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385 Pages
THE MUSICAL WORLD OF A MEDIEVAL MONK
James Grier documents the musical activities of Ade´mar de Chabannes, eleventh-century monk, historian, homilist and tireless polemicist for the apostolic status of Saint Martial, patron saint of the abbey that bore his name in Limoges. Ade´mar left behind some 451 folios of music with notation in his autograph hand, a musical resource without equal before the seventeenth century. He introduced, at strategic moments, pieces familiar from the standard liturgy for an apostle and items of his own composition. These reveal Ade´mar to be a supremely able designer of liturgies and a highly original composer. This study analyses his accomplishments as a musical scribe, compiler of liturgies, editor of existing musical works and composer; it also offers a speculative consideration of his abilities as a singer; and, finally, it places Ade´mar’s musical activities in the context of liturgical, musical and political developments at the abbey of Saint Martial in Limoges.
JAMES GRIER is Professor of Music History at the University of Western Ontario. He is the author of The Critical Editing of Music: History, Method, and Practice (Cambridge, 1996), and his work has appeared in many journals including Journal of the American Musicological Society, Early Music History, Acta Musicologica, Revue d’Histoire des Textes, Speculum and Scriptorium.
Preface
Working on Ademar has been like discovering a lost continent.” So Richard Landes begins the Acknowledgments of his book Relics, Apocalypse, and the Deceits of History: Ademar of Chabannes, 989–1034. From Richard’s research and that of other scholars, we knew that Ade´mar had made distinguished contributions to the fields of history, literature (homilies in particular) and computus. His musical activities had received attention from Le´opold Delisle, Paul Hooreman, John A. Emerson and Michel Huglo, but these accomplishments were largely perceived as a footnote to his better-known literary achievements. So, the topography of Richard’s lost continent was principally literary and historical.
If Richard’s research discovered a lost continent, then that which led to this book on Ade´mar’s musical accomplishments and the companion edition of his music has resulted in the discovery of a veritable subcontinent that significantly enlarges it. When Richard published his book in 1995, scholars had identified approximately 1,000 folios of autograph manuscript in Ade´mar’s hand, already a staggering amount of material, of which some seventy-five contained music, or less than 10 per cent, perhaps in some part justifying the footnote status of his musical activities. My discoveries of Ade´mar’s music hand in the first layers of Paris, Bibliothe`que Nationale de France, MS latin 909 (in 1992, in which Richard collaborated, as well as Gunilla Iversen of the Corpus Troporum in Stockholm, published in Scriptorium 1997) and 1121 (in 1999, published in Early Music History 2005) raised the total of Ade´mar’s autograph corpus to roughly 1,400 folios (an expansion of 40 per cent) of which 451 contain music, or about one-third of the whole. Thus, the continent that Richard discovered is not only far larger now, but very different in nature too, with music playing a much larger role than previously thought, particularly during the crucial period 1027–29.
For at this time, Ade´mar turned his attention to the production of music manuscripts in the scriptorium of Saint Martial in Limoges, initially in the second half of 1027, in the aftermath of his disappointment at not securing the office of abbot at his home abbey of Saint Cybard in Angouleˆme, and then again a year later, after the death of Count William of Angouleˆme under mysterious circumstances in April 1028 and the subsequent deterioration of the political situation there. During this second working visit to Limoges, Ade´mar decided to throw caution to the winds and embrace the flagrantly fraudulent tales of the apostolic status of Martial, patron saint of the abbey that bore his name in Limoges. His principal vehicle for the promulgation of the campaign to secure official acceptance of Martial’s apostolicity was a newly composed liturgy, with its constituent music, for the saint that acknowledged his apostolic status. And so, for his most overt attempt to shape public opinion regarding Martial’s apostolicity, Ade´mar chose music and the liturgy as his means.
In so doing, he created documents that afford us an unprecedented glimpse into the working world of a highly professional monastic musician of the central Middle Ages for whom musical literacy formed an integral part of music-making. What follows is an account of that musical world and the extraordinary accomplishments that constitute it. Here, I name just two of them: his introduction of accurate heighting to the Aquitanian notational dialect for the purpose of inscribing precise intervallic information; and his significant creative output in some 100 preserved original compositions. Either achievement would be adequate to justify detailed study of his musical activities, but, taken in the context of his other accomplishments in the field of music, they show Ade´mar to be a musician of singular ability, deserving of a full assessment of his musical achievements.
It is impossible to undertake research of this scope without incurring many debts. First and foremost, it is a pleasure to acknowledge the inspiration of my dear friend Richard Landes, who introduced me to Ade´mar and the complexities of his biography, invited me to collaborate on the Collected Edition of Ade´mar’s works, shared with me much valuable material, and has functioned as an ongoing sounding board for my theories and ideas.
Thank you, Richard; this book would simply not exist were it not for you. Many other scholars have generously offered support and shared materials over the years, including Charles M. Atkinson, Gunilla Bjo¨rkvall, Pascale Bourgain, Daniel F. Callahan, the late John A. Emerson, Bryan Gillingham, Michel Huglo, Gunilla Iversen, Ritva Jacobsson, Thomas Forrest Kelly, Kenneth Levy, Alejandro Enrique Planchart, Anne Walters Robertson, Leo Treitler and Craig Wright. My colleagues and friends John Check, Susan Rankin, Paul Saenger and David Schulenberg all read portions of the book that considered matters close to their research interests, and I thank them for their thoughtful responses.
My colleagues at Queen’s University, Yale and the University of Western Ontario listened patiently over the many years of gestation this project has required and I thank them for their interest. Among the graduate students in musicology at Yale and Western, I found a sophisticated audience for this material both inside the classroom and out. I am grateful for their penetrating questions and insightful reactions.
I am particularly appreciative of the efforts of Shannon Benson, now completing a dissertation in musicology at Western, who has worked untiringly on the Ade´mar material for over half a decade now, and whose meticulous labours have improved the final product in many ways. Any errors that remain can be laid squarely at my door. I owe a special debt to Keith Hamel, School of Music, University of British Columbia, who has very generously provided me with updated copies of Notewriter, the musicprocessor he authored, over the years since we were colleagues at Queen’s. All the musical examples in this book were created with it, as was all the music in the edition of Ade´mar’s music. An equally special debt is owed Frederick Renz and New York’s Ensemble for Early Music.
An invitation from Richard Landes to participate in a conference on the millennium at Boston University in October 1996 generated an extraordinary opportunity to hear Ade´mar’s music. Richard thought it would be a good idea to open the conference with a performance of the troped Mass that Ade´mar had prepared to promote the apostolic status of Martial. My readers can imagine the alacrity and enthusiasm with which I concurred. Fred and the Ensemble, with whom I had collaborated the previous spring on a concert of Aquitanian music at the Cloisters and the Metropolitan Museum in New York in conjunction with the exhibit of enamels from Limoges at the Met, shared my enthusiasm. And so they prepared the concert from my edition, and gave life to this music, most of which had not been heard since 1029, breaking almost a millennium of silence.
I was especially moved by Paul Shipper’s expressive performance of sections of the Mass I now believe, not least because of Paul’s wonderful singing, were written by Ade´mar to be sung by himself. The Ensemble continued to programme the Mass, and I was privileged to give pre-concert lectures at Saint John the Divine in New York when they performed it on their subscription series in November 1998. They subsequently released a splendid recording of it for which I provided the liner notes.
No medievalist has to be told that research of this type could not be completed without the support and close collaboration of many libraries and librarians, but it is a pleasure and a privilege to acknowledge the debts I have accrued. My principal debt, naturally, goes to the Bibliothe`que Nationale de France, repository of the bulk of Ade´mar’s autograph manuscripts and all of the musical ones known to me. I am especially grateful to M. Franc¸ois Avril and Mme Marie-Pierre Laffitte of the De´partement des Manuscrits for allowing me generous access to the Aquitanian manuscripts in the fonds latin; and to M. Avril and Mme Monique Cohen, Conservateur ge´ne´ral, for graciously permitting me to reproduce photographs of manuscripts in their care. I am equally grateful to the Archives De´partementales de la Haute-Vienne and the Muse´e Municipale de l’E´veˆche´, both in Limoges, and particularly to their respective directors, M. Robert Chanaud and Mme Ve´ronique Notin, for access to their collections and permission to reproduce photographs. I also thank Mme Genevie`ve Contamine of the Section Latine, Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes, for many kindnesses.
In North America, I was very fortunate to have access to several wonderful research libraries. Naturally my greatest debt is to the libraries at the institutions where I worked or enjoyed prolonged visits, to their staffs and especially their inter-library loan departments: Queen’s, Yale, Western, the Institute for Advanced Study and the University of Windsor. Ken Crilly of Yale’s music library deserves special thanks for procuring many items including microfilms of several Aquitanian manuscripts that greatly facilitated early phases of the study. I spent a very productive semester at the University of California, Berkeley, where members of the music department warmly welcomed me and John Roberts opened the riches of the music library.
Thanks, also, to the libraries of the University of Michigan, the University of Toronto and especially the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto for generous access to their collections. Visits to Paris and the Bibliothe`que Nationale de France started in earnest in the summer of 1989, initially with the support of grants from the Principal’s Development Fund and the Advisory Research Committee of Queen’s University. Since then, I have been awarded three major research grants by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for the periods 1989–90, 1998–2001 and 2002–5.
The first and the last of these included Research Time Stipends that provided time free from teaching, and each gave the research significant impetus. During my tenure at Yale, I was fortunate to receive several A. Whitney Griswold Faculty Research Grants, the John F. Enders Research Assistance Grant on one occasion and the Morse Fellowship in 1994–95; these permitted me to continue summer research trips to Paris and free time for writing and research. Finally, the Office of Research Services at the University of Western Ontario has also been generous in this regard, awarding me two grants for summer travel. To all these agencies, I am extremely grateful.
They enabled the prolonged and repeated visits to Paris that have resulted in the detailed observations and analysis offered below. During the period 2003–5, I was a Visiting Humanities Fellow in the Humanities Research Group, University of Windsor, in whose hospitable setting I was able to continue my work on Ade´mar. I gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, its School of Historical Studies and especially the late Professor Edward T. Cone of Princeton University whose gift enabled me to hold the membership in music studies at the School of Historical Studies named in his honour during the academic year 2002–3.
The time I spent at the Institute was extraordinarily productive and a testament to the intellectual environment there. It was a great pleasure to meet Professor Cone, whose work I had long admired, and his partner George Proctor, who welcomed my wife and me into their home, and shared much stimulating conversation with us. I am particularly grateful for having had the opportunity to exchange views with the permanent faculty, including Glen Bowersock, Caroline Walker Bynum, Giles Constable, the late Kirk Varnedoe, Heinrich von Staden and Morton White.
I was also very glad to be able to renew acquaintance with two very distinguished scholars whose paths I had crossed before and whose scholarship has been a constant inspiration to me since my earliest undergraduate days, Elizabeth A. R. Brown and C. P. Jones. Peggy Brown, in nearby New York, taught medieval history as a visiting professor at Yale when I was a member of the Department of Music there, and Christopher Jones, a frequent visitor to the Institute, was one of my first instructors in Latin literature at the University of Toronto. The time I spent with them during my year at the Institute profoundly enriched my experience there and added to what was already a significant long-term debt. The editorial staff at Cambridge University Press has made many important contributions to the successful completion of this book, especially Dr Victoria L. Cooper, music editor.
Vicki continued to believe in the book through its many metamorphoses, as she did with The Critical Editing of Music before it, and any success these titles might have can be attributed in no small way to her vision and perseverance. It is a pleasure not frequently met to deal with someone so dedicated to scholarship and its promulgation. On a personal note, I would make the observation that this book is infused with the spirit of the late Rev. Leonard E. Boyle, OP, sometime professor of palaeography and codicology at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto, where I had the very fortunate opportunity to study palaeography with him, and later Prefect of the Vatican Library.
Father Boyle’s painstaking approach to all aspects of manuscripts studies and his insistence that manuscripts are not mere repositories of texts but artifacts that have important histories of their own (what he called the “archaeology of the book”) have guided my steps in uncovering Ade´mar’s musical career from the documents he left behind. Although we exchanged a good deal of correspondence on Ade´mar, I regret that he did not live to see the completion of this book. To my dear friends Claire Harrison and Peter Jarrett I extend a warm thanks for their wonderful hospitality in Paris, where their home served as a base for many research trips to the BNF and a refuge for writing.
And finally, I acknowledge the support of my wife and daughter. Ade´mar was already well established as a family member when our daughter Bianca entered the world. He has not been much of a surrogate father for her but he has been an entertaining, if somewhat obstreperous, companion. My wife Sally Bick, as ever my closest collaborator and most outspoken critic, has continuously offered extraordinary support for the time and attention I have lavished on him. She has attended every step of the journey with good humour, boundless affection and love. The dedication is small repayment indeed.
WINDSOR, ONTARIO
January 2006
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