7 | 2023 - Performance of Medieval Monophony: Text and Image as Evidence for Musical Practice

PERFORMANCE OF MEDIEVAL MONOPHONY: TEXT AND IMAGE AS EVIDENCE FOR MUSICAL PRACTICE

Performance of Medieval Monophony: Text and Image as Evidence for Musical Practice (Introduction)
By Kristin Hoefener and Claire Taylor Jones
This issue of Textus & Musica, «Performance of Medieval Monophony: Text and Image as Evidence for Musical Practice», explores textual and visual sources related to the performance of medieval monophonic song, providing insight into historical contexts and practices. Monophonic song is fundamental to medieval musical culture, but many questions related to its performance still need to be explored further. Medieval music manuscripts document the evolution of monophonic music and its performance practices over time; however, they only capture a fraction of the story. Other sources, such as architectural remains, artwork, and textual accounts, provide complementary perspectives on how monophonic song was experienced and practiced.
This issue brings together research from an international conference held at the Nova University of Lisbon in January 2023. Scholars from different disciplines examine medieval monophonic song performance, including liturgical practices, visual depictions, normative literature, and artistic representations across medieval Europe and Byzantium. The contributions explore various aspects of monophonic singing, from musical and textual interpretation to the embodied experience of performers, revealing a rich interplay between text, music, and performance practice.
This introduction opens up these interdisciplinary approaches, focusing mainly on liturgical practices within medieval religious orders. Descriptive sources like chronicles offer glimpses into the daily practices of religious communities. These narratives underline the spiritual significance of sung performance and the expectations for singers in performing liturgical chants. Prescriptive sources, such as customaries and liturgical ordinals, outline the specific tasks of chant leaders and provide instructions for conducting liturgical music. These documents reveal meticulous attention to detail in maintaining musical quality and correcting deviations during performance through hand signals and other gestures.
The introduction also explores how performance practices were organized and adapted within religious communities. Letters exchanged between convents demonstrate the practical performance of musical genres like sequences, including the alternating practices between soloists and choir or organ and choir. This variability shows the dynamic nature of monophonic chant performance and the creative solutions devised by singers, cantors, and chantresses to navigate challenges in the daily liturgy.

Self-Description and Self-Quotation in Two Trouvère Contrafact Pairs
By Nicholas Bleisch
Attributions to named trouvères in manuscripts raise challenging questions about the nature of authoriality in the repertoire. In the face of conflicting attributions, it is clear scribes cannot be relied on to associate songs with their authors. Given musical variance, it is unclear how strongly a given melody is associated with a given text and its attributed author. What, if anything, do these authorial attributions mean for our interpretation of text and melody? Did the makers and users of these manuscripts connect authors’ names with the authorial personae within the texts? The technique of contrafaction, the re-use of melody for multiple different texts, poses similar questions. How did medieval listeners and readers recognize the connections between pairs of songs? And how did it change the interpretation? This article is an examination of two unusual song pairs, one attributed to Richard de Semilli, the other to Moniot de Paris. Each pair, through its shared music, juxtaposes a chanson with a pastourelle. This juxtaposition creates a new context for the lyric voice within the chanson, by linking it to the dialogic interactions of the pastourelle. My reading of these songs examines how the narratives they present align shared music with an over-arching lyric persona, in turn reinforced by shared attribution. Yet the peculiar interactions of these songs challenge any straightforward assumptions about who controls the narrative. The perspectives of the female characters from the pastourelles by turns undermine and infect the music and texts of the chansons and by extension their male subjects. Central to my reading is the repetitive structure of the melodies, designed to reinforce the memory of key themes and phrases which connect pieces, while maintaining a flexibility which allows the same melody to serve poems in different genres and registers. The use of music to combine multiple lyric voices and place registers in dialogue with each other forms an analogue to debate song, dramatic works, and polyphonic genres. The conclusions of this article contribute to a growing consensus that the high-style chanson took part in a turn toward hybridity and textual polyphony in the later 13th century. They further highlight the role music plays in projecting authoriality within medieval French song.

Dominican Sisters Together in Prayer: Reading, Praying and Singing in Portuguese Observant Reform Literature
By Gilberto Coralejo Moiteiro
Reading and singing were the primary methods of prayer in monastic and conventual communities. During periods of reform, concern for these collective worship practices tended to grow stronger, as they were understood to be sources of contemplation and spiritual experience, especially for enclosed religious women who could not fulfill what friars, called to public life, could do. This paper explores discourses on liturgy and collective readings in normative and didactic literature from two Portuguese Dominican convents of the Observant reform, the Convent of Jesus in Aveiro (founded in 1461) and the Convent of Our Lady of Paradise in Évora (founded in 1516). The focus lies on the non-liturgical books found in their libraries, which are mostly written in Portuguese and include both normative documents (the Rule of Saint Augustine, the nuns’ Constitutions) as well as para-normative texts, such as sermons, a commentary on the Rule, and a translation of Humbert of Romans’s Book of Duties. Finally, special attention is given to a female-authored chronicle that tells the story of the foundation of the Convent of Jesus by its first prioress, Beatriz Leitão, which reinforces the normative principles through a discourse intended to build the identity of her community. The same trends in the increased production of vernacular normative literature for nuns that have been verified in the well-studied reform of the Dominican Teutonic province can also be found in the Portuguese province during the 15th and 16th centuries.

«Senhoras que cantan y no cantan caresciendo de la theorica y pratica». Musical Theory and Liturgical Practice in the Monastery of Lorvão
By Mercedes Pérez Vidal
This article addresses the transmission context of a formerly unknown text on music theory, copied on the verso of the last folio of a gradual (Lisbon, BnP, L.C. 238), which was part of a set of choirbooks commissioned by Catarina d’Eça, abbess of Santa María de Lorvão (1471-1521). The article discusses this source within the broader context of the production and circulation of liturgical books, particularly among Cistercian nuns. It reviews some assumptions concerning women’s agency in creating and performing liturgy and the negotiation between nuns and priests over nearly every aspect of liturgical care. It shows how the role of both lay and religious women as mediators across and between religious orders and kingdoms or territories can no longer be overlooked. The last section examines the theoretical sources of this brief musical treatise to determine whether the author of the text drew on the tradition of the Bernardian reform, or on other kinds of musical sources from outside the Cistercian tradition. Both the sources and the use of the Castilian language shed light on the origins of the text’s author.

Foray into Unknown Performance Practices: Rubrics in Byzantine Manuscripts (14th-15th centuries) Describing the Chanting of Psalms
By Nina-Maria Wanek
Psalm composition is among the least explored topics of Byzantine chant, although psalmody constitutes a vital part of the daily cycle of the Byzantine offices, especially of Matins (Orthros) and Vespers (Hesperinos). This lack of knowledge is caused to a large extent by the fact that psalmody is a chant tradition that in its early stages was transmitted primarily orally and aurally. Notated sources – with a few exceptions – have come down to us only from the 14th century onwards. Moreover, many aspects remain hypothetical as the chanting of psalms seems to have been so well-known to singers and composers alike that the performance did not merit special mention. However, so-called typika, i.e. books of directives and rubrics describing the order of the services and offices for monasteries and churches, can be found from approximately the 8th-9th centuries onwards. These typika contain valuable details regarding the way in which psalms were performed as well as in which context and by whom. Beside these documents, the rubrics in music-liturgical manuscripts also provide practical information on how psalms were to be chanted. So far, this information has rarely been used for the study of psalm compositions. Thus, various prominent psalms of the morning and evening services are selected for the present paper in order to discuss their transmission from the earliest available sources on, and to provide a detailed picture of their structure and their performance. Vital to this discussion is the fact that there existed two different types of medieval psalter in Byzantium, one for the monastic, the other for Constantinople’s cathedral rite. During the early 13th century these different ways of celebrating the offices gradually merged into one “mixed” rite. This had a profound impact on the performance and composition of psalms. The paper therefore looks at questions such as which words and what kind of phrases are used in typika and manuscript rubrics to describe the performance of psalms? Which singers are mentioned in this context and which role did they play? How can we imagine antiphonal singing to have taken place? Can we glean some more understanding of the ways psalms were chanted in the centuries before they were actually written down? These are only some of the issues examined in order to present a new angle of discussing and describing the complex topic of Byzantine psalmody.

Aspects of Performance Practice and Training of the Medieval Chanter and Chantress in Byzantium: An Interdisciplinary Approach
By Evangelia Spyrakou
Musical manuscripts, along with their rubrics and treatises, iconography, typika and historical narratives, contain fragmentary evidence of various performance practices, participants and aspects of the training procedure of the Byzantine chanting body named choros. When co-examined, sources lead to a better understanding since they provide us with data such as number, genders and ages of those chanting in churches, their attire, means and practices of co-ordination, ison-practice, specific position and movement during every part of an office, distribution of a chant among the members of the chanting ensemble, instructions for the use of the voice and articulation, qualification terms for voice, ages, methodology, training procedures and trainers of chanters and chantresses. In particular, the paper demonstrates the dual function of the Byzantine choros both as a performing body within worship and as a self-sufficient unit of lifelong training for its members and the community. In the first part of the paper, ritual instructions of typika and musical manuscripts combined with historical narratives, depictions and imperial legislation, will highlight the characteristics and performance practices of each interdependent member of the choral ensemble. In the second part, data from historical narratives, musical treatises and iconography testify to a systematic training procedure interconnected with worship practice. Source material illuminates the starting age for the training of a chanter, the various stages, the tutors, their goals and methodology according to each level and the constant training even among members considered at the top of the choral pyramid. Sources also reveal the conscious training and use of vocal cavities, thus leading to specific expectations of dynamics and vocal quality in performance instructions of musical manuscripts and the theoretical treatise of Gabriel Hieromonachos. The combined use of such sources and systematic music education also clarifies the idea of chanting by heart, without the need for books, thanks to “gestic” notation, a term coined by Christian Troelsgård. It refers to the depiction by the hand of neumes and their combinations forming formulae that, along with the presence of the domestikoi who intone and the kanonarchs who read hymnographic texts loudly, obviate the need for manuscripts during worship. Finally, it confirms the existence of a systematic concern for articulation as part of the training procedure, identified as early as the years of Theodoros Stoudites.

Alliteration and Consonance in Aquitanian versus: Putting the Body Back into Singing
By Eva Moreda Rodríguez
The use of alliteration and consonance (the repetition of consonant sounds in close proximity) in Aquitanian monophonic repertoires has been noticed in existing scholarship; scholars including Andreas Haug, Jeremy Llewellyn, and Mary Channen Caldwell ascribe various structural and mnemonic functions to it. In this article, I re-examine the presence of alliteration and consonance in Aquitanian versus and trope repertoires by focusing on the kinds of bodily engagement that they demand from singers and on how such engagements might have contributed to matters of musical structure, narrativity and relationship between text and music – all areas in which Aquitanian repertoires innovated greatly. Indeed, the repetitions of consonant sounds in close proximity would have likely demanded singers to engage their speech organs (lips, tongues, jaws, palate and abdominal support) in ways rather different from what we tend to find in the everyday repertoire that monks would have sung in Aquitanian monasteries. My discussion draws upon a range of medieval understandings of the body: from the widespread absence of bodily and organic matters in medieval singing treatises, to communal understandings of the body which would have likely resonated with monastic communities. The aim is not necessarily to reconstruct the performance practice of this repertoire, but rather to prompt a re-examination of it through its sonic and bodily aspects, gaining new understandings on the relationship between music in this repertoire and on their contextualization in a world where ideas about music, music-making and the body were changing.

«I Did it My Way»: Emotion in the Performance of Medieval Melodies
By Manuel Pedro Ferreira
The Early Music performer is always confronted with the need to create a satisfactory experience for modern ears that can do justice to a historically remote artefact represented by musical notation. The stage reinstates life, even when its ultimate model lies far in the past. This generates concern regarding the right balance between practical feasibility, historical accuracy, and public appreciation. This essay argues that emotional power and flawless voices provide an important bridge between the medieval and the contemporary reception of Early Music. It addresses some editorial and performative problems that arise when liturgical chant is removed from its context. Grounded in professional experience, it offers some tools for intensified communication, in order to foster the goal of emotional involvement in the performance of medieval music.

VARIA
ARTICLES

Towards an Assessment of the History of the Manuscript Transmission of the Musical Repertoire of the Italian Trecento: Some Methodological Problems
By Giacomo Ferraris
This paper addresses the problem of the difficulty in establishing stemmatic relationships in the repertoire of the Italian Trecento because of the strong tendency to innovation that characterises most medieval Romance traditions, on the one hand, and of the tendency to readily correcting evident copying mistakes that tends to characterise musical traditions, on the other.
Various solutions to the problem are proposed from trying to recognise variants that, while not evident errors, can however give indications of directionality in the copying process, to devising methods for “triangulating” the distribution of nondirectional variants with other streams of evidence, in order to construct at least partial stemma, or nondirectional maps of the placing of the reciprocal position of the witnesses in the history of the transmission of the repertoire (the so-called phylogenetic trees).

NOTES

«Volez oïr (la) muse Muset»: a proposito di un recente lavoro sulla metrica dei trovieri
By Luca Gatti
The analysis of a recent essay on the metrics of the trouvères (Fabio Sangiovanni, Stati di imperfezione. Studio sull’anisosillabismo nella lirica oitanica, Padova, Esedra, 2021) gives the opportunity to discuss the relationship between text and melody, also according to rhythmic patterns, with particular regard to Colin Muset’s notable composition Volez oïr (la) muse Muset (Lkr 44.17; RS. 966).

Adam de la Halle & Companions: a proposito di un libro recente
By Federico Saviotti
This paper contains an analytic review of the recently issued Musical Culture in the World of Adam de la Halle, edited by Jennifer Saltzstein (Leiden-Boston, Brill, 2019). A thorough assessment of old and new hypotheses about Adam de la Halle, his musical and poetic works and his cultural context leads to reaffirm the need of a consequent and actually multidisciplinary approach – so far only rarely applied – to a complex object, of the utmost interest for both Musicology and Philology.