Cantus intertextus: Chant and Liturgy in Medieval Italy

19 March 2004

Charbonnel Lounge - St. Michael's College - 81 St.Mary Street - University of Toronto

Sponsored by Monumenta Liturgica Beneventana and Nota Quadrata

Abstracts and schedule

MORNING

9:00	Opening remarks by Roger E. Reynolds and John Haines Music by the Schola Cantorum of St. Michaels' College under the direction of Luisa Nardini and Jamie Younkin
9:20	Timothy J. McGee (Toronto): "Preliminary Observations on the Melodic-Rhythmic Style of Early Beneventan Neumes" Research into the rhythmic interpretation of the unheighted neumes in St. Gall manuscripts have yielded information applicable to other repertories of chant, including that from Benevento. The neume forms in sources from both areas are sufficiently similar to suggest similar performance practices. A rhythmic interpretation of the chant melodies allows for the separation of notes into the categories of "essential" and "ornamental"- findings that have implications for analysis of the chant melodies. Possible support for this interpretation is that the ornaments themselves closely resemble the ornaments discussed in treatises of the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance, and codified in the performance manuals of the Baroque period. The presentation will include a performance of musical examples by Luis Garcia.
9:40	Matthew Peattie (Harvard University): "Traces of Old Beneventan Chant in a South Italian Office for the Dedication of a Church" The extant record of old Beneventan office music is sparse. There are three known complete offices, and a musical record that numbers fewer than a dozen antiphons and several responsories. This paper will examine previously undocumented examples of old Beneventan music in a south Italian office for the Dedication of a Church. I will focus on the antiphons of the Dedication office and their relation to the known corpus of Beneventan music. While much of the evidence will consist of melodic and comparative analysis, I will also discuss questions of compositional procedure and musical structure. These antiphons share a significant amount of musical material with known Beneventan melodies and employ structural and compositional procedures typical of the Beneventan chant. I will argue that these pieces are not late adaptations of Beneventan melodies, but belong to the central corpus of the Beneventan chant.
10:00	Richard F. Gyug (Fordham University): "Pontificalia beneventana: Episcopal Ceremonies in Medieval Southern Italy and Dalmatia" For historians, relating the directions in liturgical books to how different participants and viewers presented events has been an important goal, but one fraught with problems of evidence and interpretation. The rich liturgical resources of the Beneventan region are unusual, however, in that they permit detailed reconstructions of several liturgical events, including specific ordinations, synods and councils, and dedications of churches. In the paper, southern Italian liturgical books (pontificals), canons, illustrations of episcopal ceremonies and narrative accounts of ceremonies that were performed will be considered to establish how the regional liturgy changed over time and what the contemporary significance of selected liturgical ceremonies was.
10:20	Questions
10:30	Tea and coffee break
10:50	Jamie Younkin (University of Toronto): "Tam in dictamine quam in cantu: Orrigo Scaccabarozzi as Author and Compiler" Orrigo Scaccabarozzi (d. 1293) is remembered by posterity primarily for his ecclesiastical and political roles as archpriest of Milan during the episcopate of Otto Visconti. But his little-known significance as a transitional liturgical and artistic figure in Milan far exceeds his current renown. In addition to his diplomatic activities, Scaccabarozzi composed some thirty-two plainsong offices, bound in two carefully-compiled codices, that not only signaled a change in the contemporary liturgical, musical, and poetic aesthetic, but also illuminate Scaccabarozzi's uniquely perceived roles as author and compiler. This presentation explores Scaccabarozzi's commentary on his own self-image as an author of plainsong in two personal letters that accompany his offices as well as the unique ways the author's biography is reflected in his poetic texts.
11:10	William Bowen (University of Toronto): "Preliminary Thoughts on a Key to the Science of Early Musical Theory" The Pythagorean theory of a harmony found in music and manifested throughout the cosmos is one of the richest ideas in western thought. What seems strange about the theory is that it rests in part on erroneous observations. In particular, the results of the experimental tradition which supposedly support Pythagoras's discovery of the harmony or tuning were not challenged when they were quite easily tested. For, while the Pythagorean numbers produce the required results when applied to the relative lengths of strings and air columns, they do not in other physical experiments associated with this tradition. To be specific, they do not work as represented, for example, in the weight of hammers hitting an anvil, the size of bells, the amount of water in vessels, or in the weights suspended from strings. Focussing on the account of the empirical tradition found in Franchino Gaffurio's Theorica musicae (Milan, 1492), this paper will grapple with the issues underlying the acceptance and transmission of erroneous information.
11:30	Questions
11:50	Lunch

AFTERNOON

1:30	Charles Hilken (Saint Mary's College of California): "Rewriting the Dead" Over the past thirty years there has been great progress in understanding the social and cultural dimensions of remembrance of the dead. The historian who works in manuscript studies has the opportunity to test current interpretations against the manuscript evidence of traditions defined by geographical, cultural and chronological boundaries. The use of necrologies was fairly universal in the monasteries of Europe and therefore necrologies are valuable as local witnesses of a common practice. A careful reading of necrologies in light of the contexts provided by social historians and the history of monastic and local traditions can provide more certain knowledge of their construction and use. Of greater importance to their use, is the fact that necrologies were employed over many centuries. The antiquity of a monastery affords a consideration of changes in the perception of the names of the dead over time. The problematic question becomes one of the purposeful forgetting of names. Given the solemnity of the necrology-it is a liturgical record-and given the social functions of the necrology, whereby the community is defined and relations forged with past and future members, there should be no loss of names. In this light, erasures of necrological entries demand some attention and explanation.
1:50	Domenico Pietropaolo (University of Toronto): "Whipping Jesus Devoutly: Stage Directions in Early Passion Plays" Stage directions are textual devices by means of which plays protect themselves from spurious production concepts by controlling the freedom of interpretation available to actors in performance. Such restrictions are especially significant when the intent is to protect not only the aesthetic integrity but also the doctrinal and moral purport of the text. In this paper I will examine how this textual control of the performance is exercised in two early passion plays, the Devotione de Zobiadí sancto and the Devotione de Venerdí sancto, which were designed to be structurally embedded into homilies on the Passion of Christ and meant to be produced with conspicuous visual allusions to the liturgy. My purpose is to determine the kind of performance theory that they presuppose and to examine its chief implications for our understanding of the relation of sacred drama to the liturgy in early fourteenth-century Italy.
2:10	Questions
2:20	Tea and coffee break
2:40	Luisa Nardini (Pontifical Institute of MediFval Studies): "Old-Roman Intruders in Beneventan Sources" The study of non-standard Gregorian melodies has led to the discovery of some Old-Roman Mass Proper items in Beneventan manuscripts. These chants are not found in Gregorian sources from France. While the comparison of the Beneventan and Roman versions shows significant melodic variants, the tradition within southern Italian manuscripts is fairly stable. This suggests that the pieces may have been transmitted orally at an early date and transcribed in Roman and Beneventan manuscripts after the melodic diversification had already taken place. The analysis of melodic variants allows us to gain unexpected insights into an exceptional phenomenon in medieval music history: the assimilation of Old-Roman chant in a territory other than France. These pieces, which never acquired the "Gregorian" style of their companions exported to France before the end of the eighth century, give us the extraordinary opportunity to explore issues related to oral transmission and to speculate about modal arrangements in Italian liturgical repertories of chant.
3:00	Thomas Forrest Kelly (Harvard University): "Twilight of the Scribes" That dialect of Latin liturgical music known today as Beneventan chant survives only in manuscripts of southern Italian origin. The chant itself gradually disappeared over the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, in favor of the now universal chant known as Gregorian. The course of that disappearance, as a result of changing practices, and deliberate suppression, will be chronicled in this paper. I shall posit some general principles, and survey a substantial amount of manuscript evidence.
3:20	Questions
3:30	Concluding remarks by Roger E. Reynolds and John Haines
	Benedictio by the Schola Cantorum of St. Michael's College