An English composer in royal and aristocratic service: Robert Chirbury, c. 1380–1454
By Alexandra Buckle
Plainsong and Medieval Music, Vol.15 No.2 (2006)
Abstract: Four compositions in the first layer of the Old Hall Manuscript (GB-Lbl, Add. MS 57950) are attributed to R. Chirbury (or R. Chyrbury). This article argues that the Robert Chirbury who ended his days as Dean at the Collegiate Church of St Mary, Warwick was this composer. His career included stints at the Chapel Royal and probably also earlier employment in the London diocese, as well as service in the household of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick. Moreover, this individual can be differentiated from similarly named men in the Register of the London St Nicholas Fraternity of Parish Clerks, and the assertion that the composer was employed at St George’s, Windsor can be discounted.
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10 May 2010
Tags: England, Music
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Musical Monuments from Medieval Meath
By Ann Buckley
Records of Meath Archaeological and Historical Society, Vol.19 (2008)
Introduction: The most common figure representing musical performance in medieval religious iconography is King David, Old Testament prophet, musician, and author of the Psalms. His appearance in Insular art emerged in the eighth century as the scope of the iconographic programme was beginning to widen. At this time Eastern Christian influences were strongest, as witness, for example, the Book of Kells (8th-9th century, which may have been produced on Iona), and Mercian stone sculpture. David is depicted prominently in all of the surviving early Insular psalters where (with the exception of the Southampton Psalter) he is included in his role of Psalmist.
In these and in figural sculpture he is shown typically with a stringed instrument, occasionally in the company of a wind instrument player, but rarely with his full complement of four assistants, Asaph, Eman, Ethan and Idithun – a point of difference with many continental manuscript illustration.
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19 Apr 2010
Tags: Art History, Ireland, Music
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Muslims, Jews and Christians in medieval Muslim Seville: (711-1248 CE) : perceiving artistic expressions as signs of acculturation
By Laura E. Vaughan
Bachelors of Music Thesis, University of Oregon, 2006
Abstract: In the past few centuries, scholars have begun to reevaluate the Euro-centrism of western history. Spain in the Middle Ages presents fertile research ground because it was ruled under Muslims for seven hundred years. Musicologists still debate as to whether the famous manuscript, Las Cantigas de Santa Maria, contains any Arabic musical influence. This thesis enlarges the scope of this debate beyond the musical manuscript.
This study centers on Seville, where Alfonso X commissioned the Cantigas, in order to better understand the cultural relationships within the city at the time of the Cantigas’ creation. I look at five art forms that were either created in Seville or had strong ties with this city: the illustrations, poetry, and music of the Cantigas, a treatise on chess commissioned by Alfonso, and the architecture of Seville.
This thesis does not prove any new theory. Instead, I focus on finding a new approach to discovering a more conclusive answer regarding Arabic musical influence in Las Cantigas de Santa Maria. Through this comparative analysis, I seek to accurately gauge the possibility of Arabic musical influence within Las Cantigas de Santa Maria.
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12 Apr 2010
Tags: al-Andalus, Music, Spain
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The Image of the Jongleur in Northern France Around 1200
By John W. Baldwin
Speculum, Vol. 72, No. 3. (1997)
Introduction: In the pages of the Latin chroniclers writing around 1200 the jongleur appears as a gray, furtive shadow. His existence was acknowledged by the broad term joculator, but his functions were too suspect to deserve further comment. The clerical chroniclers associated jongleurs with other lay activities, such as making love, admiring feminine beauty, holding festivities, and fighting in tournaments, about which the less said, the better. In contemporary vernacular literature, however, the jongleur’s image springs into sharp focus and takes on vivid colors.
In the Roman de la rose of Jean Renart, for example, jongleurs swarm everywhere, at spring hunts, in courts and castles, at tournaments, and during the celebrations of marriages and coronations. From these crowds Jean treats his audience to a portrait of a single jongleur who bears the eponym Juglet:
He was intelligent and of great renown,
having heard and learned
many songs and many a fine story.
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23 Jan 2010
Tags: France, Music
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The Medium of Middle English Lyrics
Stevick, Robert D.
Medieval English Studies, vol. 8 (2000)
Abstract
A few years ago I prepared a revised edition of One Hundred Middle English Lyrics for a new publisher, about thirty years after completing the first edition. During the intervening years I had drifted into Old English, the history of English, and some of the early Irish and English manuscript art―and had drifted away from Middle English lyric verse. Reviewing all at once the scholarship and criticism of the years since the early 1960’s was not the bewildering experience that Rip Van Winkle must have had when he woke up, because the critical currents were familiar, and because it was possible to read the full record of the study of these lyrics for the intervening years.
During this time the main lesson we have learned―or to our peril, have not learned―is to read these poems in context. Siegfried Wenzel made it embarrassingly clear that “some objects which former scholars prized as precious coins have … turned out to be plain buttons, and what were thought to be intricate designs on them have proven to be merely the holes through which they were once fastened to a coat”2: George Kane, Stephen Manning, Edmund Reiss, Robert Evans, Thomas Hill wrote eloquent appreciations and critical interpretations of what turns out to be a list of headings for parts of a Latin sermon. Meantime, the work of Rosemary Woolf, Peter Dronke, Douglas Gray, Judson Allen, Patrick Diehl has removed the last excuses for reading these poems as if they were by modern poets―i.e., by the major writers living after about 1550.
What I want to consider here is context of two other kinds. One is the language, which lacked a standard even for written communication or record, much less for literature. The other is the set of metrical conventions that were in use. Together, the language and the meter constitute the medium of Middle English lyrics. In this context, “intertextuality” of these poems is a nearly empty notion.
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30 Dec 2009
Tags: Literature, Middle English, Music
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The Sweet Song of Satan: Music and Resistance in the Vercelli Book
Heckman, Christina M.
Essays in Medieval Studies, vol. 15 (1998)
Abstract
In the poetry and prose homilies of the Vercelli Book, a collection of Anglo-Saxon texts dating from the second half of the tenth century, music exercises a constitutive as well as metaphorical force. Music not only symbolizes the harmony of communal consensus but also provides a means through which the Christian Church can identify itself with the divine order of the universe and position itself against evil forces. By using music to construct and intensify the fundamental conflict between God and Satan, the Vercelli texts function to restrict and control the Church’s internal struggles. But even as music contributes to the reinforcement of ecclesiastical power, it works against that consolidation. Whether music comes from heaven or from hell, the operation of music in human experience always provides space for resistance. That resistance, both in texts and in communal practices, can only be minimized by disciplining music into orderly patterns and restraining it to structured environments such as those of liturgical practice.
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26 Dec 2009
Tags: Anglo-Saxon, Hagiography, Liturgy, Music, Poetry, Tenth century
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Source Readings on the Practice and Spirituality of Chant: New Texts, New Approaches
Lochner, Fabian C.
Essays in Medieval Studies, vol. 8 (1991)
Abstract
Research on performance practice is one of the thriving fields in contemporary musicology. There is indeed a growing demand for information on the performance of medieval, Renaissance and Baroque music by the community of performing artists, baffled by the complexity of “early music” scores. Medieval treatises on music theory as well as Baroque and Renaissance instrumental methods are being perused for specific statements regarding different aspects of performance practice. In the field of Gregorian chant-the sacred music of the Western church such investigations have been initiated by the monks of Solesmes and further pursued by scholars such as Franz Muller-Hauser and Stephen Van Dijk.
However, the accumulation of specific technical data (such as tuning practices, number of singers involved in specific circumstances, rhythmical indications etc.) does not yet define a style of performance. Even when abundant documentation is available (as e.g., in the Baroque period), the possession of the letter does not necessarily entail the possession of the spirit! Indeed, the lack of the spirit often leaves the letter obscure and, eventually, may lead to serious misconceptions (and to fanciful performances).
In this paper dealing with medieval chant practice I contend three things: (1) the performance practice of Gregorian chant in the Middle Ages flows from, and is largely defined by a consistent tradition of Christian spirituality; (2) whereas we have no sound documents from the middle ages, the spiritual dimensions of chant are accessible through medieval source texts of both devotional and practical character; (3) a critical yet integral reading of these texts can show the direct link between spiritual attitude and musical performance, and thus help us to relive and reexperience in our times both the practice and the spirituality of chant.
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19 Dec 2009
Tags: Liturgy, Monasticism, Music, Religious Life
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Interpolating the Musical Text of the Lyric Interpolations:Guillaume de Dole the Trouvere Manuscript Tradition
Callahan, Christopher
Essays in Medieval Studies, vol. 8 (1991)
Abstract
The early 13th century romance of Guillaume de Dole, more properly known as the Romance of the Rose, constitutes by its diverse collection of song types the oldest chansonnier that we possess. Written around 1230, it presents the most popular trouvère and troubadour songs, chansons de toile, pastourelles, and caroles of the day. We observe these lyric pieces, which number 46 in all, as they are performed by and for members of the German imperial court. Not only is the lyric contained in this narrative featured as the expression of a largely oral culture, but the narrative voice engages the reader’s participation in such a way as to suggest that the romance itself was intended to be performed. Much more than in any other Old French romance, the discursive features of the narrative text are those of the oral story-teller who addresses not a reader, but an extremely partial audience. Under these conditions, it would be entirely natural for the performer of the story to sing the lyric fragments, which extend to two stanzas at most the courtly songs and to a couplet or a refrain for the less aristocratic genres.
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19 Dec 2009
Tags: France, Literature, Music
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Scholastic Imagery in The Florence Manuscript
Catalano, George
Essays in Medieval Studies, vol. 7 (1990)
Abstract
The Florence manuscript was produced in Paris during the mid-thirteenth century by a lay workshop now known as the Johannes Grusch atelier, a named coined by Robert Branner. This manuscript contains the largest extant collection of music in the “Notre Dame” style. Apart from Branner’s work, the Parisian origin of this manuscript has been determined in several ways: (1) It includes a copy of what a 13th-century theorist, commonly known as Anonymous IV, described as the magnus liber organi used at the cathedral of Paris; (2) The chants upon which the polyphonic compositions of the magnus liber organi are built are Parisian variants; (3) Though several manuscripts containing this music are extant, this is the only one in which the polyphony conforms without exception to the edicts of the Bishops of Paris governing polyphonic performance; (4) Furthermore, the correspondence between details of its liturgical cycles of organa and the known activities of the singers of the cathedral is often so strong that there can be little doubt that this manuscript represents a copy of the cathedral’s magnus liber organi and not another church’s within the Parisian diocese.
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19 Dec 2009
Tags: France, Manuscripts and Palaeography, Music
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Franciscan Chant as a Late Medieval Expression in the Liturgy
Wagner, Lavern John
Essays in Medieval Studies, vol. 5 (1988)
Abstract
When St. Francis turned his back on earthly vanities and established the Franciscan order in the first part of the 13th century, his biographers tell us he did not cease his interest in music. The Little Flowers of St. Francis recount that he went about singing, and we have the text, though not the music of several of his songs. In sending his friars out to preach he admonished them to sing God’s praises as if they were “joculatores Domini,” i.e. “minstrels of the Lord. The friars were closely associated with the composition and spread of laude spirituali simple religious songs in the vernacular that became enormously popular. While this popular aspect of the Franciscan musical contribution has been duly noted, the liturgical chants which the Franciscans developed, especially those commemorating saints of their order, have not been as thoroughly considered. It is interesting to explore some characteristics of Franciscan chant, and relate its musical style to the mainstream of medieval liturgical chant, the better known Gregorian chant.
As a background to this study, it can be recalled that in the latter part of the 19th century the monks of the Benedictine monastery at Solesmes, France conducted their epochal examinations of Gregorian chant manuscripts. The manuscripts which they researched, and which have since come to be regarded as representative of the “Golden Age” of Gregorian chant, come from the 9th through 12th centuries, a period before the Franciscan order existed. The monks of Solesmes published their research in the Volumes of their Paléographie musicale.6 Only recently has there been an attempt to study chant which was developed within other religious orders, and which is unique to them. Dom David Nicholson, a Benedictine at Mount Angel Abbey, Oregon, gathered together articles on the chants of many religious orders in the Dictionary of Plainsong which he compiled in the 1960’s. His intention was to have this Volume printed; however, changes in the Roman Catholic liturgy mitigated against this, and he was only able to have fifteen sets copied and bound as a private edition. My contribution to this Dictionary of Plainsong is on chants unique to the Franciscan order, and it has given the impetus to this study.
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16 Dec 2009
Tags: Liturgy, Monasticism, Music, Religious Life
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