The Gorleston Psalter

A friend dared me to comment on this article on vulgar scenes from illuminated medieval manuscripts. Never one to avoid a challenge, I picked a particular (and the least vulgar) piece from a particular manuscript.

The Gorleston Psalter is so-called because of its association with the church of St. Andrew in Gorleston, Norfolk. Psalter is from an Old English word that originally came from Greek and refers to a stringed instrument. It is used to refer to personal prayer books, or books with the  Old Testament Psalms. They are frequently illuminated—by hand, since they were made decades before printing. The illuminations are frequently a far cry from any pious topic or image, and seem designed to distract the viewer from boredom.

The illuminations of the Gorleston Psalter are usually represented by a fox carrying a goose in its mouth (the duck is actually saying "queck"); this may be because it is the only straightforward image that doesn't take a left turn into the fantastical. Above (from the article) is a bishop bowing his head before the executioner's axe; the executioner is a rabbit.

Go here and see how the British Library has put the Psalter online. You can see the creature with a bill and a man's face coming out of its ass, and many other odd and exotic combinations of personified animals or human-beast hybrids.

Interest in the Gorleston Psalter was revived about a decade ago when the Macclesfield Psalter unexpectedly surfaced. The artwork in the Macclesfield was so similar to the Gorleston that it is accepted that the artist and copyist was the same for both. Internal cues link both to the church of St. Andrew's in Gorleston. The owner put the Macclesfield Psalter up for auction at Sotheby's. It was about to go to California until a coalition of several British celebrities began a funding campaign that matched the winning bid of £1.7 million and kept the Psalter in England.

Hildegard of Bingen

Hildegard of Bingen shown with a psaltery.

One of the oldest known composers of liturgical music—and perhaps the earliest medieval dramatist—was a nun who lived in Germany in the 12th century known as Hildegard of Bingen (c.1098-1179).

What little we know of her early years tells us that she was the youngest of several children born to a lower-class family in Sponheim, Germany. Whether because she was sickly, or because she was very young and not likely to be able to inherit much, or because she was said to have mystic visions at an early age, she was given to the church while still very young (between the age of eight and 14).

Although cloistered, she was exposed to some education, learning enough rhetoric to be a forceful and compelling speaker and enough music to play the psaltery (a dulcimer-like instrument, shown above). She used a Latin in her writing that was very simple (she devised her own letters and made words up). There is some debate regarding whether this was due to a lack of formal education or the deliberate need to create her own form of expressing herself. Her writings on theological matters and on her visions led to attempts to canonize her. The canonization process stretched over centuries, until two recent popes (John Paul II and Benedict XVI) started referring to her as a saint; Benedict XVI declared her officially a saint in 2012. Her feast day is 17 September.

Outside of the church, she is mostly known for her music. Sixty-nine musical compositions are known to have been produced by Hildegard, and many modern recordings of them are available. They are monophonic, possessing a single melody, and are often closely related to the text with which she accompanies each musical piece. Because she does not use musical notation as we know it today, there is much room for interpretation of her work.

Here is a sample:

When Poets Collide?

Did the greatest English poet of the 14th century and the greatest French poet of the 14th century meet, thanks to the Hundred Years War?

Guillaume de Machaut (c.1300-1377) was a classical composer and poet—in fact, one of the last poets who also composed music—and a part of the ars nova ["new technique"] movement which embraced polyphony. His name suggests that he was born in Machault, east of Rheims in France, but it is clear that he spent most of his life in Rheims. Unlike many non-royal figures of his age, his popularity has ensured that we possess a remarkable amount of biographical information about him.

As a young man, he was a secretary to the ing of Bohemia, John I. He was named a canon of Verdun, then Arras, then Rheims; by 1340 he had given up the other positions and was a canon of Rheims only. As a canon, attached to the cathedral in Rheims and living without private wealth, he could devote himself to composing poetry and music. In all, we have about 400 pieces in various forms.

He lost his first patron, King John of Bohemia, when John died at the Battle of Crécy in 1346 during the Hundred Years War. Machaut found support from John's daughter. When she died during the Black  Death, he found support from her sons, Jean de Berry and CharlesV, Duke of Normandy.

In the next phase of the Hundred Years War, Geoffrey Chaucer (likely still a teenager at the time) was in the retinue of Prince Lionel as a valet. During the siege of Rheims in early 1360, Rheims rallied and captured the besiegers. Chaucer was taken prisoner. This would not have involved being thrown in dungeons and experiencing deprivation. The practice at the time was to capture as many high-ranking opponents as possible in order to gain money from ransoms. (Chaucer was ransomed for £16 in March.) The English would have likely experienced a mild form of "house arrest" which would have allowed them a certain amount of freedom. Chaucer would have had ample opportunity to visit Machaut.

Did he? We cannot be sure. Chaucer's poetry rarely offers attribution for his influences, but he was certainly intimately familiar with Machaut's work. Scholars have found numerous influences in Chaucer's writing. Chaucer scholar James I. Wimsatt has referred to "Guillaume de Machaut, who among fourteenth-century French poets exerted by far the most important influence on Chaucer."[link] Even long before he himself began writing, he was in a court that valued and supported the arts and poetry. Machaut was enormously popular in his own lifetime, and it seems inconceivable that Machaut would not have been sought out by several of the English who would have appreciated his reputation.

For a sample of his musical composition:

Anonymous IV

[DailyMedieval is on semi-hiatus for the holidays, and I am re-cycling some older posts. Today's is new, however, inspired by a music CD I received: Secret Voices by the female a capella group Anonymous 4.]

In the post on the Las Huelgas Codex I mentioned that many of the pieces in the codex were new to scholars, but some were familiar. Where else had they been seen?

Notre Dame Cathedral

The collection of recorded polyphonic music produced by composers working at Notre Dame Cathedral from c.1160-c.1250 is referred to as the Notre Dame School of Polyphony. A majority of medieval polyphonic music up to this time was committed to parchment by the Notre Dame School.

This does not man, sadly, that we can set a manuscript in front of a modern musician and have the notes played as they were intended to be heard. Differences in musical notation and rhythm make it close to impossible to know precisely how these pieces were performed centuries ago. For us to make an attempt is only feasible because of analyses of music written by a handful of people. Franco of Cologne was one, John of Garland another (best estimates are that he was keeper of a bookshop in Paris who edited two treatises on music), and the later writing of the industrious student known only as Anonymous IV.*

The "Alleluia nativitatis" by Pérotin

Thanks to Anonymous IV, we have contemporary definitions of what is meant by organum (a plainchant melody with one voice added to enhance harmony), discantus ("singing apart"; a liturgical style of organum with a tenor plainchant and a second voice that moves in "contrary motion"), the rules for consonance and dissonance, and other terms and rules of polyphony.

One "ironic" result of the writing of Anonymous IV is that. through him, we know the names of two composers who would otherwise have been lost to obscurity. He writes about Léonin and Pérotin with such detail and feeling that, although Anonymous would have lived several decades after they lived and composed, they were presumably so famous that their reputations lived on in the school. Léonin and Pérotin are some of the earliest names of artists that we can actually link to their works.

As much as we have been given by the treatise of Anonymous IV, his own identity and details of his life are unknown. Two partial copies of his work survive at Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk, England; one is from the 13th century, and one from the 14th. Clearly, his work was considered important enough to copy and preserve—but not his name. He was likely an English student who was at Notre Dame for a time in the late 13th century. Thanks to his interests, we understand more about the development of medieval polyphonic music than we otherwise would have.

*His name is the inspiration for a modern female a capella group.

The Music of Las Huelgas

From a facsimile edition of the Codex

[DailyMedieval is on semi-hiatus for the holidays, and I am re-cycling some older posts. Today's is new, however, inspired by a music CD I received: Secret Voices by the female a capella group Anonymous 4.]

The Abbey of Santa Maria la Real de Las Huelgas was founded in 1187 by Alfonso VIII of Castile, at the request of his wife, Eleanor of England, the daughter if Henry II an Eleanor of Aquitaine. It was founded on land that was going unused at the time; huelgas meant land that is fallow, although nowadays it is used to refer to "labor strikes."

Its origin granted it many royal privileges: it was exempt from taxes, held many valuable items that belonged to royal families, and became a traditional site for many royal weddings, such as that between Edward I of England and Eleanor of Castile. The monastery became Cistercian in 1199 and the burial sit for the royal family. Two of the first royal burials were the founders, Alfonso VIII and Eleanor of England.

Known for the privileges of its abbess, and for the hospital founded by Alfonso VIII, Las Huelgas gave to the modern world one more fascinating item left over from the Middle Ages: music.

In 1904, while doing research on the origins and development of Gregorian chant, two Benedictine monks found a manuscript in Las Huelgas containing 45 monophonic pieces and 141 polyphonic pieces. They are written on fairly durable parchment in red and black ink with Franconian notation (briefly discussed here and here). The Las Huelgas Codex includes many pieces familiar to scholars, but also pieces that are not recorded elsewhere.

Most of the pieces are from the late 13th century, when it is known that Las Huelgas had a 100-woman choir. We have to assume that, despite the Cistercian rules against the performance of polyphonic music, the choir of Las Huelgas performed these pieces at will, thanks to their royal patronage and privileges (the abbess was allowed for a long time to call synods, confirm abbesses of other monasteries, and even hear confession and grant absolution!).

Here is a recording of the Benedicta et venerabilis II and the Benedicamus dominu, with pictures from the Abbey's architecture and art. Enjoy!

Hermann of Reichenau

Hermann, with crutch & Salve Regina

Hermann of Reichenau (1013-1054) was born to Count Wolverad II and his wife Hiltrud in Upper Swabia. He was severely disabled at birth, and had to be carried around in a specially built chair. A 1999 article tried to diagnose him based on contemporary reports.

Using the biography written by his disciple Berthold, [an] unbiased analysis of the symptoms described [...] is worked out: [...] Intellectual functions were unaffected. [...] Muscle disease is considered possible, but motor neuron disease - either amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or spinal muscular atrophy - seems to be the most convincing diagnosis. [C Brunhölzl, Thoughts on the illness of Hermann von Reichenau]

Because of his condition, he was nicknamed "Contractus" or "the Lame." When he was seven years old, his parents handed him over to the cloister school of the nearby Benedictine monastery on Lake Constance, where he studied under Abbot Berno. Berno was a well-known figure at the time for, among other things, his reforms in liturgical music. Hermann became a monk in 1043 and, upon Abbot Berno's death in 1048, became Berno's successor as abbot.

Despite Hermann's extreme difficulty in moving and even speaking, he was considered a devoted monk and brilliant scholar. He wrote a great deal on music, mathematics, and astronomy. As well as a treatise on the science of music, he wrote two of the best-known of the medieval liturgical songs, the Alma Redemptoris Mater (Loving Mother of the Redeemer), and the Salve Regina (Hail Holy Queen).*

Among his other accomplishments, he is credited with speaking Arabic, because through his writings he made available to the Latin West many scientific discoveries that were previously only widely known in the Arab world. This knowledge of Arabic, however, is only an assumption. His biographer, Berthold, never mentions knowledge of Arabic, which would be unusual omission for such an accomplishment. The monastery was a center of learning in the area, and very likely held copies of works by Gerbert of Aurillac, who learned much from Arabic sources in Spain.

Hermann wrote two works on the astrolabe, previously unknown in Europe, and described a portable sundial. His works on mathematics used Roman numerals. Although this precluded the use of decimals, he still achieved some remarkable results. In his Epistola de quantitate mensis lunaris (Letter on measurement of lunar months), he tries to find the average length of a lunar month. In decimal notation, it is 29.530851 days. Hermann did not only not have decimal notation, he didn't have minutes and seconds. In his time, the hour was divided into "moments" and "atoms." He calculates the length of the lunar month to be 29 days, 12 hours, 29 moments, 348 atoms, which turns out to be exactly right.

He also wrote a history called Chronicon ad annum 1054 (Chronicle to the year 1054). The original is lost, but a 1529 edition saved the unique historical knowledge inside. After Hermann's death, it was continued by Berthold; Berthold died in 1088, but the duty was taken up by others up until 1175.

Hermann died on 24 September. In 1863, he was beatified (a step toward being recognized as a saint). As Blessed Hermann of Reichenau, he is considered the patron of unborn babies, and his Feast Day is celebrated on 25 September.

*A popular English version of Salve Regina was prominent in the Whoopi Goldberg film "Sister Act."

More than a Musician

We so often study famous people in isolation, forgetting that their lives and successes probably overlapped other well-known people. Imagine the possibilities when people of vision and ingenuity met with and influence each other?

Philippe de Vitry (1291-1361) is not a well-known name today, but in his lifetime he was acknowledged as the greatest musician of the age, and his own works and his connections with others are worth knowing. In his lifetime, he was a diplomat, a soldier, a poet, a composer and music theorist. Like most university-educated men of the Middle Ages, de Vitry was in Holy Orders and held several clerical positions, finally being appointed Bishop of Meaux by Pope Clement VI.

Some of the motets he composed have survived. His chief contribution to music, however, was in the evolving system of notation. In Ars nova notandi (Art of the new notation), de Vitry improved on Franconian musical notation that had been set out in Franco of Cologne's Ars Cantus Mensurabilis (The Art of Measurement of Songs); de Vitry recognized the existence and importance of duple and triple meter. For connoisseurs of music:

In the treatise Vitry recognizes the existence of five note values (duplex longa, longa, brevis, semibrevis, and minima), codifies a system of binary as well as ternary mensuration at four levels (maximodus, modus, tempus, prolatio), and introduces four time signatures. He also discusses the use of red notes to signal both changes of mensural meaning and deviations from an original cantus firmus. (source)

And of course he knew other accomplished figures of his age, such as Petrarch, Nicholas Oresme, and Gersonides. In fact, de Vitry's musical approach to mathematics (the two subjects were closely linked in medieval education) prompted him to request of Gersonides a work to prove a theory. This 1342 work, De harmonicis numeris (On the harmony of numbers), maintained that, "except for the pairs 1-2, 2-3, 3-4, and 8-9, it is impossible for two numbers that follow each other to be composed of the factors 2 and 3." (source) The result is known today as the Theorem of Gersonides.

Julie Andrews & St. John

Paul the Deacon

Paulus Diaconus (c.720-c.799) wrote the hymn of St. John, and it goes like this:

Ut queant laxis resonāre fibris
Mi ra gestorum famuli tuorum,
Sol ve polluti labii reatum,
Sancte Iohannes.
So that your servants may,
with loosened voices,
resound the wonders of your deeds,
clean the guilt from our stained lips, O Saint John!

What does this have to do with Julie Andrews? Nothing, until the 11th century, when Guido of Arezzo (c.992-1050) proposed an ascending diatonic scale for music.* He realized that the hymn was a perfect mnemonic for the scale, and so he described the scale using the syllables on which the ascending tones fell: ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la. Around 1600, in Italy, a musicologist named Giovanni Battista Doni refined the scale by changing "ut" to "do" because he preferred the open vowel sound it created, and added a seventh note which he called "si" because of the SI initials from "Sancte Iohannes." So we had do re mi fa sol la si.

It was a long time later that a Norwich, England music teacher named Sarah Glover (1785-1867) developed a method she called Sol-fa for teaching a capella singing, and changed si to ti so that each syllable would start with a different consonant sound.

Glover published her ideas, and they were further refined (and sometimes independently developed) by people like John Curwen, Pierre Galin, Aimé Paris, Emile Chevé. I cannot draw a direct line from any of these to Rodgers and Hammerstein, but by the time R&H came along, "singing the scales" was a commonplace way of teaching the rudiments of music to children. When R&H needed a number for a scene in the 1959 musical "The Sound of Music" when Maria teaches the children to sing—after discovering they knew nothing of singing because their father had forbidden it—what was more natural than using the sung scales that had been developed over the past thousand years? Hammerstein turned each note to a homonym to flesh out the lyrics, and the rest is theatrical/cinematic history.

Hammerstein should be grateful that he didn't have to write a lyric for "ut."

*"Ascending" is important here: previously, the scale was described as a series of descending notes.

What is Time?

What then is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not: yet I say boldly that I know, that if nothing passed away, time past were not; and if nothing were coming, a time to come were not; and if nothing were, time present were not. Those two times then, past and to come, how are they, seeing the past now is not, and that to come is not yet? But the present, should it always be present, and never pass into time past, verily it should not be time, but eternity.

With this passage, found halfway through Book XI of his Confessions, St. Augustine of Hippo (13 November 354-28 August 430) discussed the difference between Time and Eternity. He knows that he is not aware of time that is yet to come, or time that is past; only time that is present; but he still doesn't know how to define what time is.

A medieval 24-hour clock.

Measurement of time was imprecise. There were "hours" of the day: the Vigil took place between 2:30 and 3:00 a.m., Matins came at Dawn, et cetera. These hours designated times of worship and work for monks and were extended to general use, but they were not exactly a way to quantify time. The hour of Sext was at noon, for instance, which was recognized when the sun was highest, but Matins/Dawn came more or fewer hours before Sext, depending on the time of year. They were segments of the day that altered with the seasons; they did not measure a span of time.

St. Benedict of Nursia (c.480-543), in his Rule for monks, intends them to worship at specific times, and finds a way to measure a span of time. Monks were not to slack at getting up for Matins, and so:

If anyone shall come to matins after the Gloria of the 94th Psalm, which on this account we wish to be said slowly and leisurely, he shall not take his place in the choir, but go last of all, or to some place apart which the abbot may appoint for those who so fail in his sight.

Time could be measured, therefore, by comparison to a known duration.* But even durations could be tricky. Augustine had pondered thinking of a long syllable as equivalent to two short ones, "But when two syllables sound one after the other—the first short, the second long—how shall I keep hold of the short one?" Augustine seemed to be caught up in the idea that time was a continuum, and that he was living in a constant present and could not treat the past and future in the same conceptual way, since he could not live in them. The Middle Ages couldn't grab time and measure it, like water or distance or even acceleration. It was insubstantial, and belonged to God.

The concept of time had to change ... and eventually it did. There was no clear turning point; there had to be some conceptual change, planned or otherwise, to see time not as a line but as a series of points, as separate moments that could be thought of without being linked to a past or future moment.

Sometime in the mid-13th century, we find Franco of Cologne. He was a music theorist who gave us the idea that a mark on a page should distinguish how long a note should be. This was the logical extension of Franco's definition of time: "Time is the measure of actual sound as well as of the opposite, its omission."

Was this the moment? Was it music, with its attention to and reverence for mathematics that accidentally inspired the thinking of time as separate units that could be measured and counted? We might be able to believe that, if there were some evidence that the world began to measure and quantify time; for instance, if the development of mechanical clocks were to start around this time.

Well, guess what happened next?

*This method of measuring spans of time without a clock is used even today.