue describes 131 complete sources (+ 68 missals with some musical notations), and 655 fragments. It provided the first overview of notated fragments, defining their liturgical contents, the melodic varaints of the chants, and the type of notation. The Szendrei-catalogue was the first work to illustrate the importance of musical approaches in fragmentology, emphasising how at times the notational system, or an extant melodic variant are the only information that can be used to deduce the origin of a fragment, when traditional codicological approaches fail.
In the 35 years since the Szendrei-catalogue was published, the number of known notated manuscript fragments in Hungary has multiplied. A small number of these were included in the Fragmenta Codicum series, fragments with music notations were described under a separate chapter „Liturgica cum cantu”. Alongside codicological descriptions, the type of musical notation is also discerned, and the results of the musical-liturgical analysis summarized. Throughout all volumes a total of 236 fragments have been described.
Neither the number of fragments published, nor their short descriptions comply to the professional expectations of (musical) fragment databases in the present day, and the recent trends in research. In 2016 the Department of Early Music of the Institute for Musicology at the Research Centre for the Humanities of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences applied for a grant with the title Codices and Fragments from late Medieval Hungary. Examining, Re-examining and Online Publishing of Notated Manuscripts and Chant Repertories.5 The project aims to collect, classify and publish notated medieval manuscript fragments online. The result of the four-year project which begun in 2016 is the Fragmenta Manuscriptorum Musicalium Hungariae Mediaevalis database.
During the grounding work carried out within the framework of the project, it became clear that music fragment research, with its versatility and multilayeredness, utilizing the knowledge of many other disciplines and serving as a source and inspiration for them, can be – and need to be – practiced as a separate field. Based on this recognition, we have now focused on this new field of science, digital music fragmentology, and chose it as the topic of our application submitted to the ‘Lendület’ (‘Momentum’) Programme of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in early 2019. The application proved to be successful, and thus the ‛Momentum’ Digital Music Fragmentology Research Group of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences could be established in October 2019 at the Early Music Department of the Institute for Musicology.6