Iacobus. Codex Calixtinus, Omnia Cantica
Coro Ultreia — Liner notes
Iacobus
Codex Calixtinus
Religious Poetry in the Codex Calixtinus
The Codex Calixtinus, Compostelan Liturgical Landmark
Europe's Founding Song
The Sound of the Codex
IACOBUS
To my father.
To our fellow Benito.
To Maruxa Barreiro.
Just
as Master Mateo's “Pórtico da Gloria” (“Gates of Glory”) in the
Cathedral of Santiago stands as a true jewel of medieval Christian art,
so the Codex Calixtinus or Liber Sancti Iacobi kept in the Cathedral's
library can be considered a genuine historical, literary, liturgical and
musical monument. Its importance is reflected in the various articles
from this booklet accompanying our full recording of the music from the
manuscript, whose very prologue bears the name IACOBUS.
Our
choir's name gives away our interest for this invaluable musical
repertoire. As for myself, this interpretative endeavour derives from my
fondness and liking for the Jacobean phenomenon. But it is also the
result of my own scholarly and interpretative experience of the
Calixtinus's music, gathered from the almost fifteen years during which I
was lucky enough to belong to the Chamber Group of the University of
Santiago de Compostela. Under the direction of Carlos Villanueva, I
became familiar with Prof. López Calo's work, which is no doubt the
touchstone of all musicological research on the Codex. This activity,
which was rendered into many live performances and musical recordings,
was continued when the Ultreia Choir came into being under Vicente
Couceiro's direction. No wonder, then, that in the course of these years
and looking ahead on the oncoming last Jubilee of the millenium, we
devised this ambitious project that finally comes to light after two
long years of work.
The paleographical basis for our
interpretation is the Codex itself, particularly the excellent full
edition by Dom. Germán de Prado accompanying the masterful research work
on the Liber undertaken from 1931 to 1944 and sponsored by the Consejo
Superior de Investigaciones Científicas and the Instituto P. Sarmiento
de Estudios Gallegos. According to the suggestions from this outstanding
musicologist from Silos, we include all the music contained in the
manuscript except for that which, even though mentioned in the incipit,
is not complete or does not belong to this specific repertoire (ie. the
psalms).
The monody throughout Book I displays a great variety
and richness of melodies. The fact that many of these tunes were already
known and had been taken from other choir books and musical
compilations (Benedictine Antiphonary, Roman Antiphonary, etc.) does not
diminish the musical value of this beautiful repertoire. The adaptation
of preexistent melodies (through centos or contrafattura)
was already a long-standing custom in ancient musical practice, and
there was no need for the compiler of the Codex to do differently. In
any case, the outcome of this adaptation of ancient liturgical texts is
splendid, and it stands far above most medieval repertoires devoted to
one single figure. The process was reversed in some cases, as with the
pretty tune “O lux Decus Hispanie” which can be found in many
manuscripts afterwards.
Leaving aside any musicological
disquisitions about its authorship, origin, or intention, or about the
overt French influence on the Codex's style and notation, or about
whether this or that lyrical or musical component had already been used,
our impression as interpreters of the Codex is that we face a body of
music to be used in the worship of the Apostle, whether this be in the
Cathedral of Santiago itself or in some other church. This would refute
other readings which consider it a French didactic manual, strictly for
teaching. The importance of the music, the numerous indications for its
proper use that can be found in the very text (like “St James's own mass
must be sung every day to the pilgrims;” “This to be sung by a child
standing between the Reader and Singer;” “This to be sung joyfully;”
etc.), as well as the opinion of authoritative scholars all support the
specific Jacobean end of this music. This monody comprises mainly songs
for the offices for St James (invitatories, hymns, antiphons, responses,
lessons, chapters and verses), processional verses, and three masses,
one for the vigil and two for the feasts of St James, one of which is
the original farce mass with tropes for every part but the Crede. The
pieces were ordered numerically, as in the Roman Antiphonary. Our
interpretation followed the free and loose rhythms indicated by the
tunes themselves—which have a marked melismatic character—, so that we
could enjoy some freedom of style in our performance. We have also felt
free to use some polyphonic techniques such as pedal notes or bordons,
which come from improvisational procedures like the faux-bourdons. This
has enriched the plain chant and has readied us for what is the most
interesting and famous instance of musical art in the Codex: the
polyphonic compositions which, except for two of them, are collected in
the appendix at the end of Book V. These are liturgical and processional
pieces such as conducti, organa, etc. which make up “the first
polyphonic repertoire of artistic value in the History of Music”, as
Professor López Calo has asserted. Following both this scholar's work
and our own experience, we have avoided sticking to any aprioristic or
preconceived theory attempting to solve the musical problems raised by
the polyphony in the Calixtinus. The balance between the looseness and
freedom of the musical phrasing, and the rigour in the polyphonic
setting of the voices can only be achieved by means of the detailed
analysis and interpretive study of each individual piece, of its
internal rhythm and of its melodic singularities.
The
accompaniment by instruments is justified for two reasons: firstly
because of the plentiful literary references in the Codex; and secondly
because the instruments used in the recording are replicas crafted after
the marvellous stone rendering of contemporary instruments in the
“Portico da Gloria”. Provided by the Compostelan group Martin Codax,
these instruments evoke the sonority that this music could have had
under the vaults of the Apostolic See.
Let me finish the
introduction to this booklet by thanking the help and contribution from
many people and institutions listed elsewhere, and especially from our
Lord St James. Indeed His aid has made it easier for us to record the
music from “His” book.
Pontevedra, March 1999, in the Holy Year of St James
Fernando Olbés Durán
CODEX CALIXTINUS
By Emilio Casares Rodicio
The
“flaming lights” that could be seen at night over the Celtic village
near Iris Flavia were the sign that convinced bishop Teodomiro and king
Alfonso II “the Chaste” that St James the Apostle's remains were buried
on that very spot. Such a miracle soon prompted the building of the
first places for worship, paid for with royal funding. These
constructions would eventually become the city called Compostela,
“campus stellae”, in remembrance of those lights. The news about the
finding of St James's corpse spread rapidly around all Christendom, and
both the Pope and Charlemagne—as would the order of Cluny later
on—became involved with fostering the appeal of the sacred place. In
fact, the story goes that the son of Pipino's contribution to the
pilgrimage to Santiago went as far as to build the basilica of Sahagún
or the Way of Santiago, and even to discover the Apostle's sepulchre.
The faraway Compostela of St James—the only Apostle to be buried in
Western Europe except for the martyrs of Rome—would become the western
vertex of Christian pilgrimage, particularly since visiting the Holy
Places under Islamic rule turned out to be a dangerous endeavour.
More
stars, like the ones in the Milky Way, have helped the pilgrim trod his
way to Santiago to this very day. Every year, thousands of pilgrims
from all around the world come to Santiago following the path that runs
along the way of the stars in the sky. As they linger on their way, they
leave samples of their art, their science, or their language. There is
no way to account for what the thrive and exchange brought about by the
pilgrimage to Santiago has meant to the development, culture and art of
the Iberian Peninsula.
Such a remarkable event was bound to give
rise to works of literature for the pilgrims and about their pilgrimage.
One of the seminal works is no doubt the Codex Calixtinus, known since
the beginning of this century also as Liber Sancti Jacobi, the very
first words in the text. The manuscript is kept in the archive of the
Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. It was copied with extreme care on
fine parchment, and it is adorned with beautiful miniatures and
initials. It comprises a collection of services, sermons or chants in
honour of St James the Apostle, who is the saint patron to the
cathedral.
The Calixtinus—so called because most of the
pieces in it were attributed to Pope Calixtus II— was compiled at the
start of the last third of the 12th century (probably in 1160 to 1170)
with materials of varied origin and authorship. Dr. Lopez Calo asserts
that the materials in the Calixtinus were written before they were ever
included in the Codex, though immediately before, “so that only a few
years could have passed between the writing and compilation of these
materials and their inclusion in this and other extant copies of the
Liber Sancti Iacobi. It can be ascertained that the idea of compiling
these writings in honour of St James the Apostle came about in the time
of bishop Diego Gelmírez, more exactly from c. 1120 on. This means that
the Codex was but one more of the many endeavours conceived and
undertaken by the great Compostelan prelate in order to exalt his church
and to present an audience as large as possible with the excellence of
the Apostle, of his worship and of the city that held its remains”. Calo
continues: “although the text was the work of several copyists, most of
it was carried out by one single scribe who worked under heavy French
influence, probably Cluniac”. Indeed, Gelmírez brought in the most
outstanding representatives of culture at the time, Cluny monks, for he
believed this would raise the cultural level in Santiago. That is why
most of the writing and musical notation of the Codex are French, more
precisely Northern French.
The Codex is made up of five books of
uneven value. The first one is the most interesting one, for it
comprises the liturgical ritual for the various festivities pertaining
to St James together with a great number of monodic compositions for the
various parts of the services, as well as numerous conducti, proses,
farces, etc. One short booklet is particularly interesting music-wise,
for it comprises 22 polyphonic pieces from as early as the very
beginnings of the Ars Antiqua. The booklet was added to the Codex after
it had been completed (López Calo's estimation is no later than 1180),
and it includes the conductus, the earliest known composition for three
real voices.
Thus, the Calixtinus stands as the oldest and most
coherent whole musical corpus in Europe: it comprises the complete
liturgy and its music, together with the chanted pieces for the
services; it also includes masses, many of which are well-known, and
other poetical works to adorn different moments of the ritual (fol. 123r
and ff.). The liturgy in the Cathedral of Santiago appears as one of
the most magnificent in Western Europe. The music resounded in the
Cathedral of Santiago all day long: ordinary and feast masses and
services, eve songs of praise and pilgrimage by English, Germans,
Italians, French. On arriving, the worshippers of the Apostle went into a
superb Romanesque church and attended a splendid liturgy, adorned with
chants enriched by tropes and proses and conducti written purposely for
the liturgy of the saint patron and dedicated to him. The modern verse
forms with their rhythmic scansion and polyphonic accompaniment sung by
the Cathedral school and musicians alternated with more popular songs in
honour of St James that the pilgrims would play on their own
instruments and in their own languages. A musical symbiosis occurred,
mingling the whole culture of the Middle Ages in Western Europe.
But
there was singing all along the journey, too. Popular songs from the
Peninsula would be played and sung at resting stops, which in many cases
took place the at Clunian monasteries open to pilgrims. The pilgrims
would cry “Eia, ultreia!” when they reached the Monte do Gozo (”Mount of
Joy”) and saw Santiago for the first time. Together with other popular
or clearly foreign expressions from pilgrimage songs, this cry appears
in several occasions in the Calixtinus, for instance “ultreia” in Alleluia Gratulemur (f. 120v), in Ad honorem regis summi (f. 199v), and in Dum pater familias (f. 193r), in which we also find “Herru Sanctiagu, Grot Sanctiagu” (”Lord St James, Divine St James”).
Apart from music, the Codex Calixtinus
comprises many useful news for the faithful and for pilgrims such as
tales about the Apostle's miracles or the Bearing of his corpse, the
narrative of Charlemagne's crusade in Spain (known as the
“Pseudo-Turpin” after its presumed narrator), a collection of liturgical
and ritual texts, and the Liber Peregrinationis containing ample
information about the journey. It seems, then, that the work had a
twofold purpose: to exalt and spread knowledge about the Compostelan
see, and to provide the pilgrims with information and teachings about
it.
Most certainly, any work written in Santiago in the course of
the 12th century might well have been the work of a Frenchman, or of
someone under heavy French influence. The rubrics of the musical pieces
in the Calixtinus name numerous French ecclesiastics as authors (also
Italians and some Galicians, but mainly French): Ato, bishop of Troyes;
Gauterius of Château-Renard; Magister Golsenus, bishop of Soissons;
Droardus of Troyes; Fulbertus, bishop of Chartres; Magister Albertus of
Paris; Magister Albericus, archbishop of Bourges; Magister Airardus of
Vézelay. Most of them are known and some of them certainly as composers,
but still the attribution of many of the pieces in the Liber Sancti
Iacobi is doubtful. Nevertheless, many pieces show a strong local
influence in the form of direct references to rituals and places, and
sometimes even in the use of popular melodic twists1: there is no doubt whatsoever that the manuscript was written for the Cathedral of Santiago and its services.
It
has already been pointed out that the most conspicuous part of the
Calixtinus is its polyphonic booklet (ff. 185r to 192r), which is the
first written European polyphony together with that of Saint Martial of
Limoges. Fairly enough, it has been considered the most important
section in the Codex.
The birth of polyphony is one of the great
revolutions in the history of music. Some musicologists have even
posited the hypothesis that the true beginnings of western music were
tied to the appearance of this musical technique. They argue that
monodic music—one-voice singing—would be an eastern tradition which had
been transplanted into the western world. In Europe, however, there
comes a time at around the 9th century when a new perspective on music
arises, and polyphonic singing comes into being. Through it will the
western man find a way to reach over the straightforward preexistent
musical forms—which were no other than Gregorian chant—and develop a new
feel for music. Containing some precious tokens of this primitive
polyphony, the Codex Calixtinus was not only a witness to this revolution, but also a force in it.
Both
rhythmically and compositionally, the Calixtinus steps ahead of works
from the school of Limoges, standing halfway between it and the
so-called school of Notre Dame of Paris—it should not be forgotten that,
among its many authors, our work names some master Albertus of Paris,
likely predecessor of the Master of León, Leoninus.
This is how
Professor Lopez Calo describes the music from the Calixtinus: “The
polyphony in the Calixtinus would be halfway between the free rhythm of
plain chant and the strict rhythm of the Ars Antiqua, measured according
to the rules of the six modes. Still, it is obvious that the polyphony
in the Codex Calixtinus stands as the first polyphonic repertoire of
artistic value in the history of music after the theoretical experiments
from the 10th and 11th centuries and conducti from Winchester and St
Martial, which cannot be compared, artistically speaking, to the
Compostelan compositions”. Clearly the Schools of Santiago and Limoges
are the two great representatives of 12th century polyphony, and the
three-voiced polyphonic pieces in the Codex Calixtinus and in the work
from St Martial are one of the keystones of medieval polyphony. There
has been discussion about who influenced whom, but there is no doubt
that Santiago was the great disseminator by means of the musical
activism that springed from the Way and rests on a beautiful and
suggestive music.
The calixtinian polyphony has been the object
of plenty of scholarly research, editions, revisions, and recordings.
Still, its transcription has always been extremely hard to interpret.
These difficulties derive from the fact that the notation used for this
polyphony was the one used for monodic chant in France at the time, so
that it does not convey any rhythmical value whatsoever. Thus, the
interrelation of the three voices in the Congaudeant, for instance,
turns extremely difficult.
This CD presents for the first time the full recording of the whole of the Calixtinus—both
monody and polyphony—. It follows the detailed and still valid
edition by Dom. Germán Prado, a monk in Silos: Liber Sancti Jacobi. Codex Calixtinus in two volumes, published in Santiago de Compostela in 1944.
The
recording was carried out in a unique place which can represent any of
the monasteries in the Way of Santiago where these pieces could be
heard. This is the hidden monastery of Santa Cristina de Ribas de Sil,
known as “o Mosteiro” by the villagers, in the steep banks of the Sil
river that cuts across the “Ribeira Sacra”, one of the most wonderful
and withdrawn places in Galicia. As Father Yépez tells, the monastery
was founded in the 9th century, and it was completed in the 12th century
with the building of the church and the actual monastic premises.
Surely the vaults of this Cistercian monastery have provided the
adequate acoustics to this recording, so that this monument of western
culture that is the Codex Calixtinus has found the right place to
materialize in the magnificent interpretation by the Coro Ultreia from
Pontevedra.
RELIGIOUS POETRY IN THE CODEX CALIXTINUS
By Manuel C. Díaz y Díaz
As
far as religious poetry is concerned, the 12th century in Compostela
bears a proper name, the famous Codex Calixtinus, which has been kept in
the Cathedral of Santiago since then.
The Codex Calixtinus, or rather the Liber Sancti Jacobi,
is a huge compilation of texts about St James which were put together
as an homage to the Apostle. Interesting both in its composition and in
its atmosphere, it comprises five books which contain liturgical pieces
on the matter of St James (Book I), St James's miracles (Book II), tales
about the bearing of St James's corpse (Book III), the history of
Charlemagne and his army's deeds in Spain, or Historia Turpini (Book
IV), and a guide to the Way of Santiago with a description of the city
of Santiago and its Cathedral (Book V). Initially, the two first books
(liturgy and miracles) made up one single independent work entitled
Jacobus. The present body bears the general title of Codex Calixtinus
because the compilation of its five books is atributed to pope Calixtus
II (1118-1125), although nowadays we do know that this attribution is
false.
The author of such a vast work wanted it placed under a
threefold patronage, taking care that the three patrons were in one way
or another linked to the manuscript, which is not the orginal manuscript
but a careful copy produced to be stored in the cathedral of Santiago.
The three patrons are: the presumed author of the whole volume, the Pope
of Rome Calixtus, who often marks many of the pieces in the Codex as of
his own doing; the Compostelan archbishop Diego Gelmírez, the most
likely sponsor of this as well as of many other Compostelan works; and
the patriarch William of Jerusalem, who will dealt with below. The
contribution of Cluny, the great Burgundian monastery, must also be
acknowledged; it stands as one of the great centers of diffusion of the
Santiago manuscript, which is paid homage for its role in the pilgrimage
to Santiago, and consequently in the splendor of the very Cathedral of
Santiago and its cult.
Since the Calixtinus still treats William
as patriarch of Jerusalem, it must have been compiled before 1147, for
it was in this year that he renounced his patriarchy. The Jacobus
must have been finished before 1140, when the great archbishop Gelmírez
is no longer recorded in history. Only after that could the rest of the
Calixtinus have been completed, and this by adding new pieces to the Jacobus
and by redoing and retouching some of the old material. In any case,
Calixtus's papacy appears only as a remembrance, something which many
Compostelans must have appreciated because he had been an extraordinary
promoter of the Santiago see.
The work was completely finished at
about 1160, and certainly before 1173, for it was then that the monk
from Monserrat Arnaldo de Monte undertook his precious copy of the book,
which he found an interesting novelty worthy of transcription.
Therefore, it is very likely that all the liturgical poems in the book
were produced at around 1130-1140.
The Codex Calixtinus as a
whole is repeatedly presented as a foreign product, intended for
foreigners, who must have been the most likely addressees of the work.
This intention, together with the already mentioned reference to Cluny,
made many scholars consider the Codex Calixtinus a French work, both in
what refers to its literary integrity and to its paleographic
realization. Certainly this is not so.
It can be said that every
ancient text dealing with St James the Apostle either comes from the
Codex Calixtinus exclusively or has it as its essential evidence.
Moreover, the Calixtinus stands as our only source of religious poetry
from the 12th century. We are left, therefore, alone with the Codex
Calixtinus. Texts and problems have it as their only critical referent.
Several
scholarly studies have dealt with Compostelan poetry: the illustrious
Jesuit Guido Maria Dreves compiled under the epigraph Carmina
Compostelana every piece from the Calixtinus into an appendix to Volume
XVII of the Analecta Hymnica Medii Aevi, dedicated to the Hymnodia lberica (Leipzig 1894). A new edition, already outdated in many ways, was produced by Peter Wagner in Friburg in 1931 when he studied Die Gesänge der Jacobusliturgie zu Santiago de Compostela aus dem sog. Codex Calixtinus
(“Liturgical Songs of Santiago de Compostela from the so-called Codex
Calixtinus”). Many of the poems had already been edited by Antonio López
Ferreiro in his Historia de la S.A.M. Iglesia de Santiago, II
(“History of the Church of Santiago”; Santiago 1889), in
which he closely follows F. Fita-A. Fernández Guerra, Recuerdos de un viaje a Santiago de Galicia
(“Recollections of a Trip to Santiago in Galicia”; Madrid
1880). All this works were bound to be outdone by the edition Liber Sancti Jacobi. Codex Calixtinus
(Santiago 1944), by the distinguished art historian Walter M.
Whitehill. For a number of reasons, this edition is as hard to come by
as the Codex itself. The meticulous skill of the Compostelan professor
Abelardo Moralejo produced a full translation of these texts with plenty
of notes in 1950 (reprinted in 1993 and 1998). A new edition of the
original Latin text has just been released by K. Herbers and A. Santos
Otero (Santiago, 1998). Fortunately, we are not unaided in this search.
The
compositions we are about to deal with are some 35, all different in
character and worth. They have been attributed to various authors
ranging from Pope Calixtus himself, of course, to Fulbertus of Chartres
or William of Jerusalem, and including an anonymous bishop from
Benevento or an unknown Galician doctor. Thus, we are presented with
pieces whose origin lies in places around the whole known world. On top
of this geographical dispersion, which points to some of the most
outstanding literary names of those times, we still have a poem
attributed to Pope Calixtus, which involves the three sacred languages
that were already on the inscription that Pilatus had wanted carved on
Christ's cross: Hebrew, Latin and Greek. That is to say, geographical
universality is conjoined by the more prestigious tradition derived from
true sacred universality.
Two from among the first compositions
in the Vigil for Santiago have been ascribed to Fulbertus of Chartres,
an excellent writer and poet who helped the Carnotian School grow into
high technical and lyrical standards. Three poems, presumably by William
of Jerusalem —one of the addressees of the Liber Sancti Jacobi—, can be
found in a feast within the octave of the great holy day of St James.
The three poems are highly achieved: the first one is written in
rhythmic iambic senarii, which are grouped in five-line verses with
bisyllabic rhyme; the second, more complex one is divided into
eight-line verses, of which ll. 1, 2, 3 and 5, 6, 7 have one single
tetrasyllabic trocaic word, while ll. 4 and 8 are heptasyllabic trocaic
feet with bisyllabic rhyme. The third one is presented as a short
version of the Passion of St James, to which it adds nothing; the poem,
however, was designed to be sung on any occasion (crebro cantanda) as
its easy rhythm and simple structure indicate, and it is full of poetic
resources such as its consonant rhyme, its distichs with two trocaic
dimeters, and the fact that each verse is followed by a chorus or
refrain with the invocation Iácobe iuua. Curiously enough, the consonant-rhyming syllabes are always those ending in - orum.
It is worth lingering over these two last poems. This is the first verse of the second poem mentioned:
locundetur
et letetur
augmentetur
fidelium concio;
solemnizet
modulizet
organizet
spirilati gaudio.
ie. in Moralejo's rhythmic version:
Numerous,
jubilant,
and joyous
of faithful this reunion;
rejoycing,
modulating,
and singing out
their emotion.
What
none of the versions reveal is the fact that the first tetrasyllabic
series increase proportionally, from the innermost realm of man to his
behaviour in the community; whereas the second series presents a new
variation in which singing (modulizet) and accompaniment (organizet) are
evoked. The first and second heptasyllables refer to the powerful will
that underlay the session: that the assembly, in accordance with the
early Christian ideal as cor unum et anima una, will rise spiritually in due praise to St James in his festivity.
Meeting
the most strict rules of the genre, the last poem is more popular in
tone, and this in spite of its many lexical resources —the only ones its
brevity allows for—.
Clemens seruulorum
gemitus tuorum
Iacobe iuua.
Flos apostolorum,
decus electorum
Iacobe iuua.
Gallecianorum
dux et Hispanorum
lacobe iuua.
Moralejo's translation reads:
To your poor people
who moan in piety,
give your aid St James.
Flower of Apostles,
honour of the chosen
give your aid St James.
Guide of the Galicians
and of the Spanish,
give your aid St James.
Notice
the subtle and precise succession of the various moments evoked by the
author, whose use of the Latin resources is masterful. Certainly the
author of these little jewels is of some account. The poems move swiftly
between its Latin erudition and the forms and rhythms the
romance-speaking people were beginning to appreciate.
As we have said, these poems have been attributed to William of Jerusalem. In his History of the Kingdom of Jerusalem (XIV 26), William of Tiro provides a valuable definition of our author: “uir simplex, modice litteratus”
(“a simple man with a mediocre education”). A handsome Flemish from
Malinas, William happened to make a good impression not only on on the
king, but also as on the VIP and common people of Jerusalem; if we take
de Tiro's remark into consideration, however, he does not appear as a
man particularly gifted for poetry, an art which demanded not only
inspiration, but also a profound knowledge of language and poetic
techniques. Thus, we are bound to presume that it was not him who
composed these works from the Codex even though they have long been
attributed to him. They are probably the work of some good poet or
other, Galician or maybe French, who chose to disguise himself behind
such a relevant pseudonym.
What can be said of the numerous works
attributed to Fulbertus of Chartres? Apart from four poems, they
comprise all the rich and varied pieces that make up the interesting
Farce Mass for St James. It deserves some of our attention due to its
fabulous performing character, in which there is a certain degree of
scenic interplay (with the altar as stage, of course). As its name
suggests, the missa farsa or Farce Mass is a service in which the main
pieces (Kyrie, Gloria, Sanctus, Agnus Dei and even a benediction)
are interspersed with various little excerpts, sometimes presenting two
choruses which reply each other's interventions as well as the main
singer's, who represents the officiant. This is best explained here by
reproducing the three first Kyries with a excerpt from the Sanctus:
The Kyrie reads as follows:
Rex inmense, pater pie, eleison
Kyrie eleison.
Palmo cuncta qui concludis eleison
Kyrie eleison
Soter theos athanatos eleison
Kyrie eleison
Notice
how the third piece is entirely made up of Greek words not entirely a
product of the artist's imagination, but rather taken from the famous
Byzantine trisagion preserved by the Roman liturgy.
After the first part of the Sanctus has been sung, the Hosanna in excelsis is presented thus:
Chorus: Hosanna, saluifica tuum plasma qui creasti potens omnia.
Singers: A
Chorus: tenet laus, honor decet et gloria, rex eterne in secula.
Singers: A
and on like this until the chorus completes the liturgical sentence singing in excelsis.
The
farce masses —which can take even more varied shapes, though never
richer as far as their literary achievement is concerned— become very
frequent around this time, especially in the most important churches in
France. To this extent was our Calixtinus up to date. But let us return
to Fulbertus of Chartres.
Fulbertus had been an excellent poet
(c. 1160) and a master to the renowned cathedral school of Chartres.
Many of his works, most of which are of great lyrical and literary
value, have survived. Our poems, however, do not appear among his
genuine production. This does not imply that we must consider them
apocryphal, but it is sound to presume that someone after Fulbertus
followed his trail and appropriated his name so as to bring his own
works to light.
We must still recall some other authors whose
name has not outgrown his connections to the Codex. Master Anselm uses
verses with three octosyllabic iambic lines, each one of which ends with
a chorus reading Fulget dies, transformed into Fulget dies ista
to close the verse. Whereas the chorus and its double form reveal the
popular hue of these pieces, their metric features are far from being
simple.
These works include some conducti, one of which has been
attributed to a Roman cardinal called Robertus (maybe referring to
Robert Pullen, archdeacon of Rochester and later cardinal, d. 1146);
another one to Fulbertus, and still a third one to the unnamed bishop
from Benevento mentioned above. Although we have much theory from the
12th and 13th centuries dealing with the conductus, its common form has
not been ascertained yet. Apparently its denomination—rather than its
metrics, which is very varied indeed—corresponds to the kind of lyrics
needed to be sung in certain tones, from which the so-called cantus
firmus was certainly excluded.
The collection of religious poetry
in various tones continues into the Appendix to the Calixtinus, a
compilation of pieces which were collected too late to be included in a
more adequate place within the Book of St James. Many names come up in
this section, although I am not so sure that their attribution does not
refer to the lyrics (some of which are very shallow), but rather to the
music, which is written for two and three voices sometimes, just like
some other instances in the very body of the Liber. This is the oldest
surviving compilation of this kind in Europe.
The analysis of one
of this pieces allows for a better assessment of the various
attributions, and posits one more methodogical procedure. It is a
conductus ascribed to Venantius Fortunatus, bishop of Poitiers and a
widely read poet of the 6th century who was highly esteemed, especially
in the Peninsula. Presumably, the piece was to be acted out, since a
note on the margin of the manuscript suggests that the refrain should be
sung by a child standing among the singers of the conductus. The piece
goes like this:
Salue festa dies, ueneranda pro omnia fies
qua celos subiit Iacobus, ut meruit
gaudeamus.
These are good elegiac distichs with the only addition of the refrain. It so happens that the distichs were taken from a cento compiling works by Fortunatus. Many other quotations from this poet were included in the sermons that can be found in the Liber Sancti Jacobi. This was probably done in many other cases, such as with the great Fulbertus of Chartres.
Centos
or simple evocations apart, we must nor forget that many of the pieces
in the Codex are a work of the compiler himself. Many of these pieces
are mere versifications of phrases and expressions already present in
other parts of the Liber, especially in sermons. Some of these sermons
were written by the compiler, some others surely were finished and
readied before he even began his task.
Many of the poems were
actually written by contemporary authors, even by Compostelan authors.
Given the many-fold origin and status of the pilgrims, this geographical
label is best understood not as a national or local concept, but rather
as referring to the constant pool of truly international people that
flooded Compostela in those times. No source informs about the coming of
literary personalities to Compostela; but we must not overlook the fact
that the two great works bestowed by Bishop Gelmírez on Compostela were
participated not only by Spaniards and Galicians, but also by
foreigners. Why should we not consider the same possibility for those
authors of religious poetry in the 12th century?
A good example
of this is the remarkable, easy-to-sing marching chant. These are
trocaic septenaries with bysillabic rhyme inspired in a well-known
classical meter. It has been attributed to Aymericus Picaud, presbyter
in Partenay near Vezelay, who appears also as donee of the Codex to the
Cathedral of Santiago. The present Compostelan Calixtinus has not been
preserved in whole, and it was completed thanks to some of the old
copies.The poem reads as follows:
Ad honorem regis summi, qui condidit omnia
iubilantes veneremus Iacobi magnalia.
De quo gaudent celi ciues in superna curia
cuius facta gloriosa memnit ecclesia.
That is, in the often used translation by Moralejo:
In honour of the supreme king of it all,
let's praise St James's great deeds.
The heavenly curia rejoices at him,
and the Church remembers his glorious record.
Again,
this is a peculiar case for whose assessment we have quite a few
elements. It is quite likely that some character come from Vezelay to
Santiago wrote it to the honour and glory of the Apostle, and this in a
rhythmical metre that makes it easy to aprehend and apt to be sung.
Some of the pieces were extremely popular, such as the Dum paterfamilias,
whose music was composed outside of the Codex Calixtinus. This song has
become well-known as the “song of Ultreia”, due to its beautiful
refrain which was sung by pilgrims from the North or by Flemish pilgrims
as they marched on to Santiago. Presumably, it was the refrain that
gave way to the poem. In any case we find in it a perfect symbiosis of
the strictly popular quality of the refrain with the author's learned
Latin work.
When the good Father,
King of it all,
bestowed the twelve apostles
on his kingdoms,
did St James to his Spain
bring his saintly light.
The Latin for which is as follows:
Dum pater familias
rex uniuersorum
donaret prouincias
ius apostolorum,
lacobus Hispanias
lux illustrat morum.
We must not leave out the remarkable refrain I just referred to:
Herru Santiagu, grot Santiagu.
e ultr 'eia, e sus 'eia, Deus aia nos.
In
any case, Compostela appears as a thriving melting-pot of trends, forms
and novelties, both popular and learned. No wonder then that this rich
life, far from submitting to the straight and stiff liturgical pomp that
glittered in the Cathedral of Santiago, would in the end make an
impression on the people from Compostela and on the pilgrims, and would
give way to a constant and fruitful imitation.
THE CODEX CALIXTINUS, COMPOSTELAN LITURGICAL LANDMARK
Por Manuel Jesús Precedo Lafuente
Dean-President of the Most Excellent Cathedral Chapter of Santiago de Compostela
(Nov. 16, 1998)
The
12th century has bestowed two great works on the city of Santiago de
Compostela: one of them is an architectural and theological masterpiece,
Master Mateo's “Pórtico da Gloria” (‘Gates of Glory’); the other one is
the Codex Calixtinus, a work of most profound literary and musical
value. As we revive the musical matter from those times, which mark the
beginning of polyphony, it is but fair that we refer briefly to the
liturgical texts included in the Codex. The book has been attributed to
Pope Calixtus II, a relative to king Alfonso VII ‘the Emperor’, who was a
son of the Pope's brother, Don Raimundo, and of the famous Doña Urraca.
A Service to Compostela
The
moral author of the Codex is also presented as the actual author of its
liturgical texts. As he openly states, his endeavour is to provide the
Compostelan Church with enough material, carefully selected by him, to
keep the liturgical celebrations in honour of St James the Older from
resorting to texts which were already devoted to other Apostles. Buried
in the city to which he gave his name, the son of Zebedee surely
deserved to have his own devotional texts.
Scholars such as the
presbyter D. Elisardo Temperán Villaverde suspect that the literary
goods supplied by the Codex were actually never used in those times. The
fact that this collection of texts —which included readings,
benedictions, antiphons, prayers, responses for the dead, hymns,
homilies, as well as tales of the Apostle's passion and martyrdom— was
done without, however, does not go against its importance.
For
one thing, they let us know the solemnity with which the various
celebrations dedicated to St James took place. The Codex begins by
announcing the 12th century calendar of St James, which included three
festivities: two of them, the martyrdom and bearing of the Apostle's
remains, are still held nowadays; and the other one concerning St James
the Older's miracles, in which the Codex abounds, has faded out.
An Overwhelming Richness
The
matter of the texts, particularly of those by the Fathers of the
Church, and of the homilies is also worth mentioning. As for the former,
however, they are often hard to ascribe to any one author in
particular—whether this be Pope Calixtus himself or any other—and their
genuine attribution cannot be always determined for sure.
The
Calixtinus is not the first piece of religious literature about St
James. The first Jacobean hymn to be known in Hispanic liturgy came out
in the times of king Mauregato (d. in 789), even before the Apostle's
remains were found in 813-814. It is an acrostic writing which invokes
St James for protection for the mentioned monarch. The hymn calls the
Apostle “golden and refulgent head, defender and saint patron of Spain”,
titles which would be often repeated from then on because they express
the heavenly roles generally attributed to the Apostle who brought the
Gospels to the very end of the world and wanted to rest forever in this
most faraway corner.
Still, as we go deeper into the texts from
the Calixtinus, we ascertain praises to Christ's direct disciple and to
his link to Spain and Galicia. What follows has been taken from one of
the liturgical hyms: “People of Galicia, raise your new songs to Christ;
thank God for the coming of St James....under his guidance will the
flock graze on sacred pastures.” And Pope Calixtus begins like this one
of the sermons attributed to him: “With spiritual joy, let us rejoice in
this day, dearest brothers, for the most sublime apostle St James, son
of Zebedee, saint patron of Galicia.”
The Festivity of the Miracles
Since
the so-called “Festivity of St James's Miracles” is no longer a part of
the liturgical calendar, it seems appropriate to say a few words about
it here. The author of the Codex justifies the current dates for the
festivity. These are no doubt hypothetical, and to this day we cannot be
sure that these are the correct dates, since there is written evidence
in both cases. Only for the day of the martyrdom could we give an
approximate date, because Acts locates it in the Jewish Passover. The
Calixtinus marks March 25th following the Venerable Bede, to whom the
date would have been revealed in a vision by a friend of his. The
traditional date of July 25th was fixed by St Jerome, and December 30th
commemorates both the Bearing of the Apostle's remains and his election
as a disciple of Christ.
But the uniqueness of the Calixtinus
rests mainly on the Festivity of the Miracles. This is what Calixtus
says about the celebration: “It was St Anselm who piously commanded the
celebration of the Festivity of St James's Miracles, like the one about
the man who had killed himself and was brought back to life by the
Apostle, as well as all the other miracles he performed, and it is
usually held on October 3rd. And we confirm this fact herein.”
Twenty-two miracles are rendered in Book II of the Codex Calixtinus, and
some others are scattered in various other tales. But there is no doubt
that the Apostle's greatest miracle is his ever-growing cult and
adoration, the flourishing pilgrimage to the site of his sepulchre, and
the increasing number of pilgrims' conversions. That in itself would
suffice to celebrate its thaumaturgical function.
St James's Conches
It
is interesting to read about the vicissitudes underwent by the Codex
Calixtinus in Pope Calixtus II's lifetime, as told by the author
himself. Overcoming the harassment by thieves, the hazard of
imprisonment, shipwrecks, and even a fire, and rid of all his
possessions, he was finally able to preserve the book on which he had
worked since he was a child out of his devotion for St James. He would
finally bestow it on a Cluny monastery, so that its monks could judge
its orthodoxy and become the zealous custodians of what had been so hard
to keep away from many dangers and threats.
Calixtus ordered the
Codex to be written with the Cathedral of Santiago and the many
pilgrims in mind. Thus, he does not miss any chance to give all kinds of
advice to them. He deals with the various ways to enhance the piety of
those who head for Compostela, and he also provides practical advice for
an easy and pleasant journey. Nevertheless, he does not refrain from
warning them about the many tricks and swindles they may fall prey to,
like “the misdemeanors of the evil innkeepers who dwell in my Apostle's
way”. He is also aware of the interest in those mementos from Santiago
that the pilgrims are to take back home, such as the ones he calls “St
James's conches”. These are probably the “horns” from the Rías Bajas, as
the translators of the Spanish version believe. The author of the
Calixtinus ascribes magical powers to them: “it is told that whenever
the melody from a conch of St James, which every pilgrim always carries
with him, resounds in the ears of the people, these feel their faithful
devotion grow, and ward off their enemies' animosity, the rumble of
hail, the roughness of the storm ...”.
EUROPE'S FOUNDING SONG
Por Xosé Luis Barreiro Rivas
Universidade de Santiago de Compostela
On the map of Europe, the Way of Santiago
is like a sea-current flowing from the vast western plains of the Old
World, when the winds of change began to blow on the complex social,
economic and political structures of the Carolingian Empire. That is why
I often resort to E. M. Sait's metaphor in which he compares political institutions to coral reefs,1
for I have the impression that we inhabit a world resulted from the
random piling up of unnoticed material, dragged by currents of pilgrims,
traders, crusaders, intellectuals, warriors and onlookers who broke up
the rigid structures of the feudal society in the Early Middle Ages and
began building what is now, like a portentous coral reef, the fruitful
and immense reality of Europe.
Certainly, we now see pilgrimage
as a peculiar phenomenon that hardly fits our social life and our ways
of worship. But it represents the sheer dynamics of a hyerocratic
society, when social changes looked for their legitimacy to a religious
form that would enable the old codes to be challenged and replaced for
new sets of values.2 That is the reason why it is best to
look into the Jacobean phenomenon from two different perspectives:
firstly, as a religious instance whose occurrence brought about
important side-effects such as the progress in art, economy, culture and
the institutions; and secondly, as a political fact that fostered
social change and was staged around the worship of the Apostle.
Symbol
of a new cosmology created in Western Europe in the 9th and 10th
centuries, the Way of Santiago is the axis mundi of a Christendom which
emerged as the signs of political and social identity that had been
swept away by the barbarian invasions in the Early Middle Ages began to
amalgamate. As a cosmos-making device, the Way of Santiago defines the
values which mark the boundaries of Christianity, legitimize its sources
of authority, and generate the centralizing thrust which will organize
power in the emergent western kingdoms. Motivated both by their
religious faith and by the civil incentives in the great route to the
End of the World, the pilgrims placed their beliefs and their ideals
above the centrifugal forces that threatened to fragment and impair the
feudal society. This is how they became the officiants of universality,
the true holders and designers of a space which they themselves had
helped to build and structure.
The city of Santiago, western tip
of Christianity, grew as a result of all this and gradually became the
most important reference encouraging the birth of a new Europe. It
spread new values as its Way took in the artictic splendor and the
infrastructural efficiency necessary for a route on which hundreds of
thousands of pilgrims coming from all around the world were bound to
stage the coming of a new era. In order to unify the flow of
contributions stored by the current of pilgrims on the institutional
reefs of the Early Middle Ages, and in order to allow for the complex
construction of Europe, the Way of Santiago equipped itself with a new
theory of society. Conveyed by legends, myths, traditions, and oral
historical narratives, this theory completed the central idea of a
universal Christendom who journeyed from Eastern to Western Europe—or
from Jerusalem to Santiago—as its understanding of the world pivoted on
Rome.
If we take into account that in large part political
socialization is, at least originally, a non-political fact based on
educational, religious, and family relations,3 the founding
of Europe can be described as a process of political socialization
featuring the rising of a new affective and cognitive structure in the
political reality. This provoked an incipient institutionalization of
the centralizing powers—Church and Empire—which broke away from the
feudal immobility of the Early Middle Ages and gave way for social,
cultural and economic change.
The Carolingian Legend
belongs to these theoretical-doctrinal corpus. Resting on a masterful
epic-historical structure, it conveys the values which defined the
structure of authority and the social and political aims of the new
temporal and religious order born of Aix-la-Chapelle. Its best version
can be found in the so-called Historia Turpini, included in Book IV of the Codex Calixtinus.4
The
more undifferentiated and the less institutionalized a society is, the
more it depends on the indirect ways of socialization and on a formal
assimilation of the new political values to the preexistent, established
and largely internalized community values. Accordingly, as Stephen Driscoll
points out, the farther away a society is from the dominance of reading
and writing and from the means of documental spreading, the more
precise the language of symbols and the indirect expression of meaning
become. This is why we can say that, within the frame of a vast
world-making activity, the social and cultural importance of pilgrimage
must be linked to the socio-genesis of the European civilization. This
process steps ahead of the rising of the political structures of the
late Middle Ages and becomes the seminal substratum of the changes
undergone in the Renaissance.5
Every political system
rests on an organized subjective system of values that endows individual
actions with meaning, that legitimizes and disciplines the
institutions, and that gives a sense of stability to political decisions
articulated as parts of a long-range social construction.6
Thus, pilgrimage to Santiago can be considered a means of linking the
beliefs, psychology, and individual action of the medieval person to the
social aggregate; or as an instrument to create a political culture
which moved along two axes: from the individual to society, so as to
structure the norms and values that make the power organizations and
institutions cohere, and from society to the individual, so as to
provide him or her with means of social integration and clues to
political behaviour.
In its most basic version, pilgrimage has a
sacramental character. This character allows for an incomprehensible
spiritual idea to be felt and understood, which is why pilgrimage has
always been considered a hyerophany, ie. a form of the sacred that the
common person can experience directly. Besides the simple reality of the
tired man going after his sacred goal, however, there are other
components in pilgrimage that helped define its historical reality, and
determined its remarkable effects on the European society of the Middle
Ages. Along with the pilgrims came monastic life, the ritual and
doctrinal unification of the Church, the papal authority on the Catholic
Church, the underlying political identity of Christendom, new literary
forms, new social ways and usages, as well as techniques of production
and scientific developments, all of which unified European society,
raised its self-awareness, and stirred in it the feeling that it
inhabited its own dwelling, and owned its own world.7
If
history is the politics of the past, if it is the means to understand
the facts that underpin our world, then listening to the music from the Codex Calixtinus
is returning to the sounds that lay the foundations of Europe. Like
them, a whole aesthetics with a vast social hold spread around the
Christian world as a means of praying, and as the actual evidence that
the long pilgrimage routes never crossed the limits of the own,
not-to-be-declined cosmos. At the same time, when we ascertain the
tightness of the bond between today's individual and the melodic art of
some thousand years ago, we shiver at the picture of the abyss of time,
even though we do this from the comfortable security of having a “way of
the stars” that runs across the western sky, from Frisia to Fisterra,
in its search after the apostolic sepulchre in Santiago. It was here
where, at the end of the first millenium, the whole of Europe began its
long way back.
1 Sait, E.M. (1938): Political Institutions: A Preface. New York: D. Appleton-Century.
2 Cfr. Bellah, R. 1966. “Religious Aspects of Modernisation in Turkey and Japan”, in J.L. Finkle and R.W. Gable, eds. Political Development and Social Change. New York: Wiley.
3 Cfr. Dowse, R.E. and J.A. Hughes. 1972. Political Sociology. New York: Wiley. Spanish edition: 1990. Sociología Política. Madrid: Alianza Editorial. 5th. ed.
4 Book IV of the Codex Calixtinus comprises the Historia Turpini
(ff. 163 to 191 v.): “TTURPINUS DOMINI GRATIA ARCHIEPISCOPUS Remensis
ac sedulus...” Furthermore, numerous manuscripts (more than 250) from
the Historia Karoli Magni et Rotholandi include variants from the Calixtinus narrative: vid. C. Meredith-Jones's Historia Karoli et Rotholandi ou Cronique du Pseudo-Turpin: textes revus et publiés d'apres 49 manuscripts (These, Faculté des Lettres de l'Université de Paris, 1936).
5 Cfr. Elias, N. 1987. El proceso de la civilización. Investigaciones sociogenéticas y psicogenéticars. Madrid: F.C.E.
6 Cfr. Pye, L.W. and Verba, S. 1965. Political Culture and Political Development. Princeton NJ: Princeton UP.
7 As for contemporary political science, Ernst Cassirer vouched for the validity of myth as a way of shaping the great political instances of our time. Cfr. 1947. El mito del Estado. Mexico: F.C.E.
THE SOUND OF THE CODEX
It seems particularly difficult for a
person like myself to leave my natural environment, among wires and
microphones, and step from behind the shelter of the sound mixer in
order to explain how I dared participate in such a project. I have to
confess that, unlike the other people with whom I am honoured to share
some space in this book, I enjoy a very special advantage when it comes
to expressing my opinions on the Codex. For, who knows which was the
atmosphere that surrounded the interpretation of these works in medieval
times? Well, this was the first issue that struck me at the very start
of this project, and it also happens to be the doubt remaining at the
back of my mind once the task is finished.
It has become more and
more difficult in our world to come across virgin, unpolluted spaces.
It is hard to breathe this air because it is clogged with strange
substances; mass-media spread cultural pollution at the speed of light,
whether this be for the better of for the worse; the stars are not
visible to our eyes, not even in dark, open nights, due to the
artificial light shed by our cities; and some of us are particularly
worried about an animal in clear and present danger of becoming extinct,
even though it is never listed in National Geographic surveys: silence.
The first and most crucial technical problem that came up as we were
preparing the recording sessions was finding a place which offered the
acoustic conditions most adequate for the interpretation of the pieces
in the Codex, but which were sufficiently isolated from the ever present
noise granted daily by the civilization at the closing of the third
millennium. After trying out several locations, we finally found the
place. The church of the monastery of Santa Cristina de Ribas de Sil
displayed, together with a breathtaking landscape, the ideal conditions
to carry out our enterprise: a wonderful sonority due to its wooden
ceiling, the absolute availability of the premises thanks to the
generosity of the persons in charge of the monastery, and, above all,
the conditions of isolation and distance from populated areas necessary
to prevent non-natural sounds to sneak into the recording. But alas!,
there was no electric power. The very civilization from which we were
escaping gave us, in turn, the solution to this problem in the form of a
quiet fuel generator, prudently placed some hundreds of meters away,
which fed power to the light and recording units. We had but to wait for
the night to avoid the singing of birds and other unwanted sounds ...
except, of course, for bats and owls, who sometimes accompanied the Coro
Ultreia with their authoritative voices, as if wanting to assert that
they were there long before us, and that their music surely matches up
to ours.
Santa Cristina had a unique atmosphere for monody, as
far as both setting and sound were concerned, but the very first
attempts at polyphony and instruments revealed that the atmosphere was
rather too dense for them. That is why a location with a lower degree of
reverberation was preferred and the recording was moved to the
Santuario de Nosa Señora de Abades, a church in a very beautiful valley
near Santiago de Compostela. With its clean and transparent acoustics,
it adequately hosted and wrapped the voices of the Coro Ultreia, thus
allowing for a clearer recording of the various melodic lines.
The
third space, the Cathedral of Tui, was not chosen because of its
acoustic conditions as in the previous cases. Its sweet-fluted organ
provided the best enfolding for some of the pieces collected in the
Calixtinus, although we had to fight the background noise brought to us
by city life.
I will refrain from boring anyone with technical
details. Certainly technics was not the key to the sonority put into
this records. We have tried to avoid every unnecessary electronic
addition, and this is how we believe to have achieved the purest sound
possible for you, as it could be found in the wonderful places where we
spent many hours recording it. Just pour plenty of enthusiasm and
communication among the people participating in this project, and you
will have the recipe that has turned Fernando Olbés's dream into a
reality. For he was the one who transmitted it to everyone else
including me, who, like Fernando himself and insofar as I was involved
in it, would like to offer it to all who have gone before it came true
and and to all who have arrived in time to enjoy it.
Allow me to
finish off with a confession. I was lucky enough to listen to what I
think is the perfect sound for the Codex Calixtinus: I was, at three in
the morning and minus three degrees, buried in the dark, standing at the
doorstep of a romanesque church from the XII century lost in the Sil
canyon, feeling the silence only broken by the sound of the slightest
rain and the voices of some twenty madmen singing musical works eight
hundred years old. Not many people have had such a chance. . not even
the madmen “themselves”.
Pablo Barreiro Rivas. Sound technician.
