Workshop 2 – Marginal Music: Minuscule Texts and Liturgical Practices in the Early Medieval West

Ninth- and tenth-century ‘musical minitexts’ are often evidence for practices which sit alongside more authoritative behaviours. Such minitexts can be written in more informal notations that do not conform in strict ways to recognised neumatic scripts, while the same passage written twice in the margins of the same manuscript by two different scribes might show noticeable variation, especially if melismatic, as if each scribe were writing his/her own rendition. There are many ninth-century records of sequentiae, sequences and tropes that would otherwise hardly receive a place in the main content of a contemporary chant book, not to mention the autonomous and autograph unica consisting of texted music by single authors that cataloguers brusquely describe as (mere) pen trials because they do not fit the plainchant corpus and may be difficult to place. Yet, even if we merely see through a glass darkly, musical minitext entries indicate an intensely creative musical landscape in the Carolingian period. Mostly unrecognized and not systematically studied until now, these musical minitexts demand that we reconsider the spectrum of why music was recorded in writing in the ninth and tenth centuries.

Programme

Abstracts

1ST SESSION. EARLY MEDIEVAL CHANT

Sam Barrett

Marginalized Hymns? Ninth-century Notations for Prudentian metra in Non-Liturgical Sources

One of the many intriguing results of Susan Rankin’s study of ninth-century notations was the large number of versus among the earliest notations, the majority of which are settings of metra by Boethius and Prudentius (Writing Sounds, 2018, pp. 129-133).  Music historians have tended to regard these and other notated versus as examples of non-liturgical song.  This paper will present evidence for an alternative hypothesis, namely that metra from Prudentius’ Liber Cathemerinon and Liber Peristephanon that were notated in ninth-century non-liturgical sources preserve hymns excluded from both the Romano-Frankish rite and the rapidly expanding New Hymnal.  It will be shown that the melodies of several of these notated metra may be reconstructed since they accord closely with melodies later recorded for the same texts as processional hymns.  If both the hypothesis and the reconstructions are accepted, then ninth-century notations for Prudentian metra provide a window onto marginalized hymn traditions whose melodies were previously regarded as irretrievable.

Giulio Minniti

Three Minitexts, One Gallican Chant

Work from the Minitext Project has uncovered three 10^th c. minitext notated sources for Veniens vir splendidissimus, the offertory for the Inventio crucis mass.

Until now the 11^th c. Aquitanian BnF Lat. 776 and 903 were the first witnesses to Veniens vir and other proper chants for Inventio crucis, whereas the oldest Inventio crucis formulary in the 9^th c. Compiegne antiphonary ‘recycled’ pre-existing chants. This brought Luisa Nardini to interpret Veniens vir as one of several new chants sharing a distinct archaising Gallican style composed to supply an ad hoc proprium missae for Inventio crucis. [2016]

Our findings now open space for new hypotheses, and here I will assess two: one integrates the three minitexts into Nardini’s reading as testimonies from major Merovingian-Carolingian centres that are about a century earlier than the previously eldest Aquitanian sources; the other, simply put, probes these minitexts as witnesses of authentic Gallican chant.

Whatever the soundest path, the three Veniens vir minitexts are documents of extraordinary importance for the history of Gallican chant, providing remarkable evidence for its transmission in unexpected places.

Susan Rankin

A New Ninth-Century List of Chants for the Divine Office

Currently unknown to scholars of the Roman liturgy, a list of office chants made in the middle third of the ninth century provides a long ‘minitext’ for my contribution to this meeting.  This addition to a pandect bible includes incipits for office chants from the first Sunday of Advent to the feast of St John the Evangelist (27.12). 

The new list depends on liturgy for the monastic office, and therefore sits alongside the list of office chants in Trier Stadtbibliothek 1245/597 — also made in the mid ninth century — as the earliest extant information about specific Gregorian chants in monastic offices for the first eight feasts of the liturgical year.  The Trier manuscript was made somewhere in Lotharingia, while this new list was made somewhere in central France: its nearest later relatives belong to the Corbie-St Denis tradition much written about by Michel Huglo.  It is therefore possible to trace that tradition much further back than previously possible, and to use this as a basis for investigating Carolingian liturgical reforms of the divine office.

2ND SESSION. MEDIEVAL MUSIC THEORY AND DIAGRAMS

Mariken Teeuwen

Annotations and Minitexts surrounding the ars musica in the early Middle Ages

In the margins of music-theoretical treatises from late Antiquity, glosses and commentaries were added that bridge the gap between one world of music thinking and -making (the ancient Greek world, with kithara and tetrachords) and another (with melodies for the voice and liturgical repertoire). Looking at these, can we see a reflection of the new music practice in which these commentators were grounded? Do they reveal how concepts, terminology and systems were appropriated and changed in the process? Furthermore, I would like to consider which musical elements can be found in the toolbox of the glossator: neums, melodies, schemata or diagrams – how were they used and shared among the annotated texts concerning the ars musica?

Konstantin Voigt

Annotations and Minitexts Surrounding Cantus-Theory in “Musica”-Manuscripts since the 10^th Century

The minitexts, diagrams and glosses surrounding ancient ars musica in Carolingian times confirm the authority of their reference texts and their status as knowledge relevant to acquisition. The glosses on Boethius for example reveal a competent mathematical understanding of the matters by Carolingian commentators. However, they do not show direct links between the ancient ars musica and cantus practice – the texts were not studied for the sake of cantus. In the theoretical manuscripts of the 10^th and 11^th centuries, the situation is different. Those texts that established the link between antique ars and cantus around 900 - the Enchiriadis treatises, Hucbald, Regino of Prüm, etc. - do now appear in the same manuscripts as the canonical texts of the ancient ars and their glosses – forming a newly calibrated discipline encompassing both cantus theory and ancient ars musica.  This paper examines minitexts, diagrams, glosses on 9^th and 10^th century texts of cantus theory that appear in the same manuscripts as the enriched ars musica texts, in order to make the different dynamics of adopting, connecting and commenting music-related knowledge comparable: Before and after the fusion of ars and cantus into a common field of study and in the tension of ancient and new authority.

Andrew Hicks

On the Transmigration of Soul Diagrams

Building on the foundational work of Michel Huglo and Anna Somfai on the late Platonic, Calcidian, Macrobian and other ersatz world soul diagrams, this contribution maps the contingent and ancillary spaces (flyleaves, paste-downs, unused folios, and other marginal spaces) on which scribes and scholars scribbled world soul diagrams and related fragmentary texts (a gloss here, a lemma there), even during the earliest stages of the Carolingian reception of late-ancient Platonism. Such a map charts the transmigration of ancient cosmology into surprisingly "practical" musical spaces, which has striking implications for our understanding of the complex intersections of "minitextual" philosophical and musical experimentation.

3RD SESSION. NEW COMPOSITIONS

Thomas Forest Kelly

Neuma triplex: New Sources, Old Questions

The discovery, by Susan Rankin, of the two earliest sources of the neuma triplex described by Amalar brings us closer than ever to Amalar’s own time. The enormous popularity of what Amalar calls a triple neume, with its various prosulae, allows a very interesting view of filiation and transmission, but does not clarify the nature of its origin. These new sources do not solve, but help to clarify, a surprisingly complex web of associations.

Andreas Haug

Recalling a Melody with Voice and Pen

One of the intriguing aspects of additions to medieval manuscripts is that they reveal practices not otherwise attested to by books. On a page left empty at the end of the manuscript Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek, Class. 24, several alternating hands, presumably of the late 10^th or early 11^th century, have entered several notations of one and the same liturgical melisma plus a notated record of its most widespread texting, the offertory prosula Laetemur gaudiis (Corpus Troporum XI, no. 44E, pp. 128-129). The paper provides a close description of these interrelated entries and proposes a scenario capable of explaining them. It argues that the partly aborted, partly completed notations are to be understood as visible traces of repeated, partly failed, partly successful, joint, or competing attempts to perform the melisma and to retrieve its exact melodic content from the memory of singers gathered around the page of the book. Furthermore, it is suggested that the melodic reconstruction of the melisma in a medium that renders melodic movement visible without preserving it detached from memory, was part of an attempt to ascertain the coordination between the melisma recalled and written text of the prosula shaped after and sung on it. The overall purpose of the paper is to explore, how an exceptional and, in some respects, idiosyncratic use of neumatic notation can illuminate the 'normal' function of this medium, which is disputed in research.

Henry Parkes

Liturgical Additions and the Liturgical Round: Case Studies from Fleury

Minitexts that seem unrelated to their host manuscript nevertheless record a historical transaction between a person and a material object. Considered in isolation these transactions are open-ended and usually impossible to fathom. But the beauty of liturgical and musical minitexts is that they can encode a great deal of hidden information: texts may divulge a particular ‘time stamp’ that corresponds to a moment in the liturgical day, season or year; different genres may point us towards particular persons, ranks or duties, liturgical or institutional; and localisable peculiarities of worship, melody or notation may give us insights into geographies and networks of practice. This is especially true wherever minitexts cluster, either in a single book or in the work of a single hand. In my paper I shall look at a handful of instances where these kinds of information can be calibrated, triangulated, and then manipulated into loose hypotheses about the liturgical cultures that stand behind minitext additions. My examples will be drawn from manuscript corpora associated with the Benedictine abbey of Fleury (as identified by Solange Corbin, Anselme Davril, Marco Mostert and others) in the years 900-1100.

4TH SESSION. PALAEOGRAPHY AND CODICOLOGY

Laura Albiero

Written Space and Margins: A Codicological Perspective

In the context of manuscript production, the layout of a page is essential for understanding how the text was presented to readers and how visual elements, such as illuminations or illustrations, were integrated into the manuscript. The arrangement and organization of content on a written page are prepared by the scribe through techniques and designs that changed over time. Previous studies have shown how, according to medieval recipes, aesthetics and functionality were crucial in the construction of page layouts. Simultaneously, they have underscored the significant diversity in ruling patterns. In this contribution, the relationship between the written area and margins is examined from a codicological perspective, illustrating how various solutions can alter the reader’s perception of what constitutes the margin and what does not.

Giovanni Varelli

Probationes notarum

While there seems to be no evidence of a phase of graphic experimentation for the design of main notational families in the early ninth century, the design of basic neume shapes must have resulted from a process of experimentation taking place at the level of 'pre-script'. During this phase, parameters such as the graphic proportions of music signs and their module, their placement on the manuscript page, disciplined features of style and their visual interaction with other graphic apparatuses of early chant books, etc. were established. The same lack of evidence may not be said for later centuries, especially the tenth and the eleventh. Graphic development continued well after 900 AD, if at a less fundamental level; it was mostly involving choices of calligraphy ('style'), pitch-specificity, and design of special signs, that were either absent in earlier notations, or present in simpler, less nuanced forms.

The only privileged places where we can have a glimpse of what might have happened in this ‘lost’ phase of experimentation are exactly outside those conventional contexts such as a well-planned and disciplined folio of an Alemannic Gradual. Just as the once-widespread misconception that 'minuscule texts' were of lesser importance to historical research, there also seems to have been less of an interest in the in-depth analysis of music scripts outside those few exceptions of well-planned, complete examples in marginalia and flyleaves, thus generally neglecting 'pen trials' and fragmentary annotations. In my contribution, I intend to show how illuminating the analysis of these sources can be for those scholars interested in questions of origin and/or later development of early musical notations, and as such I claim that musical 'minuscule texts' should be treated at the level of primary written evidence, alongside more formal sources. In particular, I will illustrate some examples where the scribes' probatio was clearly not (or not only) that of calami, but primarily of notae (et cantus).

Nicolas Bell

Remarks on Some English Musical Marginalia

The publication in 2006 of K. D. Hartzell’s Catalogue of Manuscripts Written or Owned in England before 1200 containing Music marked an important moment in our understanding of music-writing in England as it constituted the first attempt to list all relevant materials in a single volume. Following various additions and some removals from his list, we can now speak with reasonable confidence of some 380 surviving manuscripts before 1200 containing notation, a tiny survival rate and a collection which for many reasons is likely to be unrepresentative, but nevertheless a much larger number than was previously known to scholarship, and a more comprehensive list than exists for most other countries. A significant proportion of the entries in Hartzell’s catalogue consist of marginal additions to otherwise non-musical manuscripts. These are generally described in the catalogue as “Pentrials”, but in this presentation I will take a representative selection of these marginal additions and argue that this nomenclature of probationes pennae is problematic and unduly reductive in many cases. On occasion the marginalia are in some form of dialogue with the main text, sometimes by adding an exegetical layer, where in other cases they provide interesting and unexpected evidence of musical practice in institutions for which little other evidence survives. Ultimately the variety of textual situations makes the possibility of making any generalised statements of function (such as the designation as “pen-trial”) very difficult, and reveals the rich range of contexts in which marginal music can exist.

This workshop is organised by the FRIHUMSAM Project Voices on the Edge: Minuscule Texts in Early Medieval Latin (2021-27), funded by the Research Council of Norway. Voices on the Edge collaborates in its activities and agenda with the ERC Advanced Grant Project no. 101018645 MINiTEXTS: Marginalized Voices in Early Medieval Latin Culture c. 700–c.1000 funded by the European Research Council (2022–26).