Music and Transcendence

Ferdia J. Stone-Davis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781472415950
• eBook ISBN: 9781317092223
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

Music and Transcendence explores the ways in which music relates to transcendence by bringing together the disciplines of musicology, philosophy and theology, thereby uncovering congruencies between them that have often been obscured. Music has the capacity to take one outside of oneself and place one in relation to that which is 'other'. This 'other' can be conceived in an 'absolute' sense, insofar as music can be thought to place the self in relation to a divine 'other' beyond the human frame of existence. However, the 'other' can equally well be conceived in an 'immanent' (or secular) sense, as music is a human activity that relates to other cultural practices. Music here places the self in relation to other people and to the world more generally, shaping how the world is understood, without any reference to a God or gods. The book examines how music has not only played a significant role in many philosophical and theological accounts of the nature of existence and the self, but also provides a valuable resource for the creation of meaning on a day-to-day basis.

PART I
Music and Absolute Transcendence

Chapter 1
Music and the Beyond in the Later Middle Ages

Christopher Page

In a great many pages, and with almost as many transcendental events to report, the Frankish historian and hagiographer Gregory of Tours (d. 594) rarely offers anything to suggest that the chant of Mass or Office might provoke a vision, a miraculous cure or a flood of divine inspiration. Although he accepts that the supernatural constantly breaks through the surface of life, especially the life of monks, his sense that chanting might be some form of conjuration or that human singers share a repertoire of vocal praise in words and music with their angelic counterparts seems intermittent at best. At no point in Gregory’s writing, for example, does any pious man or woman see and hear a saint or angel singing a text and associated melody with the kind of stabilised identity or fixed place in the liturgy that might encourage Gregory to give the incipit of the text and identify the feast(s) where the chant was used.

By the later Middle Ages, however, the situation was rather different. Many texts from the twelfth century onwards contain detailed accounts of events in which the performance of a chant from the liturgy precipitates a supernatural happening. One of the earliest is reported to have taken place soon after 900, when a female recluse named Wiborada, dwelling near the abbey of St Gall, had a vision (and audition) of the abbey’s patron, St Gall himself, singing the Gregorian Introit Ne timeas Zacharia for the Nativity of John the Baptist ‘with a company of radiant souls’.¹ The question of why medieval writing from the tenth century onwards contains so many stories of this kind, often involving specific chants that the author is careful to cite by incipit, while earlier narratives, like those of Gregory of Tours, contain so few, has rarely been broached. In raising that question here, I do not wish to overdraw the contrast: some of the chants associated with miraculous events in the later Middle Ages, such as the Te deum, were very ancient, so whatever powers they possessed in the thirteenth century, for example, cannot have been so very new. Yet there is something to be explained, nonetheless, and it will not be enough to remember what is easily forgotten, namely that a large proportion of literate men and women in the later medieval west spent much of their lives standing shoulder to shoulder, engaged in what we would now call ensemble singing. That was also true in the early Middle Ages when far fewer stories of this kind were generated. Nor can we maintain that we are asking a question about some entity we might call ‘medieval music’ with an internal history. Once medieval singers assumed the various forms of life they chose for themselves, they were neither musicians, as we might immediately understand the term, nor an audience. This does not have to mean that their singing was always self-effacing. There was ample scope in the liturgy for a soloist to display a fine voice, and some believed there was a great deal too much; even then, however, plainsong was not exactly music in any immediately familiar sense. The singers heard, but did not exactly listen; they sang but did not exactly perform.

And yet the explanation for this marked increase in the number of stories where a chant is reported to have produced a transcendent experience probably does lie, in large measure, with the history of medieval music, or rather with music and text together as they evolved in one particular and eventually trans-European liturgical repertory: Gregorian chant. It is now generally agreed that Gregorian (or better ‘Frankish-Roman’) chant arose between about 750 and 825 in monastic and cathedral communities located in the political core of the Frankish kingdom, approximately between the Seine and the Rhine. This is the territory that is marked out, with considerable precision, by two of the earliest centres for the development of the music, Rouen and Aachen. Gregorian plainsong seems to have emerged during a protracted attempt to reform the liturgy of the Frankish Church on the model of Roman custom, a process that certainly did involve the importation of the Roman liturgical calendar and a large amount of textual material for the Mass Propers of the entire liturgical year, adapted in some respects to suit Frankish usages and customs. The Carolingian kings and emperors did much to sponsor this liturgical reform in a process that began with the first of their line, Pippin (d. 768), and gathered strength under his much more famous son, Charlemagne.²

When Frankish-Roman chant begins to appear in consolidated and decipherable notations, the melodies prove to be astonishingly stable from one source to another, even when the books in question were compiled many hundreds of miles apart and show no genetic link. These chants were indeed sacred melodies: each one was a sequence of pitches, perhaps with durations assigned to them, deemed fitter for the ritual purpose in hand than anything likely to be achieved by making major adjustments in performance or by extemporising something new. They resemble finds of coins, discovered in many different regions but showing a remarkable consistency of weight and composition. Sustaining the metaphor, we might say many of them suggest a series of interrelated and regulated mints at work.

Like much else given the stamp of Charlemagne’s royal and eventually imperial authority, Gregorian chant spread wide, which invites us to ponder music and transcendence in a rather different sense to anything we have encountered up to now. As applied to an experience, the term ‘transcendence’ is commonly taken to mean a potentially transformative contact with something that cannot be reduced to nature, often the divine. Yet I would like to consider a terrestrial, indeed political, meaning of the term in which a body of shared music may be said to transcend narrow political or ethnic allegiances. Music has an extraordinary power to do this: to consolidate human groups in relation to others deemed ‘primitive’ and perhaps threatening because their music is different. An example from the later Middle Ages will serve to make the point.³ There are Flemish paintings of the fifteenth century that show the Virgin sitting in a chair placed upon a fine Turkish carpet. Such things were clearly admired, but what of Turkish music? In the 1480s, a Fleming named Johannes Tinctoris heard Turkish captives in Naples playing the long-necked lute, or saz, that is still played in Ankara today: he reacted sharply, believing that the music expressed only the barbarity of the players who made it. Tinctoris was a trained musician whose ears were saturated with the idioms of Gregorian chant and with the great compositions of Franco-Flemish masters such as Dufay, Ockeghem and Busnois.⁴ As he listened to the Turks, he assumed the role for which many years of training had prepared him: he appointed himself the representative of a Latin-Christian sound-world whose musical landscape had suddenly experienced a sharp intrusion.

By the 1200s, Gregorian chant did indeed transcend the cellular jurisdictions of kingdom, bishopric, principality and county in much of Latin Europe to create a soundscape. From Cadiz in Western Spain to Esztergom in Hungary, from Trondheim in Norway to the verge of the kingdom of Granada, monks, nuns, clergy, canons and friars by 1300 were gathering in churches, several times a day, to sing plainsong, with its historical core of Frankish-Roman chant or relatively new chants such as the Salve Regina. The singers breathed as one and resumed, after each pause, as one, for that is how plainsong works: it helped the singers transcend the varied and disorganised breathing that marks any gathering of individuals, with as yet scattered minds. Illuminated initials in Psalters, from the twelfth century onwards, show singers standing close to one other, often maintaining a light physical contact as if to ensure that the circuit of energy flowing between them remains unbroken.⁵ As the community worked its way through the liturgical calendar of their house, familiar items of chant came and went with the lengthening and shortening of days, and with the arrival of seasonal fruits on the common table.

The internationalism (as we might call it) of this chant made the localism of other plainsongs, notably those in honour of local saints, all the more conspicuous, entrenched and (in local terms) meaningful. What is more, regional or even national differences in the manner of singing had become a subject of pointed and sometimes intemperate comment by the thirteenth century. But the idea of a common repertory throughout the Latin church existed and helped to establish a comprehensive allegiance in a place that was increasingly called ‘the Latin world’, or Latinitas, after 1100. This was a new development, for to authors of late antiquity the term latinitas had meant the Latin language and the resources of vocabulary and grammar in Latin that variously allowed, impeded or prohibited exact translations to be made of scriptures and commentaries written in Greek. The word carries a different but related sense, however, when Lanfranc of Bec (d. 1089) refers to the fame of a particular churchman and declares that ‘all Latinitas knows this’. Latinitas is now a community and one partly defined by its own repertoire of chant.⁶ When, in the next generation, St Malachy (d. 1148) first studied the core of Latin chant for the Mass and Office, his contemporary biographer judged that he was learning to sing ‘according to the manner of the entire world’, which meant singing ‘after the usage of the Holy Roman Church’. Malachy was moving away from the localism (and ‘primitivism’) of his Irish background or so his biographer (none other than St Bernard of Clairvaux) plainly believed.

By the time of Bernard, Gregorian plainsongs could be used to fix the day when something occurred or was planned to take place. The chants at issue are almost invariably Introit antiphons, the chants that begin the service of the Mass. One of the earliest examples shows St Anselm referring to his consecration as archbishop of Canterbury (1093) ‘on the Sunday when the Introit Populus Syon is sung’. After 1100, however, it becomes increasingly common for chroniclers and others to place an event ‘on the Sunday of Laetare Jerusalem’ (the Fourth Sunday in Lent) or in relation to other Introits that include Oculi mei (Third Sunday in Lent), Dum sanctificatus (Pentecost Sunday), Esto mihi (Sixth Sunday after Pentecost) and Dicit dominus: Ego cogito (Thirty-Third Sunday after Pentecost). In 1131, the Introit Laetare Jerusalem identifies an appointed day in a letter of Innocent II, showing that this method to define the day of some past or future event was already so universally understood that it could be used in a document issued by the patriarch of the Latin West. The repertory of liturgical singers had by now joined the movement of celestial bodies as a cycle that defined the passage of time in a yearly cycle.⁷

The sense of Christian universalism that the possession of such music could induce, with contingent events on earth seeming to replay the mystery of the incarnation and passion of Christ, related in texts whose forms of expression acknowledged no frontier of either time or place, emerges clearly from the work of chroniclers entrusted to relate the major events in the life of a pious magnate or churchman. In 1202, Abbot William of Eskill in Zeeland died on the eve of Easter Sunday, and one of his disciples traced his last hours through the liturgical services in which the saint barely had the strength to engage. On the Thursday, William tried to perform the Mandatum ceremony but was too weak to wash the brothers’ feet. Led to his chamber, he eventually asked for his bed to be carried into the choir so that he could take part in the Easter Day liturgy. At Matins, the choir had just begun the third Responsory, Dum transisset sabbatum, when a sign was given that Abbot William was now at the point of death. He began to cross over into the next life as the community traversed the midnight of the Sabbath and passed into the next day. Dawn broke, and after singing the Responsory Ut venientes ungerent Jesum, describing the anointing of Christ’s body, the Prior and some of the brothers left the choir to anoint William with holy oil. William was then dressed in penitential clothes and laid on a bed of cinders. He died soon afterward, rising to a new life on the Day of the Resurrection as the choir tearfully but triumphantly sang the appointed chant to end the service before the beginning ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Music Examples
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Music and Absolute Transcendence
• Music and Immanent Transcendence
• Bibliography
• Index