Medieval Music: Origins of Notation, (part 4)
By the 12th century, Western Europe had many of the components necessary for modern written notation to flourish as a practice of preserving melodic content of the liturgy. Secular uses were not far behind, and in many ways, had always been a part of the journey. Much of our knowledge of these non-religious songs are still limited to social systems of the upper classes. The nobility and the clergy are the areas through which records survive, and it can be assumed that the populace was filled with as much music as they were entertained in the higher echelons of royalty and religion, the record that survives comes from the latter. Still, that being said, there is much to glean from these texts. Two fascinating accounts that we will explore derive from William IX, the Duke of Aquitaine (1071-1127) and Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179). While they both survive in vastly different worlds, their music is some of the first examples of written notation that relates to the modern western style.
Some of the nuances of music recorded from this time period include its simplicity as a single melody line with no specific references to instrumentation. This notation evidently has only the purpose of allowing faithful reproduction of the intended melody to the lyrical content. In both instances of Hildegard’s liturgical songs and William’s lyrical poetry, the melodic provisions are restricted to singular notation of melodic passages. The 11th and 12th centuries had not developed specific rhythmic notation; this would come later in the 13th century with the treatise of De Mensurabili Musica), so this melodic line often relied on the cadence of the language and the placement of the corresponding neumes in the text to supply the general tempo and meter of the performance. The long-standing oral tradition of transmitting previous melodic content was now given authorship, and in the case of these two song writers, these works now had attribution that attached identity to content. Previously, the performer had more investment to the reproduction of material with their personal emulation, whereas now songs were in the voice of their creators.
William IX was a member of the French aristocracy as the Duke of Aquitaine and Gascony and Count of Poitou from 1086 until his death. He was one of the Crusade leaders in 1101, through his military career was largely unsuccessful. He had a tenuous relationship with the church and had a history as a womanizer and seducer. An anonymous script in the old Occitan language typically written to provide a brief biography of troubadours of the time states, “The Count of Poitiers was one of the most courtly men in the world and one of the greatest deceivers of women. He was a fine knight at arms, liberal in his womanizing, and a fine composer and singer of songs. He traveled much through the world, seducing women.” Only eleven of his works survive and these songs make William the IX the earliest lyrical poet of the Romance vernacular language. His frankness, wit, and vivacity endured him to the public, and his works are preserved in chansonniers (literally, “song books” where chansons, or polyphonic or monophonic settings of songs were recorded) that replicate his compositions in several reproductions. Most of the songs are about women, though he also wrote about feudal politics due to his scrupulous dealings with the church. He was excommunicated twice, and one of his songs is possibly written one of these instances, as it partly muses about mortality. He loved scandal and no doubt enjoyed shocking his audiences. This obvious link to our modern approaches to celebrity is in stark contrast to our other example of early written music.
Hildegard of Bingen lived during roughly the same period, yet she couldn’t have been more the contrast to William IX. The tenth child of a family of the lower nobilities, her headaches and sickly conditions, possibly as a method of political positions or both, led her parents to offer her as a servant of God to the Benedictine monastery at the Disibodenberg, which had been recently reformed in the Palatinate Forest. She remained there for 39 years where she learned to read and write from her fellow professed, an older woman named Jutta who came to the monastery at the same time. Hildegard tells us that it was a father confessor named Volta that taught her the ways of simple psalm notation, (Reed-Jones, p6). During her time at the Disibodenberg monastery and her tenure at the St. Rupertsberg monastery in 1150 she wrote three great volumes of visionary theology, an variety of musical compositions, two volumes on natural medicines, invented a language, and wrote two works of hagiography, (Kienzle, 2011).
Ordo Virtutum (Play of the Virtues) is a morality play thought to have been composed in 1151. It is in Latin with music and has 82 songs that do not pay homage to the Mass, the Office, or any feast. It is thought to be the earliest known surviving drama not attached to the liturgy, (Norton, 2006). The play serves as a metaphor for the fables of sin, forgiveness, repentance, and confession. The female voices serve to restore the fallen to the faithful. The Devil character shouts or speaks his parts while the female characters sing in monophonic plainchant. In addition to the Ordo Virtutum, Hildegard wrote many liturgical songs collected into a cycle called Symphonia armoniae celestium revelationum. She wrote monophonic melodies that pushed the boundaries of range for Gregorian Chant of the time. As with other compositions of the 12th century, they lacked rhythmic or tempo indications. The surviving manuscripts use ornate late-style German notations.
Hildegard’s works are significant for several reasons. One being that she actually signed them, unlike many other works that were simply listed as ‘anon’. The second is that her work went largely unrecognized until 1979 when modern scholars began to take deeper investigation into the role of female contributions history. This is in notable contrast to the investigations to French Chansonnier of the 13th centuries, where large amounts of scholarship has been devoted to their authorship, categorization, and analysis. Sylvia Huot has done extensive research into these song books and writes, “By the time the first songbooks were compiled, then, the songs would already have existed in multiple versions developed through oral transmission, and a given scribe would have written down the version that he knew or liked the best.” Hildegard’s music not only stands apart from these traditional secular texts as being original compositions, but also as lasting through the development of performance in compliment of its written communication.
The songbooks that follow Hildegard and William IX are a testament to their pioneering into the world of connecting prose with musical composition. Though the religious, political, and technological aspects of their societies helped usher in this age of musical transmissions through more than just the memory of melodic passage, this advent would create building blocks for richer explorations of melisma, polyphony, and grand orchestral arrangements to come. The association of authorship to these melodies created a permeable barrier between the noble and underclasses. The profession of musicians and their connection to scribes most certainly opened the door between communicating social class distinctions by which earlier methods of literacy did not allow. One of the most notable examples of this exists within the jugement d'amour, stating that “clerks have transmitted the cultural values of courtliness, presumably through their role in literary tradition.” The text illuminates a central debate that knights would know nothing delight or liberty had they not learned it from the clerks. As Huot states in her work, “This argument suggests a valorization of the figures responsible for the transmission of literary texts over and above those whose deeds are celebrated in these texts.” (Huot, p63).
This act of music notation has many secrets to unlock in its permeance to social order, transmission of history, cultural epistemology, and contributions to authorial voice. Its origins are intertwined with countless points of contribution, whose focal personalities distinguish themselves by a stroke of an autograph. William IX and Hildegard of Bingen are two of the first recorded musicians in our current historical archive that exemplify the impact of modern written notation and its ability to preserve music as it had never been before. The masterpieces that would follow became compositions with great global impact, and their names are almost certainly as significant as their sounds.
Enjoy the listening example from Ensemble für Frühe Musik Augsburg, Camino de Santiago - Musik auf dem Pilgerweg zum Heilige Jacobus / Music on the Pilgrimage Route to St. James. The following song by William IX describes a piquant adventure which he had during his pilgrimage. The ensemble use the melody of the Versus "In laudes innocentium" found in the earliest of the St. Martial manuscripts (ca. 1099).
References for this article:
· https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_IX,_Duke_of_Aquitaine
· Chapter Title: Scribal Practice in Lyric Anthologies: Structure, Format, and Iconography of Trouvère Chansonniers Book Title: From Song to Book Book Subtitle: The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyrical Narrative Poetry Book Author(s): SYLVIA HUOT Published by: Cornell University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/10.7591/j.ctvn96fz1.6
· Reed-Jones, Carol. Hildegard of Bingen: Women of Vision (Washington: Paper Crane Press, 2004), p. 6.
· Hildegard of Bingen. Homilies on the Gospels. Trans. Beverly Mayne Kienzle (Cistercian Publications, 2011); and Hildegard of Bingen. Two Hagiographies: Vita Sancti Rupperti Confessoris and Vita Sancti Dysibodi Episcopi, ed. C.P. Evans, trans. Hugh Feiss (Louvain and Paris: Peeters, 2010).
· Burkholder, J. Peter, Claude V. Palisca, and Donald Jay Grout. 2006. Norton anthology of western music. New York: W.W. Norton.