Sam Barrett is Professor of Early Medieval Music, and Fellow and Director of Study in Music at Pembroke College. He is a specialist in early medieval music, with a particular interest in Latin song and issues in notation, transmission and performance. He also has interests in jazz and related genres of popular music. Address: Pembroke College, Cambridge
In a new introduction to his article “The Early History of MusicWriting in
theWest,” first publis... more In a new introduction to his article “The Early History of MusicWriting in theWest,” first published in 1982, Leo Treitler expanded upon the implications of his call for a shift from palaeographic to semiotic study of early notations. What was needed was a reorientation to consider who used notation, for what purpose, using what modes of representation, entailing what conception of musical objects, and on the basis of what sort of knowledge and competence. A possible focus for such inquiry was briefly mentioned, namely neumatic notations added to sources of classical poetry copied from the ninth to the twelfth century. The broad extent of these notations had been known since the pioneering codicological work undertaken by Birger Munk Olsen and Yves-Franc ois Riou, as reported in a series of publications beginning in the 1980s, which identified some ninety notated manuscripts. Renewed interest was sparked in the first decade of the new millennium by Jan Ziolkowski’s framing of questions about these notations as a philologist interested in the reception of classical texts. Inspired by Ziolkowski’s exploration of the cultural implications of notating classical verse, Treitler warned that future musical research in this area should not “leap to assimilate this phenomenon to the medieval song traditions of sequence, versus, and conductus and restrict the study of it to the control of the questions we are accustomed to raising about those traditions.”
Corpus Rhythmorum Musicum is the critical edition both printed and digital, with linguistical, me... more Corpus Rhythmorum Musicum is the critical edition both printed and digital, with linguistical, metrical, paleographic and musicological analysis, of the Latin poems set to music of the IV-IX centuries composed in rhythmic verse, i.e. in the syllabic-tonic system from which it was born modern western poetry. It presents for the first time the texts together with the music and the complete reproduction of all the handwritten witnesses with relative transcriptions. It includes songs of non-liturgical tradition, computational-astronomical rhythms and rhythmic hymns. The project, conceived and directed by Francesco Stella (Università di Siena) with the collaboration of international specialists, is coordinated by Sam Barrett (University of Cambridge) for the music edition, and carried out thanks to the support of the European Commission (TMR1998-2000 project) and PRIN 2004-2006.
New light is shed on the song culture of Sankt Gallen almost a century before its earliest notate... more New light is shed on the song culture of Sankt Gallen almost a century before its earliest notated sources through consideration of the poetic section of a manuscript copied at the Abbey shortly after the year 800, i.e. the second part of Leiden, Universiteitsbibliotheek Vossianus Lat. Q. 69. The predominantly Merovingian accentual Latin verse (rhythmi) and metrical verse by the late-antique poet Prudentius (his Liber Cathemerinon and Liber Peristephanon) were written out in song forms. It is newly proposed that Prudentius’ verse from the Liber Peristephanon was arranged into a liturgical cycle. The poetic section of the Leiden manuscript is accordingly understood as a collection of songs, which prompts reflection on the way in which earlier sung versus at Sankt Gallen may have provided models for the later Liber ymnorum. Witnesses to the song culture of Sankt Gallen in the first half of the ninth century are re-examined and a leading role during this period for the nearby Abbey of ...
This study seeks to reconstruct the music for Boethius’s final and most widely read work, On the ... more This study seeks to reconstruct the music for Boethius’s final and most widely read work, On the Consolation of Philosophy. Although a handful of neumations for Boethius’s thirty-nine poems have long been known, the almost complete absence of surviving pitched versions of the melodies has hindered the task of reconstruction. Following a systematic study of neumed manuscripts dating from the ninth to the eleventh centuries and identification of underlying principles of melodic design, it is now possible to attempt informed reconstructions. Even so, the leap from scholarship to modern performance remains substantial, involving a preliminary need to recreate melodies through experimentation.
Collaboration with members of the ensemble Sequentia over a four-year period (2014–17) provided an opportunity to explore ways in which creative practice might supplement scholarly knowledge, whether through posing new research questions, the formation and exploration of hypotheses, or recourse to memorized practices built up through sustained engagement with early medieval repertories and instruments. Taking a recovered mid eleventh-century leaf of the Cambridge Songs as a focus for investigation, songs from the first book of Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae were newly reconstructed. Although debate continues to surround the status of results obtained through creative practice, comparison with the way other disciplines have proceeded under similar conditions reveals acceptance of experimentation as a mode of inquiry. This essay proposes that performance can fruitfully supplement philology in seeking to reconstruct lost songs from notated traces.
Chapter 1 of Manuscripts and Medieval Song: Inscription, Performance, Context, ed. Deeming and Le... more Chapter 1 of Manuscripts and Medieval Song: Inscription, Performance, Context, ed. Deeming and Leach, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. A reassessment of Paris BNdF lat. 1154 as a prayerbook.
For a large part of Western music history we are forced to interpret in the absence of signs. The... more For a large part of Western music history we are forced to interpret in the absence of signs. The appearance in the ninth century of a system of signs to represent music thus not only comes as something of a relief but also raises certain questions. How would the signs have been understood? How would something with no immediate history have been comprehended? Recent answers to such questions have placed notational signs within the context of oral history, positing a degree of continuity and interaction across oral and literate domains. Much insight has been gained through this awareness of oral issues, and it is not intended to challenge claims made in this area.
The latest volume in the Monumenta Monodica Medii Aevi series is symptomatic of a renewed interes... more The latest volume in the Monumenta Monodica Medii Aevi series is symptomatic of a renewed interest in music of the Latin West from the ninth through to the twelfth century. Early medieval tropes and sequences have been the subject of much recent scholarship, while hymns, ...
Edizione critica e traduzione a cura di Chiara Savini e Irene Volpi. Edizione musicale di Sam Bar... more Edizione critica e traduzione a cura di Chiara Savini e Irene Volpi. Edizione musicale di Sam Barrett. Revisione di Francesco Stella 🔗 https://bit.ly/3DimVPd Il volume presenta l’edizione critica del ritmo mnemotecnico Anni Domini notantur basata su ventisei testimoni manoscritti e uno a stampa del 1612. L’edizione, provvista di traduzione, apparato critico negativo ed esplicitazione delle fonti, è preceduta da una breve storia del genere letterario e della sua funzione nel campo delle scienze computistiche, dalla descrizione di tutti i testimoni manoscritti, da un profilo ecdotico e dall’analisi metrica, musicale e contenutistica del componimento, con una approfondita annotazione degli elementi computistici. Il lavoro fa parte del progetto «Corpus Rhythmorum Musicum (saec. IV-IX)», diretto da Francesco Stella, inteso allo studio e all’edizione dei ritmi mediolatini musicati dei secoli IV-IX. L’edizione sviluppa i risultati della tesi inedita di Chiara Savini, Il ritmo «Anni Domini notantur» nella tradizione computistica medievale, ampiamente verificati e integrati dalla curatrice Irene Volpi sulla base di un numero consistente di nuovi codici, ed è corredata dall’analisi della melodia conservata nel ms. BAV, Reg. lat. 1723, ad opera di Sam Barrett.
Although the importance of music to the development of early medieval poetry has long been recogn... more Although the importance of music to the development of early medieval poetry has long been recognised, surviving musical notations have rarely been identified and only occasionally analysed. One reason for this neglect is the absence of a readily identifiable corpus of notated poetry. In the absence of a uniform body of material, attention is directed in this study towards one type of manuscript in which notated poetry was transmitted; that is, poetic collections. In total, six notated poetic collections written before the eleventh century are identified as primary material for research. In selecting for investigation both a topic (early medieval verse and music) and a medium (poetic collections), a twofold enquiry is pursued. First, potential uses and users of the surviving notations are assessed. This entails a consideration of notation as, on the one hand, one among several activities involved in the collection and presentation of verse on the page, and, on the other, a witness to the later reception of poetic collections. The particular selections and presentations of text and notation in the individual collections are accordingly analysed as written representations of early medieval music and verse with their own rationale and audience. Through this assessment of the writing of individual manuscripts, a spectrum of uses for and users of the neumatic notations is proposed. Second, surviving notations are analysed as representations of sounding structures. Although the information provided by the neumatic notation cannot be transcribed into a modern format, the information transmitted by the neumes is analyzed in conjunction with the poetic texts. Two forms of analysis are undertaken: a comparison of surviving notations for textual concordances, and a comparison of notations for similar text structures. On the basis of these analyses, characteristic melodic behaviours are identified and new models for the interaction of music and poetry proposed. The notations and texts for these analyses are presented separately in a second volume, which contains reproductions, transcriptions and commentaries of the thirty-nine poems in the six poetic collections, as well as reproductions and transcriptions of notations for concordant texts transmitted outside these collections.
In a new introduction to his article “The Early History of MusicWriting in
theWest,” first publis... more In a new introduction to his article “The Early History of MusicWriting in theWest,” first published in 1982, Leo Treitler expanded upon the implications of his call for a shift from palaeographic to semiotic study of early notations. What was needed was a reorientation to consider who used notation, for what purpose, using what modes of representation, entailing what conception of musical objects, and on the basis of what sort of knowledge and competence. A possible focus for such inquiry was briefly mentioned, namely neumatic notations added to sources of classical poetry copied from the ninth to the twelfth century. The broad extent of these notations had been known since the pioneering codicological work undertaken by Birger Munk Olsen and Yves-Franc ois Riou, as reported in a series of publications beginning in the 1980s, which identified some ninety notated manuscripts. Renewed interest was sparked in the first decade of the new millennium by Jan Ziolkowski’s framing of questions about these notations as a philologist interested in the reception of classical texts. Inspired by Ziolkowski’s exploration of the cultural implications of notating classical verse, Treitler warned that future musical research in this area should not “leap to assimilate this phenomenon to the medieval song traditions of sequence, versus, and conductus and restrict the study of it to the control of the questions we are accustomed to raising about those traditions.”
Corpus Rhythmorum Musicum is the critical edition both printed and digital, with linguistical, me... more Corpus Rhythmorum Musicum is the critical edition both printed and digital, with linguistical, metrical, paleographic and musicological analysis, of the Latin poems set to music of the IV-IX centuries composed in rhythmic verse, i.e. in the syllabic-tonic system from which it was born modern western poetry. It presents for the first time the texts together with the music and the complete reproduction of all the handwritten witnesses with relative transcriptions. It includes songs of non-liturgical tradition, computational-astronomical rhythms and rhythmic hymns. The project, conceived and directed by Francesco Stella (Università di Siena) with the collaboration of international specialists, is coordinated by Sam Barrett (University of Cambridge) for the music edition, and carried out thanks to the support of the European Commission (TMR1998-2000 project) and PRIN 2004-2006.
New light is shed on the song culture of Sankt Gallen almost a century before its earliest notate... more New light is shed on the song culture of Sankt Gallen almost a century before its earliest notated sources through consideration of the poetic section of a manuscript copied at the Abbey shortly after the year 800, i.e. the second part of Leiden, Universiteitsbibliotheek Vossianus Lat. Q. 69. The predominantly Merovingian accentual Latin verse (rhythmi) and metrical verse by the late-antique poet Prudentius (his Liber Cathemerinon and Liber Peristephanon) were written out in song forms. It is newly proposed that Prudentius’ verse from the Liber Peristephanon was arranged into a liturgical cycle. The poetic section of the Leiden manuscript is accordingly understood as a collection of songs, which prompts reflection on the way in which earlier sung versus at Sankt Gallen may have provided models for the later Liber ymnorum. Witnesses to the song culture of Sankt Gallen in the first half of the ninth century are re-examined and a leading role during this period for the nearby Abbey of ...
This study seeks to reconstruct the music for Boethius’s final and most widely read work, On the ... more This study seeks to reconstruct the music for Boethius’s final and most widely read work, On the Consolation of Philosophy. Although a handful of neumations for Boethius’s thirty-nine poems have long been known, the almost complete absence of surviving pitched versions of the melodies has hindered the task of reconstruction. Following a systematic study of neumed manuscripts dating from the ninth to the eleventh centuries and identification of underlying principles of melodic design, it is now possible to attempt informed reconstructions. Even so, the leap from scholarship to modern performance remains substantial, involving a preliminary need to recreate melodies through experimentation.
Collaboration with members of the ensemble Sequentia over a four-year period (2014–17) provided an opportunity to explore ways in which creative practice might supplement scholarly knowledge, whether through posing new research questions, the formation and exploration of hypotheses, or recourse to memorized practices built up through sustained engagement with early medieval repertories and instruments. Taking a recovered mid eleventh-century leaf of the Cambridge Songs as a focus for investigation, songs from the first book of Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae were newly reconstructed. Although debate continues to surround the status of results obtained through creative practice, comparison with the way other disciplines have proceeded under similar conditions reveals acceptance of experimentation as a mode of inquiry. This essay proposes that performance can fruitfully supplement philology in seeking to reconstruct lost songs from notated traces.
Chapter 1 of Manuscripts and Medieval Song: Inscription, Performance, Context, ed. Deeming and Le... more Chapter 1 of Manuscripts and Medieval Song: Inscription, Performance, Context, ed. Deeming and Leach, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. A reassessment of Paris BNdF lat. 1154 as a prayerbook.
For a large part of Western music history we are forced to interpret in the absence of signs. The... more For a large part of Western music history we are forced to interpret in the absence of signs. The appearance in the ninth century of a system of signs to represent music thus not only comes as something of a relief but also raises certain questions. How would the signs have been understood? How would something with no immediate history have been comprehended? Recent answers to such questions have placed notational signs within the context of oral history, positing a degree of continuity and interaction across oral and literate domains. Much insight has been gained through this awareness of oral issues, and it is not intended to challenge claims made in this area.
The latest volume in the Monumenta Monodica Medii Aevi series is symptomatic of a renewed interes... more The latest volume in the Monumenta Monodica Medii Aevi series is symptomatic of a renewed interest in music of the Latin West from the ninth through to the twelfth century. Early medieval tropes and sequences have been the subject of much recent scholarship, while hymns, ...
Edizione critica e traduzione a cura di Chiara Savini e Irene Volpi. Edizione musicale di Sam Bar... more Edizione critica e traduzione a cura di Chiara Savini e Irene Volpi. Edizione musicale di Sam Barrett. Revisione di Francesco Stella 🔗 https://bit.ly/3DimVPd Il volume presenta l’edizione critica del ritmo mnemotecnico Anni Domini notantur basata su ventisei testimoni manoscritti e uno a stampa del 1612. L’edizione, provvista di traduzione, apparato critico negativo ed esplicitazione delle fonti, è preceduta da una breve storia del genere letterario e della sua funzione nel campo delle scienze computistiche, dalla descrizione di tutti i testimoni manoscritti, da un profilo ecdotico e dall’analisi metrica, musicale e contenutistica del componimento, con una approfondita annotazione degli elementi computistici. Il lavoro fa parte del progetto «Corpus Rhythmorum Musicum (saec. IV-IX)», diretto da Francesco Stella, inteso allo studio e all’edizione dei ritmi mediolatini musicati dei secoli IV-IX. L’edizione sviluppa i risultati della tesi inedita di Chiara Savini, Il ritmo «Anni Domini notantur» nella tradizione computistica medievale, ampiamente verificati e integrati dalla curatrice Irene Volpi sulla base di un numero consistente di nuovi codici, ed è corredata dall’analisi della melodia conservata nel ms. BAV, Reg. lat. 1723, ad opera di Sam Barrett.
Although the importance of music to the development of early medieval poetry has long been recogn... more Although the importance of music to the development of early medieval poetry has long been recognised, surviving musical notations have rarely been identified and only occasionally analysed. One reason for this neglect is the absence of a readily identifiable corpus of notated poetry. In the absence of a uniform body of material, attention is directed in this study towards one type of manuscript in which notated poetry was transmitted; that is, poetic collections. In total, six notated poetic collections written before the eleventh century are identified as primary material for research. In selecting for investigation both a topic (early medieval verse and music) and a medium (poetic collections), a twofold enquiry is pursued. First, potential uses and users of the surviving notations are assessed. This entails a consideration of notation as, on the one hand, one among several activities involved in the collection and presentation of verse on the page, and, on the other, a witness to the later reception of poetic collections. The particular selections and presentations of text and notation in the individual collections are accordingly analysed as written representations of early medieval music and verse with their own rationale and audience. Through this assessment of the writing of individual manuscripts, a spectrum of uses for and users of the neumatic notations is proposed. Second, surviving notations are analysed as representations of sounding structures. Although the information provided by the neumatic notation cannot be transcribed into a modern format, the information transmitted by the neumes is analyzed in conjunction with the poetic texts. Two forms of analysis are undertaken: a comparison of surviving notations for textual concordances, and a comparison of notations for similar text structures. On the basis of these analyses, characteristic melodic behaviours are identified and new models for the interaction of music and poetry proposed. The notations and texts for these analyses are presented separately in a second volume, which contains reproductions, transcriptions and commentaries of the thirty-nine poems in the six poetic collections, as well as reproductions and transcriptions of notations for concordant texts transmitted outside these collections.
"On the Consolation of Philosophy" by Boethius (d. 524) was arguably the second most widely read ... more "On the Consolation of Philosophy" by Boethius (d. 524) was arguably the second most widely read book of the Middle Ages after the Bible. This two-volume study brings together for the first time all the surviving medieval musical notations added to the poetic portions of the work, which survive in manuscripts dating from the ninth through to the eleventh centuries. The first volume comprises a detailed study of the sources, the development of new analytical techniques for assessing a musical tradition handed down largely in neumatic notation, a study of the melodic transmission and an account of historical context. The second volume contains plates, transcriptions and commentaries for all the surviving notations presented first singly and then in comparative tables. This comprehensive study is both an invaluable resource for performers and scholars interested in reconstructing an overlooked melodic tradition and a substantial contribution to understanding early medieval Latin song.
A world-renowned scholar of plainchant, Kenneth Levy has spent a portion of his career investigat... more A world-renowned scholar of plainchant, Kenneth Levy has spent a portion of his career investigating the nature and ramifications of this repertory's shift from an oral tradition to the written versions dating to the tenth century. In Gregorian Chant and the Carolingians, which represents ...
In the summer of 2007, as part of the University of Oxford’s Classics Outreach Programme, members... more In the summer of 2007, as part of the University of Oxford’s Classics Outreach Programme, members of the Classics Faculty put on a performance of ‘Aeneid: The Musical’, the publicity for which announced that ‘Virgil’s tale of the founding of the Roman Empire is being brought to life in an accessible way, accompanied by modern songs such as “Bad” by Michael Jackson, “Together” by the Village People and also songs from, Dido, U2 and Robbie Williams, together with classical music from Vivaldi, Stravinsky and Purcell.’ 1 Whatever one makes of the choice of songs, the intersection of dramatic staging and the classics has a long heritage: snippets of evidence from the first millennium include a donnish aside by Augustine (‘Few of you know from books, many from theatres, that Aeneas went down to the underworld’ – p. 177, n. 18), and a report that Virgil’s own recitation of his Eclogues proved such a hit with his first-century BC audience that extracts were subsequently sung in the theatre by a courtesan, much to the astonishment of none other than Cicero (pp. 175–6). But what of the music that might have accompanied first millennial performances of the classics? Little can be gleaned from early reports of recitation in a variety of different contexts; the first glimpse of what it meant to sing the classics comes with surviving neumatic notations added to manuscripts from AD c. 900 to c. 1200. Making the scope and nature of surviving notations clear to both Latinists and musicologists inclined to overlook a seemingly esoteric field is one of the laudable aims of Ziolkowski’s monograph. The extent of the topic is established at the outset with reference to documentary evidence assembled in two appendices, which introduce and reorder instances of surviving notations of classical verse first collated in studies of the manuscript transmission of classical authors. The story of how the philologist Birger Munk Olsen compiled an inventory of manuscripts
The first millennium has long been a blind spot for devo-tees of early music, if only because it ... more The first millennium has long been a blind spot for devo-tees of early music, if only because it is hard to sustain enthusiasm for music intimately tied to a liturgy and set of beliefs that seem to most not only foreign, but peculiarly resistant to translation. Attempts to establish points ...
For those wishing to know more about Marc Antonio Ingegneri (before or after deciding to perform ... more For those wishing to know more about Marc Antonio Ingegneri (before or after deciding to perform his madri-gals), there is little available in print, the most substantial offering being the proceedings of the 1992 conference in Cremona which launched the Ingegneri 'progetto'. Miuc'Anhmio ...
'We know more about the musical activities of Adémar de Chabannes than of any other medi... more 'We know more about the musical activities of Adémar de Chabannes than of any other medieval musician, with the possible exception of Guillaume de Machaut.' James Grier's striking opening line captures the sense of the extraordinary that surrounds the figure of Adémar de ...
One of the first things that every student of chant learns is that Gregorian chant was not compos... more One of the first things that every student of chant learns is that Gregorian chant was not composed by Pope Gregory the Great. The search for alternative models for the generation and transmission of chant has occupied scholars in earnest since the 1950s. Comparative study has ...
This paper explores the influence of classical music on Kind of Blue, arguing that a dynamic or c... more This paper explores the influence of classical music on Kind of Blue, arguing that a dynamic or cyclical notion of influence is needed to account for the ways in which orally transmitted traditions that became fixed when used as a resource for modern classical composition were subsequently unfrozen by jazz musicians in being recycled as devices for improvisation. An investigation of classical pieces cited as influential around the making of the album is followed by a brief account of the way that Stravinsky’s music was received by leading American jazz musicians in the 1940s and 1950s. Miles Davis’s solos on the album are lastly considered as examples of the ways that a variety of techniques parallel to those explored by Franco-Russian composers were exploited in improvisation. It is concluded contrary to recent criticism that an expanded understanding of the term ‘modal’ may be meaningfully retained for the album.
... Heard in this way, it is worth considering how far the spectacular commercial success of the ... more ... Heard in this way, it is worth considering how far the spectacular commercial success of the album ... advances of the civil rights movement, discriminatory segregation continued in practice through urban renewal programs, which created European-American suburbs with ...
Lost songs fascinate, especially when their melodies survive in unfamiliar notations that cannot ... more Lost songs fascinate, especially when their melodies survive in unfamiliar notations that cannot be fully reconstructed. It has long been known that poems from the influential De consolatione philosophiae (On the Consolation of Philosophy) by the sixth-century Roman philosopher and statesman Boethius were sung in the Middle Ages. But how to recover a song tradition recorded over a thousand years ago in mnemonic notations when performance traditions have fallen silent? A new website gathers together manuscript images, videos and other resources, explains reconstruction methods and invites users to contribute. Research conducted at the University of Cambridge by Dr Sam Barrett and extended in consultation with members of the professional ensemble Sequentia resulted in the creation of a small number of reconstructions. It remains to extend the process across all thirty-nine poems, drawing on expertise from a wider community to refine hypotheses and make unexpected connections in an area where systematic research methods can proceed only so far.
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theWest,” first published in 1982, Leo Treitler expanded upon the implications of his call for a shift from palaeographic to semiotic study of early notations. What was needed was a reorientation to consider who used notation, for what purpose, using what modes of representation, entailing what conception of musical objects, and on the basis of what sort of knowledge and competence. A possible focus for such inquiry was briefly mentioned, namely neumatic notations added to sources of classical poetry copied from the ninth to the twelfth century. The broad extent of these notations had been known since the pioneering codicological work undertaken by Birger Munk Olsen and Yves-Franc ois Riou, as reported in a series of publications beginning in the 1980s, which identified some ninety notated manuscripts. Renewed interest was sparked in the first decade of the new millennium by Jan Ziolkowski’s framing of questions about these notations as a philologist interested in the reception of classical texts. Inspired by Ziolkowski’s exploration of the cultural implications of notating classical verse, Treitler warned that future musical research in this area should not “leap to assimilate this phenomenon to the medieval song traditions of sequence,
versus, and conductus and restrict the study of it to the control of
the questions we are accustomed to raising about those traditions.”
Collaboration with members of the ensemble Sequentia over a four-year period (2014–17) provided an opportunity to explore ways in which creative practice might supplement scholarly knowledge, whether through posing new research questions, the formation and exploration of hypotheses, or recourse to memorized practices built up through sustained engagement with early medieval repertories and instruments. Taking a recovered mid eleventh-century leaf of the Cambridge Songs as a focus for investigation, songs from the first book of Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae were newly reconstructed. Although debate continues to surround the status of results obtained through creative practice, comparison with the way other disciplines have proceeded under similar conditions reveals acceptance of experimentation as a mode of inquiry. This essay proposes that performance can fruitfully supplement philology in seeking to reconstruct lost songs from notated traces.
🔗 https://bit.ly/3DimVPd
Il volume presenta l’edizione critica del ritmo mnemotecnico Anni Domini notantur basata su ventisei testimoni manoscritti e uno a stampa del 1612. L’edizione, provvista di traduzione, apparato critico negativo ed esplicitazione delle fonti, è preceduta da una breve storia del genere letterario e della sua funzione nel campo delle scienze computistiche, dalla descrizione di tutti i testimoni manoscritti, da un profilo ecdotico e dall’analisi metrica, musicale e contenutistica del componimento, con una approfondita annotazione degli elementi computistici.
Il lavoro fa parte del progetto «Corpus Rhythmorum Musicum (saec. IV-IX)», diretto da Francesco Stella, inteso allo studio e all’edizione dei ritmi mediolatini musicati dei secoli IV-IX. L’edizione sviluppa i risultati della tesi inedita di Chiara Savini, Il ritmo «Anni Domini notantur» nella tradizione computistica medievale, ampiamente verificati e integrati dalla curatrice Irene Volpi sulla base di un numero consistente di nuovi codici, ed è corredata dall’analisi della melodia conservata nel ms. BAV, Reg. lat. 1723, ad opera di Sam Barrett.
before the eleventh century are identified as primary material for research. In selecting for investigation both a topic (early medieval verse and music) and a medium (poetic collections), a twofold enquiry is pursued. First, potential uses and users of the surviving notations are assessed. This entails a consideration of notation as, on the one hand, one among several activities involved in the collection and presentation of verse on the page, and, on the other, a witness to the later reception of poetic collections. The particular selections and presentations of text and notation in the individual collections are accordingly analysed as written representations of early medieval music and verse with their own rationale and audience. Through this assessment of the writing
of individual manuscripts, a spectrum of uses for and users of the neumatic notations is proposed. Second, surviving notations are analysed as representations of sounding structures. Although the information provided by the neumatic notation cannot be
transcribed into a modern format, the information transmitted by the neumes is analyzed in conjunction with the poetic texts. Two forms of analysis are undertaken: a comparison of surviving notations for textual concordances, and a comparison of notations for similar text structures. On the basis of these analyses, characteristic melodic behaviours are identified and new models for the interaction of music and poetry proposed. The notations and texts for these analyses are presented separately in a second volume, which contains reproductions, transcriptions and commentaries of the thirty-nine poems in the six poetic collections, as well as reproductions and transcriptions of notations for concordant texts transmitted outside these collections.
theWest,” first published in 1982, Leo Treitler expanded upon the implications of his call for a shift from palaeographic to semiotic study of early notations. What was needed was a reorientation to consider who used notation, for what purpose, using what modes of representation, entailing what conception of musical objects, and on the basis of what sort of knowledge and competence. A possible focus for such inquiry was briefly mentioned, namely neumatic notations added to sources of classical poetry copied from the ninth to the twelfth century. The broad extent of these notations had been known since the pioneering codicological work undertaken by Birger Munk Olsen and Yves-Franc ois Riou, as reported in a series of publications beginning in the 1980s, which identified some ninety notated manuscripts. Renewed interest was sparked in the first decade of the new millennium by Jan Ziolkowski’s framing of questions about these notations as a philologist interested in the reception of classical texts. Inspired by Ziolkowski’s exploration of the cultural implications of notating classical verse, Treitler warned that future musical research in this area should not “leap to assimilate this phenomenon to the medieval song traditions of sequence,
versus, and conductus and restrict the study of it to the control of
the questions we are accustomed to raising about those traditions.”
Collaboration with members of the ensemble Sequentia over a four-year period (2014–17) provided an opportunity to explore ways in which creative practice might supplement scholarly knowledge, whether through posing new research questions, the formation and exploration of hypotheses, or recourse to memorized practices built up through sustained engagement with early medieval repertories and instruments. Taking a recovered mid eleventh-century leaf of the Cambridge Songs as a focus for investigation, songs from the first book of Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae were newly reconstructed. Although debate continues to surround the status of results obtained through creative practice, comparison with the way other disciplines have proceeded under similar conditions reveals acceptance of experimentation as a mode of inquiry. This essay proposes that performance can fruitfully supplement philology in seeking to reconstruct lost songs from notated traces.
🔗 https://bit.ly/3DimVPd
Il volume presenta l’edizione critica del ritmo mnemotecnico Anni Domini notantur basata su ventisei testimoni manoscritti e uno a stampa del 1612. L’edizione, provvista di traduzione, apparato critico negativo ed esplicitazione delle fonti, è preceduta da una breve storia del genere letterario e della sua funzione nel campo delle scienze computistiche, dalla descrizione di tutti i testimoni manoscritti, da un profilo ecdotico e dall’analisi metrica, musicale e contenutistica del componimento, con una approfondita annotazione degli elementi computistici.
Il lavoro fa parte del progetto «Corpus Rhythmorum Musicum (saec. IV-IX)», diretto da Francesco Stella, inteso allo studio e all’edizione dei ritmi mediolatini musicati dei secoli IV-IX. L’edizione sviluppa i risultati della tesi inedita di Chiara Savini, Il ritmo «Anni Domini notantur» nella tradizione computistica medievale, ampiamente verificati e integrati dalla curatrice Irene Volpi sulla base di un numero consistente di nuovi codici, ed è corredata dall’analisi della melodia conservata nel ms. BAV, Reg. lat. 1723, ad opera di Sam Barrett.
before the eleventh century are identified as primary material for research. In selecting for investigation both a topic (early medieval verse and music) and a medium (poetic collections), a twofold enquiry is pursued. First, potential uses and users of the surviving notations are assessed. This entails a consideration of notation as, on the one hand, one among several activities involved in the collection and presentation of verse on the page, and, on the other, a witness to the later reception of poetic collections. The particular selections and presentations of text and notation in the individual collections are accordingly analysed as written representations of early medieval music and verse with their own rationale and audience. Through this assessment of the writing
of individual manuscripts, a spectrum of uses for and users of the neumatic notations is proposed. Second, surviving notations are analysed as representations of sounding structures. Although the information provided by the neumatic notation cannot be
transcribed into a modern format, the information transmitted by the neumes is analyzed in conjunction with the poetic texts. Two forms of analysis are undertaken: a comparison of surviving notations for textual concordances, and a comparison of notations for similar text structures. On the basis of these analyses, characteristic melodic behaviours are identified and new models for the interaction of music and poetry proposed. The notations and texts for these analyses are presented separately in a second volume, which contains reproductions, transcriptions and commentaries of the thirty-nine poems in the six poetic collections, as well as reproductions and transcriptions of notations for concordant texts transmitted outside these collections.