Boethius. Songs of Consolation
/ Sequentia
Metra from 11th-century Canterbury
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Glossa GCD 922518
2018
1. Carmina qui quondam [6:54] 1,1
2. Heu, quam praecipiti [6:08] 1,2
3. Tunc me discussa [2:27] 1,3
4. Quisquis composito [2:09] 1,4
5. O stelliferi [8:11] 1,5
6. Cum Phoebi radiis [3:04] 1,6
7. Nubibus atris [3:32] 1,7
8. Stans a longe [3:41] instrumental interlude
9. Si quantas rapidis [2:48] 2,2
10. Tuba [3:12] instrumental interlude
11. Bella bis quinis [3:57] 4,7
12. Vaga [2:12] instrumental interlude
13. Quid tantos [1:50] 4,4
Sequentia
Ensemble for medieval music
Benjamin Bagby — voice, harps & direction
Hanna Marti — voice & harp
Norbert Rodenkirchen — flutes
A production of the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis - Hochschule für Alte Musik
Recorded at Topaz Audio Studios, Cologne, from 31 July to 5 August 2017
Recording producer, editing and mastering: Reinhard Kobialka
Scientific advice: Sam Barrett, University of Cambridge
Photographs: Susanna Drescher | Design: Rosa Tendero
Executive producer & editorial director scb: Thomas Drescher | Sequentia: Katja Zimmermann
All texts and translations © 2018 Schola Cantorum Basiliensis
Executive producer & editorial director Glossa /note 1 music: Carlos Céster
Assistance (Glossa): María Díaz, Mark Wiggins
© 2018 note 1 music gmbh
This recording would not have been possible without the support provided at various stages by the British Academy,
the Leverhulme Trust, the Isaac Newton Trust, the Music & Letters Trust, Pembroke College, Cambridge, and
the Faculty of Music at the University of Cambridge.
We would also like to thank the Maja Sacher-Stiftung for supporting this production.
Schola Cantorum Basiliensis – Hochschule für Alte Musik
University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW)
Boethius
Songs of Consolation
I.
Imprisoned in Pavia in the early 520s, Boethius could not have
anticipated that his final work would become one of the most widely
read books of the Middle Ages. Born into a distinguished Roman family
around the time of the deposition of the last emperor of the West in
476, Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius enjoyed a distinguished career
as a Roman statesman. He also excelled as a scholar, embarking on a
project to translate Greek learning into Latin, his works proving
critical in the transmission of classical thought to the Middle Ages.
Loyalty to the Roman Senate nevertheless made him vulnerable to his
enemies at a time when the West was ruled by an Ostrogothic king.
Accused of treason, Boethius was arrested, tortured and condemned to
death.
The Consolation of Philosophy
portrays Boethius’ struggle to reconcile himself to his fate by
exploring the ways of man, the role of Fortune, and the major questions
of good and evil. Visited in his cell by a personified figure of
Philosophy, who is alarmed by the state into which he has fallen,
Boethius is gradually restored from self-pity to his rightful mind not
only through reasoned dialogue but also through lyric. The thirty-nine
poems interspersed with prose throughout the Consolation of Philosophy
provide not only occasions for reflection, but also the medicine
that heals and cures his psychological frailty.
Evidence that the poems of the Consolation were
sung in the early Middle Ages survives in the form of
musical notation added to over thirty extant manuscripts
dating from the ninth through to the beginning
of the twelfth century. The signs used for the
notation, known as neumes, record the outline of the
melodies, prompting the singer to recall precise
pitches from memory. Without access to the lost oral
tradition, the task of reconstructing the melodies for
the Consolation had seemed impossible.
Research conducted at Cambridge made a
breakthrough by identifying song models that lie
behind the neumatic notations. It has been shown
that medieval musicians associated certain metres
used in the Consolation of Philosophy with contemporaneous
song styles and then applied characteristic
melodic patterns from these repertories to Boethius’
poetry. Scholarly detective work enabled much
melodic information to be recovered about individual
songs, but the final leap into sound required a second
step. Collaboration with the singers of Sequentia
enabled practical experimentation and the opportunity
to draw on a working knowledge of early
medieval song repertories derived from decades of
reconstruction, oral memorization and performance.
Proceeding through dialogue, it proved possible to
arrive at realisations informed by both scholarly
insight and practical experience.
The recorded performances take as their starting
point a fragment from the Cambridge Songs, a
repertory of over eighty songs thought to have been
compiled in part in the Rhineland, possibly at the
court of the Holy Roman Emperor Henry III (1017-
1056). A missing leaf from a copy of the collection
made at St Augustine’s Canterbury in the mid-eleventh
century was rediscovered in the early 1980s
by the Boethian scholar Margaret Gibson and identified
by Christopher Page. This fragment, now reunited
with the original manuscript in the University
Library at Cambridge, transmits the opening lines of
poems from the Consolation of Philosophy in series.
Neumes were added to six of the seven poems
from the first book, the most dramatic portion of the
text, in which Boethius laments his fallen condition
(Carmina qui quondam), is reprimanded by Philosophy
(Heu quam praecipiti) and undergoes an internal transformation
that begins the process of returning to his
true self (Tunc me discussa). In the fourth song
(Quisquis composito), Philosophy encourages Boethius
to calm his emotions in order to ready himself for the
task ahead. Taking this advice to heart, Boethius
replies with O stelliferi conditor orbis, which opens as a
hymn to a distant creator, before changing into a
complaint that the wicked prosper at the expense of
the just while Fortune governs human affairs. In the
final seven lines he turns to prayer, pleading with the
creator to intervene and restore order in the affairs of
man. Seeing that Boethius is not yet ready for more
powerful remedies, Philosophy turns to nature
imagery in the unnotated Cum Phoebii radiis, pointing
out that everything has its proper season and thus
the natural order of things is divinely ordered. The
last song in the first book, Nubibus atris, continues
with Philosophy instructing Boethius to cast aside
joy and fear in order to submit himself to what will be
her talking and singing cure.
The remaining songs in this recording are highlights
from the ensuing debate between Boethius and
Philosophia. In Si quantas rapidis, Philosophy seeks to
persuade Boethius that happiness is not to be sought
in mutable Fortune: men complain even in times of
plenty; it is the man who controls his appetite that is
rich. By the time of Quid tantos iuvat, which appears
in the fourth book of the Consolation, the mood is
darker: Philosophy urges Boethius not to take his
own life as death is always nearby and true consolation
is to be found not in worldly rewards but in a
morally ordered life. Lastly, Philosophy evokes the
labours of Hercules in Bella bis quinis. She weaves
together the tales of Agamemnon, Odysseus and
Hercules into a single poem that concludes with the
stern moral injunction to overcome the self in order
to achieve the highest goals.
The recovered Cambridge Songs leaf is of vital
importance since its neumes can be placed alongside
two coeval notated manuscripts from eleventh-century
Canterbury. The resulting critical mass of information
exceptionally allows informed reconstruction
of a body of songs linked to a single centre. The
majority of reconstructions are based on the
Cambridge Songs leaf, but Carmina qui quondam and
Quid tantos were reconstructed from notations
recorded in a manuscript now held in private ownership
that was previously conserved at Geneva, and
Bella bis quinis is based on an Oxford manuscript
(Bodleian Library Auct. F. I. 15). Two melodies were
reconstructed with the aid of continental sources:
the realisation of Si quantas rapidis was informed by a
northern French notation that provides decisive
clues for reconstruction (Berne Burgerbibliothek
181). Cum Phoebi radiis is the only song that does not
survive with notation in an insular manuscript;
reconstruction began from the neumes recorded in a
late ninth-century manuscript from St Gall now held
in Naples (Biblioteca Nazionale IV. G. 68).
The Carmina Cantabrigiensa constitutes an
important song collection associated with episcopal
and royal courts, whose texts tell of singing to the lyre
and of performance at the ‘palaces of kings’. The
inclusion of Boethian metra in this collection indicates
that these songs were sung and played by highly
trained musicians to members of an educated and
social elite within what was already a sophisticated
European song culture. There are plenty of other
indications that these songs were sung in the cathedral
schools and monasteries renowned for their
learning as part of a clerical culture that extended
from boys through to the highest ranking prelates.
The Canterbury manuscript conserved at Oxford
contains a note recording its donation by Bishop
Leofric to the cathedral chapter of Exeter on his
death in 1072. Another manuscript now held in the
Vatican was already notated when a singer and
harpist by the name of Dunstan consulted it at
Glastonbury, where he was abbot in the middle of the
tenth century before taking up his post as
Archbishop of Canterbury (960-88).
The three instrumental items are not directly
related to the Boethian metra but are reconstructed
from a contemporary Anglo-Saxon repertory from
nearby Winchester. The realisations are based on a
comparison between the eleventh-century neumes
contained in the Winchester Troper as held in Corpus
Christi College, Cambridge, and later sources from
which pitches may be reliably transcribed. The three
pieces are instrumental versions of sequences (a form
of poetry and music composed using parallel strophes)
transcribed and reconstructed by Norbert
Rodenkirchen as part of his ongoing research into
the earliest written sources of music that might have
been played by instruments. Several sequence
melodies have evocative names: titles such as Puella
turbata (“The troubled girl”) suggest a pre-existing
and probably non-liturgical melody, while a certain
number of titles refer to musical instruments (such as
Symphonia and Cithara), implying an original purpose
as instrumental pieces in oral tradition. Stans a longe
takes its name from a text added to the melody as
early as the mid-ninth century, which tells of the publican
in the temple who did not pray ostentatiously
with the Pharisee but stood far off, pleading forgiveness
for his sins (Luke 18:13). Vaga is a sequence
melody whose name refers to an itinerant actress or
player, perhaps also indicating a worldly appearance
or manner. Tuba, which refers to a brass instrument,
is a melody that goes back at least to the ninth century
and is found in continental sources under the
name Fistula, which means flute.
Sam Barrett
[Sam Barrett is Reader in Early Medieval Music at the
University of Cambridge and Fellow and Director of Studies
in Music at Pembroke College. His research on the medieval
melodic tradition of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy was
published by Bärenreiter in a two-volume study in 2013.]
II.
Sequentia’s interest in the Boethian metra dates to
the 1980’s, when Barbara Thornton and I were
increasingly drawn to the text of the Consolation of
Philosophy as a source of inspiration for several of
Sequentia’s other musical projects, but also for the
significance which this magnificent text had for our
lives outside the work of the ensemble. Barbara, who
managed to find time in her busy life to create a large
corpus of poetry in English, wrote a series of poetic
cycles in response to the metra of the Consolatio.
These were never published, and are currently
housed in the ensemble’s archives.
We were well aware of the existence of some
neumed sources, but in those days there were as yet
no successful attempts at making viable reconstructions,
and we felt hesitant to attempt such reconstructions
ourselves. But in 1991, while working on a new
concert program called The Wheel of Fate and Fortune’s
Revenge (an extension of an earlier project around the
early 14th-century Roman de Fauvel), the urge to
attempt a performance of Boethian metra was simply
irresistible. I made versions of two of the metra, Haec
cum superba (2,1) and Cum polo Phoebus (2,3) for that
programme, using simple modal formulae for the
recitation. As was the case with most of our small-ensemble
concert programmes, these versions were
never recorded, but performed widely in 1992-1993.
As the ensemble was re-grouping following
Barbara’s death in 1998, various new programs were
developed, and chief among these was Lost Songs of a
Rhineland Harper, which was inspired by the neumed
texts in the famous 11th-century Cambridge Songs
manuscript. This source contained Boethian metra,
and I was tempted to try again at a reconstruction of
the metrum, Felix qui potuit boni (3,12), with its retelling
of the Orpheus myth. This time my musical
source was an introit trope (Iam philomelinis) found in
an Aquitanian troper from the early 11th century
(BnF lat. 1121, fol. 16). This important piece was a cornerstone
of the new program, and was finally recorded
in 2002. A second metrum, Quod mundus stabili fide
(2,8), was added to the concert programme in 2003-4,
but never recorded. After this burst of activity, the
ensemble moved on to other projects. The final performance
of Lost Songs took place at the BBC Proms in
London, in the summer of 2007.
I had been hearing about Sam Barrett’s work
with Boethian metra and other early medieval Latin
poetry for quite some time, and finally we had a
chance to meet in London in 2009, agreeing to find
a way to collaborate on a project of reconstructing a
group of songs from the Consolatio. When Sam’s
2-volume study on the metra appeared in 2013, the
impetus to move ahead with the project was
immense. I had working meetings with Sam, in tandem
with academic presentations we gave at
Harvard University (2014) and Ohio State University
(2015). Later in 2015 we were joined by my colleague
Hanna Marti for a working session at Pembroke
College (University of Cambridge). The following
year, Sam invited the entire ensemble for a 10-day
working residency at Pembroke College, for final
work on the reconstructions, rehearsals, public presentations,
a workshop, and making a film about our
work (see Reconstructing the Songs of Boethius’ Consolation
of Philosophy on YouTube). This culminated in a
first public performance of several of the metra in
new reconstructions, most of which were the product
of a lively collaboration among Sam, Hanna and
myself. We returned in the summer of 2016 for a
musicological symposium which Sam had organized
(https://performinglostsongs.wordpress.com), and
on that occasion we performed the first full concert
programme of the Boethian songs. Sequentia began
performing a selection of Boethian metra as an integral
part of a new concert programme entitled Monks
Singing Pagans, which has been performed throughout
the USA and Europe.
A public colloquium was organized by the
Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in March 2017, to which
Sam Barrett and Sequentia were invited. Sam, Hanna,
and I each gave presentations about our work with
Boethian metra and other sources, showing the challenges
and possible solutions facing musicians who
wish to get involved with “lost songs”. It was at this
time that we made the final agreements that a
recording should be made, and released in the Schola
Cantorum Basiliensis series on the label Glossa. We
are grateful to the Schola Cantorum and its director,
Thomas Drescher, for their support and enthusiasm
for this project.
As the date of the recording approached, we
met again in Cambridge in May 2017 for revision and
final versions of the performing editions of the metra.
The recording took place in early August 2017, at the
Topaz Studio in Cologne, Germany, with Sam present
to watch over and guide the process.
Sequentia could never have approached and
completed this ambitious project without the constant
support and intellectual stimulation of Sam
Barrett, his sharing of his many years of research and
expertise, and the generous working conditions
which were afforded us, through his good offices, by
the University of Cambridge and Pembroke College.
We are deeply grateful for this astonishing level of
involvement and unconditional support for such an
atypical artistic and intellectual undertaking.
Benjamin Bagby
Sequentia is among the world’s most respected and innovative
ensembles for medieval music. Under the direction of
Benjamin Bagby, Sequentia can look back on more than 40
years of international concert tours, a comprehensive discography
of more than 30 recordings spanning the entire
Middle Ages (including the complete works of Hildegard von
Bingen), film and television productions of medieval music
drama, and a new generation of young performers trained in
professional courses given by members of the ensemble.
Sequentia, co-founded by Bagby and the late Barbara
Thornton during their final years as students at the Schola
Cantorum Basiliensis, has created over 70 innovative concert
programmes that encompass the entire spectrum of
medieval music, touring throughout Western and Eastern
Europe, the Americas, India, the Middle East, East Asia, Africa
and Australia, and has received numerous prizes (including a
Disque d’Or, several Diapasons d’Or, two Edison Prizes, the
Deutsche Schallplattenpreis and a Grammy nomination) for
many of its thirty recordings on the BMG/Deutsche
Harmonia Mundi (Sony), Raumklang and Marc Aurel Edition
labels. The most recent CD releases include reconstructions
of music from lost oral traditions of the Middle Ages (The
Lost Songs Project), including 9th and 10th century Germanic
songs for the Apocalypse (Fragments for the End of Time),
the ensemble’s acclaimed programme of music from the
Icelandic Edda: The Rheingold Curse, as well as the earliestknown
European songs (Lost Songs of a Rhineland Harper)
and medieval liturgical chant (Chant Wars, a co-production
with the Paris-based ensemble Dialogos). After many
years based in Cologne, Germany, Sequentia’s home was reestablished
in Paris in 2003.
[www.sequentia.org]
Vocalist, harper and medievalist Benjamin Bagby has been
an important figure in the field of medieval musical performance
for over 40 years. In addition to his work with Sequentia,
Bagby is deeply involved with the solo performance of
Anglo-Saxon and Germanic oral poetry: an acclaimed performance,
Beowulf has been heard worldwide. In addition to
researching and creating over 70 programmes for Sequentia,
he has published widely, writing about medieval performance
practice; as a guest lecturer and professor, he has taught
courses and workshops all over Europe and North America.
From 2005 until 2018, Bagby taught medieval music performance
practice at the University of Paris-Sorbonne.
[www.bagbybeowulf.com]
Norbert Rodenkirchen has been the flute player of
Sequentia since 1996 and also works regularly with the
French ensemble Dialogos directed by Katarina Livljanic. He is
also much in demand as a composer of music for theatre and
film as well as a producer for CD projects. He has given workshops
on medieval instrumental improvisation at the
Mozarteum Salzburg, at the Musikhochschule Köln and the
conservatories of Lyon and Liege, and is preparing to publish
his first book on that topic: Stante Pede – the lost art of
medieval instrumental improvisation. In 2012 he released his
third solo CD Hameln Anno 1284 / Medieval flute music on the
trail of the Pied Piper on the label Christophorus.
[www.norbertrodenkirchen.org]
Hanna Marti is a native of Switzerland. At fifteen, she was a
rock guitarist and wrote songs for the band she started. She
studied at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, where she completed
a Masters Diploma (voice) as a student of Evelyn Tubb,
in 2015. Hanna Marti has focused most of her artistic work on
medieval song. She has taken part in numerous concerts and
recordings in Europe and in the United States. With her own
ensemble, Moirai, she is currently performing musical reconstructions
of the Icelandic poetic Edda. Hanna Marti’s most
recent solo project is a musical recitation and reconstruction
of stories in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, sung in Latin and accompanied
on a 12th century harp.
[www.hannamarti.com]
Since its creation in 1933, the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis
(SCB) and its working philosophy have lost nothing of their
topicality. Founded by Paul Sacher and close colleagues in
Basel, Switzerland, this School of Early Music (since 2008 part
of the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern
Switzerland) remains to this day unique in numerous
respects. From the very beginning, musicians gathered here
who decisively influenced the course of historical performance
practice. The scope of activities at the SCB ranges from
the early Middle Ages to the 19th century. And as a result of
the close co-operation between performers and scholars, a
dynamic interaction exists between research, professional
training, concerts, and publications. In all of this, the SCB
operates with a broad definition of music. This arises from a
particular approach which explores the historical context of
past musical production to create musical interpretations
that inspire the listener today – often combined with a fascination
for the previously unknown. The CD productions play
their part in bringing important projects and performers at
the SCB to a wider audience. Around 80 such recordings have
been produced on different labels since 1980. From 2010 the
CD productions of the SCB have appeared on Glossa.
[www.fhnw.ch/schola-cantorum-basiliensis]