Susan Rankin

ON THE TREATMENT OF PITCH IN EARLY MUSIC WRITING

When a practical way of recording music in writing was invented in the early ninth century, it defined neither the pitches of specific notes in a melody, nor the intervallic relations between successive notes. Nineteenth-century views of such notations considered them primitive; more recent descriptions have recognised that precise pitch notation was not a basic aim. But how did ninth-century neumatic notations deal with pitch, and, if the role of memory was not usurped by written records, what role did notation fulfil? In this study, the interaction of memory and writing is explored. Notations written by a French and by a German scribe (F-La MS 239 and S-SG MS 359) are seen to follow different strategies for the arrangement of signs above the text, striking divergent visual balances between pitch information and the text–music link. In each notation the reader is led along a path of recall, with more or less emphatic written signals provided as required.

The earliest sources of Notker's sequences: St Gallen, Vadiana 317, and Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale lat. 10587

‘This little book has verses of composed modulamen , so that he who wishes to be retentive may hold on to his breath.’ With this elegiac distich Notker Balbulus concluded the preface dedicating his Liber ymnorum to Liutward, Bishop of Vercelli, abbot of Bobbio, archchaplain and chancellor to the then emperor, Charles the Fat. The collection of sequences must have been sent to Liutward during 884, since by December of that year Notker had broken off work on his Metrum de vita sancti Galli , mentioned in the preface to the Liber ymnorum as in the process of preparation. The genesis of the book of sequences can be traced farther back: Notker tells in his preface how, on showing verses to his teacher Iso, corrections were proposed. Later he presented some ‘little verses’ to his teacher Marcellus (the Irish monk Moengal) who ‘with joy’ collected them on parchment scrolls ( rotulae ) and gave them to his students to sing. Marcellus died at St Gallen in 871, Iso in the same year at the monastery of Moutier-Grandval, where he had been sent to teach some time previously. Many of the ‘versus modulaminis apti’ must have been composed already by 871.

A new English source of the Visitatio Sepulchri

The manuscript 596 in the Library of the Abbaye-St-Pierre, Solesmes, is a copy, made in 1860, of a noted English processional, which was written between 1250 and 1320 for the Benedictine Abbey of St.Ediths at Wilton, near Salisbury. How the manuscript came to Dom Gueranger, and what subsequently became of it after 1860 is unknown. In 1961 Georges Benoit-Castelli published an examination of the provenance, date and contents of the processional, noting the presence of dramatic ceremonies, which include an Elevatio Crucis and Visitatio Sepulchri for Easter Day. This, in fact, makes the manuscript one of only five extant English sources of the Visitatio Sepulchri . Yet, despite Benoit-Castellis report, this processional has been entirely neglected by historians of the liturgical drama. This article aims to describe the relation of the Visitatio ceremony to others in the Anglo-French repertory, and will conclude with a complete transcription based on the 19th-century copy.