Gentile da Fabriano and the Getty Coronation of the Virgin

It is always pleasantly surprising when serendipity throws up a little treasure for a musicologist, even when it is a well known cultural artefact. Recently my attention was drawn to the wonderful panel (painting) by Gentile da Fabriano (1370–1427), The Coronation of the Virgin, now owned by the Getty Museum, Los Angeles. The Getty has provided an open-access, high resolution reproduction of this astonishing example of late medieval art which gleams with gold and textured surfaces (all the techniques that the next generation of renaissance artists eschewed). The panel shows the Virgin Mary being crowned as the Queen of Heaven by Christ. The dove hovering above the Virgin’s head represents the Holy Spirit.

So, after recovering from the eye-boggling sheer beauty of this piece, I noticed that the choir of angels on either side of the lower half of the panel were holding rolls on which musical notation appears. The music notation is of the type found in choir books of liturgical plainchant from the late thirteenth-century onwards, developed by Dominican and Franciscan reformers whose religious orders brought about fundamental transformations in the natural and notation of plainchant after their founding the early thirteenth century.

The question that immediately came to mind was whether the notated music was a known piece of music. There are two primary leads that a musicologist might pursue in trying to discover the identity of a piece of what is clearly vocal (i.e. sung) music. There is the music notation itself; and there is the sung text. (Listening and memory of music heard/sung also plays a role, but more on that another time.) Sometimes it is easier to discover the identity of a piece of liturgical chant firstly by identifying its text, although the same text can often have more than one musical setting. So a quick text search with Google using a few advanced techniques soon revealed that the portions of text shown in the two rolls of music come from a text that St Francis of Assisi, the founder of the Franciscans, composed from snippets of Biblical passages, and which is known as the Exhortatio ad Laudem Dei or the “Exhortation to the Praise of God”. The text of the Exhortatio is shown below, with the bold text indicating the portions that can be found in Gentile’s painting (bracketed text refers to the Biblical origin of each verse).

Timete Dominum et date illi honorem (Apoc 14, 7). Dignus est Dominus acciper laudem et honorem (cf Apoc 4, 11). Omnes, qui timete Dominum, laudete eum (cf Ps 21, 24). Ave, Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum (Lc 21, 24). Laudate eum caelum et terra (cf Ps 68, 35 – Ps Rom). Laudate omnia flumina Dominum (cf Dan 3, 78).Benedicti filii Dei Dominum (cf Dan 3, 82). Haec dies quam fecit Dominus, exsultemus et laetemur in ea (Ps 117, 24 – Ps Rom). Alleluia, Alleuia, Alleluia! Rex Israel (Joa 12, 13)! Omnis spiritus laudet Dominum (Ps 150, 6). Laudate Dominum, quoniam bonus est (Ps 146, 1); omnes qui legitis haec, benedicite Dominum (Ps 102, 21 – Ps Rom). Omnes creaturae benedicite Dominum (cf Ps 102, 22). Omnes volucres caeli laudate Dominum (Dan 3, 80; cf Ps 148, 7-10). Omnes pueri laudate Dominum (cf Ps 112, 1). Juvenes et virgines laudate Dominum cf Ps 148, 12). Dignus est agnus, qui occisus est, recipere laudem, gloriam et honorem (cf Apoc 5, 12). Benedicta sit sancta Trinitas atque indivisa Unitas.Sancte Michael Archangele defende nos in proelio. (ed. K. Esser, O.F.M, Die opuskula des hl. Franziskus von Assisi. Neue textkritische Edition, Grottaferrata (Romae): Editiones Collegii S. Bonaventurae ad Claras aquas, 1976.)

That both verses from the Book of Revelations (Apoc) appear here in the same order as in St Francis’s Exhortatio (the later one first), and that Gentile paints them as though they are part of a more extensive text would support my conclusion that this is a reference to St Francis’s text. So what about the music, Mr Music Historian?

Gentile da Fabriano, The Coronation of the Virgin, detail lower left

One of the most useful online research tools for chant researchers to emerge in the last few years is the Global Database of Chant developed by web app genius and musicologist Jan Koláček. A great feature of the Global Chant Database, which draws together data for existing indices of chant melodies and continues to add new material, is the melodic search tool which you can use to find a particular melodic phrase from a chant. Entering the first nine melodic pitches that appear above the words “Timite dominum” (on left) produced three hits: two related hymns In caelesti collegio novus and In caelesti collegio novus, and a rare and late antiphon Proles de caelo prodiit novis. Both hymns (In caelesti and Proles) are sung for the feast of St Francis of Assisi, and have almost identical melodies in their respective indices (see the Global Chant Database for details on these indices). The antiphon was sung for the Office of St Benedict and its melody is quite different to the hymns after the first 10 notes.

Gentile da Fabriano, The Coronation of the Virgin, detail lower right

But there’s a catch. Gentile’s melody begins in Gregorian chant Mode 1 (the one with a D final and whose range is mostly above that note); known sources transmit the hymns and antiphon in Mode 3 (E final, high range). This need not be the end of the matter since so long as a chant avoids the second degree of a mode (which is tone above the final in Mode 1 and a semitone above the final in Mode 3) and uses a B flat, a Mode 3 melody can be easily rewritten or transposed down to a Mode 1 melody. Whether this happened frequently, however, is another matter that requires further research. Unfortunately, the melodic fragment in the music roll held by the angels on the right does not correspond to the melodies of either hymn or the antiphon in any easily recognisable way. Nor does this melody score any hits for the chants stored on the Global Chant Database.

This suggests several possibilities. Either the melody that Gentile painted in his panel remains unknown or is lost; or Gentile simply made up the melody (suggesting he or one of his apprentices knew enough about music and music notation to produce a fairly convincing resemblance to at least one well known chant; or that Gentile (or his apprentice) painted a melody that was transmitted orally to which the Exhortatio ad Laudem Dei was sung. Each of these is a possibility, although exploring them in extensio is an exercise that will have to wait until time and possibly another forum. But the curious association of St Francis’s Exhortatio with a hymn to the same saint raises some curious possibilities, especially concerning a lost (oral) tradition.

Art historians generally agreed that Gentile painted the Getty Coronation of the Virgin for his home town of Fabriano around 1420, after he had left Brescia in 1419 and before arriving at Florence c. 1422 (Christiansen 1978/9:8). In its original form, the other side of the panel featured the Stigmatisation of St Francis. This side of the panel was split off in the 19th century, and is now in the Magnani-Rocca collection in Reggio Emilia (Allen 2003: 15). The two-sided panel would have been used in processions in Fabriano: it originally had attachments to allow it to be hoisted up as a processional standard (Christiansen 1978/9:10). It seems clear from documentation and the art-historical evidence that this panel was painted for the church of Saint Francis and its Franciscan monks at Fabriano. The use of St Francis’s Exhortatio and the possible reference to one or more of the hymns sung in his honour provides further evidence for this conclusion.

One final remark needs to be made before I finish. This is not the only instance that Gentile painted angels singing from notation to the Virgin. Each version of his Enthroned Madonna with Child and Angels—one is in the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria at Perugia, the other in the Metropolitan Art Museum at New York, both possibly painted while Gentile was a resident of Venice—depict a rank of angels at the virgin’s feet singing from a roll of music notation. There is little difficulty in determining the music that Gentile paints: it is the Marian antiphon Regina caeli laetare sung at Compline (click on the previous link to listen to a recording of this chant), especially on Sundays (Billiet 2008, 126). Both panels predate the Getty Coronation of the Virgin by a decade or more, and illustrate Gentile’s continued use of a rather conventional device to represent singing visually in a painting. Gentile clearly went to considerable trouble to paint the square neumes (the types of notes used in contemporary Gregorian chant sources) carefully in both instances: apart from portions where the angels obscure the notation, it is relatively easy to recognise the traditional solemn melody. (There are some interesting differences in how neumes are formed). This leads me to suspect that the melody in the Getty Coronation of the Virgin is in fact a lost (or as yet unknown) music setting, perhaps part of an oral tradition, of St Francis’s Exhoratio ad Laudem Dei.

Do you know the chant or melody shown in Gentile’s Coronation of the Virgin? Do you know of a discussion of this same melody in published literature? I would be most grateful for any responses to these two questions – please leave any responses as a comment to this post!

References

- Allen, Denise Maria. ed. 2003. Masterpieces of painting in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles: Getty Publications. View on Google Books

- Billiet, Frédéric. 2008. “Entendre le concert céleste dans oeuvres de Gentile.” In Il mondo cortese di Gentile da Fabriano e l’immaginario musicale: La cultura musicale e artistica nel Quattrocento europeo e la sua riscoperta in epoca moderna e contemporanea, ed. Mara Lacchè, 104–127. Rome: ARACNE.

- Christiansen, Keith. 1978/79. “The ‘Coronation of the Virgin’ by Gentile Da Fabriano.” The J. Paul Getty Museum Journal 6/7: 1–12. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4166383

2012 in review

Tags

ars nova, ars subtilior, Denis Le Grant, music palaeography, notation

The clever elves at WordPress.com have prepared a 2012 annual report for my blog. Here’s an excerpt:

600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 2,000 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 3 years to get that many views.

Click here to see the complete report.

I’m bemused by the fact that it states that more people visited by blog than the number of mountaineers that conquered Mount Everest last year! Hopefully most of my readers don’t need oxygen to get to the end of a post!

Some interesting trends emerge in the data. My rather offhand post concerning evidence for a new composition by Denis Le Grant had the most visits in a single day for the past year. If anything, it suggests that manuscript indexes still hold much potential in music research, and that massive digitisation projects like Gallica at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France hold many treasures for digital humanists. A post on my article in Early Music published last last month proved to be the most viewed one for the year (hurrah!), followed by the first part of my thoughts on a new taxonomy of medieval music notation and fragments from the Austrian National Library.

Social media sites and websites concerning medieval music remain important for alerting readers to new content on my blog, and I am grateful to fellow bloggers who have referred readers to my various posts during the year. Finally a big thanks to all followers of this blog for their kind attention and comments during the year.

Music and Politics

I recently attended the 35th National Conference of the Musicological Society of Australia, 3–5 December 2012, a regular fixture on the Australian music research scene. The conference, held at Australian National University, brought together over 140 speakers on the broad theme of “The Politics of Music“. Like many conferences most of the papers ran in parallel sessions, so it is always difficult to arrive at an overall view of the conference and its success. Australian musicology is a broad church, and my own research and general interests determined which sessions I attended. For me, highlights of the conference included James Webster’s keynote on politics in the music of Joseph Haydn and John Griffiths’s account on the relationships between architecture, rhetoric and music in the 15th and 16th centuries. A slightly abbreviated version of Griffiths’s paper can be read here.

For my part, I presented a paper on a long gestated topic: the politics of part of the repertoire of the manuscript Modena, Biblioteca Estense, ms. α.M.5.24 (Mod A) (warning: links to 14 MB PDF of the manuscript). The following details are from the conference program.

Title: The Angevin Struggle for the Kingdom of Naples (c.1378­­–1411) and Politics of Repertoire in Mod A_II–IV: New Hypotheses

Abstract: The “old corpus” of the music manuscript Modena, Biblioteca Estense, ms. α.M.5.24 (Mod A_II–IV) is a tangle of politically-charged songs (mostly in French) that refer to the tumultuous Great Schism of the Western Church (1378–1417) and the prowess of several princes of ascendant Italian states during the same period. Some scholars have connected the repertoire of Mod A_II–IV with Pétros Fílargos, sometime Archbishop of Milan and then the short-lived Conciliar pope Alexander V. However, as I have argued in extensio elsewhere, art-historical evidence now strongly suggests this manuscript was completed as late as September 1410 at Bologna in the midst of Alexander’s successor, John XXIII. During the first two years of John’s pontificate one of the most influential and wealthiest princes of France, Louis II d’Anjou, materially and personally reasserted his claim for title of the Kingdom of Naples, simultaneously supporting John XXIII’s military campaign to reclaim Rome and the Vatican. This paper will explore my new hypothesis that part of the repertoire of Mod A_II–IV—and possibly the manuscript’s very structure—reflects the presence of the Angevin prince at the court of John XXIII at Bologna in the second half of 1410. It will also consider how other political threads running through this manuscript render it an unlikely candidate for a source connected with the pro-Visconti Alexander V.

Five keywords: Late medieval music, the Great Schism, Late medieval Italian Politics, Louis II d’Anjou, (Anti-)Pope John XXIII

Portrait of Louis II of Anjou. Source: Wikipedia.

Readers interested in the full text of the paper (which I am a little reluctant to distribute while part of this research is being considered for publication) are invited to contact me using the contact form on this blog to request a copy.

Some insights into late medieval music notation

Tags

ars nova, ars subtilior, music palaeography, notation

As 2012 draws to a close, it pleases me to learn that the journal Early Music has published my article examining an anonymous late fourteenth-century song, Aÿ, mare, amice mi care. This Latin rondeau was discovered among an odd assortment of music fragments by Mark Everist just a few years ago but until now has not been satisfactorily transcribed nor its notation discussed. Thanks to the generosity of Oxford University Press, I am able to provide readers of my blog with a free-access URL to my article for their personal use only. The details of the article are as follows:

Jason Stoessel, ‘Revisiting Ay, mare, amice mi care: insights into late medieval music notation’, Early Music 40/3 (2012): 455-468. doi: 10.1093/em/cas101. Free access links: PDF or HTML.

Abstract

In late 2009, Mark Everist published a report on the rediscovery of a set of music fragments in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Among these is a hitherto unknown work, Aÿ, mare, amice mi care. This article provides a new reading and reconstruction of damaged portions of this tiny yet exceptional Latin song. Most significantly, a close reading of the song’s notational devices, including a canon, provides new and unequivocal evidence for the intersection of musical cultures on either side of the Alps. The composer of this song was evidently trained in ‘Italian’ Trecento music theory, but used ‘French’ Ars Nova notation. As such, Aÿ, mare can be situated as an early example of breve-equivalent notation. These findings contribute to music history’s understanding of how composers on the Italian peninsula received and cultivated the Ars Subtilior style in the decades either side of 1400. They also contribute to (or complicate) an ongoing dialogue concerning the origin(s) of the Paris fragments.

Keywords: Ars Subtilior; Ars Nova; Trecento; canon; mensuration signs; breve equivalence

Bibliography

Apel, Willi, ed. French Secular Compositions of the Fourteenth Century. 3 vols. Vol. I: Ascribed Compositions, Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae 53. [Rome]: American Institute of Musicology, 1970.

Bent, Margaret. “Ciconia, Prosdocimus, and the Workings of Musical Grammar as Exemplified in O Felix Templum and O Padua.” In Johannes Ciconia, Musicien De La Transition, edited by Philippe Vendrix. 65-106. Turnhout: Brepols, 2003.

———. “The Early Use of the Sign Ø.” Early Music 24/2 (1996): 199–225.

———. “Notation, §3, 3: Polyphonic Mensural Notation c. 1260–1500.” In The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. xviii: 129-40. London: Grove, 2001.

———. “Principles of Mensuration and Coloration: Virtuosity and Anomalies in the Old Hall Manuscript.” In Le Notazioni Della Polifonia Vocale Dei Secoli IX-XVII. Antologia – Parte Seconda: Secoli XV-XVII, edited by Antonio Delfino. Pisa: Edizioni ETS, forthcoming.

Busse Berger, Anna Maria. Medieval Music and the Art of Memory. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

———. Mensuration and Proportion Signs: Origins and Evolution. Oxford Monographs on Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.

———. “Cut Signs in Fifteenth-Century Musical Practice.” In Music in Renaissance Cities and Courts: Studies in Honor of Lewis Lockwood, edited by Jessie Ann Owens and Anthony M. Cummings. 101-12. Michigan: Harmonie Park Press, 1997.

Cappelli, Adriano. Lexicon Abbreviaturarum. Leipzig: J.J. Weber, 1928.

DeFord, Ruth I. “The Mensura of Ø in the Works of Du Fay.” Early Music 34/1 (2006): 111–36.

Della Sciucca, Marco, Tiziana Sucato, and Carla Vivarelli, eds. Marchetto da Padova: Lucidarium – Pomerium, La Tradizione Musicale, 12. Firenze: Edizioni del Galluzzo per la Fondazione Ezio Franceschini, 2007.

Dronke, Peter. Poetic Individuality in the Middle Ages: New Departures in Poetry 1000–1150. 2nd ed. London: Westfield College; University of London Committee for Medieval Studies, 1986.

Dumitrescu, Theodor. “The Solmization Status of Sharps in the 15th and 16th Centuries.” Studi Musicali 33 (2004): 253-83.

Everist, Mark. “A New Source for the Polyphony of the Ars Subtilior: Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Nouvelles Acquisitions Françaises 22069.” In A Late Medieval Songbook and Its Context: New Perspectives on the Chantilly Codex (Bibliothèque Du Château De Chantilly, Ms. 564) edited by Yolanda Plumley and Anne Stone. 283–301. Turnhout: Brepols, 2009.

Gallo, F. Alberto. “Die Notationlehre in 14. Und 15. Jahrhundert.” In Die Mittelalterliche Lehre Von Mehrstimmigkeit, edited by Frieder Zaminer. Geschichte Der Musiktheorie 5, 257–356. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1984.

———. La teoria della notazione in Italia dalla fine del XIII all’inizio del XV secolo. Bologna: Tamari, 1966.

Gozzi, Marco. “New Light on Italian Trecento Notation Part 1: Sections I-IV.1.” Recercare 13 (2001): 5-78.

Greene, Gordon Kay, ed. French Secular Music: Ballades and Canons. Vol. 20, Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century. Monaco: L’oiseau-lyre, 1982.

Günther, Ursula. “Das Ende der Ars Nova.” Die Musikforschung 16 (1963): 105–20.

———. “Das Manuskript Modena, Biblioteca Estense α.M.5.24 (olim Lat. 568=Mod).” Musica Disciplina XXIV (1970): 17–69.

Haar, James. “Some Introductory Remarks on Musical Pedagogy.” In Music Education in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, edited by Russell E. Murray, Susan Forscher Weiss and Cynthia J. Cyrus. 3–22. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010.

Leach, Elizabeth Eva. “Interpretation and Counterpoint: The Case of Guillaume De Machaut’s De Toutes Flours (B 31).” Music Analysis 19/3 (2000): 321–51.

Long, Michael. “Musical Tastes in Fourteenth-Century Italy: Notational Styles, Scholarly Traditions, and Historical Circumstances.” Unpublished PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 1981.

Memelsdorff, Pedro. “What’s in a Sign? The [natural sign] and the Copying Process of a Medieval Manuscript: The Codex Modena, Biblioteca Estense, α.M.5.24 (Olim Lat. 568).” Studi Musicali 30 (2001): 255-79.

Omont, Henri. Bibliothéque Nationale: Catalogue Général Des Mansucrits Français. Nouvelles acquisitions françaises, IV, No. 10001–11353 et 20001–22811, Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1918.

Plumley, Yolanda. “Playing the Citation Game in the Late 14th-Century Chanson.” Early Music 31/1 (2003): 20–40.

Reaney, Gilbert, ed. Early Fifteenth-Century Music. edited by Armen Carapetyan. Vol. iv: Anonymous Chansons from the Ms Oxford, Bodleian Library, Canonici Misc. 213, Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae 11. s.l.: American Institute of Musicology, 1969.

Reynolds, Robert Davis. “Evolution of Notational Practices in Manuscripts Written between 1400–1450.” Unpublished PhD dissertation, Ohio State University, 1974.

Richardson, W.F. “The Latin Prefix Sesqui–.” Prudentia 17 (1985): 37–41.

Schiltz, Katelijne, and Bonnie J. Blackburn, eds. Canons and Canonic Techniques, 14th–16th Centuries, Analysis in Context; Leuven Studies in Musicology. Leuven: Peeters, 2007.

Schreur, Philip, ed. Tractatus Figurarum. edited by Thomas J. Mathieson, Greek and Latin Music Theory Series, 6. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989.

Smilansky, Uri. “Rethinking Ars Subtilior: Context, Language, Study and Performance.” Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Exeter, 2010.

Stoessel, Jason. “The Interpretation of Unusual Mensuration Signs in the Ars Subtilior.” In A Late Medieval Songbook and Its Context: New Perspectives on the Chantilly Codex (Bibliothèque Du Château De Chantilly, Ms. 564) edited by Yolanda Plumley and Anne Stone. 179–202. Turnhout: Brepols, 2009.

———. “Looking Back over the Missa L’ardant Desir: Double Signatures and Unusual Signs in Sources of Fifteenth-Century Music.” Music & Letters 91/3 (2010): 311–42.

Stone, Anne. “Che cosa c’è di più sottile riguardo l’ars subtilior.” Rivista Italiana di Musicologia 31/1 (1996): 3–31.

———. “Glimpses of the Unwritten Tradition in Some Ars Subtilior Works.” Musica Disciplina 50 (1996): 59–93.

———. The Manuscript Modena, Biblioteca Estense, alpha.M.5.24: Commentary. Ars Nova Nuova Serie 1. Lucca: Lim Editrice, 2005.

———. “Self-Reflexive Songs and Their Readers in the Late 14th Century.” Early Music 31/2 (2003): 180–95.

———. “Writing Rhythm in Late Medieval Italy: Notation and Musical Style in the Manuscript, Biblioteca Estense, Alpha.M.5.24.” Unpublished PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 1994.

Tanay, Dorit. Noting Music, Marking Culture: The Intellectual Context of Rhythmic Notation 1250-1400. Musicological Studies and Documents. Edited by Ursula Günther Holzgerlingen: American Institute of Musicology, 1999.

Vecchi, Joseph, ed. Marcheti De Padua Pomerium. Vol. 6, Corpus Scriptorum De Musica. s.l.: American Institute of Musicology, 1961.

Wegman, Rob C. “Different Strokes for Different Folks? On Tempo and Diminution in Fifteenth-Century Music.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 53/3 (2000): 461–505.

Woodley, Ronald. “Sharp Practice in the Later Middle Ages: Exploring the Chromatic Semitone and Its Implications.” In, Music Theory Online 12, no. 12.2 (2006). http://mto.societymusictheory.org/issues/mto.06.12.2/mto.06.12.2.woodley.pdf.

Note: The responsibility for the grammatical blunder in the first sentence on the second page of the article rests solely with the author. Mea culpa!

Redemption and the “Missa L’Ardant desir”

Tags

biblioteca apostolica vaticana, cantus firmus, Cappella Sistina 51, Mass, symbolism

Recently I have been thinking again about the Missa L’Ardant desir, an anonymous polyphonic mass that was at the centre of a previous piece of research on the use of unusual signs in fifteenth-century music notation. The remarkable Confiteor from the Credo of this mass is but one of a number of distinctive features in this mass. Like many polyphonic settings of the Ordinary of the Mass from the middle of the fifteenth century (or slightly later, perhaps the 1460s, in the case of the Missa L’Ardant desir) this setting repeatedly uses a preexistent tune, mostly in the Tenor, throughout its settings of the five items of the Ordinary of the Mass, the Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus and Agnus dei. This preexistent tune, called the cantus firmus meaning ‘the fixed song’, could be drawn from either a liturgical chant (a chant sung in the Mass or the Holy Office) or a secular song, both courtly and also popular street songs. In the case of the L’Ardant desir melody, there is no surviving court song that corresponds to the L’Ardant desir text incipit or melody used in the Mass, although the tenor survives in two settings (nos. 133 and 134) from the Buxheimer Organ Book, a mid-fifteenth century book of early organ or keyboard tablature now in the Bavarian Library at Munich.

Some years ago Rob C. Wegman argued persuasively that the Missa L’Ardant desir as it survives solely in the manuscript Cappella Sistina 51 in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (Rome) represents a subsequent phase in the transmission of this mass. (The article is available here; log-in access/a subscription is required.) By transmission, I refer to the process by which a piece of music is copied and distributed in a culture before the invention of the movable type music printing press by Ottavio Petrucci at the dawn of the sixteenth century. Before this time (apart from some interesting experiments with woodcuts in the second half of the fifteenth century), all music was copied by hand, a painstaking and often expensive undertaking. Wegman pointed out that many of the unusual transformations of the rhythms and indeed melody of the L’Ardant desir tune found in the CS 51 transmission of this Mass can be explained as straightforward and some not-so-straightforward manipulations of the original melody. For example, the note values of the melody are sometimes doubled. Sometimes the melody is sung in duple meter, sometimes triple and even in quadruple meter operating a particular proportion with respect to the other voices in this four-part composition. Because certain elements of late medieval musical notation operate contextually, changing the meter of the melody also changes the value of some notes. But this is not the end of the story. As the mass progresses, the anonymous composer reaches into a grab-bag of notational tricks and subjects the melody to several unusual transformations. Sometimes the rhythms of notes are changed by simply reading the original tune’s notation as if all note stems have been erased. At one point, the melody is sung upside down, in the sense that when the original melody rises, its transformation falls, and vice versa. At the very end of the Mass, in Agnus dei III, the composer reaches further into his bag of tricks and modifies the melody’s rhythm by changing the longest note, called the maxima in medieval music theory, into the shortest note, called the minima, and vice versa. (In practice, composers and scribes actually use notes smaller than the minima, but none of these appear in the L’Ardant desir tune. Note that the minima of late medieval notation is the ‘ancestor’ of the minim or half-note in present-day traditional music notation.) Similarly the second shortest note (the semibreve) is swapped for the second longest note (the long), and vice versa, but the middle note, the breve, stays the same, as shown here.

Rhythmic transformations in Agnus dei III, Missa L’Ardant desir

Late medieval note names (partially ‘Anglicised’)

As Wegman explains, and as Emily Zazulia as recently demonstrated in her dissertation, these various transformations could have been readily achieved by taking the one version of the written L’Ardant desir tune and simply instructing the singer of the tenor to change the melody in various ways, whether simply by changing the time signature/meter, omitting rests, or more complex transformations like inverting the melody or swapping one rhythm for the other. By the time that the Missa L’Ardant desir was created, this process of musical transformation wasn’t so unusual; indeed it had already been used in the late fourteenth-century motet and seems to have been transferred to Mass composition around the middle of the fifteenth century as other examples discussed by Wegman indicate.

So there’s nothing new here in terms of what is already known about the Missa L’Ardant desir, although the following table offers some refinements to our understanding of some of the devices causing rhythmic transformations, particularly in the Et resurrexit.

Cantus firmus (CF) transformations in the Missa L’Ardant desir

While some of these transformations are similar to those found in other contemporary settings, others like those in the Credo and Agnus dei foreshadow bolder treatments of the cantus firmi in the Mass settings by late fifteenth-century composers like Jacob Obrecht and Josquin des Prez. The question that I soon began asking myself was why might the composer have chosen these transformations at particular points throughout the Mass, and might they actually ‘mean’ something, or at the very least symbolise some aspect of the liturgy in general or in particular?

Two aspects of the treatment of the cantus firmus stand out in the Missa L’Ardant desir, although more could be said elsewhere about several other tenor transformations, cantus firmus quotations in other voices and use of other musical devices like melodic repetition or sequences. The setting of the Confiteor stands out for the absence of any type of transformation of the cantus firmus, despite the fact that the other three non-tenor voices constitute one of the most complex examples of proportional notation outside pedagogic sources. Secondly, so far as I have been able to determine, the swapping of the maxima for the minima in the Agnus dei III is found anywhere else in the polyphonic mass repertoire in the fifteenth century. (Wegman must be credited once again with recognising rhythmic transformation in the Agnus dei III.)

The text of the Confiteor contains the article of faith from the Nicene Creed that professes the Christian belief in unique baptism for the remission of sins and the promise of everlasting life. The Agnus dei occurs in the Mass at the point that the consecrated communion bread is broken, symbolising the break of bread at the Last Supper. Its text acknowledges the agency of Christ’s sacrifice for the salvation of Christian souls: Agnus dei qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis, ‘Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy on us’. Thus the Confiteor and the Agnus dei are linked through their reference to the remission or removal of sin through baptism and salvation. This linking of baptism and Christ’s sacrifice comes as no surprise, given the same emphasis is accorded to both elements in religious painting in the fifteenth century. Hubert and Jan Van Eyck’s Adoration of the Lamb from the Ghent Altarpiece (1432) visually represents this relationship between baptism and salvation by placing an eight-side baptismal font in the foreground, immediately before an altar on which stands the Lamb of God whose blood spills symbolically into a communion chalice. Just in case the viewer is in any doubt about the symbolism in this panel, Van Eyck painted in the words ‘Here is the font of the water of life proceeding from the throne of God and the Lamb’ on the baptismal font, and the text of the Agnus dei on the altar upon which the pascal Lamb stands. (Note: there is a slight problem with the last word in the first inscription which seems to read homi or homini, which makes no sense theologically.) What is perhaps surprising is the emphasis the composer of the Missa L’Ardant desir places on this relationship and what musical symbols are used to represent this.

One possible explanation of the musical symbols in the Missa L’Ardant desir might lie in the writings of an important fifteenth-century prelate and thinker, Nicholas de Cusa (1401–1464), sometimes called Cusanus. Although he was an important canon lawyer (who distinguished himself at the Council of Basel), papal envoy and administrator, Cusanus also wrote prolifically on theology, philosophy, mathematics and the sciences. I believe that one of his earliest books, ‘On learned ignorance’ (De docta ignorantia) holds clues to a new reading of the Missa L’Ardant desir. (The philosopher Jasper Hopkin’s has generously provided a wealth of free online resources, including a translation of De docta ignorantia on his website. This research is very much indebted to his scholarship.) In ‘On learned ignorance’, Cusanus expounds upon the finiteness of human knowledge in relation to God. This strand of mystic theology is nothing new in itself since the same argument had been articulated by the sixth-century Neoplatonist Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and closer to Cusanus’ time by the Dominican mystic Meister Eckhard von Hockheim (c.1260–c.1327). The novelty of Cusanus’ approach rested with his use of numbers—including the ‘unreal’ number infinity—and geometry to illustrate and support his argument. While it would require several paragraphs to describe fully several important principles of Cusanus’ theology in ‘On learned ignorance’, the following points sum up in a potted fashion those relevant to this discussion:

1. Because God is all things and there can be nothing greater than God, God is the Absolute Maximum (DI I.3). The Absolute Maximum is incomprehensibly infinite in its magnitude and nature, and eternal. Because it is all things, there is only one Absolute Maximum.

2. Because the Absolute Maximum is all things in and of itself, nothing can be lesser that it and therefore it is also the Absolute Minimum (DI I.2). The Absolute Maximum is equal to the Absolute Minimum. This is an example of Cusanus’ peculiar mode of reasoning known as the coincidence of opposites.

3. The Absolute Maximum’s infinite being can only be equated to infinity. Cusanus demonstrates this with the figure of a triangle (DI I.14). If any one side of the triangle is of infinite length, then he reasons that the other two sides must also be of infinite length, both separately and together. The triangle also serves to illustrate the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, the triune being of God, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.

4. As a consequence, this infinite Oneness only begets itself (a concept that will be crucial in the third book of ‘On learned ignorance’ concerning the God-Man), and is therefore eternal. Plurality arises from Oneness (by multiplication), and is derivative and therefore transient. In other words, God is eternal and infinite, creation is transient and finite (DI I.8).

5. According to Cusanus’ Neoplatonic theology through the gradual mortification of the flesh through faith, the believer progressively ascends from a state of plurality to oneness with Christ (DI III.2). Ascent towards God, starting with baptism is not a new idea, but Cusanus symbolises this spiritual transformation through numbers and their relationship to one another.

I have already argued elsewhere that cessation of complex proportions in the Confiteor from the Missa L’Ardant desir symbolises the remission of sins described in the text of this article. In terms of a Cusanan reading of this section of the Missa L’Ardant desir, the imitative entries in the non-tenor voices in the first 14 bars are sung proportionally in relation to the tenor voice. In most cases these voices use a four to three proportion or compounds of it. Interestingly Cusanus states that inequality, symbolised by proportions like 4:3, is the mark of transience and plurality, that of this world, while equality symbolises eternity (eg. 1:1). After 14 bars, the non-tenor voices all stop singing proportionally and fall back into same meter as the tenor voice. In this sense the non-tenor voices attain equality or oneness with the musical meter as the tenor voice, which up until this point they have been struggling against that complex proportions. Moreover, the tenor voice only enters after six bars of rest. Could the eight bars of melody in the tenor sounding against the proportions in other voices correspond to the eight sides of the baptismal font, the highly recognisable physical symbol of baptism found in many churches and in Van Eyck’s Adoration of the Lamb? I don’t believe the music symbology is coincidental. But, even in light of the fact that the Ordinary items of the Mass set polyphonically are interspersed with other items sung to plainchant, intoned or spoken silently, the Confiteor might be seen as the figurative centrepiece in the spectacle of this Mass, coming at the end of the first item of the Liturgy of the Eucharist, the most sacred liturgy of the church. As the first and unique sacrament of the faith, baptism takes centre stage.

Reading Cusanus in conjunction with the Confiteor of the Missa L’Ardant desir provides one way of understanding its use of wayward proportionality at the beginning of the Confiteor. However, the influence of Cusanus’ ideas also explain the rhythmic transformations of the Agnus dei III. The equating of maximas with minimas and vice versa in this section of the mass presents itself as an uncanny musical representation of Cusanus’ coincident opposites, the Absolute Maximum and Absolute Minimum, symbolising for feeble human minds the incomprehensible God. In this sense, the symbolic imagery of the Missa L’Ardant desir resembles that of Van Eyck’s Adoration of the Lamb. In The Adoration of the Lamb, the viewer must visually negotiate the symbolic space of this painting by proceeding past the eight-sided baptismal font towards the symbol of the paschal Lamb who takes away the sins of the world. In the Missa L’Ardant desir, because it is a musical event, the listener must progress within a linear timeframe, proceeding past the symbol of the baptism in the Confiteor before approaching the Agnus dei. But the symbolic representation of God’s incomprehensibility at the very end of the polyphonic setting of the Mass in the third Agnus dei serves as a poignant reminder of the Lamb of God’s agency in the salvation of all believers.

The question that I have already asked myself is whether it is plausible to suppose either a Cusanan influence upon the composer or at the very least upon some of those that might have sung or heard this mass. The Mass’s anonymity posses a some obstacles to the first part of this question, although Cusanus’ status in the mid fifteenth-century church would have made it more likely that his views and writings were known in Germany and Italy during this time. Cusanus in many respects marks the end of a late medieval tradition. However his ideas influenced a small number of subsequent thinkers so some extent, including Marsilio Ficino and Giordano Bruno, and German humanists. Clearly further work is required concerning the permeation of Cusanus’ ideas into artistic and musical circles (and I would like to hear what readers think in this respect), although I suspect that revival of Neoplatonic thought during the fifteenth century makes this task a difficult one.

This post is based upon a paper that I delivered during the ‘Transformations’ Symposium of Arts New England at the University of New England, Australia, 12-13 November 2012. To my knowledge there is no recording of the Missa L’Ardant desir to date, something I am keenly interested in working to remedy in the future. A synthetic recording many be found on Rob C. Wegman’s Renaissance Masses 1440–1520 website, although his reading of the Confiteor differs from my own interpretation in several respects.

Book review: Citation, Intertextuality and Memory

Readers of this blog might be interested in a recent review I was asked to write for the Medieval Review,  an online endeavour that publishes reviews on recent books in medieval studies including music.

TMR 12.08.04, Plumley, ed., Citation, Intertextuality and Memory in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Jason Stoessel)

Here’s an excerpt that gives some idea of the content of this delightfully cross-disciplinary collection of essays by various authors:

Its thirteen chapters–preceded by a preface by the editors and an introduction by Lina Bolzoni which broaches many of the issues discussed above–as a whole exhibit a cross-disciplinary approach, although the degree to which individual contributions span more than one discipline is limited. Five chapters concern the fourteenth-century poet- composer Guillaume de Machaut (or his reputation); two chapters deal with early English lyric; a central kernel of chapters explores citation in early modern Italian literature and medical texts; and three chapters examine the pictorial arts, including book decoration. Jan Stejskal’s chapter on the role that Italian humanists and the reformist John Jerome of Prague played in maintaining the memory of the Hussite reformists condemned at the Council of Constance fits less comfortably within the themes of this collection, despite its intrinsic merit. As such, this collection will appeal to historians of literature, music, art, and law, as well as to general historians whose interests lie in the period spanning the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries. The breadth of the collection may lie in the fact that its chapters originate from no less than three interdisciplinary gatherings of scholars over a period of five years: a pair of sessions convened by Plumley and Jossa at the 2004 annual conference of the Renaissance Society of America, and two workshops held in 2008 and 2009 at the University of Exeter as part of Plumley’s “Citation and Allusion in the Late French Ars Nova Chanson and Motet” project.

That’s all for now.

Armchair philology – Musical treasures from the Austrian National Library

Tags

ars nova, ars subtilior, music palaeography, notation

Philology—the study of early texts, their meaning and how they have been passed down through the ages—has has traditionally consisted of researchers chasing after books and manuscripts scattered throughout libraries and archives. I use the adverb “traditionally” with some irony since for some time now researchers have done much of their work sitting at a desk (or occasionally in an armchair) pouring over facsimiles, photographic images on 35 millimetre microfilm, and increasingly digital images on a computer’s screen, of original sources. Researchers are spending less time with the original manuscripts. Although it is important that archivists maintain access to the original sources, it is also important that these sources are conserved for future generations. There are many music manuscripts that have been the subject of intense scrutiny over the last century, and between their handling by scholars and sometimes fraught attempts at conservation by their owners, the condition and legibility of these sources has noticeably declined. Though I am inclined to give examples, I won’t because that would give the impression that I am censuring particular individuals, libraries or archives. The reality is that time has simply taken its toll on these books.

Recording Review: Le Ray au soleil

Le Ray au soleil: Musica alla corte pavese dei Visconti (1360-1402)
La Fonte Musica, Michele Pasotti, dir. ORF « Alte Musik » SACD 3124 [SACD hybrid], 2011.

Although I don’t intend to make it a regular habit, this month I have decided to review a recent recording of medieval songs from around the year 1400. Late last year, Michele Pasotti kindly sent me a copy of the first CD issued by his ensemble la fonte musica, “Le Ray au soleil” (The Ray of the Sun). As other writing projects have been cleared out of the way, I am now in a position to return this favour in one of the few ways I can and provide a brief review on this recording. Naturally, I write without fear or favour, as a musicologist who has engaged in and taught critical listening for several years, and someone who is fairly familiar with recordings of this late medieval music from the last thirty years or so.

Towards a new taxonomy of medieval music writing? Part 1

Tags

computers, music palaeography

For the past month or two I have been writing a grant proposal for a detailed study of late medieval music writing (or notation). Beside the obvious aim of attempting to secure funding for future research, grant writing is often a useful for focusing one’s ideas about research and also identifying those fundamental problems that lay at the heart of one’s field. Here I reflect on one of those problems.

A new composition by Denis Le Grant?

Tags

ars nova, Credo, Denis Le Grant

A new colour digitisation of a fascinating musical fragment from the last quarter of the 14th century has provided new evidence for assigning another composition to one of that century’s most famous, but today little known, composers. The fragment is found in the the western manuscripts collection in Bibliothèque Nationale de France (hereafter BNF), under the shelf number NAF 23190. Music historians often refer to this manuscript as the Trémoïlle manuscript—reflecting the fact that it was owned by the Duchess of Trémoïlle prior to its donation to the the BNF—or simply Trém. BNF staff uploaded Trém’s digitisation on the Gallica website on Monday, 9 January 2012. All that remains of what must have been a grand music manuscript is a bifolium, a two-page leaf that contains an index of the lost manuscript’s content and the notation of four motets (some incomplete). While the notated compositions are important, what has interested researchers most is the index that seems to name some motets, liturgical music and songs still known today and also contains several unknown works (see Droz & Thibault 1926; Bent 1990). One of the interesting things (there are several more discussed in Bent 1990) about the index is that two different names were added in front of two settings of the Credo from the Mass. For the second Credo the name “sortes” appears. It has been generally assumed that this is a reference to the same composer (whose name is sometimes given as “sortis”) and his popular Credo “de Rege” that was used in both the so-called Toulouse and Barcelona polyphonic settings of the Mass. It was previously thought that the name given for the first Credo was “decus”. However, the BNF’s splendid online colour reproduction has revealed that the name is in fact “denis”.