I was delighted to be interviewed over at the New Books Network by David Kunsman recently; you can hear the resulting podcast here!
New volume of Revue de musicologie!
My article on Christ’s voice, the mystic winepress, and Latin song is now published in vol. 108, no. 1, of Revue de musicologie!
https://sfmusicologie.fr/derniere-livraison
Sneak peak of the first page here…
It's here!
Devotional Refrains in Medieval Latin Song has arrived in hard copy TODAY and I’m beyond thrilled to hold it in my hands and flip through its pages.
I wrote about the book this week for the Cambridge blog FifteenEightyFour; read the post here: http://www.cambridgeblog.org/2022/04/devotional-refrains-in-medieval-latin-song/
Send me a song...Lyrics and letters in medieval Europe
Bibliothèque nationale of Luxembourg, MS 27, fols. 23v-24r
Today’s tune, Laudes canamus virginis, is somewhat unusual since it has no surviving notation and, instead of being copied in a music book or collection of poetry, it was written by a 12th-century cleric as a gift, included in a letter he sent to his sister Aelis. A canon in Châlons-sur-Marne, Gui de Basoches (Guido de Basochis) is known for several pieces of writing, including his liber epistolarum, a book of letters reflecting correspondance between him and friends, colleagues, and family. Interestingly, almost all of his prose letters conclude with verses, including rhymed, rhythmical, strophic poetry (sometimes with refrains!) that bears a striking resemblance to the poetry of contemporary Latin song.
Laudes canamus virginis in particular is an interesting poem in the Liber epistolarum since Gui frames its performance in specifically musical ways. He writes in the closing of his letter, “of this glorious mother of God and virgin, since I know you pursue with celebrating praise and are a most devout worshipper, I send you her praises composed rhythmically to be said as a suppliant before her reverend image in prayer or sung with sweet melody.” The poem Laudes canamus virginis then follows directly, as you can see in the image to the left from the sole surviving source for Gui’s letters (Bibliothèque nationale of Luxembourg, MS 27, fols. 23v-24r). (You can see an edition and translation of the song here.)
What is so fascinating about this “song” is both that it belongs to an epistolary interaction and also that Gui assumes that Aelis could readily realize the poem musically (if she so chooses—the choice to speak or sing the poem is another interesting aspect). The survival of Laudes canamus virginis asks us to think about the different ways Latin song circulated in medieval Europe, the flexible nature of “song” as both spoken and sung, and the role of personal relationships in the creation of Latin song (not to mention the role of women in performing Latin song!).
I will be talking about this example and other links between Latin songs, letters, and refrains in a talk this week (Jan 27, 2022, 8:30am EST) as part of the conference “Circulations et échanges des technicités et des savoirs musicaux et littéraires au Moyen Age et à la Renaissance” (programme here), to be streamed live on YouTube at this link.
(Although my focus is on Latin examples, the vernacular realm has much to offer on the topic of letters and lyrics! Machaut’s Voir dit is just one wonderful example, one which garnishes several provides beautiful depictions of the sending and delivery of letters in Machaut MS A, F-Pn fr. 1584, seen below.)
Le Livre dou Voir Dit in Machaut MS A (F-Pn fr. 1584), fol. CCXXIr
Le Livre dou Voir Dit in Machaut MS A (F-Pn fr. 1584), fol. CCXXXIIIr
Selected Bibliography
Basochis, Guido de. Liber epistularum Guidonis de Basochis. Edited by Herbert Adolfsson. Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis: Studia Latina Stockholmiensia Vol. 18, Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1969.
Boulton, Maureen Barry McCann. The Song in the Story: Lyric Insertions in French Narrative Fiction, 1200-1400. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993.
Camargo, Martin. "The Verse Love Epistle: An Unrecognized Genre." Genre 13 (1980): 397-405.
Constable, Giles. Letters and Letter-Collections. Turnhout: Brepols, 1976.
Everist, Mark. Discovering Medieval Song: Latin Poetry and Music in the Conductus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Leech-Wilkinson, Daniel, and R. Barton Palmer, eds. Guillaume de Machaut: Le livre dou voir dit (The Book of the True Poem). New York: Garland, 1998.
Melli, Elio. "I ‘salut’ e l'epistolografia medievale." Convivium 4 (1962): 385-398.
Meyer, Paul. “Le Salut d’amour dans les littératures provençale et française.” Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Chartes 28 (1867): 124 – 170
Munk Olsen, Birger. "L’édition d’un manuscript d’auteur: les letters de Gui de Bazoches." Revue des études latines 49 (1971): 66–77.
Szövérffy, Joseph. Secular Latin Lyrics and Minor Poetic Forms of the Middle Ages: A Historical Survey and Literary Repertory from the Tenth to the Late Fifteenth Century. 4 vols. Concord, N.H.: Classical Folia Editions, 1992-1995.
Turcan-Verkerk, Anne-Marie. "Le Formulaire de Tréguier revisité: les Carmina Trecorensia et l'Ars dictaminis." ALMA, Bulletin du Cange 52 (1994): 205-252.
Wahlgren-Smith, Lena. "Letter Collections in the Latin West." In A Companion to Byzantine Epistolography, edited by Alexander Riehle, 92-122. Leiden: Brill, 2020.
Wattenbach, Wilhelm. "Die Briefe des Canonicus Guido von Bazoches, Cantors zu Chälons im zwölften Jahrhundert." Sitzungsberichte der Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin 9 (1890): 161-179.
———. "Aus den Briefen des Guido von Bazoches." Neues Archiv der Gesellschaft für Ältere Deutsche Geschichtskunde 16 (1891): 67 -114.
© Mary Channen Caldwell, January 25, 2022.
Let us rejoice: Musical Texture, the Latin Refrain Song, and Singing with One Voice
Latin songs with refrains most often feature single melodic lines—Christopher Page once wrote that such songs have “bold and ingratiating musical settings,” and the popularity of these works with early music ensembles certainly underscores their approachability and singability. Among the few refrain songs with polyphonic settings, a handful set the stanzas polyphonically and the refrain monophonically, highlighting the formal structure by means of a change in musical texture. More than marking form, the setting of refrains in a single melodic line is suggestive of how refrains represent a moment of coming together, an opportunity to sing as if with one voice, quasi una voce.
Today’s Tuesday Tune is Exultantes in partu virginis, a refrain song surviving in several sources with and without notation between the 12th and 16th centuries. Its later copying in an elaborately troped Circumcision Office (January 1) from Le Puy-en-Velay includes in an appendix a polyphonic voice to be added to the otherwise monophonic song. But, this polyphonic addition only applies to the stanzas and not the refrain. The result—as you can hear in this recording by the Ensemble Gilles Binchois—is that rich yet simple polyphonic stanzas alternative regularly with a one-word monophonic refrain, gaudeamus (first couple of stanzas with translation below).
As I explore in Chapter 3 of my forthcoming book, the refrain in devotional Latin song brought individuals and communities together in the moment of performance through the acts of remembering together, responding collectively, and worshipping communally. Drawing on the rhetoric, grammar, form, and musical texture of Latin refrain songs, I illustrate how poets and composers embedded ideas about performance, community, and communal participation in their compositions. Exultantes in partu virginis is one example in Chapter 3 that focuses on both the grammar of the refrain itself—namely the first person plural of “gaudeamus,” “let us rejoice”—and on how musical form and texture work together to craft a layered experience of singing as if with one voice by literally bringing voices together in monophony for the repeated refrain.
More on the refrain and its multivalent meanings in performance, including its possible connection to dance, in Chapter 3, “Singing the Refrain: Shaping Performance and Community Through Form,” of Devotional Refrains in Medieval Latin Song.
Grenoble, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 4413, fol. 28r, middle stanzas and refrain of “Exultantes in partu virginis”
1. Exultantes in partu virginis
Quo deletur peccatum hominis
Ad honorem superni numinis
Gaudeamus.
2. Facta parens, non viri coitu
Quem concepit de Sancto Spiritu
Virgo parit sed sine genitu.
Gaudeamus.
etc.
1. Exulting in the birthing of the Virgin
by which the sins of man are expunged,
to the honor of the supreme divinity,
let us rejoice.
2. Made a parent without congress with a man,
the Virgin gives birth to the one she conceived
through the Holy Spirit, but without generation;
let us rejoice.
etc.
Source: Grenoble, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 4413, fols. 27v-28v (monophonic) and 162r (polyphonic supplement)
Selected Bibliography
Arlt, Wulf. "Einstimmige Lieder des 12. Jahrhunderts und Mehrstimmiges in französischen Handschriften des 16. Jahrhunderts aus Le Puy." Schweizer Beiträge zur Musikwissenschaft 3 (1978): 7-47.
———. "The Office for the Feast of the Circumcision from Le Puy." Translated by Lori Kruckenberg, Kelly Landerkin and Margot E. Fassler. In The Divine Office in the Latin Middle Ages: Methodology and Source Studies, Regional Developments, Hagiography: Written in Honor of Professor Ruth Steiner, edited by Margot E. Fassler and Rebecca A. Baltzer, 324-343. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Chevalier, Ulysse. Prosolarium ecclesiae aniciensis: Office en vers de la Circoncision en usage dans l'église du Puy. Paris: A. Picard, 1894.
Connor, Steven. "Choralities." Twentieth-Century Music 13, no. 1 (2016): 3–23.
Crocker, Richard L. "Two Recent Editions of Aquitanian Polyphony." Plainsong and Medieval Music 3, no. 1 (1994): 57-101.
———. An Introduction to Gregorian Chant. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.
Fuller, Sarah. "Aquitanian Polyphony of the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries." 3 vols. PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1969.
Page, Christopher. Voices and Instruments of the Middle Ages: Instrumental Practice and Songs in France, 1100-1300. London: J.M. Dent and Sons, Ltd., 1987.
Peraino, Judith A. "Listening to the Sirens: Music as Queer Ethical Practice." GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 9, no. 4 (2003): 433-470.
———. Listening to the Sirens: Musical Technologies of Queer Identity from Homer to Hedwig. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006.
Quasten, Johannes. Music and Worship in Pagan and Christian Antiquity. Translated by Boniface Ramsey. Washington, D.C.: National Association of Pastoral Musicians, 1983 [1973].
Treitler, Leo. "The Aquitanian Repertories of Sacred Monody in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries." PhD diss., Princeton University, 1967.
© Mary Channen Caldwell, January 18, 2022.
"Anni novi prima die" from the Hortus Deliciarum (late 12th century)
To celebrate pressing send on the final (final!) set of proofs for my book, I’m starting a countdown to its publication in April 2022 with Tuesday Tunes—a Latin refrain song each week!
This week’s song is Anni novi prima die, possibly penned and definitely compiled by Abbess Herrad of Landsberg in her Hortus Deliciarum, a compendium of knowledge for the novices at Hohenburg Abbey (Mont St Odile) in Alsace in the late 12th century. Although the manuscript was destroyed in an 1870 bombing and fire in Strasbourg, the poetry of Anni novi prima die survived because parts of the manuscript had been copied prior to its destruction. Rosalie Green et al published a reconstruction in 1979 that has become the standard source for everything we know about its contents, including Latin poetry (some notated) composed and/or compiled by Herrad. The Latin songs in the Hortus Deliciarum are by and for women, in other words, and reflect the kind of devotional (and not always liturgical) music making that was taking place throughout Europe in the Middle Ages.
Anni novi prima die is one such song, a celebration of the Feast of the Circumcision on 1 January, which was also often celebrated (unofficially at that time) as the New Year. Each strophe cites the new year (“anni novi”) in the same way, always framed around the ritual act of Christ’s Circumcision and reflecting one of the earliest poetic links between the liturgical feast day and popular celebrations of 1 January. Most interesting is the developing refrain that emphasis first the “when” and then the “who” of the ritual act (text and translation below). While Anni novi prima die is unique to the Hortus Deliciarum, it is part of a larger group of songs that not only celebrates 1 January as an inherently pluralistic day ritually and popularly, but also that employs “anni novi” or “annus novus” as a refrain within and among songs. More on this and the other Latin “New Year’s songs” in Chapter 1 “Latin Song and Refrain in the Medieval Year” of Devotional Refrains in Medieval Latin Song.
(Although Anni novi prima die is unnotated, you can hear a reconstruction of a different-notated!-Latin poem from the Hortus Deliciarum by Discantus, Sol oritur occasus; image below.)
Hortus Deliciarum (destroyed), folio 323r. Herrad of Landsberg (right) and her community.
Hortus deliciarum (destroyed), fol. 30r. Sol oritur occasus nescius (polyphonic) and Primus parens (monophonic)
Text and Translation of Anni novi prima die* (Hortus deliciarum, fol. 30v)
1. Anni novi prima die
Filius virginis Marie
Morem gessit natilie.
Dum, dum, dum circumcidi sustinuit
In quo non fuit dignum quid abscidi.
2. Anni novi die prima
Superna moderans et ima
Passus est sub petre lima
Dum, dum, dum circumcidi sustinuit
In quo non fuit dignum quid abscidi.
3. Anni novi die nova
Homo cor animaque nova,
Ad ipsius laudem ova
Qui, qui, qui circumcidi sustinuit
In quo non fuit dignum quid abscidi.
4. Anni novi festum cole
Qui manet sub utroque sole
Te peccati solvit mole.
Qui, qui, qui circumcidi sustinuit
In quo non fuit dignum quid abscidi.
5. Anni novi die festo
Pater et Spiritus adesto,
Et fac ut sis nobis presto,
Qui, qui, qui circumcidi sustinuit
In quo non fuit dignum quid abscidi.
1. On the first day of the New Year,
the Son of the Virgin Mary
bore the custom of his birth.
When, when, when he endured to be circumcised
in whom there was nothing worthy of being cut away.
2. On the first day of the New Year,
governing the celestial and terrestrial,
He suffered under the sharpened stone.
When, when, when he endured to be circumcised
in whom there was nothing worthy of being cut away.
3. On the new day of the New Year,
person, heart, and new spirit,
rejoice in His praise.
Who, who, who endured to be circumcised
in whom there was nothing worthy of being cut away.
4. Keep the feast of the New Year:
He who abides throughout the seasons
releases you from the heavy burden of sin.
Who, who, who endured to be circumcised
in whom there was nothing worthy of being cut away.
5. On the feast day of the New Year,
come, Father and [Holy] Spirit,
and make yourself available to us.
Who, who, who endured to be circumcised
in whom there was nothing worthy of being cut away.
*Latin edited in Green, ed., Herrad of Hohenbourg, 2:144.
© All materials Mary Channen Caldwell January 11, 2022. Please ask for permission before reproducing or citing. I do not own the image rights; all images are in public domain as of January 2022.
Select Bibliography
Cames, Gérard. Allégores et symboles dans l'Hortus deliciarum. Leiden: Brill, 1971.
Engelhardt, Christian Moritz. Herrad von Landsperg, Aebtissin zu Hohenburg, oder St. Odilien, im Elsass, in zwölften Jahrhundert und ihr Werk: Hortus deliciarum. Stuttgart and Tübingen: J. G. Cotta, 1818.
Green, Rosalie, ed. Herrad of Hohenbourg: Hortus deliciarum. 2 vols. London and Leiden: Warburg Institute and Brill, 1979. (Includes Kenneth Levy’s contribution titled “The Musical Notation” (ch. 7), 2:87–88.)
Griffiths, Fiona J. The Garden of Delights: Reform and Renaissance for Women in the Twelfth Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.
Griffiths, Fiona. "Herrad of Hohenbourg: A Synthesis of Learning in The Garden of Delights." In Listen Daughter: The Speculum Virginum and the Formation of Religious Women in the Middle Ages, edited by Constant J. Mews, 221-243. New York: Palgrave, 2001.
Griffiths, Fiona. "Nuns' Memories or Missing History in Alsace (c. 1200): Herrad of Hohenbourg's Garden of Delights." In Medieval Memories: Men, Women and the Past, 700-1300, edited by Elisabeth Van Houts, 132-149. Harlow and New York: Longman, 2001.
Joyner, Danielle. Painting the Hortus deliciarum: Medieval Women, Wisdom, and Time. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016.
Schultz, Simone. Hortus deliciarum: le plus beau trésor d'Alsace. Strasbourg: Coprur, 2004.
Yardley, Anne Bagnall. "‘Ful weel she soong the service dyvyne’: The Cloistered Musician in the Middle Ages." In Women Making Music: The Western Art Tradition, 1150-1950, edited by Jane Bowers and Judith Tick, 15-38. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986.
*I haven’t yet read this (from 2021) on puppets in the Hortus Deliciarum!