Day-to-day Music-Making in the Middle Ages: Re-thinking Historiographical Narratives through the Benedicamus Domino
Chair(s): Anne Walters Robertson (University of Chicago)
Despite the wealth of surviving music manuscripts from the Middle Ages, there is much we cannot know about quotidian music-making. Most everyday practices were rarely, if ever, fully documented, presumably because this was unnecessary and since the act of music writing was exceptional and expensive. Yet historiographical narratives within musicology have, understandably, favoured the musical genres and geographical centres where written traditions were most prominent. Scholars have largely overlooked informal, day-to-day music-making, principally because it remains so difficult to access.
The brief, ubiquitous blessing Benedicamus Domino (“Let us bless the Lord”), which was sung multiple times a day in various liturgical, sacred, or festive contexts, offers a productive lens through which to access kinds of quotidian singing and ad hoc musical practices – both monophonic and polyphonic – that were not typically written down. This versicle productively, indeed provocatively, cuts across multiple genres and performance environments, often appearing in unexpected manuscript contexts. The pervasiveness, across time and space, of musical practices for the Benedicamus Domino stands to challenge traditional understandings of what musicology has long regarded as “central”.
The three papers in this panel offer distinct but complementary perspectives on the Benedicamus Domino, from a wide range of repertoires, not normally considered in conjunction: twelfth-century liturgical singing from north-central Italy (Korzeniewski), thirteenth-century polytextual motets usually localised in Paris (Bradley), and fifteenth-century English carols, with both sacred and secular texts (Tomova). Benedicamus Domino melodies added to the margins of a little-known liturgical manuscript provide unique insights into unusual and sometimes highly virtuosic vocal practices in twelfth-century Pistoia. Revealing the proximity of supposedly “complex” polytextual compositions, preserved in thirteenth-century motet compendia, to “simple” practices of making polyphony for the Benedicamus Domino exposes a certain historiographical or aesthetic agenda within thirteenth-century manuscripts collections themselves. English carols quoting the Benedicamus Domino offer concrete evidence of flexible modes of adaptation, which point towards the pronounced multifunctionality of these ritually fungible songs. These diverse case studies, united in their focus on the Benedicamus Domino, spotlight significant examples of otherwise elusive performative practices, still little understood and largely confined to the music historical periphery.
Presentations of the Symposium
Making Music in the Margins: Notation and Practice in Twelfth-Century Pistoia
Emily Korzeniewski
University of Cambridge
New Haven 1096 is a twelfth-century Italian gradual, acquired by the Beinecke Library in 2005, but not yet studied by musicologists. The manuscript contains many melodies added to its margins contemporaneously, which might be easily dismissed due to the informal character of their unusual cursive notation; however, I find that these additions offer insight into regular uncodified musical practices undertaken by the book’s users. I propose that the manuscript was created at San Zeno of Pistoia and can be situated alongside two graduals and a troper remaining there today. Scholars including Lance Brunner, Sean Dunnahoe and Viacheslav Kartsovnik have connected other fragments to twelfth-century Pistoia, but New Haven 1096 is by far the most complete source to be added to the group. I argue this manuscript has the potential to shed new light on the cathedral’s day-to-day musicking.
In this paper, I consider marginal additions to New Haven 1096 that testify to practices of music making and music writing. San Zeno had an active schola and a thriving scriptorium; music theory treatises in the chapter library attest to a level of musical expertise. Several accretions to New Haven 1096 are witness to oral practices not otherwise recorded, including a series of Benedicamus domino melodies, a vocal exercise, and marginal workings out of melodic material. This paper offers a case study of related later additions in distinctive “cursive square notation” (as defined in other sources by Giovanni Varelli) with highly abbreviated shorthand texts. I argue that these marginal notations, which show variant melodies for the Lamentations of Jeremiah in at least two hands, may reflect a largely extemporized polyphonic practice. While these notations are on the periphery of the rest of the manuscript, they shed light on the central, day-to-day musical practices that took place in the cathedral, ones which are not often captured so clearly in writing. The identification of this manuscript expands the corpus of chant books at San Zeno and illuminates its living musical practices.
Polytextual Motets as “Simple” Polyphony
Catherine A. Bradley
University of Cambridge
This paper challenges a deep-seated dichotomy in the study of late-thirteenth and early-fourteenth century music: the opposition of Parisian polytextual motets – whose subtlety and complexity have long been a focus for medieval musicologists – with so-called “simple” or “primitive” polyphony, chiefly preserved in books from the German-speaking lands, and which has attracted little historical or analytical attention.
Approaching “central” and “complex” Latin polytextual motets from the historiographically marginalized perspective of “peripheral” and “primitive” polyphony, I reveal and interrogate musical, textual, generic, and functional characteristics that are not usually emphasized, or even perceived, in such polytextual motets. These include the quotation of pre-existing liturgical texts and formulae – rather than the newly composed, poetically irregular texts that are considered the hallmark of thirteenth-century motets – and musical instabilities of the kind common in “simple” polyphony, there typically ascribed to oral transmission. In addition, I emphasize the circulation of certain polytextual motet texts and musical voices beyond the confines of the curated polyphonic collections at the center of musicological enquiry: in liturgical and devotional contexts sometimes directly associable with specific sacred rituals, especially those involving the Benedicamus Domino versicle.
Unspoken expectations about center and periphery remain pervasive and self-fulfilling. I seek to deconstruct this problematic binary in two key respects. First, by uncovering traces of what are presumed to be peripheral behaviors within the supposedly central, French sources. Second, by underlining the prevalence of practices currently perceived as marginal, spotlighting and re-interpreting musical compositions and manuscript sources that have been dismissed, overlooked, or misunderstood precisely because they conflict with established assumptions about what is central and typical.
Multipurpose Music in the Fifteenth Century: The Benedicamus Domino Carols
Kalina Tomova
University of Cambridge
Establishing a single, unified theory about the function, origin, and performance contexts of fifteenth-century carols has proved impossible. The genre encompasses various themes, influences, and quotations and thus cannot easily be confined within specific parameters. During the last century, a wide range of liturgical and non-liturgical performance settings were theorized for particular examples within the carol repertoire: as processional hymns (Robbins 1959) or in place of antiphons (Smaill 2003) or the Benedicamus Domino versicle in sacred settings (Harrison 1958 and 1965); during scholastic sermons and Corpus Christi play cycles (Smaill 2003); for performance at festive meals (McInnes 2013), or in the presence of royalty (Fallows 2018). Diverse theories and scholarly dispute or uncertainty about the performance contexts of carols has, arguably, contributed to their marginalisation within music scholarship.
The ability of carols to inhabit multiple spheres is especially evident in the case of those pieces that incorporate the music and/or text of the Benedicamus Domino versicle and its tropes. Certain of these carols were suitable for different feasts and could be adapted for performance both with and without their Benedicamus Domino tag, tailored to a wide variety of social or ritual functions. A number of these carols are also macaronic – combining Latin with English and sometimes French – thus invoking several linguistic registers. This paper explores a number of Benedicamus Domino carols, in order to analyze these special cases and interrogate their particularly pronounced multifunctionality. I showcase both carols that could have been Benedicamus substitutes and others that clearly were not, in this way exploring the pervasiveness of the Benedicamus text within popular music making.
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