leo treitler. with voice and pen coming to know medieval song and how it was made

Contents: Medieval improvisation – Written music and oral music : improvisation in medieval performance – The Vatican organum treatise and the organum of Notre Dame of Paris : perspectiv

With Voice and Pen

coming to know medie val song

and how it was made

}

Leo Treitler

1

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Data available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Treitler, Leo, 1931–

With voice and pen: coming to know medieval song and how it was made / Leo Treitler p cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p ) and index.

Contents: Medieval improvisation – Written music and oral music : improvisation in medieval performance – The Vatican organum treatise and the organum of Notre Dame of Paris : perspectives on the development of a literate music culture in Europe – Peripheral and central – On the structure of the Alleluia melisma : a Western tendency in Western chant? – Homer and Gregory : the transmission of epic poetry and plainchant – Centonate chant : Übles Flickwerk or e pluribus unus? – Lingering questions about oral literature – The politics of recep- tion: tailoring the present as fulfilment of a desired past – Oral, written, and literate process in the music of the Middle Ages – Observations on the transmission of some Aquitanian tropes – History and ontology of the musical work – The early history of music writing in the West – Reading and singing: on the genesis of Occidental musical writing – Speaking of Jesus – Medieval music and language – The marriage of poetry and music in medieval song.

1 Vocal music – 500–1400 – History and criticism 2 Music and literature I Title.

ml1402.t73 2003 782.42'09'02–dc21 2002192579

isbn 0-19-816644-3

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Typeset by Figaro, Launton, ox26 5dg Printed in Great Britain

on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., Guildford & King’s Lynn

Helmut Hucke

and to the memory of

Barbara Thornton and Fritz Reckow

When I proposed the topic to Oliver Strunk and asked him to be my adviser heexpressed surprise I had arrived at Princeton as a foreigner in such territory (some-thing that I now think worked to my advantage), having first earned a master’sdegree jointly in music composition and history at the University of Chicago,writing a thesis on harmonic procedure in the Fourth String Quartet of BélaBartók, and then spent a year studying composition in Berlin Strunk was notmuch impressed with the music involved, but he allowed that ‘the problems arepretty interesting all right’, and agreed to oversee my work He seemed to knowbetter than I—and conveyed in that characteristically spare way of his—howdeeply the theoretical problems and topics entailed in the study of medieval musicwould engage me.

As one does in developing a dissertation topic we reined mine in, making itmore concrete, less ambitious, and more realistic It would be a study of a tradition

of monastic songs with rhythmic verse on sacred topics originally transmitted inAquitanian manuscripts of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a rich tradition ofart songs made for virtuoso singers whose study did not really require the justifica-tion of a role in the investigation of origins that had led me to them Once intothose repertories I came to think otherwise about Strunk’s assessment of theirmusical qualities, and I have since been struck by the number of modern perform-ing ensembles who have drawn from them in their concerts and recordings

I found there were thirty-three songs that I could read and place in theirintended tonal frameworks with some confidence The first task was to establishtexts for them, and with that my learning began Of the thirty-three songs of my

repertory, twenty-five are represented in at least two sources, and no two sources

of any song in the collection are identical in their musical texts In the exceptionalcase of one song for which notation had been written out for all the strophes (thesongs are all strophic and normally the melody was written out just once) no twostrophes are identical in the notation even of a melisma that concludes each one,where the differences are not explained by the singing of different words

My training and experience with Western music of later times led me to thinkthat I ought to be able to explain such differences as reflections of different ideasabout the structures of the songs, but as far as I could tell the differences did notseem consequential in that way and usually one version seemed to work as well asanother And then there was always the hovering question of the determinacy ofthe neumes, which, to be sure, did seem to be oriented to a single etched line as away of conveying information about relative pitch distance between notes, butwith which one can never be quite certain that an apparent difference is an inten-tional one As long as I reported variants I believed I was serving the material aswell as could be done I first posed this general problem in the original version ofChapter4, where I suggested that it should be regarded not only as an irritant toeditors but also as a potential source of insight into the nature of the early medi-eval music culture

That is how I regarded it, and it opened up successive waves of questions thathave engaged me, on and off, during some forty years, and well beyond the domain

of medieval music in many directions: what is the ontological state, the state ofbeing, of music that is represented in such a fluid way? How can we understand itsprinciples of organization and progression and how can we represent what such anitem essentially is? What were the traditions and conventions on the basis ofwhich it was composed? How was it transmitted and known to the people whosang it? How firmly did the notators mean just exactly what they wrote down? Didthe notations serve them and the singers as prescriptions for the singing, or asdescriptions, or as touchstones, or as exemplifications within a range of possibil-ities for the singing? In any case what were the principles on which the notationsfunctioned and what can we understand about the invention of the notational sys-tems and what prompted it? How was music composed, transmitted, and learntbefore their invention? Each question provoked others and as they unfolded theylinked together in a dense network rather than any kind of logical sequence orhierarchical structure The network spread from philology to history, criticism,

and philosophy But then, that is the original, broad sense of philology.

One of the most important learning experiences for me over this long span

of time was a growing awareness of the handicaps under which we, with mentalresources and forms of thought that we have accumulated over centuries after thefact but especially since the nineteenth century, labour in trying to capturethe spirit of a musical culture that was alive a millennium and more ago I mean

the resources of language, of aesthetic beliefs, of analytical procedures, of images

of the music-historical geography, landscape, and time spans, with their peaks andtroughs and central and peripheral phenomena, the influence of feelings of cul-tural and national, racial, and gender identity and alienation on historical think-ing, the modes of representing histories in narratives and panoramas, ideas abouthow things change, evolve, develop, progress, ideas of what is musical and what isnot, ways of thinking about the ontology of music and about the relations betweenlanguage and music, of our expectations and uses of musical notation

I intend the contradiction implied in the juxtaposition of ‘handicap’ and

‘resources’, which is the dilemma that we share with all historians but which Ibelieve is especially acute for historians of the Middle Ages That is because ‘TheMiddle Ages’ and things ‘medieval’ bear, more than other epochs and the crea-tions of their cultures, the burden of the purposes for which they were inventedand perpetuated as historiographic concepts by people who were not members ofthe culture they invented Brian Stock, a historian of medieval literature, hascaught the weight of this burden: ‘The Renaissance invented the Middle Ages inorder to define itself, the Enlightenment perpetuated them in order to admireitself; and the Romantics revived them in order to escape from themselves

“The Middle Ages” thus constitutes one of the most prevalent cultural myths ofthe modern world’ (‘The Middle Ages as Subject and Object’) For ‘medievalmusic’ that means it must be both pejorated in the service of the Renaissance andthe Enlightenment (representations of medieval music have been especially con-strained by this role, as we see in Ch 16) and idealized in the service of theRomantics And we must add a role as foundation and model of European orWestern music, which has been highly influential in the characterization andjudging of medieval music (see, especially, Ch 9)

But I said ‘dilemma’, for we cannot divest ourselves of our mental resources andreplace them with those of our medieval objects, which we can only try to inferwith hopes of occasional limited success (In Ch 5 I report on one such successachieved by Fritz Reckow, one which would, if allowed, constitute a basis for therevision of much of the modern characterization of medieval song; another is

Mary Carruthers’s The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture,

which could contribute substantially to our conjurings about the role of memory

in the transmission and performance of medieval song.) The best we can do,beyond such occasional successes at capturing medieval beliefs and conceptions, is

to be alert to representations that sound suspiciously like our own conceptions,projected like the voice of a ventriloquist to the bodies of medieval dummies ofthe historian-puppet-master’s manufacture This book is meant to be attentivethroughout to the relations between representation and reality that is thusencountered—in Chapters 1 and 2, 6, 7, and 8, 9, 11, 13, 15, and 16, and most expli-citly Chapter 5, where I reprint and, hopefully, correct my own early disfigurement

of a phenomenon of style history within a medieval genre in accordance with anideological map of the world’s music in the Middle Ages—as egregious aninstance of historiographic conditioning of historical discovery as can be found inthe literature of this field.

This question about ‘Coming to Know’ is as much the subject of this book as arethe particular song traditions that are studied in its chapters and the central ques-tions about their composition and transmission—orally through improvisation,working out (precomposition, as some put it), and memory; and scriptuallythrough notation Indeed it was more than anything else in order to make explicit

in the new introductions that I have added the—often tacit—epistemologicalconditions of study that I took the decision to join these far-flung essays in a book.But that also provided a welcome opportunity to revise them where that seemednecessary and to take account of other work in the field that has appeared since theinitial publications

There are references here and there in the literature to an ongoing ‘debate’ abouttopics discussed in this book that have to do mainly with aspects of the history

of Latin chant, particularly its composition and transmission—oral tradition, improvisation, the role of memory, the stability of the repertory, the beginning of

written transmission and its role vis-à-vis performance (for example, LászlóDobszay, ‘The Debate about the Oral and Written Transmission of Chant’) I be-lieve that the disagreements about these matters—they are hardly debates in anyformal sense—arise mostly out of different ways of construing the processes con-cerned and the names for them They can be sublimated with attention to some ofthe epistemological matters mentioned just above, and with a bit of linguisticarchaeology Both are attempted in this book (see Chs 1 and 2 with respect to

‘improvisation’ and Ch 6, especially the introduction, with respect to ‘memory’).There is, however, one object of contention that has at least the appearance that

it might be settled through the analysis of hard evidence The oldest survivingspecimens of musical notation from the medieval West have been dated to the firstthird or so of the ninth century The oldest books of chant provided throughoutwith musical notation have been dated to some time around the turn of the ninth

to the tenth century Kenneth Levy has compiled evidence in support of hishypothesis that a fully neumated chant book was nevertheless available to thecourt of Charlemagne a century before the writing of the oldest surviving ones,and that it played a key role in the court’s project of replacing local chant traditionswith the tradition of Rome The evidence has been discussed in several publica-tions, and there is no consensus about its conclusiveness (see Ch 6 for details).But the importance of this question, too, depends on a matter of epistemology.Can it be assumed that the members of chant communities singing since child-hood in oral traditions, upon receiving for the first time a text of a tradition differ-ent from theirs, would have accepted its authority and turned at once to the

project of replacing their tradition with the foreign one represented by the text?This would have entailed not only unlearning their tradition and learning a for-eign one, it would have had to entail as well a radical cognitive shift, creating a rolefor a written text to intercede in the pathway from ear to voice—at least for theirleaders.

No evidential support for such a scenario has turned up; on the contrary, onlyanecdotal reports about singers, not books, being sent around to effect such anexchange, and about chant communities blaming one another for the initial fail-ures of the project But it would seem to be an unspoken premiss for asserting thesignificance in this sense of any proposed dating of the origin of the written tradi-tion

In a new propaedeutic for chant studies Richard Crocker relegates such tions to what he calls the ‘prehistory’ of Gregorian chant because they concern atime from which we have no written sources, and he wants us to regard specula-tion about them as ‘romantic fantasy’ He consequently urges a change of focus tothe critical study of chant that is preserved in readable sources (see the introduc-tion to Ch 2 for details)

ques-The posing of such alternatives and the recommendation to choose one overthe other suggests an isolation from the broad range of historical fields that hasmuch bedeviled music-historical studies in general Historians of all subjects haveever occupied themselves with reconstructions and hypotheses that come downessentially to informed and reasoned imaginings about how the surviving evi-dence came to be how it is I am thinking not only of workers in disciplines thatidentify themselves explicitly as some kind of ‘history’, but also of palaeontolo-gists, palaeographers, botanists, zoologists, students of evolution, archaeologists,astronomers, linguists As for the history of chant, unless one assumes that thepieces we have in writing were all composed at the time they were initially writtendown—something that no one has suggested—they are clues to the practices withwhich they are continuous, no matter how well or badly we exploit them as such Idoubt that our curiosity about the connections will be dampened, any more thanwould the curiosities of historians in all those other fields about their

‘prehistories’

We are all guided, consciously or not, by the idea expressed in R G

Collingwood’s classic formulation (The Idea of History):

How, or on what conditions, can the historian know the past? In considering this tion, the first point to notice is that the past is never a given fact If the historian has nodirect or empirical knowledge of his facts, and no transmitted or testimonial knowledge

ques-of them, what kind ques-of knowledge has he? My historical review ques-of the idea ques-of history hasresulted in the emergence of an answer to this question: namely that the historian mustre-enact the past in his own mind

There should be no disputing, in any case, that performance was the focus oftraditions of medieval song, and I could not conceive of making a book aboutthose traditions that would illustrate them only with scores The accompanyingcompact disc, I feel, transforms the book It, as representative of the work of theperformers beyond it, makes its own research contribution, in making manifestthe musicality and virtuosity of singers in all aspects of performance that musthave been assumed by composers and pedagogues—if these were other than singersthemselves That must be a major component of any representation of medievalsong traditions, although it has had hardly any place in scholarly representationsand is in effect suppressed in the aural representations of modern performance tra-ditions such as the chanting tradition that follows the style created by the choirs ofthe monastery of St-Pierre of Solesmes and that has been widely disseminated inrecordings.

The production of the recording was supported with generous grants from theResearch Foundation of the City University of New York, where I was a member

of the faculty of the Graduate Center during the entire time of the preparation ofthis book; and from the Weiss–Brown Publication Subvention Award of theNewberry Library in Chicago I was particularly moved to have the latter support.Howard Brown was my colleague at the University of Chicago very early in mywork on this subject He was the director of the Collegium Musicum there, inwhich his companion Roger Weiss was a tenor When I gave a talk on work com-ing out of my dissertation—my first—at the national meeting of the AmericanMusicological Society in Columbus, Ohio, in 1961, Howard’s ensemble illustrated

it So I feel, in a sense, that the project has come full circle

I have been fortunate, during this work, to be nourished by continuous contactthrough nearly half a century with a number of mainly European colleagues andfriends who share my passion for our subject and from whom I have learnt moreand received more stimulation and support than I can possibly recount, contactwithout which I could not have produced work of any merit in this field They areHelmut Hucke, the late Fritz Reckow, Hartmut Möller, and Andreas Haug inGermany; László Dobszay in Hungary; Wulf Arlt and Max Haas in Switzerland;Ritva Jacobsson, Gunilla Björkvall, and Gunilla Iversen in Sweden; Susan Rankin

in England; the late Nino Pirrotta in the United States and Italy; EdwardNowacki and Charles Atkinson in the United States Their influence is evidentthroughout this book, which I offer as a measure of my appreciation and of myrespect for them Just typing their names brings a rush of blood to my head

I have been equally fortunate in being able to recruit for the performances onthe compact disc a number of friends whom I count among the great singers ofmedieval music: Benjamin Bagby and the late Barbara Thornton of the ensembleSequentia; Dominique Vellard of the Ensemble Gilles Binchois; Katerina

Livljanich of the ensemble Dialogus Their singing has enlivened my ing of medieval song beyond what I could have imagined I am grateful to themfor that and for their enthusiastic contributions to this project.

understand-The decision to add the Blues performance by Lightnin’ Hopkins came verylate The parallels with certain kinds of medieval performance models that arediscussed in Chapter 6 have long been evident to me I thought I should share thatimpression But then, too, I decided to make explicit the exception I take to anattitude that runs just below the surface of some of the literature in the field, thatemphasis on oral tradition and, even more, improvisation, is an offence to the dig-nity and worth of a tradition like that of Gregorian chant At the same time Isignal thereby my regret that the study of oral traditions and of improvisation as aprimary mode of creation has in effect been relegated mainly to the field ofethnomusicology, historical musicology accepting as a subject in general onlysuch improvisation as ornaments of written compositions Historical musicologysuffers a loss from such a division

Having my colleague Bonnie Blackburn serve as copy-editor of this book hasbeen a stroke of great good fortune for me Beyond attending to normal editorialtasks with consummate skill she has rescued me from numerous errors and incon-sistencies, provided valuable information bearing on my subject, and followed myreasoning closely, calling my attention where necessary to its unclear or dubiousturns The book is much the better for her collaboration, and I am most gratefulfor it I do not, however, mean to imply by this that what has survived this processnecessarily has her endorsement

L.T

Lake Hill, New York

The original versions of the chapters comprising this book appeared in the lowing publications and are included here, as revised, with the permission of thepublishers Revisions have been made in the interest of clarity, to eliminate irrel-evancies, and to correct what I now regard as errors

fol-Chapter1 The World of Music, 3 (1991).

Chapter2 El Códice Calixtino y la música de su tiempo: actas del simposio organizado por la Fundación Pedro Barrie de la Maza en La Coruña y Santiago de Compostela, 20–23 de septiembre de 1999, ed José López-Calo and Carlos Villanueva (Funda-

ción Pedro Barrie de Maza: La Coruña, 2001)

Chapter 3 ‘Der Vatikanische Organumtraktat und das Organum von NotreDame de Paris: Perspektiven der Entwicklung einer schriftlichen Musikkultur in

Europa’, Basler Jahrbuch für historische Musikpraxis,7 (1983), translated from theGerman by Leo Treitler

Chapter 4 Roundtable ‘Peripherie und Zentrum in der Musik des Hohen

Mittelalters’, Deutsche Musikforschende Gesellschaft, Internationaler Kongress Berlin

1974, Kongressbericht (Kassel, 1980) The segment reprinted here was originally in

id (ed.), Oral-Formulaic Theory: A Folklore Casebook (Garland Folklore

Case-books, 5, and Garland Reference Library Series of the Humanities, 739; New York:Garland Publishing, 1990), in Music Library Association Notes,50 (1993), 70–6.Chapter9 Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 116 (1991).

Chapter10 Speculum: Journal of the Medieval Academy of America, 65 (1981).

Chapter11 Forum musicologicum, 3 (1982).

Chapter17 Under the title ‘Once More: Medieval Music and Language’, in Essays

in Honor of David G Hughes (Isham Library Papers, 4; Cambridge: Harvard

Uni-versity Press, 1995) The version in this book has a new beginning

2 Written Music and Oral Music: Improvisation in

3 The Vatican Organum Treatise and the Organum of Notre Dame

of Paris: Perspectives on the Development of a Literate Music

5 On the Structure of the Alleluia Melisma: A Western Tendency

6 Homer and Gregory: The Transmission of Epic Poetry and

9 The Politics of Reception: Tailoring the Present as Fulfilment

10 Oral, Written, and Literate Process in the Music of the Middle Ages 230

11 Observations on the Transmission of Some Aquitanian Tropes 252

14 Reading and Singing: On the Genesis of Occidental Music Writing 365

List of Plates

Plates are between pp 162 and 163

I Drawing accompanying the notational representation of the first astical mode in the trope MS Paris lat 1118

II Drawing accompanying the notational representation of the second astical mode in the trope MS Paris lat 1118

III Drawing accompanying the notational representation of the third astical mode in the trope MS Paris lat 1118

IV Drawing accompanying the notational representation of the fourth astical mode in the trope MS Paris lat 1118

ecclesi-V Sculptural representation of the first and second ecclesiastical modes on acapital from the abbey church of Cluny

VI Sculptural representation of the third and fourth ecclesiastical modes on acapital from the abbey church of Cluny

VII Frontispiece from Paris lat 1141

VIII Treves, Stadtbibliothek, uncatalogued single leaf

IX Frontispiece from St Gallen 390–91 (Codex Hartker)

X Frontispiece from Munich clm 17403

XI The Musical Hall of Fame, a painting distributed in reproduction with the magazine The Etude, December, 1911

XII Cartoon by Eugene Mihaesco

XIII Drawing of a lion and a porcupine by Villard de Honnecourt, c.1235 (Paris

fr 19093)

XIV Saint-Bénigne de Dijon, Christ in Majesty with the Animals

XV Vézelay, Église de la Madeleine, Christ in Majesty

List of Figures

2.1 Simha Arom’s analysis of the temporal organization of the Aka

(b) Alleluia Ostende nobis, in Laon 239

(c) Alleluia Eripe me, in St Gallen 339

(d) Alleluia Beatus vir qui suffert, in St Gallen 339

6.1 Sequence Diem festum de sancto Bartholomeo, in Kremsmünster 309 14213.1 An example of cantus planus binatim in Berlin, former Deutsche

13.8 Signs interpreted as accents in ‘transition’ to neumes in Paris, Bibl

14.2 Notational cues in the tenth-century gospel book from St Gallen,

List of Tables

6.1 The two categories of constraints determining chant types 162

13.1 Eight neume characters as written in fourteen neumatic scripts 336

List of Musical Examples1.1 Transcription of the offertory Factus est dominus from Codex Bodmer,

with variants in Vatican Vat lat 5319 and San Pietro F 22 141.2 Hypothetical revision of a passage in Ex 1.1 according to inferred

1.5 The gradual Sciant gentes in the Frankish Gregorian transmission;

the Old Roman transmission of Codex Bodmer; VaticanVat lat

1.6 Written sources of different provenance from the twelfth century:

(a) final cadence of the organum alleluia Hic Martinus; (b) passage

from a MS from the Norman colony of Sicily; (c) passage from an

organum of the Parisian Magnus liber organi; (d )–( f ) passages from

4.1 Two songs by Bernart de Ventadorn, Ara’m conseillatz and Pos pregatz 93

4.4 Notre Dame organum duplum Judea et Iherusalem 100

5.5 Alleluia and melisma from the alleluia Beatus vir sanctus Martinus 121

5.6 Rhythmic prosa from Misset and Aubry, Les Proses d’Adam de

5.7 Two versions of the melisma from the alleluia versus Eripe me 126

6.1 Melisma on ‘dierum’ in the second verse of the offertory

6.2 The melody of Ex 6.1 with prosula texts from Bamberg lit 5;

6.3 Mode 2 Gregorian tract Deus, Deus meus, comparing fourteen

verse melodies and the final phrases of mode 2 tracts

6.4 Initial phrases of the first verses of six Gregorian and five Old

Roman mode 2 tracts with schematic representation of the

6.5 Second phrases of several verses of the mode 2 tract Deus, Deus meus

6.6 The verse melody of the alleluia Dies sanctificatus in standard and

6.7 Conclusion of the alleluia verse Paratum cor meum in Gregorian

transmission from Paris lat 903, Benevento VI 34, and London

6.8 Cadential melismas of the respond and verse of the Gregorian

gradual Timete dominum; cadential melismas of the gradual

Timete dominum and the alleluia Dies sanctificatus in the Old

10.2 Cadential melismas of three strophes of the versus Ex ade vitio 245

11.5 Trope In Ihordane 277

12.2 Second (più mosso) section of Chopin, Waltz Op 64 No 2 in

C sharp minor with transcriptions from recordings by Alfred

12.3 Chopin, Waltz Op posthumous 70 No 1 in G flat major,

12.4 Chopin, Nocturne Op 62 No 1, bars 53–5: sketch, autograph fair

13.1 Trope introduction Deus pater filium to the Christmas introit

15.1 Two trope elements from Paris lat 909 and Apt 17, with the

16.2 Two versions of the trope verse Discipulis flammas and two versions

Two emphases throughout this book make the enclosed compact disc able for illustration of the book’s interpretations and, more directly, as conveyer ofits meanings Both can seem so self-evident as to be redundant, but they need stat-ing explicitly First, medieval song was a singer’s art, an art of belting out throughmastery of melody and vocal skills the thoughts, sentiments, and images of scrip-tural prose and sacred and secular poetry Second, the composing and broadcast-ing of medieval song took place in singing; it was an oral tradition, whether or notany of it came to be represented by the ciphers of musical notation In the absence

indispens-of singing, the notated musical examples in the book would have presented selves to readers as objects, held fast in their notational matrices The emphases ofthis book, instead, do not only require recorded performances, they ask for singingthat celebrates the oneness of verbal and musical expression as it celebrates voice.The performances on the disc answer to those demands, but I must put it theother way around: it is largely from such performances that I have learnt the need

them-to make histhem-torical interpretations responsible them-to the moment of singing out,something that has been too much neglected in the scholarly study and—paradoxically—even in many recorded performances of medieval song (I thinkespecially of the tradition of chant singing owing to the choirs of the Abbey ofSt-Pierre de Solesmes and their followers, which tends to the suppression of thevocal virtuosity, versatility, and sensuousness implicit in the written record made

by notators of the Middle Ages)

content s of the compact disc

1 Eighth mode intonation formula and model antiphon from Paris lat 1121(Aquitanian, 11th c.) Eighth mode introit Introduxit vos (Frankish*) with

trope verses from Paris lat 1121

2 First mode introit antiphon Rorate caeli (Frankish)

3 First mode introit antiphon Rorate caeli (Roman; Vatican Vat lat 5319, 11th c.)

4 First mode gradual Sciant gentes (Frankish)

5 First mode gradual Sciant gentes (Roman; Codex Bodmer, 11th c.)

6 Second mode alleluia v Dies sanctificatus (Frankish)

7 Second mode alleluia v Dies sanctificatus (Roman; Codex Bodmer)

8 Organum: first mode alleluia v Hic Martinus (Vatican Ottob lat 3025, the

Vatican Organum Treatise)

9 Second mode tract Deus deus meus (Frankish)

10 Lightnin’ Hopkins, Blues, Goin’ Away

11 Fifth mode offertory Factus est Dominus (Roman; Codex Bodmer)

12 Versus Lilium floruit, Paris 3549 (12th c.)

13 Versus Radix iesse, Paris lat 1139 (c.1098)

14 Versus Radix iesse, Le Puy A/V/7/009 (c.1588)

15 Jaufre Rudel, troubadour, Lanquand li jorn, Paris fr 20050 (13th c.) For

sources see Chapter 17 n 17

16 Walther von der Vogelweide, Minnesänger, Palästinalied (13th c.) For sources

see Chapter 17 n 19

* Chant items identified as ‘Frankish’ are based on the neumes and transcriptions of the

Graduale triplex, with the exception of Track 9, which is based on Paris lat 776 (Albi,

11th c.) Attentive listeners will notice differences of pitch content between thisperformance and the transcription in Chapter 6, Ex 6.1, which is based on the VaticanEdition I leave these differences as a tacit commentary on the concept of the ‘fixity’ of therepertory See the introduction to Chapter 6 on this subject

Tracks 1–7 and 11 are performed by members of the ensemble Dialogus: CatherineSergent, Caroline Magalhaes, and Katarina Livljanic (Director) They are joined

in track 8 by Lucia Nigohossian Track 9 is performed by Dominique Vellard,Director of the ensemble Gilles Binchois; track 10 is performed by Lightnin’Hopkins; tracks 12–16 are performed by members of the ensemble Sequentia:track 12, Benjamin Bagby, Co-Director, and Eric Mentzel; track 13, BenjaminBagby; track 14, Barbara Thornton, Co-Director and the women’s choir ofSequentia; track 15, Barbara Thornton; track 16, Benjamin Bagby

Track 9 is taken from Chant Grégorien (STIL 2106 S84), with permission ofSTIL records Track 10 is taken from Goin’ Away (Prestige/Bluesville OBCCD-

522-2 [BV-1073]), courtesy of Fantasy, Inc Track 13 is taken from Shining Light: Music from Aquitania (Deutsche Harmonia Mundi 05472 77370 2), courtesy of the

RCA Victor Groups Track 15 has been digitally remastered from the cassette tape

issued with The Union of Words and Music in Medieval Poetry, edited by Rebecca A.

Baltzer, Thomas Cable, and James I Wimsatt (Austin: University of Texas Press,1991), used with the permission of the University of Texas Press All four items areused with the permission of their original publishers The remaining tracks areoriginal to this Compact Disc

Benjamin Bagby supervised the recording of the new items in Paris RobertBerkovitz remastered tracks 14 and 15 and provided altogether indispensable guid-ance in the preparation of the recordings The design for the Compact Disc wasmade by Leann Davis Alspaugh

Katerina Livljanich has provided the following comment on her ensemble’sperformances of chant on this recording

a note about chant performance¹

All stories are haunted by the ghosts of the stories they might have been

(Salman Rushdie, Shame)

Like stories, medieval chant manuscripts seem to be haunted by the ghosts of howthey might have been written These performances of Frankish and Roman chantare just one such story: what we can hear on this recording is just one possibleimage of their sound, for they certainly did sound in different ways in the mouths

of medieval cantors throughout Europe When we perform chant of the Frankishtradition, we are confronted with a multitude of taciturn manuscripts from differ-ent places and centuries that transmit very similar or identical images of chantmelodies To which does one give the privilege of being considered ‘good sourcesfor performance’? And what do we mean by ‘good source’? A diastematically pre-cise one? Richer in rhythmical indications? Or just more legible to us than theother manuscripts? Would the same ‘good source’ be considered good by acontemporary singer and a medieval cantor for whom oral tradition was a trueperformance source and manuscripts were not ‘scores’ in the sense that we knowthat word? Would the criteria be the same?

Through decades of chant research scholars have considered some types ofnotation as more precise than others with respect to rhythm, giving particularprivilege to the earliest neumes of the St Gallen and Metz families Yet thisknowledge does not encourage us to translate them into a set of tables and recipesfor a precise performance of each neume The same text can reveal different truths

to different readers The discipline known as Gregorian semiology brought a newperspective to the understanding of the earliest neumes, but as singers we areaware that each performance style is just one possible reading, an interpretation of

an interpretation In this particular performance we try to take into account all theprecision of the rich indications for rhythm and neume grouping provided by St.Gallen manuscripts for the Frankish pieces Besides careful reference to rhythmicnuances in the neumatic script, there are many different levels we may considerwhen we want to incarnate these signs in sound There is the rhetorical function ofeach piece, its modal identity, ornamental richness, a profile crystallized duringcenturies of oral transmission All these elements influence our performance deci-sions Yet we shall never be able to know precisely what constituted long and shortdurations or fast and slow movement for St Gallen cantors and scribes, how thesevalues related to one another, and how flexible they were in their symbiosis with

¹ The CD accompanying this book contains recordings of several medieval chants and songs, preted by various performers This note is not a musicological commentary about all of them, but an indi-

inter-vidual performer’s point of view concerning the following chants: introit Rorate caeli, alleluia Dies sanctificatus, gradual Sciant gentes, all in Frankish and Roman traditions, offertory Factus est dominus in the Roman tradition, the troped introit Introduxit vos, and an organum from the Vatican Organum Treatise.

the words of a chant Yet medieval chant did not survive only through the mirror

of St Gallen neumes, and if we want to perform chant repertory from othersources we should not be trapped by a St Gallen myopia or apply parameters fromone notation to another It seems that the ultimate help and guidance in the per-formance of neumes comes from the words that we are singing, the sense of thestory or the sentiment we are conveying Only in connection with the words doneumes reveal their inner logic

This matter becomes much more complex when we look at Roman chant.Should we then say ‘As we do not know how to interpret the rhythm of this type ofnotation it is useless to sing this repertory’? Some layers in chants of the Romanrepertory are more or less comparable to the melodies of the Frankish tradition If

we take the example of the Christmas alleluia Dies sanctificatus we shall gain a very

significant amount of information from similarities in the ornamental characterand phrasing of that melody between Roman and St Gallen manuscripts If, onthe other hand, we wish to apply an analysis of the same kind to the offertory

Factus est dominus we shall be confronted by less similar versions For the highly

repetitive Roman melody there will be different problems in the performance,presented by its inner construction and by the role of musical formulas in the dec-lamation of the text that cannot be reduced to an isolated analysis of neumes.Then what do we really want to do when we make this music sound? Do wewant it to sound as it did in a medieval liturgy? (But then, in which century, atwhich place? in which acoustics?) Or do we simply want it to sound ‘well’? ‘Well’for which audience? Are we not conditioned by our musicological visions andconvictions, by our musical taste, by a tendency even to tailor messages from themanuscripts sometimes in order to make them suit our own theories?

From the same text performers will always read slightly different musical ities and each of these realities will be haunted by the ghosts of songs they could

real-have been (The way of singing three solo verses in Factus est dominus shows this

plurality, and we purposely stress the different vocal and personal identities of thethree singers who render them.) The attempt to reduce the song to neumes alwaysreminds me of forbidden literature by dissident writers When their books finallybecame available and openly published, one realized that many writers had beenscreaming for decades about the impossibility of expressing themselves in theirlanguage, but when the time came to speak, in the hysterical joy over their redis-covered tongue they forgot what they actually intended to say In our joy overdiscovering neumes we might be in danger of reducing music to its script, andforgetting that we can sing

man uscrip t sigla

Kultur-besitz

Swit-zerland), Codex 74Codex Las Huelgas Burgos, Monasterio de Las Huelgas, Codex Las Huelgas

Münster Staatsarchiv

Paris, Bibl Ste-Gen Bibliothèque Ste-Genevieve

Rome, Bibl naz Biblioteca nazionale Vittorio Emanuele II

Rome, Bibl Vall Biblioteca Vallicelliana

Vatican Organum Treatise Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Ottob lat 3025

bibliographical

Planus: Papers Read at the Third Meeting, Tihany, Hungary, 19–24 September 1988 (Budapest, 1990)

Supplement (Oxford, 1934–71)

CT Corpus Troporum, ed Ritva Jonsson, Gunilla

Björkvall, and Gunilla Iversen (Acta universitatisStockholmiensis, Studia Latina Stockholmiensia;Stockholm and Uppsala, 1975– )

Twelfth Congress, ed Daniel Heartz and Bonnie

Wade (Kassel, 1981)

Hucbald, Guido, and John Hucbald, Guido, and John on Music, trans Warren

Babb, ed Claude V Palisca (New Haven, 1978)

Honor of David G Hughes (Isham Library Papers, 4;

Cambridge, Mass., 1995)

Blume, 16 vols (Kassel, 1949–79)

Ludwig Finscher (Kassel, 1994– )

Stanley Sadie, 20 vols (London, 1980)

edn., ed Stanley Sadie, 29 vols (London, 2001)

Palaeographie der Musik Palaeographie der Musik, i: Die einstimmige Musik des

Mittelalters, ed Wulf Arlt (Cologne, 1973–9) [in 5

pts]; pt 2: Max Haas, Byzantinische und slavische

Notationen (1973); pt 3: Solange Corbin, Die Neumen

(1977); pt 4: Ewald Jammers: Aufzeichnungsweisen der

einstimmigen ausserliturgischen Musik des Mittelalters

(1975)

PM Paléographie musicale (Solesmes, 1889– )

Strunk’s Source Readings Oliver Strunk (ed.), Strunk’s Source Readings in Music

History, rev edn., Leo Treitler, gen ed (New York,

1998)

A familiar example is the often-discussed case of the interpretation of the phonies, sonatas, and chamber works of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven and theircontemporaries in terms of the concept of ‘sonata form’ that was fully articulatedonly in composition manuals of the second quarter of the nineteenth century.What we must evaluate is the degree to which this helps to elucidate those works, asagainst the possibility that in interpreting them under a conception that was givenexpression after the fact, we somewhat distort their composers’ conceptions ofthem Without entering into the complexities of the issue over intentionality thatthis case can raise, we can probably agree that the matter is pretty well settled withthe acknowledgement that those nineteenth-century formulations are themselvesbased on the works of those composers as models There is little serious rejection ofthem as anachronistic and distorting.

sym-But this is no more than a particular case of the task constantly faced by ians of every subject: elucidating some part of the past with the language andconcepts of the historian’s present, while seeking at the same time to capture thelanguage and concepts of that past and breathe life into them so as to grasp them asthe tools of that past’s own present The task is complicated even further by thehistory that the language and concepts of the historian’s present bear, history that isoften not in the historian’s consciousness, and which may be alien to the historian’s,

histor-as well histor-as to the historical object’s, present The history of language can in suchstealthy reversal capture and imprison thought Must we resign ourselves to thedistorting effects of that, yielding, with Nietzsche, that ‘We cease to think when werefuse to do so under the constraint of language?’¹ Or can we oppose such effectsthrough work in the archaeology of language?

Improvisation—word and concept woven as leading thread into the texture of

¹ The Will to Power, trans Walter Kaufmann and R J Hollingdale, ed Walter Kaufmann (New

York, 1964), 283.

discourse about medieval music-making—presents this dilemma in shrill voice.Thefirst two chapters in this book are concerned to demonstrate that, and toexemplify the benefits towards an unfettered historical view from such archaeo-logical work.

The subject of this chapter—‘improvisation’, considered as word, concept, andpractice—presents a particularly vexing case The word (along with its verb, adjec-tive, and adverb forms) is modern in all European languages (details are given in

Ch 2) That alone is not reason enough to avoid its use in describing medieval tices But in its etymological roots and in its wide usage as of the nineteenth andtwentieth centuries it can have negative and even pejorative connotations when it isheld up against the value-norm of through-composed, well-structured, unifiedmusic These are described at the beginning of the following chapter Bruno Nettlhas reflected on the cultural meaning of those connotations and I summarize hisreflections further on in this introduction Because such connotations come to thefore in the context of scholarship on chant—more prominently by far than inthe context of the study of any other Western art music—until the publication ofthe original version of this chapter in 1991 I avoided the word ‘improvisation’ andits variants in writing about oral traditions of chant and related music in order not

prac-to give the impression that I would place those under the rubric of traditions ried on by improvident musicians Nonetheless, as it happened, even my talk of oraltraditions was translated by some readers as language about improvisation, with allthe negative connotations that have been impressed on that word during its mod-ern history As Nettl wrote, as editor, in the preface to the collection of essays inwhich this one first appeared, ‘Improvisation was linked with oral tradition [in theWestern tradition of music scholarship], and it was sometimes assumed that allmusic not notated must be in some way improvised.’²

car-So when Nettl invited me to contribute to that collection I welcomed the tunity to write about the subject in the company of scholars for whom ‘improvisa-tion’ is not negatively valued Their subjects are improvisation by Arab musicians,

oppor-by North American jazz musicians, and oppor-by children singing while at play in an tralian aboriginal culture.³ Their perspectives are alike in four fundamentalrespects: first, they understand ‘improvisation’ neutrally, descriptively, as ‘creativity

Aus-in the context of performance’, as Racy puts it (p 8);⁴ second and third, they do notconceive a boundary between improvisation and composition so sharp as to makethem categorical opposites, and so they do not construe the relationship to be ahierarchy in which durable works produced through composition are more high-valued than the ephemera that emerge in improvisational activity; fourth, they refer

² ‘New Perspectives on Improvisation’, WM 3 (1991), 3–6.

³ Ali Jihad Racy, ‘Creativity and Ambience: An Ecstatic Feedback Model from Arab Music’, ibid 7–28; Gregory E Smith, ‘In Quest of a New Perspective on Improvised Jazz: A View from the Bal- kans’, 29–52; Margaret J Kartomi, ‘Musical Improvisations by Children at Play’, 53–66.

⁴ Nettl, in his article ‘Improvisation’ in The New Harvard Dictionary of Music, ed Don Randel

(Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 392, puts it: ‘The creation of music in the course of performance.’ The last

phrase served him for the title of his subsequent anthology, In the Course of Performance: Studies in the World of Musical Improvisation, ed Nettl with Melinda Russell (Chicago, 1998).

to entirely different sets of values for the musical creations of the cultures aboutwhich they write from those on which we judge the masterworks of Western classi-cal music Kartomi writes, for example: ‘We need to recognize that these expres-

sions are artistic Child art, which has come to be highly appreciated by adults for its

unique styles and outlook, normally displays a high measure of spontaneous tivity as opposed to the laborious workings behind most adult art works’ (p 56).Racy concludes his account this way: ‘The ecstatic feedback model of creativity places prime emphasis on the process of music making Music is seen as a particip-atory phenomenon that involves direct emotional exchange between performers

crea-and listeners Tarab artistry is directly crea-and organically intertwined with the ecstatic

and interactive dynamics of the performance event’ (p 22)

Above all, for none of these writers—any more than for ethnomusicologists andjazz scholars in general—is ‘improvisation’ a value term one way or the other And

so I took this opportunity to introduce the term in the context of medieval studies,cleared of the dark tones with which it has been stained in the literature of chantstudies especially, in order to suggest the varying ways and various contexts in whichmusic-making in the European Middle Ages was in general like music-making inthe cultures that these authors describe I believe that is what Nettl expected of me,for it was his project in that publication, as in the anthology of 1998, to redress theneglect of ‘the various orders of creativity’ that lead to finished works in favor of thefocus on works themselves that has characterized ‘the history of musicology’, asNettl put it in the introduction to his anthology (p 1) Putting it positively, he hasbeen working to establish a place in musical studies for learning about improvisa-tion, a place that is commensurate with the prominence and the range of its prac-tices over a very extensive historical and geographical terrain, and that requires theneutralization of the concept that is attempted in the 1998 anthology

But even there we find signs of how difficult a task that is and how much tion it requires In Stephen Blum’s illuminating contribution to the book, ‘Recog-nizing Improvisation’, there is a citation of Aristotle’s famous speculations on the

atten-origins of drama in the Poetics In the translation of Stephen Halliwell⁵ we read of

‘those who brought poetry into being by their improvisations ton]’, and of ‘tragedy, having come into being from an improvisational origin [arches autoschediastike].’ Blum provides a translation from the Arabic of Ibn Sina’s com-

[autoschediasma-mentary on this passage, in which the word ‘extemporize’ in its several formsappears in place of ‘improvise’.⁶ That Dahiyat’s rendering is more proximate to the

sense of the original is suggested by references in the Iliad and the Odyssey to ing ‘at close quarters’ (autoschedios; Blum elucidates ‘i.e with minimal opportunity

fight-to plan one’s moves before making them’) This concords with dictionary

defini-tions of schediasma as whim or caprice and of schediazo as acting off-hand, giving

free play, or pejoratively acting with insufficient care Translating these conceptswith the word ‘improvisation’ presupposes its prior negative loading, which wouldpre-empt the kind of neutrality for which Nettl’s authors aim

⁵ The Poetics of Aristotle:Translation and Commentary (Chapel Hill, NC, 1987)

⁶ Avicenna’s Commentary on the Poetics of Aristotle, trans Ismael M Dahiyat (Leiden, 1974).

It is worth trying to understand how it happens that suggestions of tion in the background of medieval chant tradition, and even implications ofimprovisation read into talk about the oral tradition of chant practice, have been somuch understood in the sense of this negative loading To do so we must first takeaccount of the paradoxical fact that what is negative in the connotations of theword was actually celebrated when the word came into general use in Europeanlanguages in the nineteenth century The signs are in words incorporated in the

improvisa-titles of many pieces that were composed at the time: caprice or capriccio, fantasy, impromptu, moment musicale, rhapsody, all of them suggesting a musical expression

that is a whim of the moment, an impulse, unplanned as to its occurrence and itsmoment-to-moment progression, guided more by passion and intuition than bythe rational faculty, emphasizing that rather than elegant design Pieces with suchwords in their titles were not necessarily in fact such unplanned productions (one

thinks of the wealth of analytical literature about Chopin’s Polonaise Fantasie), but

they were meant to give that impression, to have that aura, exactly in prominent andperhaps titillating contrast with works—often by the same composers—that werecarefully worked out

It is precisely the implication of that aura of the impulsive and the unplannedthat has been taken as an offence to the stature, dignity, and aesthetic grandilo-quence of chant when improvisation is mentioned or implied in reference to it (As

I write this we in the USA are confronted with a dramatic demonstration of howunsettling and disturbing the experience of an improvisatory process can be I meanthe course of resolution of the presidential election of 2000, which was unpredict-able at every turn.) I think of three reasons why this should be so: first, Gregorianchant has been the music of the Western Christian Church for over a millennium;second, it is regarded as the foundational music of Western culture, the counterpartfor music of the visual and literary arts of Greek Antiquity; third, there is conse-quently strong motivation to see embodied in it what have been regarded since thenineteenth century as the essential aesthetic principles and values of Western clas-sical music This subject is discussed at length in the introduction to Chapter 5 and

in Chapter 9, the second part of whose title hints at this function Clearly the notations of ‘improvisation’ fly in the face of this value system

con-Nettl attributes the neglect of improvisation in musical studies substantially tothis conflict, putting it rather sharply:

The musical establishment to which the profession of musicology belongs connects improvisation as a musical practice, but even more as a concept, with

a kind of third world of music Jazz, the music of non-Western cultures, folkmusic, and all music in oral tradition are somehow included here In theconception of the art music world, improvisation embodies the absence ofprecise planning and discipline The most common contrast in the Americanpublic conception is between composed art music and improvised jazz, inwhich art music is correlated with discipline, art for art’s sake, reliability, andpredictability, while the correlation between classical musicians as middle

class and conventionally moral, as against the old stereotype of jazz musicians

as unreliable, with unconventional dress and sexual mores, excessive use ofalcohol and drugs, and more Improvisation as the music of people who don’tplan ahead ⁷

However closely this catches ‘the American public conception’, a stereotypedcontrast between the ‘discipline, reliability, and predictability’ of Western classicalart music and the ‘absence of precise planning and discipline’ of other, especiallyimprovised, musics, is certainly in evidence in the modern literature on medievalchant It is what has made it so difficult to conceive of chant as an improvisatory art

In the face of that stereotype I invite a comparison between the Gregorian tract

American blues song Goin’ Away (CD track 10), composed and performed by

Lightnin’ Hopkins

The two performances have parallel expressive vocations, each in its own socialsetting: the intonation of a lengthy personal lament, each piling on its woefulplaints in the manner of a litany, that is, in a series The expressive impact is thusdelivered in large measure by the almost numbing repetitiveness of the singing Thewords are unfolded in a series of verses, each intoned to a model fixed by the samemusical pattern, a pattern that is thus heard over and over In both cases it is a matter

of four phrases in which each verse is declaimed What fixes the pattern in the

tract—which is of course melody alone—are the goal tones of the four phrases: d, c, f,d, reinforced by formulaic approaches to those tones (a detailed analysis is given in

Ch 6) In the blues the pattern is also fixed by a sequence of focal points for the fourphrases in which each verse is likewise declaimed, but there they are the tones of thetonal-harmonic hierarchy, given out by the guitar: tonic, subdominant, tonic–dominant–tonic (this last progression often made via the subdominant) In bothcases the melodic phrases and sub-phrases are adapted to the sense-units of thewords, which they, in effect, punctuate (this principle is articulated in the presentchapter) We would find the same parallels between any second-mode Gregoriantract and any blues Floating the words on this sort of musical patterning is a pro-cedure well adapted to improvisation, and its use in these traditions of cultures sodistant from one another can be understood against the background of the fact thatboth indeed began as improvising traditions The similarities illustrate the princi-ple that biologists call convergent evolution, producing homologues

What do we gain from the comparison? I shall try a paradoxical formulation Onthe one hand we exploit the familiar experience of the blues performance as a kind

of hermeneutic bridge to the distant chant—it helps us to think ‘this is like thing we know’ On the other hand we approach the tract liberated from the insu-lating genre classification that has been a principal dimension of the organization

some-of Western music history, and we are released from the habit some-of apprehending it,like all items of chant, as a piece of fixed, absolute music That habit is, after all, apremiss of the interpretation of chants as structurally unified works In that sense

⁷ Nettl, In the Course of Performance, 6–7.

we de-familiarize the tract The comparison enables us to transcend the category

distinction of art music and popular music, which is especially dubious for theMiddle Ages And in identifying a fundamental musical universal, it transcends thecultural opposition that has been another premiss of the analysis of plainchant (dis-cussed in the introduction to Ch 5 and in Ch 9)

The last phrase of the passage from Nettl’s introduction puts in a nutshell a tral point about the improvisation concept that runs afoul of one of the mostsanctified axioms about the transmission of chant both before and after the precip-itation of the repertory into notated books Whether it is in the Romantic concep-tion that valorized all those pseudo-extempore compositions, or in the pejorativereading of ‘improvisation’ that we find in the literature on chant, or in the criteriafor successful improvisation in music cultures other than the Western art-musicculture, there is intimation—true or not—that improvised music is characterized

cen-by variation; the rendering of an improvised item is different from one time to thenext: intentionally, if this is regarded as a value, inevitably when it is the opposite,usually called ‘stability’, that is valued It is the latter conception that prevails in theliterature on chant history, and that is why the possibility of improvisation in theestablishment of the chant tradition has been thought to be ruled out by the homo-geneity of the written transmission in the earliest notated books The problematics

of the place of the stability concept in the discourse about chant history are cussed at length in the introduction to Chapter 6 In this chapter the analysis of theRoman offertory Factus est dominus is intended as a counter-example in the domain

dis-of chant to the axiom dis-of the necessary variability dis-of improvised music The analysis

is given in terms of rules or constraints according to which the succession of crete melodic elements is determined by the semantic, syntactic, and phoneticparameters of the words to be vocalized The rules are of such a density and preci-sion as to control nearly every note In a comparison of the three existing sources forthe chant a small number of variants emerge, sufficient, perhaps, to suggest that thenear replication is not simply a result of copying (in each case the variant can beunderstood as the product of an alternative rule), and showing the small degree ofplay in the determination of the chant I suggest that a singer who had memorizedthe melodic elements and the rules was prepared to vocalize the words, and that theoutcome could be virtually identical from one performance to another The conclu-sion is that variability is not inevitable, but depends on the density of the con-straints controlling the performance

dis-Another cross-cultural comparison, drawn in Chapter 2, reinforces this point.There it concerns the highly rule-bound offertory discussed in Chapter 1 and anexample of the entrancing polyphonic singing of Central African pygmies This is ahighly complex oral performance practice that is made possible by a rigorousorganization in accordance with extremely strict rules which, here, too, bring aboutperformances that are nearly identical from one time to the next

While the original version of this chapter was the occasion for the abandonment

of my own long-guarded scruple against any appeal to the label ‘improvisation’ forcharacterizing medieval performance—in particular of chant—it was by no means

thefirst occasion on which that tradition has been so characterized On the trary, as Helmut Hucke wrote in the opening sentence of his essay ‘Improvisation

con-im Gregorianischen Gesang’, ‘That there was con-improvising in the practice ofGregorian chant is a supposition that is often expressed.’⁸ For an example he cited apassage from an article by Walter Lipphardt:

Germinal melodies of the time around 600 lay at the root of Roman cantorialpractice, but these were, in characteristic southern fashion, forever varied,ornamented, reconfigured by the singers, for as long as the melodies weremaintained on Italian soil It was in the special nature of the Frankish melodictradition that it gave up the improvisational art of the South and becamefixed, but by virtue of that and at the same time it became ‘sacral’ and unified.⁹

At the root of this brief account, we might say, lies a germinal theme of historicalchant scholarship, with these motifs: improvisation is a practice of southern peo-ples, particularly Italians; its essence is perpetual variation; when the Romanmelodic tradition was taken over by the people of the North (the Franks) it becamefixed—fixity is as much an expression of the northern character as is variability anexpression of the southern character; with fixity goes unity: fixity is a necessarycondition of unity, as it is a necessary condition of authenticity; and it does not lievery far below the surface that both unity and authenticity are to be preferred totheir absence—their attainment constitutes an advance

What I have translated as ‘ornamented’ in the first sentence of the passage from

Lipphardt is the German verziert, and the association of that word with

‘impro-visation’ is a clue to the context of meaning that the latter carried along when it wasintroduced into the domain of medieval chant composition and performance

Verzierung referred to the practice by virtuoso performers in the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries—mainly singers—of ornamenting the composed and writtensolos of the works they performed in concert The practice was highly valued byaudiences, who were, however, impatient with performers whose improvisationsthey had heard before It was from such a tradition that the improvisation concept,first applied to music in the eighteenth century, acquired its connotation of per-petual variation, which runs counter, of course, to the investment in the theme ofthe chant’s fixity And it is one of the two contexts evoked by the phrase ‘impro-visatory flights’, cited in the following chapter as an ironic characterization meant

to cast doubt on the suggestion of improvisation in chant tradition The other,clearly, is the eighteenth-century fashion for the ‘free fantasy’, as described and ex-emplified by C P E Bach, with its qualities of flowing spontaneity, eccentricity,abruptness, and unpredictability.¹⁰ But these could not be further removed fromthe ideals and methods of chant practice, before or after the age of music writing.What is very clear in Lipphardt’s language is the a priori nature of the narrative

Each of its motifs expresses a value—now aesthetic, now cultural or even national,

a prejudice in the literal sense—that has priority in the interpretation of evidence.And we might well wonder whether such a narrative could ever actually be the clearoutcome of an open engagement with the historical material, were it not alreadypre-interpreted through the elements of the narrative itself We must recognizethat historical accounts, especially when they are cast in narrative form, inevitablyhave a fictive aspect, but we do want them to be true and realistic accounts of theirpart of the historical world in flux, as far as we can make them so On close readingLipphardt’s unidimensional and unidirectional account must strike us, not somuch as false, but as incapable of being confirmed as true and lacking any semb-lance of an appearance of reality This fundamental historiographic issue will come

up repeatedly throughout the discussions in this book

Hucke continued, in the second sentence of the cited essay, ‘But until now ourknowledge hardly goes beyond this supposition [i.e that Gregorian chantingentailed improvisation]’ He motivated the undertaking to push our knowledgefurther with the simple but profound admonition that ‘one must take into accountthat, after all, this all happens in the absence of writing’.¹¹ And he directed it withthe question whether the melodies transmitted in writing show ‘improvisatorymarkings’, whether we can regard them as ‘inscribed improvisations’, to be put to apopulation in the field that he had defined on the grounds of an intuitive sense thatanswers would be found there—Gradual verses of the fifth mode, in the OldRoman transmission (‘Improvisation im Gregorianischen Gesang’) There hethought he did indeed find the ‘marks of a regulated improvisational practice, mak-ing use of rigorous stylization principles, formal schemes, and fixed melodicelements’ (p 5)

What he did not explain, in the latter essay or anywhere else, is why these should

be regarded as ‘improvisatory markings’, or what he really meant by that At theconclusion of the earlier of the two essays he had drawn a contrast between themaking of chants through the ‘free’ stringing together of fixed elements or lines—

he called that ‘improvisatory’—and their composition following a ‘model’ or figurational principle’ I can see the difference, but why one should be called

‘con-‘improvisatory’ and the other not, is not so clear Much later, for example in

‘Toward a New Historical View of Gregorian Chant’,¹² Hucke seemed to be fied to show how attention to these elements and other factors allow us to under-stand, through re-enactment of the composition of individual chants, how suchchants could have been composed orally, without any reference to ‘improvisation’,and without any effort at systematic classification of techniques His late analysesshow that such re-enactment is really the ultimate critical approach to the chants

satis-we have before us in written form With this shift of focus the fixity–variabilitytopos ceased to be such an issue for him In ‘Improvisation im GregorianischenGesang’, however, he was still under the sway of the paradigm sketched byLipphardt and its priorities He concluded: ‘At the latest about the middle of the

¹¹ ‘Musikalische Formen der Officiumsantiphonen’, KmJb 37 (1953), 7–33.

¹² JAMS 33 (1980), 437–67.

eighth century the melodies were set down in writing While the Old Roman ertory was in part further developed, the Frankish transmission, arising throughconsistent revision of the Old Roman transmission, shows signs of a practice thatremained note-for-note faithful to its tradition.’¹³

rep-Hucke subsequently revised his views about the time of the writing down, therelation between the Old Roman and Frankish transmissions, the degree of uni-formity in the early written Frankish transmission and what it shows (or does notshow) about fixity in the oral tradition, and altogether about the possibility of flesh-ing out a narrative as unidimensional and unidirectional as that sketched byLipphardt

We are undoubtedly influenced in our thoughts about ‘improvisation’ by ourfeelings about the sorts of life strategies—or absence of them—that are often solabelled That must interfere with the effort to ground—as I am trying to do—asense of improvisation as a practice or behaviour that can result in orderliness and

stability in any domain Mary Catherine Bateson begins her book Composing a Life

with a description of this tension:

This is a book about life as an improvisatory art, about the ways we combinefamiliar and unfamiliar components in response to new situations, following

an underlying grammar and an evolving aesthetic It started from a gruntled reflection on my own life as a sort of desperate improvisation inwhich I was constantly trying to make something coherent from conflictingelements to fit rapidly changing settings Improvisation can be either a last resort

dis-or an established way of evoking creativity.¹⁴

af terword

I note that I have used the word ‘tradition’ nineteen times in this introduction It is

a term that deserves more careful reflection than we are accustomed to affording it

in our literature Two pieces of writing are especially recommended to the readerfor their encouragement of such reflection: Brian Stock, ‘Tradition and Modernity:Modes from the Past’,¹⁵ and Ruth Finnegan, ‘Tradition, But what Tradition, andfor Whom’?¹⁶

}

¹³ ‘Improvisation im Gregorianischen Gesang’, 8.

¹⁴ Composing a Life (New York, 1989), 1 My emphasis.

¹⁵ Listening for the Text: On the Uses of the Past (Baltimore, 1990), 159–71.

¹⁶ The Milman Parry Lecture on Oral Tradition for 1989–90, in the journal Oral Tradition, 6

(1991), 104–25.