The Sounds and Sights of Performance in Early Music

Essays in Honour of Timothy J. McGee

Maureen Epp, Brian E. Power

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351540452
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

The experience of music performance is always far more than the sum of its sounds, and evidence for playing and singing techniques is not only inscribed in music notation but can also be found in many other types of primary source materials. This volume of essays presents a cross-section of new research on performance issues in music of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The subject is approached from a broad perspective, drawing on areas such as dance history, art history, music iconography and performance traditions from beyond Western Europe. In doing so, the volume continues some of the many lines of inquiry pursued by its dedicatee, Timothy J. McGee, over a lifetime of scholarship devoted to practical questions of playing and singing early music. Expanding the bases of inquiry to include various social, political, historical or aesthetic backgrounds both broadens our knowledge of the issues pertinent to early music performance and informs our understanding of other cultural activities within which music played an important role. The book is divided into two parts: 'Viewing the Evidence' in which visually based information is used to address particular questions of music performance; and 'Reconsidering Contexts' in which diplomatic, commercial and cultural connections to specific repertories or compositions are considered in detail. This book will be of value not only to specialists in early music but to all scholars of the Middle Ages and Renaissance whose interests intersect with the visual, aural and social aspects of music performance.

PART I
Viewing the Evidence

Chapter 1

A Sight-Reading Vielle Player
from the Thirteenth Century

John Haines

The following essay was written in appreciation of Timothy McGee. It brings together one of his primary research interests, medieval instrumental music-making, with those of his two longtime fellow medieval musicologists at the University of Toronto: Robert Falck, a scholar of trouvère music, and Andrew Hughes, an expert in liturgical sources.¹

This essay purports to be nothing more than the presentation of a simple finding in a medieval manuscript. This is the sort of subject that has been less and less favoured of late, if the pages of the Journal of the American Musicological Society (JAMS) are any indication. Between 1960 and 1979, there was at least one main article every year in JAMS devoted to medieval music (a record-breaking six for the years 1963 and 1975), with a total of 38 articles for the 1960s and 30 for the 1970s; incidentally, this was also the period when McGee’s first JAMS article appeared. In the 1980s, the total had fallen to 20, and certain years (1981 and 1983) had no articles on the Middle Ages at all. The 1990s followed this trend with a record low of 13 articles on medieval music for the entire decade, as well as the first article-long critique of a prominent medievalist.² Yet medieval books still have much to offer present musicology, especially considering the Middle Ages’ continuing popularity both inside and outside academia.³ One could even say that medieval books are an inexhaustible source of information for our ever-changing perspectives on the Middle Ages. Though my finding here may have implications for our own current theoretical positions on the Middle Ages, I have sacrificed such a discussion for the sake of the more basic facts surrounding the manuscript and its contents, facts that are crucial to understanding the original purpose and meaning of the single illustration under treatment here. The study of medieval sources can still lead to interesting, simple discoveries that in and of themselves will slowly but steadily improve our knowledge of medieval music performance. That, I think, is just the sort of thing that would please Timothy McGee.

In the summer of 2002, while researching Gautier de Coincy’s music in the Brussels Royal Library, I ran across the illustration shown in Figure 1.1. I had barely opened a small (240 × 155 millimetres) manuscript, Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique 10747, when my eye landed on the striking historiated initial at the bottom left-hand side of folio 3r. It is a fairly small painting, about 35 × 35 millimetres, yet executed with exquisite care and detail. It shows a tonsured man holding a vielle upright in his left hand and a large bow in his right. He is playing the instrument, although not looking at it, instead gazing downwards at a book with musical notation. From certain details in the picture – the distinct placement of the vielle and the book, the player’s turned head with his eyes’ focus on the book practically behind him rather than on the instrument before him – the artist is making clear that this performer is relying on notation rather than memory: he is sight-reading.

This is, to my knowledge and that of the experts I consulted,⁴ the only reported medieval illustration of a fiddler sight-reading music. Now it is important to note that the vielle is one of the most frequently depicted musical instruments in the Middle Ages. Vielle players are portrayed in a variety of ways, both singly and with other instrumentalists. A common iconographic context in the latter case is either an ensemble of angel musicians or the 24 Elders of the Apocalypse. Famous examples include relief sculptures at the portals of the Benedictine Abbey Church at Saint-Denis and the Saint James Cathedral at Compostela.⁵ Players’ postures can vary widely, from fully engaging in performance to simply holding the vielle on their lap. An exceptional single example of multiple postures is the front portal of the cathedral at Moissac in the south of France from the twelfth century.⁶ Here, each one of the 24 elders are vielle players, quite realistically depicted either tuning. playing or holding a vielle. In general, medieval depictions of musicians playing the vielle show them looking slightly away from the viewer and their instrument, over at an undetermined spot; they are presumably scouring their memory for inspiration or are simply lost in their playing. Occasionally, a vielle player will look to another instrumentalist for musical inspiration. Such is the case in several paintings from the celebrated Cantigas of Santa Maria manuscript, San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Monasterio, Real Biblioteca, b.I.2.⁷ In none of these instances, however, is a vielle player relying on a notated exemplar.

This iconographic evidence, together with the total absence of notation for instrumental music until the thirteenth century, has led to a common assumption that instrument players in the Middle Ages could not read music or did not rely on musical notation when performing, or both. As McGee recently put it, ‘ instrumentalists’ repertory apparently consisted primarily of improvisation and melodies that circulated only aurally’.⁸ The documentary vacuum for medieval instrumental music is precisely what makes our example so exceptional. Instead of an illiterate vielle player relying on his memory, we have a clearly literate performer – a tonsured cleric – relying on a score. And so my essay might well stop here, with a happy finishing flourish on how this image of a sight-reading vielle player tells us that some medieval fiddlers knew how to read musical notation. That would be outstanding enough. But a little more elementary research into our painting’s manuscript context goes a long way to illuminate for us this historiated initial.

The work in which we find the illustration shown in Figure 1.1 is the Miracles de Nostre Dame by Gautier de Coincy.⁹ A Benedictine monk, Gautier was trained in the late twelfth century at the Abbey of Saint-Médard in Soissons, going on from there to become prior of the Abbey at Vic-sur-Aisne, a few kilometres west of Soissons down the Aisne river. After two decades at Vic, he returned with honours to Saint-Médard to become prior there in 1233 and died only three years later. Gautier was a prolific writer, his most famous work being the Miracles de Nostre Dame whose two books he composed in 1218 and around 1225. The bulk of the Miracles’ around 30,000 lines are Old French rhymed translations of now-lost Latin miracles, which Gautier decided to ‘translate … in rhyme and metre’ (‘translater … en rime et metre’).¹⁰ Gautier included songs with music notation in his work, ‘new songs’ that he wished to ‘plant in this book’ like ‘sweet-scented flowers’.¹¹ The two books each begin with a prologue (actually two in the first book) followed by seven songs with music. Then comes the bulk of the work, 35 and 23 miracles, respectively, with a few more songs added in some manuscript versions. More than likely Gautier composed his musical works in several stages, beginning after writing his first book and completing them shortly before his death in 1236, as Jacques Chailley has suggested. In his songs as in his miracles, Gautier demonstrates the breadth of his bookish knowledge. The models for his songs range widely, from the ‘high style’ courtly song down to more playful genres such as the pastourelle or the chanson à refrain. Throughout the Miracles, he refers to an even greater variety of musical genres, among them the chanson, son, sonet, rotrouenge, carole and conductus.¹²

Figure 1.1 Gautier de Coincy playing the vielle, Gautier de Coincy MS B (Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique, MS 10747), fol. 3r

It is clear from the Miracles that Gautier was a virtuoso of both words and music. Before becoming a full-fledged monk at the age of 15, Gautier spent his childhood receiving his basic education at the monastic school of Saint-Médard, a training he rounded off with a stint at the University of Paris.¹³ The curriculum at medieval monastic schools and the University of Paris spanned the seven liberal arts. In the trivium (grammar, rhetoric and logic), Gautier’s training included the standard Latin writers from Prisician to Virgil.¹⁴ The extent to which he learned from his Latin mentors is evident in his verbal skill, in particular his propensity for punning, as seen in the excerpts cited below. In the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music), Gautier’s monastic training would have included...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Plates
• List of Tables
• List of Music Examples
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I VIEWING THE EVIDENCE
• PART II RECONSIDERING CONTEXTS
• Publications of Timothy J. McGee
• Index