Remains of a Medieval Italian Antiphonal

MUSICAL NOTATION OF PLAINCHANT

The musical notation of these leaves is that of plainchant, 12 an ancient method of singing the prescribed liturgical texts of the services. As Pope Clement testified in the first century, psalms have been sung since their introduction to Christian history - often in the same manner as their performance today, when they are usually set to the melodic chants firmly established by the thirteenth century.13 The notation of liturgical chant, however, makes its earliest appearance in the mid-eleventh century, with diastematic neumes: specific fluid shapes, placed above the words, at different levels on a staffless page to indicate pitch and style. The neumatic shapes gradually evolved by the thirteenth century into the square notation found in these leaves, whose notation is very clear and precise. The basic unit is the single square, called a punctus, which can be placed together in multiples to create lines of melody with particular rhythms and techniques implicit in their structure. There are exact terms for the different note patterns, beginning with the podatus, and continuing on in great complexity.

In addition, early chant notation eventually adopted a center line, with more staff lines added on until the late fifteenth century, when five became the general practice. However, throughout the late medieval period, chant can be found with up to six or seven staff lines, in order to accommodate the range and complexity of the chant melody. The fact that this manuscript had five lines for the staff, and not four as many other antiphonals of this period contain, might not necessarily imply a later date as much as use by a more complex style of a specific musical tradition of a particular monastery or cathedral. This detail will become more relevant when further research can reveal the full body of information stored in the presence and style of the chant in this manuscript. A quick overview of the nature of the chant melodies in these leaves: they are highly melismatic, or give each syllable multiple notes on which to be sung. Most of the chant is written out completely; fixed or scheduled parts of the liturgy, like the Magnificat or the Psalms, would be sung to established chants which were all memorized, or whose first notes are included as a visual reminder. The pitches of the notes on the page are determined by the key signature, the pair of notes on the far left edge of the staff, whose tonal basis is placed in the eight church modes, a developed system of tonalities employed from the tenth century to the present day. Transcribing this kind of developed notation into modern musical notation is not difficult; with some training these chants could easily be sung directly from the page.

An interesting aspect of the music in these leaves is that it appears as if many of the notes have been changed. Erasure is evident on roughly half the leaves, with at least two or more puncti having been scraped off along with a little of the rubricated staff lines, which were not restored. It seems as if the melodies were altered by a hand later than the scribe's, who would be more likely to touch up the broken staff lines. A discrepancy between what the codex originally notated and what was actually performed may be one implication of these alterations; perhaps an awareness of the chants by performers themselves differed from the tradition of the exemplar, and they changed it to conform to their customary practice. Using the concordance system described below, comparison of the original chants and the altered chants might be a valuable avenue of exploration.

In order to organize all the chant of the medieval Roman Catholic Church, a standardized system of identification has been established by musicologists. René-Jean Hesbert's Corpus Antiphonalium Officii is a multi-volume work cataloguing all the text and their accompanying melodic chants contained within twelve different medieval sources, covering both the monastic and the Roman cursus; each chant is given a concordance number beginning with the letters CAO and followed by an identifying number. Hesbert has labeled thousands of chants in his work. This CAO number can be used to identify matching chants in any liturgical songbook, giving researchers a common ground for cataloguing the material with which they are working. When a chant does not find a match in Hesbert, it is given its own number with a three-letter tag connected to the name of the manuscript. Sometimes the makeup of the chants in a book can connect it to an individual monastic tradition, which makes cataloguing each chant a worthwhile pursuit. Though beyond the scope of this introductory investigation, a full transcription of the music and concordance with CAO numbers would be rewarding - though frustrating, as so few chants are contained complete on their single leaf.


Listen to a recording of Folio 1.
"In principio erat verbum..."
Christmas Day (Nativitas Domine)
Matins: Nocturn I: Responsory I

Recorded 10-12-03 in the Lady Chapel of St. Stephen's Church, Providence, Rhode Island
Produced by Laura Saetveit
Sung by Frederick Jodry, W. Randolph Miles, and Christopher Lowrey

Image Source: Historiated initial 'M' from folio 9r.


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