Conference Agenda

We will probably never know how the earliest Christian chants were related to Jewish chants, due to the lack of ancient sources. Nevertheless, some later notations of Gregorian and synagogue chants suggest a relationship. This paper discusses one such case: the melodies of the Jewish hymn Aleinu (“We Must Praise the Lord of All”) and a nearly identical Sanctus.
Aleinu, like the more famous Kol nidrei, belongs to a small group of chants that are revered as if they were part of the Sinaitic revelation. Although no “melodies from Sinai” are notated before the eighteenth century, they are commonly considered to be of medieval origin. Among these melodies, Aleinu stands out for two reasons: it closely resembles a fourteenth-century Sanctus, and a twelfth-century Hebrew chronicle claims that thirty Jewish martyrs sang Aleinu while being burned at the stake in 1171. Two questions arise: did the martyrs sing the traditional chant, and was the Sanctus derived from it?
Abraham Idelsohn mentioned the “conspicuous similarity” of Aleinu and Sanctus without discussing the details (1926). Eric Werner implied, but did not show, a relationship (1959). Hanoch Avenary’s brief but iconic encyclopedia article sought to establish musical parameters for the “melodies from Sinai” as a genre, accepting in principle their medieval origin (1972). He examined extremely melismatic examples of Aleinu and other chants, calling them “fantasias” (1968). Geoffrey Goldberg presented additional “fantasias” (2003) and gave an excellent summary of, but did not investigate, the historical issues surrounding Aleinu and Sanctus (2019). Finally, Jonathan L. Friedmann discussed the history of the term “melodies from Sinai” without evaluating the music (2019).
Despite the centrality of Aleinu and Sanctus in their respective traditions, nobody has yet compared them systematically. This paper fills the gap, showing that a close reading of the chronicle casts doubt on the historicity of the martyrs’ singing of Aleinu, while a musical analysis reveals that the chants are not so closely related as had been thought. Offering a new appraisal of an old interreligious puzzle, this comparative study enhances our understanding of the history of both Jewish and Gregorian chant.

The collection of medieval manuscripts at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale of Cividale del Friuli (Italy) is exceptional: 111 of the 116 books have been located in the chapter library of the Cathedral of Cividale since the Middle Ages and many of them are liturgical books. This rare collection of liturgical sources offers an incomparable resource for tracing the developments of local liturgical and musical practices, which flourished in the Middle Ages under the patriarchate of Aquileia. Whereas these sources have attracted the attention of scholars, they are usually studied as representative of the broader tradition of the region.

My study moves in a different direction, using the sources as reflective of a local musical and liturgical tradition, one underscored by Camilot-Oswald in Die liturgischen Musikhandschriften aus dem mittelalterlichen Patriarchat Aquileia. The rich repertories of sequences sung in Cividale del Friuli are most useful in this regard. The sources are unusually plentiful, and they represent tradition as it unfolded over several generations, with significant and traceable patterns of change.

My investigation concerns 8 sequentiaries, transmitted as independent sections in graduals and missals from Cividale, dated between the 13^th and the 15^th century, and used for the liturgy at the cathedral. Through codicological, paleographical and musicological analyses, as well as comparison with other Aquileian sources, I have identified the German core-repertory, which largely consists of sequences from Notker’s Liber Hymnarium, some other German sequences and a few pieces that were apparently local. This core repertory was later enriched with pieces of various provenance, which are transmitted in gradual ms. LXXIX, a manuscript written at the Augustinian female monastery of s. Giorgio and eventually used at the cathedral. Though some of the sequences transmitted in ms. LXXIX became part of the repertory, were copied in later sequentiaries or added in earlier graduals, 13 pieces are transmitted only in manuscript LXXIX. Thus, for the first time I explore the choices made by the Augustinian canonesses of Cividale and suggest reasons for adding another dimension to the local tradition.

Notated manuscripts were common among the Latin communities established across the Eastern Mediterranean during the crusader period (1099–1291), as is primarily evidenced by nine large codices notated throughout—most of which are liturgical—and by some dozen more scattered notated items. This phenomenon challenges the historiographical narrative suggesting that during premodern times notation was exclusively used in the West. An analysis of these first known cases of notated music-making in a non-European setting illuminates a neglected aspect of the cross-cultural exchange among Latins of various regional and lingual backgrounds (French, Occitan, Italian, German, etc.) who shared the same urban environments and prayed together in the churches of the Holy Land.

The paper will provide a comparative analysis of the main neume shapes found in crusader manuscripts from the twelfth century, demonstrating how these sources engendered a graphically unified notational system despite—or perhaps as a consequence of—the intermingling of Latins of various backgrounds within this environment. This system, whose earliest manuscript attestations date to the 1120s, is notable for its preference for angular (as opposed to cursive) neume shapes and for representing each sung pitch using a distinct square or rectangular notehead. This visual characterization bears a resemblance to the square notation that was standardized in Europe only during the thirteenth century (Haines 2008), and I will therefore discuss the role played by crusader notation in this shift towards a more unified notational practice.

It will be demonstrated how twelfth-century crusader notation is more iconic (Treitler 1982; Grier 2021)—and thus more intuitively decipherable by singers—compared with the symbolic nature of many of the systems concurrently used in different regions of Europe. Borrowing from linguistics terminology, it might be useful to treat this system as a pidgin dialect, a concept already applied in the study of textual traditions (Siegel 2005). I will argue that this iconic and relatively simple system was developed by those scribes of the Holy Land scriptoria in order to make notation accessible to as many musical-literates as possible, thus gaining an increased control over how the liturgy was sung across the Crusader Kingdom.