Why Worcester?
Chair(s): Jared Hartt (Oberlin Conservatory of Music)
In histories of medieval British music the so-called “Worcester Fragments” feature prominently. Compelling through their damaged and fragmentary survival against all odds, various attempts have been made to address their meaning and importance. But why Worcester? That is to say, what is the fragments’ actual association with Worcester, a relatively small medieval town in the west of England, and why does this matter in the larger scheme of things?
This session's contributors are researchers (one historian and two musicologists) on the ERC-funded BROKENSONG project (PI: Desmond) to uncover what the making of music books meant to and for the medieval musical communities of Britain and Ireland. The analysis offered here builds a picture of the complex and collaborative musical activities of one such community. Since the links to Worcester have been questioned (Wibberley 1976, Hohler 1978, Losseff 1994, Nyikos 2017), we subject the idea of the ‘Worcester’ fragments to closer scrutiny, focusing on the three sets of fragments conventionally known as Worcester Reconstructions I, II, and III. The first paper analyzes Reconstruction I as a material object, and finds that it was produced incrementally over many years; the second paper on Reconstruction III, which has the largest number of scribes working over at least a century, examines the accretive production and practical functions of its chant settings. By contrast, the final paper reveals Reconstruction II as an orderly libellus copied by a single scribe, though it too was adapted extensively.
Employing interdisciplinary methodologies that range from the more traditional (paleography, codicology, book history, liturgical and musical analysis) to the cutting-edge (multispectral imaging), this session offers new evidence to support a particular institutional context. We show that the music books were compiled, used and reused over long spans of time, by personnel cycling in and out of various roles: this is distinctive of a large monastic priory and demonstrates the practical needs and realities of a music-making community. Given the established fifteenth- and sixteenth-century recycling of the fragments’ parchment at Worcester, the most likely musical and “bookish” community for these books' creation and use, is, we argue, Worcester Cathedral Priory.
Presentations of the Symposium
Worcester I
Eric Nemarich
Maynooth University
The large assemblage of parchment gatherings and stray bifolios conventionally assigned to “Reconstruction I” has lain at the center of debate around the Worcester Fragments. The materials that constitute Reconstruction I were found in the bindings of at least nine manuscripts that are known to have formed a part of Worcester Cathedral Priory’s pre-Reformation library. Codicological work by Rodney Thomson and Michael Gullick has demonstrated that the fragments were used as endleaves and binding reinforcement for these nine manuscripts in the early sixteenth century. These nine fragments belonged to a single book of polyphony that remained intact for centuries after its creation. Reconstruction I was fragmentized in early modern Worcester, but many questions remain about what must have been a formidable collection: many leaves bear their medieval foliation, revealing a book that was at least one hundred and thirty-nine folios in length. Did Reconstruction I originate at Worcester? Why was it only disassembled in the early sixteenth century, many generations after the repertory it contained had gone out of fashion? Who created it and how might they have used it?
This paper undertakes a comprehensive re-examination of Reconstruction I as a material object. My findings invite us to think differently about how Reconstruction I was manufactured and used. First, I show that a fragment consisting of two nested bifolios can be assigned a definitive place in Reconstruction I’s original structure. Second, I present a new paleographical analysis of Reconstruction I as a whole, identifying six and possibly seven different scribes who evidently collaborated. Four scribes can be shown to have copied substantial sections, but these were not discrete “workshops” or “campaigns.” Indeed, the most prolific scribe worked on sections of Reconstruction I that were separated by dozens of folios and consisted of repertory in widely varying styles and notational forms. I suggest that Reconstruction I was produced incrementally, in “annalistic” fashion—that is, as entries that scribes added, possibly over years, to a prefabricated codex.
Worcester III
Johanna-Pauline Thöne
Maynooth University
Reconstruction III (Worcester, Cathedral Library, MS Add. 68, fragments xix and xxxii) appears at first glance the most unassuming of the Worcester Reconstructions, comprising only three bifolios (fragment xix) and a single leaf (fragment xxxii). Since Dom Anselm Hughes (1928) labeled these leaves as remnants of a “conductus book”, their actual multi-genre contents and multiple layers of scribal activity—conductus, chant settings, and cantilenas in various musical notations—have been glossed over in subsequent scholarship (Dittmer 1957, Wibberley 1977, Losseff 1994, Nyikos 2017). This paper reveals the complex make-up of Reconstruction III. Proceeding from a distinctive subset of its chant settings, I carefully trace the contributions of its many scribes and counter the lopsided notion of Reconstruction III as merely “the conductus book.”
I argue that the text scribe of the lone thirteenth-century Gloria setting in Reconstruction III can be identified with the same individual who entered the texts for polyphonic chant settings in Reconstruction I. Moreover, my analysis of this single text scribe’s work, whose focus was seemingly chant settings, reveals a striking concordance pattern not only between Reconstruction III and Reconstruction I, but also with the non-Worcester source Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Mus. c. 60, suggesting a direct relationship between these three sources. This finding demonstrates that viewing concordant sources through the lens of scribal division of labor can illuminate repertory choices that otherwise might remain hidden.
Second, I examine three polyphonic settings of the Gloria Laus et honor hymn that were added to Reconstruction III in the fourteenth century. Although in different compositional styles and added at different times by different scribes, these settings are not only indicative of the repertorial needs of a particular institution, but also show traces of continuous reworking.
In sum, the collaborative endeavor and concordance patterns highlighted in this analysis show the few leaves of Reconstruction III to be in fact a complex and revelatory music book whose cross-connections are only starting to emerge.
Worcester II
Karen Desmond
Maynooth University
As described by Peter Lefferts and William Summers (2016), Worcester “Reconstruction II” is volume of English polyphony reconstructed in the twentieth century from three sets of medieval binding fragments comprising thirteen original folios. To these may be added one more folio, thanks to the analysis of Elizabeth Nyikos (2017), who noted that the Kyries visible beneath a palimpsest in a seemingly unrelated Worcester fragment (Worcester, Cathedral Library, MS Add. 68, frag. xii) have scribal features that match those of Reconstruction II.
Most insular polyphonic sources are fragmentary. Thus this fourteen-folio manuscript is the third largest insular polyphonic source that survives from the thirteenth century, exceeded in total number of folios and total number of compositions by only two other sources, W1 and Worcester Reconstruction I. Yet its function and purpose are little understood. In its current state, Reconstruction II preserves 37 compositions apparently randomly copied by five scribes, including chant settings, motets, and conductus.
This seemingly heterogenous collection conceals an orderly and purposeful libellus, however. Significantly, this volume was heavily palimpsested in the fourteenth century. The original contents were an innovative series of troped polyphonic Mass settings (Kyrie, Alleluya, and Sanctus) ordered by chant type and copied by a single thirteenth-century scribe. Through a manuscript analysis of the music fragments and the host volumes within which they served as binding materials, and which includes new multispectral imaging of the palimpsested pages, this paper explores the uses and reuses of this book.
First compiled in the late thirteenth century probably by the cathedral’s precentor for the soloists who sang at Mass, and repurposed in the fourteenth century to preserve a collection of motets, this book was broken apart in the fifteenth century, again most likely by Worcester cathedral’s precentor, and the prettily quaint parchment repurposed as flyleaves in rebinding some of the Cathedral’s most historically important books, including two Worcester psalters from the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. I consider questions of use and fashion, and how these twelve folios preserve the layers of “bookish” activity of this medieval music community through three centuries of its history.
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