This volume in honour of Charles Atkinson focuses on the idea of music as a metadiscipline in the medieval west, in the sense of a practical and intellectual endeavour that straddles intellectual fields. A detailed bio-bibliography for Atkinson at the end of the volume, together with a cursory glance at the footnotes in each chapter, clearly illustrates the importance of his contributions to this field. The collection focuses on the Carolingian context, with groups of essays addressing music in relation to verbum (text), numerus (number), ars (formalised learning and practice), and cultus (liturgical practice). This is a helpful organising principle for the book, although it might tend to de-emphasise parallel themes that run through the collection, and that I hope to illuminate here.
The studies engage with a historical narrative whose broad outlines are familiar to medievalists. In 751, the Western-European Merovingian throne was usurped by Pepin the Short, members of whose family had gradually expanded Carolingian dynastic power as successive majordomos, orheads of the Merovingian royal household and court. Papal support was key to the success of this usurpation, and, from the outset, Carolingian rhetoric was grounded in their divine right to rule, and their responsibility for the eternal souls of their subjects; the Carolingian educational and cultural reforms are best understood through this theocratic lens. Politics and religion combine most explicitly in Gunilla Iversen’s contribution. She argues that direct connections may be made between liturgical texts in honour of Christ the King, and the political agenda of Louis the Pious (d.840, son of Charlemagne) and his sons and grandsons. While the liturgical texts present themes of rex-lux-pax, these rulers struggled with internecine conflicts and with external threats presented by Viking raiders and others. Iversen argues that the liturgical texts present a desired, idealised view of kingship and kingdom.
The 1980s and 1990s saw an explosion of scholarship on the Carolingian reforms. Several of those whose contributions fundamentally shaped me as a scholar have contributed to the present volume, making the reading of it a real treat, and outlining the “state-of-the-art” among highly-esteemed colleagues with years of experience of working with these materials.
Music’s role in the Carolingian reforms has continued to be a thorny question. As famously noted by Isidore of Seville in the seventh century, “if sounds are not held in the memory of man, they perish, because they cannot be written down.” How can we evaluate the relationship between the Gregorian chant codified in the Carolingian context and its late-antique Christian Roman antecedents, or its relationship with musical knowledge from antique Roman and Greek culture, since the first extant notated books of Gregorian chant date from as late as the ninth century? Charles Atkinson, the book’s honorand, has spent a scholarly career grappling with exactly these questions, and the book’s contributors have taken a variety of diverse approaches in addressing them.
Christian worship was of central importance in the Carolingian project. As emperor Charlemagne’s famous Admonitio generalis specified in 789AD, Christian worship was to be unified, renovated, corrected, and supported by a focused educational programme. John Contreni lays out multiple modern interpretations of the key Admonitio generalis passage referring to education; this cacophony results from inconsistent medieval text transmission. Contreni’s is a compelling interpretation: the Admonitio generalis orders that schools should be established in which boys should study (“read,” in the sense of “reading history at university”)--in order--psalms, [Tironian] notes, chant, computus and grammar. This curriculum, as Contreni argues, is logically structured to lead pupils towards a nuanced understanding of Christian theology. Chant is a central element of this curriculum. The moral importance of musical correctio is explained by Patrick Geary, who summarises musicologists’ understanding of the power and danger of music in Carolingian thought. This also helps to outline the ethically crucial role of cantors, in charge of chant and liturgy within Christian institutions. Susan Rankin’s chapter begins and ends with case studies illustrating practical applications of this curriculum: grammar was used by Carolingian poet and theologian Gottschalk as the starting point for analysing difficult chant texts, then proceeding to text models and meaning; and Aurelian built on the same ideas, together with concern for correct musical articulation of text. Rankin interprets other eighth- to ninth-century revisions to chant texts through the same conceptual lens, greatly enriching our appreciation of the Carolingian programme of correctio in relation to music. As Rankin discusses, the Carolingian rhetoric surrounding chant performance focuses more on attitude (taking on the Benedictine admonition to “sing wisely”) than the precise shapes of individual melodies. She incorporates discussion of eight-mode system as a crucial aid to memorisation, of practical music theory for providing a vocabulary with which cantors could effectively conceptualise and teach melody, and of the conceptual development of the chant book as libellum musicae artis (“a book of musical art”).
Andreas Pfisterer and Rebecca Maloy both discuss the practical results of Carolingian engagement with chant. Pfisterer identifies regional patterns in the choice and ordering of office responsories in Easter week, demonstrating lack of repertorial fixity in the franco-roman chant tradition as it emerged during the Carolingian period. He engages only with text, where Maloy asks similar questions about repertorial fixity in offertory chants, incorporating melodic variants. She shows that while texts and melodies for the core pan-European repertoire became stable during the ninth century, more recent compositions continued to develop, with text variants (sometimes including entirely different verse texts) and melodic variants that encompass minor differences between versions, entirely different melodies, and everything in between. Both essays demonstrate that Carolingian rhetoric about correctio did not in fact result in repertorial, textual, or melodic unity across parts of the chant tradition. Notational unity was equally elusive, as can be gleaned from Marie-Noël Colette’s catalogue of ninth- to eleventh-century manuscripts now in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France that include marginal musical notation. This, together with summary remarks, is a useful starting point for those pursuing future detailed studies on musical marginalia, their contexts, their dating, and their notational variety.
The roots of Carolingian knowledge in the ancient world are an important component of understanding the context and content of Carolingian intellectual endeavours. Such roots are teased out for poetry, especially Virgil, by Jan Ziolkowski. Ziolkowski uses ninth-century editions of Virgil’s poems and new Virgil-influenced poetry to trace his influence and impact on Carolingian intellectual culture, and to grapple with how ancient knowledge was balanced with Christianisation. The integration of poetry and liturgical hymns as closely related Latin genres is central to Sam Barrett’s contribution. He offers a case study of a ninth-century manuscript that combines diverse Latin poetic genres, laid out for singing, and with significant amounts of notation added by the 920s. This is a clear, concrete illustration of the way that older Latin poetry was drawn on in Carolingian literary culture. The treatise De exordiis et incrementis by Carolingian poet and theorist Walahfrid Strabo offers an alternative route into similar questions of poetic genealogy. Felix Heinzer discusses the way this treatise outlines a history of the liturgy of the hours, and in particular the contributions of named individuals to non-biblical liturgical texts (especially hymns). Walahfrid Strabo did not subscribe to the narrative that Pope Gregory the Great had created the Gregorian chant tradition, nor to anxieties about use of non-biblical texts in liturgy. Instead, De exordiis et incrementis helps to justify contemporary composition of hymnographic texts which, Heinzer argues, may have been stemmed at least in part from Walahfrid Strabo’s own activities as a composer of liturgical poetry.
Three essays concentrate on speculative music theory, the area of study for which Charles Atkinson is perhaps most celebrated. In a rhetorical tour-de-force, Michel Huglo (transl. and ed. Barbara Haggh-Huglo) discusses the medieval western reception of Pythagorean number-based music theory, via Plato’s Timaeus and, in particular, via lambda-shaped diagrams. These diagrams demonstrate the relationships between musical notes conceptualised through the numerical ratios between string lengths that make those notes. Béatrice Bakhouche engages with the same topic, but with more focus on the relevance of Calcidius’s Latin translation of the Timaeus, showing that medieval commentaries attest to medieval Platonism as a live intellectual tradition in which thinkers at the time were deeply engaged. Her introduction to the lambda diagrams is easier for non-experts to understand than Huglo’s, and might be best read before his essay. Amnon Shiloah offers a counterpoint to these discussions of the development of Carolingian music theory. Shiloah surveys musical numerology in Arabic and Jewish writings of the middle ages. As in western writings, particular numbers are given especial significance (3, 4, 7, and 8, for example), and are imbued with metaphorical, metaphysical and magical properties. This essay is a useful corrective to western-centric or Christo-centric discussions of the later reception of ancient Greek philosophy, demonstrating that many of the associations and ideas had wider traction.
As well as Carolingian treatises and commentaries, more informal writing in the form of glosses can provide useful information about the reception of earlier texts, demonstrating how they were grappled with intellectually (rather than simply being copied blindly). David Ganz offers a revisionist corrective to overly simplistic accounts of the importance of the liberal arts in the Carolingian education programme, arguing that despite relevant texts being copied and extensively glossed, there is little evidence of the direct influence of the liberal arts in Carolingian biblical exegesis. Mariken Teeuwen’s essay is particularly engaging, exploring eighth- and early-ninth century glosses on Boethius’s and Martianus Capella’s music theoretical texts. The commentary traditions on these two authors are interwoven, offering layers of anonymous but individual interpretations of their texts within the Carolingian context. Sometimes glosses presented together are mutually contradictory, apparently drawing together all known information on these topics for the purposes of clarifying their meaning and implications. While she lays out some of the challenges for modern scholars working with such materials, and signals that much is as-yet unknown, Teeuwen’s discussion and examples show the richness of this evidence base for scholars seeking to understand Carolingian music-theoretical knowledge in the decades pre-dating the earliest extant Carolingian music treatises.
The volume ends with a keynote presentation by Calvin Bower, in which he contrasts Boethius’s rational approach to music with Martianus Capella’s transcendent interpretation. The combination of both approaches in Carolingian thought, he argues, is fundamentally Christian and--more specifically--fundamentally Pauline. The Carolingian juxtaposition of music as scientific endeavour and as a valuable tool through which human minds can seek unity with the divine runs as a double thread through the entire volume of essays.
My only caveat about the volume is that at some points, insufficient introduction is offered to the kinds of evidence under discussion, or to specialist terminology or concepts, making some of the essays impenetrable to generalist readers. That said, however, this is a rich and valuable collection of essays, which I recommend very highly.