Elizabeth Randell Upton

Music and Performance in the Later Middle Ages Print Pub Date: December 2012Online date: January 2013

DOI:10.1057/9781137310071.0004

Introduction 10 pp

This book is concerned with late medieval polyphonic songs preserved in two manuscript collections, one

transmitting music composed before 1400 and one after that date: the Chantilly codex (Chantilly, Musée

Condé 564, abbreviated Ch564) and the Oxford manuscript, Canon. Misc. 213 (Ox 213). My goal is to

discover more about the historical circumstances of late medieval musical performance by examining works

in these two manuscripts, moving beyond a more traditional musicological focus on works of music and their

composers to include consideration of the activities of performers, listeners, patrons, and scribes as well. I

hope to show that extending our inquiry in this way will allow us to perceive heretofore unrecognized

evidence for medieval music-making recorded on the pages of surviving manuscripts.

Manuscripts are unique by definition, in that each one represents the work of a particular scribe or scribes,

following a set of decisions made concerning the specific book at hand. Even so, many manuscripts surviving

from the Middle Ages to the present day share certain characteristics. Some of these characteristics can be

seen as contributing to a given book’s chances for survival. For example, deluxe volumes copied on

parchment, especially if decorated with painting or calligraphy, especially if they belonged to library

collections or institutions that themselves have survived to the present day, were more likely to be kept

intact and not destroyed outright or erased or dismembered so the parchment could be reused.

Chapter 1.History and Evidence 26 pp

Evidence for the performance of music in the Middle Ages comes to us only indirectly. Public notices, concert

reviews, and diary entries: all the familiar trappings of later public musical culture would not be invented for

centuries. Only a very few mentions of music-making have been found in historical chronicles—such as the

two famous examples from Du Fay’s life, the 1436 dedication of the cathedral Santa Maria del Fiore in

Florence, and the 1454 Feast of the Oath of the Pheasant held by Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy in Lille

—but such rare reports are usually too vague to be useful—“the singers sounded like angels!”—and the

occasions themselves are too extraordinary, once-in-a-lifetime events for generalization to be safe.

Performance contexts for sacred music, for the Mass or Offices, can be reconstructed using historical

information about liturgy, about the architecture of liturgical spaces, and about church personnel, attested

by pay records or the personnel files documenting benefices. For secular music the sources of external

documentation are much more limited: unlike so many medieval churches and cathedrals, medieval

domestic or court buildings have not survived, and even when recorded, the scripts of entertainments were

never as consistently enacted as were liturgical services. As a result, much of our information for imagining

the performance of nonliturgical medieval music has come from more indirect sources, such as fictionalized

descriptions of music-making. Christopher Page has demonstrated how useful fictional depictions of music-

making can be for informing our sense of performance norms.

Chapter 2.The Singers’ Voices 30 pp

As an historical object, the Oxford manuscript Canonici Misc. 213 [Ox213]provides musicologists with rare

evidence. Codicological study has shown that Ox213 was copied by a single scribe over a long period of

time. Because we can know the actions that resulted in this manuscript were the work of a single mind, we

are justified in interpreting that scribe’s choices as meaningful acts. What we see on the page is the

evidence of what one late medieval man thought important enough to record about the music of his own

time.

Since 1895, when its existence was made public by Sir John Stainer, this manuscript has been used as a

source of information concerning the performance of late medieval music, a source from which we can learn

about sounding phenomena in the past as recorded in notation. Internal evidence derived from observation

of scribal practice in this manuscript has been used to support several issues central to our understanding of

the performance of the music it transmits. However, just as unexamined assumptions concerning modern

wedding practices misled scholars discussing Du Fay’s ballade Resveilliés vous, assumptions about the

relationship between score and voice have skewed the conclusions about performance drawn from the

evidence of Ox213.

In this chapter, I reexamine the musical works recorded in Ox213 with an eye toward understanding their

performance in the past. I show that some details of the words and notes copied on the pages, previously

understood as deliberate scribal choices revealing aspects of performance practice, cannot be meaningful.

Chapter 3.Polyphonic Music in Performance 30 pp

In chapter 2, I showed how evidence for the historical singers and ensembles survives in the notes on the

page. In this chapter, I will explore how the notes on the page can preserve historical evidence of the

performance experience. Such evidence reflects composers’ knowledge about the real-world conditions that

served as constraints for their work. A composer was likely to have known in advance which singers would

be available to perform his music, and so could accommodate those singers’ voices when writing a particular

piece of music. Similarly, a composer was likely to have known the conditions under which a piece of music

would be performed, and could respond to those expected performance conditions as well. Recognizing such

details as historical evidence allows informed speculation as to the social settings for these performances.

Because the institution of the church regulated and documented its changing liturgical practice,

performances of liturgical music can generally be located in time and space. In contrast, information

concerning the specific times and places for the performance of songs is almost entirely nonexistent. In

1983, David Fallows was able to list only nine pieces of evidence for the performance of polyphonic songs in

our period, from sources including historical chronicles, narrative poetry, and treatises. One of these was the

metrical romance Cleriadus et Meliadice, surviving in nine manuscripts (and five early printed books),

brought to musicological notice the year before by Christopher Page.

Chapter 4.The Listeners’ Experience 34 pp

In previous chapters we have seen how evidence from notes on the page can preserve information about

singers and ensembles, and how details of musical works can suggest the social context that shaped a

medieval musicking process. For both categories, such evidence reflects the composers’ awareness of and

response to anticipated performance constraints. In this chapter, I want to focus directly on listeners by

exploring how two medieval song forms—the ballade and the rondeau—can structure different listening

experiences. Both of these song forms involve the repetition of different sections of music according to a

fixed pattern, and as a result the two have been seen by musicologists to be closely-related variants. But the

listening experience structured by each of the two forms is significantly different. This difference in the

experience shaped for listeners may account for the rondeau’s dominating popularity in the fifteenth

century.

Musicologists sort most late medieval French polyphonic songs into three categories—ballade, rondeau, and

virelai—according to the formal structure of their poems. The names of these forms are genuinely medieval

but our understanding of them as musical works is thoroughly modern. The few written discussions of songs

from the medieval period focus almost exclusively on their lyrics, and by extension on the work of poets as

the creators of these texts. Contemporary treatises have little to say about such songs’ music, with no

discussion whatsoever as to how these forms were perceived or used by listeners and performers.

Chapter 5.Reframing the Sacred/Secular Divide 28 pp

In the preceding chapters my primary focus has been on late medieval songs and their performance. In this

final chapter, I will discuss the conceptual frame that divides sacred and secular music in musicological

thought and practice. Finally, I will analyze a work of music categorized as sacred using the analytical tools

developed through my investigation of secular songs. In this way, I demonstrate how attention to songs and

their evidence concerning performance and the medieval musicking process can further understanding of all

surviving music—both secular and sacred—and the people who wrote, performed, and heard them in the

early fifteenth century.

Medieval music for church services is vastly better researched and more extensively studied than are other

kinds of surviving compositions. In part, the focus of musicological research has followed the evidence: the

medieval institution of the church supported music-making, and by extension the personnel tasked with

making music, for far longer than did any single secular institution. In addition, the continuing existence of

the Catholic church has helped its historical documents to survive in far greater numbers than the

documents from long-vanished courts. Scholarly investigation of medieval music first began with attention to

church music. As Andrew Kirkman has shown, it was a specific interest in the sixteenth-century mass that

drove pioneering musicologists in the nineteenth century to investigate earlier and earlier music. Inevitably,

polyphonic music for mass became the standard to which any subsequently discovered compositions would

be compared.

Appendix I. Altieri, Li Nuptiali 4 pp

When a man first begins to think about giving his daughter in marriage, he should (1) celebrate a Mass of

the Holy Spirit. This is followed by (2) “discreet bargaining” with the father of the young man who has been

chosen as the groom. The discussions are supervised by a priest or by “someone who is respected by all.” At

this meeting the bride’s father (2a) presents a written list of how much will be offered as a dowry. After a

few days the interested parties meet each other (3) in a nearby church, along with three or four relatives;

the agreement (3a) becomes ratified by a handshake and a kiss between the fathers. [Altieri terms this

meeting the Abbocamento, after the kiss that seals the fathers’ agreement.]

The dowry is paid (4) within 8 to 15 days, following which all the relatives reconvene in the presence of their

neighbors. At this reunion a notary stipulates the act of the future marriage (5) in which the dowries are

registered, and specifying “the clothes, jewelry, gifts, cash allowance (donativo) for the honeymoon and the

wedding chest.” The notary also records what would happen in the case that the wedding does not come to

completion. At this occasion the father gives to the groom “the established sum, or access to an equivalent

amount” (5a). This meeting is concluded (5b) by the exchange of rings and another kiss. Altieri terms this

meeting the Fidanze, the pledging of faith. The bride is not present for this ceremony.

Appendix II. Selected Cleffings in Ox213 6 pp