medieval.org
book with CD released on 2003
Oxford University Press
Two emphases throughout this book make the enclosed compact disc
indispensable for illustration of the book’s interpretations and,
more directly, as conveyer of its meanings. Both can seem so
self-evident as to be redundant, but they need stating explicitly.
First, medieval song was a singer’s art, an art of belting out
through mastery of melody and vocal skills the thoughts, sentiments,
and images of scriptural prose and sacred and secular poetry. Second,
the composing and broadcasting of medieval song took place in singing;
it was an oral tradition, whether or not any of it came to be
represented by the ciphers of musical notation. In the absence of
singing, the notated musical examples in the book would have presented
themselves to readers as objects, held fast in their notational
matrices. The emphases of this book, instead, do not only require
recorded performances, they ask for singing that 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 the
other way around: it is largely from such performances that I have
learnt the need to make historical interpretations responsible 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 think especially of the
tradition of chant singing owing to the choirs of the Abbey of
St-Pierre de Solesmes and their followers, which tends to the
suppression of the vocal virtuosity, versatility, and sensuousness
implicit in the written record made by notators of the Middle Ages).
DIALOGOS
Katarina Livljanic
Catherine Sergent, Caroline Magalhaes, and Katarina Livljanic
& Lucia Nigohossian in #8
01 - [4:44]
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
First mode introit antiphon Rorate caeli
02 - Frankish [0:50]
03 - Roman · Vatican Vat. lat. 5319, 11th c. [0:58]
First mode gradual Sciant gentes
04 - Frankish [4:03]
05 - Roman · Codex Bodmer, 11th c. [4:36]
Second mode alleluia v. Dies sanctificatus
06 - Frankish [1:57]
07 - Roman, Codex Bodmer [1:53]
08 - Organum. First mode alleluia v. Hic Martinus [8:30]
Vatican Ottob. lat. 3025, the Vatican Organum Treatise
DOMINIQUE VELLARD
09 - Second mode tract Deus deus meus [9:09]
Frankish
taken from Chant
Grégorien (STIL 2106 S84)
LIGHTNIN' HOPKINS
10 - Goin’ Away [5:49]
blues
taken from
Goin’ Away (Prestige/Bluesville OBCCD522-2 [BV-1073]), courtesy
of Fantasy, Inc
DIALOGOS
11 - Fifth mode offertory Factus est Dominus [5:14]
Roman · Codex Bodmer
SEQUENTIA
12 - Versus Lilium floruit [4:36]
Paris 3549 · 12th c.
Benjamin Bagby · Eric Mentzel
13 - Versus Radix iesse [2:18]
Paris lat. 1139 · c.1098
Benjamin Bagby
from Shining Light.
Music from Aquitania (Deutsche Harmonia Mundi 05472 77370 2),
courtesy of the RCA Victor Groups
14 - Versus Radix iesse [2:01]
Le Puy A/V/7/009 · c.1588
Barbara Thornton · women choir of Sequentia
15 - Jaufre Rudel, troubadour, Lanquand li jorn [9:20]
Barbara Thornton
Paris fr. 20050 · 13th c. For sources see Chapter 17 n. 17
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
16 - Walther von der Vogelweide, Minnesänger, Palästinalied
[7:08]
13th c. For sources see Chapter 17 n. 19
Benjamin Bagby
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 this performance and
the transcription in Chapter 6, Ex. 6.1, which is based on the Vatican
Edition. I leave these differences as a tacit commentary on the concept
of the ‘fixity’ of the repertory. See the introduction to
Chapter 6 on this subject.
Original to this Compact Disc this CD: #01-08, 11, 12, 14, 16
originally recorded for this CD
Benjamin Bagby supervised the recording of the new items in Paris.
Robert Berkovitz remastered tracks 14 and 15 and provided altogether
indispensable guidance in the preparation of the recordings. The design
for the Compact Disc was made by Leann Davis Alspaugh.
Katerina Livljanich has provided the following comment on her
ensemble’s performances of chant on this recording.
A NOTE ABOUT CHANT PERFORMANCE (1)
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 how they might have been written. These performances of
Frankish and Roman chant are just one such story: what we can hear on
this recording is just one possible image 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 Frankish tradition, we
are confronted with a multitude of taciturn manuscripts from different
places and centuries that transmit very similar or identical images of
chant melodies. To which does one give the privilege of being
considered ‘good sources for performance’? And what do we
mean by ‘good source’? A diastematically precise one?
Richer in rhythmical indications? Or just more legible to us than the
other manuscripts? Would the same ‘good source’ be
considered good by a contemporary singer and a medieval cantor for whom
oral tradition was a true performance source and manuscripts were not
‘scores’ in the sense that we know that word? Would the
criteria be the same?
Through decades of chant research scholars have considered some types
of notation as more precise than others with respect to rhythm, giving
particular privilege to the earliest neumes of the St. Gallen and Metz
families. Yet this knowledge does not encourage us to translate them
into a set of tables and recipes for a precise performance of each
neume. The same text can reveal different truths to different readers.
The discipline known as Gregorian semiology brought a new perspective
to the understanding of the earliest neumes, but as singers we are
aware 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 the precision of the rich indications for
rhythm and neume grouping provided by St. Gallen manuscripts for the
Frankish pieces. Besides careful reference to rhythmic nuances in the
neumatic script, there are many different levels we may consider when
we want to incarnate these signs in sound. There is the rhetorical
function of each piece, its modal identity, ornamental richness, a
profile crystallized during centuries of oral transmission. All these
elements influence our performance decisions. Yet we shall never be
able to know precisely what constituted long and short durations or
fast and slow movement for St. Gallen cantors and scribes, how these
values related to one another, and how flexible they were in their
symbiosis with 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 other sources we should not be trapped by a St.
Gallen myopia or apply parameters from one notation to another. It
seems that the ultimate help and guidance in the performance of neumes
comes from the words that we are singing, the sense of the story or the
sentiment we are conveying. Only in connection with the words do neumes
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 of notation it is useless to sing this repertory’?
Some layers in chants of the Roman repertory 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 character and phrasing of that melody between Roman and St.
Gallen manuscripts. If, on the 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
declamation 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 we
want it to sound as it did in a medieval liturgy? (But then, in which
century, at which 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 and convictions, by our
musical taste, by a tendency even to tailor messages from the
manuscripts sometimes in order to make them suit our own theories?
From the same text performers will always read slightly different
musical realities and each of these realities will be haunted by the
ghosts of songs they could 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 the
three singers who render them.) The attempt to reduce the song to
neumes always reminds me of forbidden literature by dissident writers.
When their books finally became available and openly published, one
realized that many writers had been screaming for decades about the
impossibility of expressing themselves in their language, but when the
time came to speak, in the hysterical joy over their rediscovered
tongue they forgot what they actually intended to say. In our joy over
discovering neumes we might be in danger of reducing music to its
script, and forgetting that we can sing.
(1) The CD
accompanying this book contains recordings of several medieval chants
and songs, interpreted by various performers. This note is not a
musicological commentary about all of them, but an individual
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.