Music in Medieval Europe

Studies in Honour of Bryan Gillingham

Alma Santosuosso, Terence Bailey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351557375
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Musica

This book presents the most recent findings of twenty of the foremost European and North American researchers into the music of the Middle Ages. The chronological scope of their topics is wide, from the ninth to the fifteenth century. Wide too is the range of the subject matter: included are essays on ecclesiastical chant, early and late (and on the earliest and latest of its supernumerary tropes, monophonic and polyphonic); on the innovative and seminal polyphony of Notre-Dame de Paris, and the Latin poetry associated with the great cathedral; on the liturgy of Paris, Rome and Milan; on musical theory; on the emotional reception of music near the end of the medieval period and the emergence of modern sensibilities; even on methods of encoding the melodies that survive from the Middle Ages, encoding that makes it practical to apply computer-assisted analysis to their vast number. The findings presented in this book will be of interest to those engaged by music and the liturgy, active researchers and students. All the papers are carefully and extensively documented by references to medieval sources.

Chapter 1
Two paradigms of orality: the office and the mass

László Dobszay

The hotly debated questions of the 'Urgeschichte' of the Gregorian chant (i.e. 'the question concerning its origin and development' as formulated by Apel),¹ the relationship of the Carolingian period to the Roman heritage, the priority of the Old Roman and Gregorian versions, the problems of orality, the influence of the invention of notation, the notion of essential and 'trivial' variants, the role of improvisation and verbatim music memory, the study of 'generative rules', the possibility (or impossibility) of getting an overall view of an age prior to the employment of notation: all these are, in reality, different aspects of one and the same question. Moreover, after reading the literature over and over again and comparing the opposing views, I am inclined to regard the discords as apparent only. It is as if it were the case merely that the old, more or less naive, approaches to the whole set of questions had been attacked at different points in the past three or four decades, with the understandable consequence that each attacker exaggerated his results or had reservations about the results of others, without taking all of the elements of the argument into consideration.

Apart from some unavoidable one-sidedness of the different presentations, a new consensus among researchers seems to have taken shape at the end of the twentieth century. It has not yet appeared in written form, but it lies hidden in the apparently conflicting conclusions of scholars. It goes without saying that this consensus does not affect all details; moreover, there are some intractable problems to which answers will always remain tentative, more in the nature of probabilities than well-founded conclusions. The kind of consensus I am talking about cannot be expected to include agreement on such points.

The great questions enumerated above are, in fact, about the same thing, and it does not matter where we start the survey. The key concept may be the strength of memory in any oral music culture. Helmut Hucke and Leo Treitler, creators of the 'New Historical View',² saw much more clearly than anyone else before them that the issue of the origin of chant can be discussed only in the context of oral tradition. They realized that anything one has to say on this theme should be in harmony with the laws of an oral culture and the ways in which production, preservation, and memory work in that environment. They provoked opposition, not so much by holding this view, but by extending it to different periods of the long history, including the age of the manuscripts. The major concern of these two scholars was, in fact, not whether the music recorded in the manuscripts or the structure of a late production (a trope, for example) should be regarded as an outcome of improvisation (understood in any sense), but whether the manuscripts could offer any information regarding the periods prior to their emergence.

On the other hand, when David Hughes, Kenneth Levy, and others referred to the homogeneity of the Gregorian tradition and gave precedence to music script in the process of unification,³ it was not their intention to deny the importance of oral tradition. They meant to confront their colleagues with the fact that the freedom of variation manifested in the codices is much narrower than could be supposed in an improvisatory oral culture. For them the most important feature of chant transmission was the essential homogeneity of the written tradition. They offered a formula for compromise when they conceded that the unity of the codices may derive from the previous stability within the oral practice.

Two well-known facts speak against any tendency to exaggerate the importance of notation in the fixing of the chant repertory. The first is that manuscripts were not used in the actual singing. Anyone familiar with the behaviour of singers will know that a book in the master's hand is not an effective means of arriving at homogeneity and avoiding the process of Umsingen. The second fact is even more convincing. The adiastermatic neumatic notation was not capable of recording the most essential features of the tunes: the neumatic signs viewed in themselves could be interpreted in many different ways. The most essential support they could offer to memory was the coordination of the written words and the memorized tune. These adiastermatic manuscripts were, in fact, textbooks whose weakness with respect to the pitches had to be corrected by the strength of memory. Consequently, any description of the history of chant and its transmission that makes a sharp dividing line at the point of the introduction of neumatic notation is faulty.

Most scholars agree that the chant put in writing in the course of the ninth century was a music that had earlier been fixed in the living practice.⁴ In other words, the repertory was retained in memory by means of oral tradition during the decades between the Frankish reception and the first notated manuscripts. This statement has psychological-perceptual implications: history has demonstrated what memory was capable of; it follows that memory is able to retain a large repertory that contains many, sometimes elaborated melodies.⁵ And if memory could preserve such a complex repertory in the eighth and ninth centuries, it is illogical to deny this possibility with regard to a smaller and stylistically more homogeneous repertory during the earlier centuries.

What was this memory like?⁶ Was it reconstructive or did it preserve music like a sound recording? Those who argue in favour of the one method or the other do not in most cases refer to the same set of examples. The arguments for the 'reconstruction according to generative rules' have been taken not from the sphere of introits, offertories or communions, but from an analysis of graduals, tracts, responsories, and antiphons.⁷ There is, however, an essential difference between the two groups of genres. Many pieces in the latter group are adaptations of a model, a melody type, to different texts. The tracts and many of the graduals and alleluias are the products of thinking in terms of genres and their musical types.⁸

The genres themselves offer alternatives in each case. Though the melody of an antiphon may be more or less predetermined by the given type, its details are not. The Old Roman or Ambrosian parallels confirm clearly that the identity of a piece depends more upon its underlying type melody than upon a particular elaboration. On the other hand, Gregorian tradition, in spite of regional differences and some occasional anomalies, demonstrates a homogeneity even with respect to minor details. In other words, an item lived in general consciousness principally as a melody type, and only secondarily as a fixed series of pitches.⁹ On the one hand, we see antiphons with different words but similar music, and in all three of the main chant traditions we observe, along with this unity of type, the dissimilarity of the individual chants – eloquent witness that memory is attached to types rather than to actual elaboration. On the other hand, we encounter the testimony of the Gregorian manuscripts with their fixed combinations of melodies and text, each chant an independent entity, yet all only slightly different appearances of the same 'tune'. The musical remembrance of antiphons was not one single and homogeneous moment, but a complex process combining different psychological and historical layers.

These remarks are more or less valid for responsories, tracts, and the like.¹⁰ But introits, offertories, and communions do not in any discernible way belong to genre types (except for the late contrafacta) – and this is an important difference that calls for explanation. Some scholars are inclined to explain typological coherence as a result of later standardization;¹¹ but why should such a tendency prevail in one group of genres and not in the other?

And we may go further. Taking the office antiphons again as an example, it will be apparent that the description I have just given is not valid for the entire repertory. There is a group of such antiphons that fully demonstrate 'typological creativity'. In another group features such as typical melodic lines, or the linking of melodic lines and stereotypical motives, can be explained by the vocabulary and grammar of a genre type, while the formation of the melody as a whole is individual. In a third group the individual pieces are nearly or completely independent from each other; such is the case for introits as well.¹²

The three groups have markedly different liturgical spheres and only the contra-facta cross the borders. To the sphere of St Benedict's rule belong the first set of antiphons, those that follow the principle of type. The chants of the second group are almost completely missing from the Old Roman repertory, apart from some items borrowed from the Gregorian. The members of the third group are for the most part compositions for the new services of the early Middle Ages.¹³ This means that the first manuscripts¹⁴ already contain a complex repertory – which is another powerful argument against linking the origins of the chant repertory to the origins of the notation. A repertory produced within two or three – or even four or five – decades could not possibly demonstrate such immense stylistic differences within liturgical categories. The memory that preceded written records consisted of different kinds of recollection, with strata of different depths.

The kind of relationship observed in the first group of antiphons is not to be found in introits, offertories, and communions.¹⁵ But it must be true for them, too, that at an earlier phase of their existence the same sort of relationships were in some sense present – that is to say, that in the general consciousness abstract forms were understood to lie behind individualized pieces. Evidence of this stage is the structural identity of the same pieces elaborated differently in the Old Roman, Gregorian, and Ambrosian versions¹⁶ (the hypothesis of simple borrowing can be ruled out in most cases). As common antecedents one should not suppose an Urform, but rather the abstract melodic type itself – realized differently from the outset by different executants and different communities.

Since creation from type – something that is common in the first genre group –never occurs in the second, we cannot avoid the conclusion that we are dealing with two different performing practices and/or epochs. The following insights gained from the history of liturgy support this view. Roughly speaking, the first set of genres is the outcome of the practice of musically uneducated, but liturgically well-versed communities headed by musically trained leaders: what was sung was produced more or less like folk music. The second group is the joint product of communities of musically educated professional singers. To put it simply, the early office is completely dominated by usus, while the mass-proper was a step towards ars, a step taken while the conditions of an oral culture still prevailed.

The music of the early office was produced and maintained by secular or monastic communities. In both cases the chanting of untrained singers was directed by quasi-professional leaders, the precentors (successors of the ancient psalmistae). The functioning of memory in such a community may have worked in two different ways. In the first, the community being instinctively familiar with the musical language and the musical types, the precentors suggested the actualization of this common knowledge–the combination of melody types and text – by means of introductory intonation.¹⁷ In the second case the adaptation of music to text was fixed, and the chants were taught and memorized as individual melodies isolated from the common musical language, i.e. from the raw material offered by types. Such fixity may ha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of examples
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Bibliographical abbreviations
• 1 Two paradigms of orality: the office and the mass
• 2 Salamanca to Sydney: a newly-discovered manuscript of the Lamentations of Jeremiah
• 3 Gregorian responsories based on texts from the Book of Judith
• 4 Modes and modality: a unifying concept for Western chant?
• 5 Réôme, Cluny, Dijon
• 6 The first dictionary of music: the Vocabularium musicum of ms Monte Cassino 318
• 7 The twilight of troping
• 8 To trope or not to trope? Or, how was that English Gloria performed?
• 9 Why Marian motets on non-Marian tenors? An answer
• 10 Consecrating the house: the Carmelites and the office of the dedication of a church
• 11 A historical context for Guido d'Arezzo's use of distinctio
• 12 The musical text of the introit Resurrexi
• 13 Chants for four masses in the Editio princeps of the Pontificale romanum (1485)
• 14 The double office at St Peter's Basilica on Dominica de Gaudete
• 15 Philip the Chancellor and the conductus prosula: 'motetish' works from the School of Notre-Dame
• 16 Vox – littera – cantus: aspects of voice and vocality in medieval song
• 17 Ambrosian processions of the saints
• 18 Patterns and paleography: revisions, variants, errors, and methods
• 19 Notker in Aquitaine
• 20 The Historia Sancti Magni by Hermannus Contractus (1013-1054)
• Publications of Bryan Gillingham
• Bibliography
• General index
• Index of incipits
• Index of manuscripts cited
• Index of saints