nota bene: reading classics and writing melodies in the early middle ages

Nota bene: Reading Classics and Writing Melodies in the Early Middle AgesNota bene: Reading Classics and Writing Melodies in the Early Middle Ages by Jan M. ZiolkowskiReview by: James GrierJournal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 63, No. 2 (Summer 2010), pp. 361-367Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the American Musicological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jams.2010.63.2.361 .

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Reviews

Nota bene: Reading Classics and Writing Melodies in the Early Middle Ages, byJan M. Ziolkowski. Publications of the Journal of Medieval Latin 7. Turnhout,Belgium: Brepols, 2007. xvi, 362 pp.

Classical Latin poetry remains a subject of great interest to a wide range ofscholars in the humanities. Aside from the intrinsic quality of the verse itself, itformed a central pillar in the medieval educational curriculum, and its textsand their subjects, from Orpheus to Dido and Aeneas and the lyric poems ofHorace and Catullus, have continued to provide rich material for composersthroughout the history of Western art music. So a scholarly discussion of themusical treatments these texts received in the early Middle Ages ought to in-terest a broad constituency of classicists, medievalists, and musicologists. Thisbook, however, written by an eminent scholar of medieval Latin, represents alost opportunity in many ways. It vexes because it seems reluctant to identifyan audience that would benefit most from the wide reading and thoughtfulconsideration that went into its production.

Best known for his work on the intractable Alan of Lille, the eclecticCambridge Songs, and more recently the reception of Vergil in the MiddleAges and the historical significance of Peter Abelard, Professor Ziolkowski ad-dresses here a subject that crosses at least three disciplines: the styles and formsof Classical Latin poetry, the use of these texts in the medieval teaching of language and literature, and medieval song. From the outset, however, the author erects barriers between them. After a disclaimer about his credentials asa musician and musicologist, and after noting that the analysis that follows“will not be musicological,” he presents the book’s argument:

In this case, I seek to understand which texts were chosen for the notation ofmelodies, what can be known of the persons who composed, noted, consulted,and performed the melodies, how the melodies may have related to the formand content of the texts, what inspirations and analogues the composers, nota-tors, and performers could have found for their activities, and why the notationceases after a couple of hundred years in which it became widespread. (pp. 1–2)

The music itself, therefore, the melodies mentioned in the book’s subtitle, willreceive little attention, other than their relations to the “form and content ofthe texts.” Still, a discussion of this range of issues should illuminate aspects ofthe musical practices behind these repertories of medieval song.

The first of these themes receives by far the most imaginative and sympa-thetic treatment. Ziolkowski notes that many of the passages that receive



362 Journal of the American Musicological Society

musical settings deal with matters of great emotional or philosophical depth.Among those passages set musically from the narrative hexameter poems, di-rect speeches occupy a significant proportion (references to which the authorconveniently collects in appendix 2, pp. 281–87), and of these many arelaments, whose language and rhetoric naturally explore the range of humangrief.1 Thus, we inescapably deduce that those who created these musical set-tings and provided the surviving neumations deliberately selected passages ofliterary import, some of which they marked with marginal annotations. (Plate 1 [p. 4] from Bern, Burgerbibliothek, MS 239, and plate 6 [p. 72] fromLeiden, Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit, MS Gronov. 70, show, respectively,neumed speeches from Vergil’s Aeneid and Statius’s Thebaid, the latter thelament of Polynices for Tydeus, with marks in the margin that draw the noticeof the reader to these passages.)

The criteria for selection seem somewhat different in lyric poetry, chieflythat of Horace, whose poems employ complex metrical schemes, oftenarranged in stanzas. Ziolkowski points out, as have others before him, that themelodies supplied to these lyrics may have served as mnemonics for the me-ters, particularly the settings in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MSlatin 7979, and Saint Petersburg, Gosudarstvennaja Publicaja Bibliotheka, MSClass. Lat. 8 v 4, which, as Silvia Wälli notes, contain melodies for a selectionof poems that illustrate the range of Horatian meters.2 But the mechanics bywhich these melodies might help students of Latin understand the meters re-mains obscure. The author examines various possibilities (pp. 109–43). Hebegins by summarizing the problems in determining how Classical poetry wasread, noting the conflict between tonic accent, poetic ictus, and quantity (thatis, respectively, where the accent falls in nonpoetic delivery of Latin, where thestress in the poetic foot occurs, and the difference between long and short syl-lables). Up to this point, readers from the various disciplines mentioned abovewill appreciate Ziolkowski’s judicious discussion of these issues.

But when we move to the actual methods by which these melodies mightcommunicate the meters, Ziolkowski explores a number of culs-de-sac with-out profit. He laments the fact that neumes do not provide firm rhythmic ordurational information, even though the precise relationship between poeticmeter, tonic stress, and musical durations cannot be established, and so it isunclear how specific durations, if known, could reflect the meter. Then, hewonders whether the number of notes assigned a syllable might correspond to

1. Equally convenient is appendix 1, pp. 247–79, in which Ziolkowski gathers a list of all theknown neumed passages and usefully updates the information in Solange Corbin, “Notationsmusicales dans les classiques latins,” Revue des études latines 32 (1954): 97–99, with discussionsand further commentary in ibid., 50–51; the data in Revue des études latines 33 (1955): 37–38;and the data presented in Yves-François Riou, “Chronologie et provenance des manuscrits clas-siques latins neumés,” Revue d’histoire des textes 21 (1991): 77–113.

2. Silvia Wälli, Melodien aus mittelalterlichen Horaz-Handschriften: Edition und Interpre -tation der Quellen (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2002), 254–79.



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the syllable’s length, which might then relate to the meter. Since the durationsof the notes are not known, however, how could differences in the number ofnotes on each syllable reflect the meter? Moreover, those melodies that mostlikely relate to Horace’s meters, such as those in the Paris and Saint Petersburgmanuscripts mentioned above, are predominantly syllabic, and when they dopresent a more florid texture, the melismata fall on short or unstressed sylla-bles as often as not.3

Next, Ziolkowski addresses the question of whether stressed syllables re-ceive higher pitches than unstressed ones. He reminds the reader that PaoloFerretti proposed the idea as a “law” that was ultimately rejected (p. 135), butthen returns to it in terms that suggest he, in fact, understands it as a “law” (p. 137).4 Aside from the author’s apparent confusion as to the status of theidea, I would make two observations. First, the occurrence of higher notes onstressed syllables appears to be a convention instead of a law, as Ferretti himselfhints in the section he entitles “Eccezioni alla legge dell’accento.”5 Second,Ziolkowski has already established that the relationship between tonic accentand quantitative poetic meters is at best problematic, and so even if we grantthat, in plainsong, stressed syllables generally receive higher pitches, what sig-nificance could that fact bear on the musical settings of these quantitativepoems or the manner in which those settings function as mnemonics for themeters?6

Finally, Ziolkowski observes that these neumations, by providing music foreach syllable, fail to acknowledge elision, that is, the absorption of one syllablewhen a word ending in a vowel or the letter m precedes another beginningwith a vowel. I know no example of a musical setting from the Middle Ageson a Latin text, sacred or secular, prose or poetry, that observes elision, and so

3. See ibid., 182–90 and 218–37, for transcriptions from the Paris and Saint Petersburg man-uscripts, respectively. For a melismatic example, see Carmina 1.11 in the Saint Petersburg manu-script, transcribed by Wälli, ibid., 231, in which all the melismata fall on monosyllables or syllablesthat are either short or unstressed or both (actual count: total number of syllables, thirty-two, ofwhich sixteen receive a single note; of the sixteen melismata, five fall on short and unstressed sylla-bles, four on short and stressed syllables, four on long and unstressed syllables, none on long andstressed syllables, and three on monosyllables).

4. Paolo M. Ferretti, Estetica gregoriana: Trattato delle forme musicali del canto gregoriano,vol. 1 (Rome: Pontificio Istituto di Musica Sacra, 1934), 5–38. Ziolkowski cites the French trans-lation of 1938 and does not indicate who rejected the law. When he returns to the question, hecites as his authority Giulio Cattin, Music of the Middle Ages, trans. Steven Botterill, vol. 1 (Cam -bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). See also Peter Wagner, Einführung in die gregoriani -schen Melodien: Ein Handbuch der Choralwissenschaft, vol. 3: Gregorianische Formenlehre: Einechoralische Stilkunde (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1921), 28–32; and especially AndréMocquereau, Le nombre musical grégorien ou rythmique grégorienne: Théorie et pratique, vol. 2(Paris, Tournai, and Rome: Desclée, 1927), 86–681.

5. Ferretti, Estetica gregoriana 1:24–37.6. Aside from citing neither Wagner, Einführung, nor Mocquereau, Le nombre, on this ques-

tion, Ziolokwski also ignores Willi Apel’s typically sober account of these issues in his GregorianChant (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958), 275–97.




in this respect, the settings of Classical poetry accord precisely with otherrepertories of medieval song. The scribes and musicians who devised andcopied these melodies, however, certainly knew the priniciples of elision inClassical poetry, and so their failure to observe them arises most likely fromconventions of pronunciation, as Ziolkowski notes. Still, how could thesemelodies relate in any meaningful way to the poetic meters if they fail to ob-serve elision?

This discussion, I believe, illustrates the book’s strengths and weaknesses,together with its frustrations for the reader. All readers will find Ziolkowski’streatment of the passages chosen from hexameter verse for musical setting sen-sitive and his discussion of the conflict of poetic ictus and tonic accent compe-tent. Latinists and musicologists alike will appreciate the observation that thecreators of these melodies, like most musicians in the Middle Ages (all musi-cians to the best of my knowledge), did not observe poetic elision in their set-tings. But musicologists will be bemused by his rehearsal of theories regardingaccent, meter, and musical setting that most scholars do not take seriously anymore.7 And philologists could easily be misled by Ziolkowski’s confused pre-sentation of the status of these questions in musicological circles, com-pounded by his failure to cite some of the central treatments of the issue. Noconstituency, therefore, is particularly well served by this discussion. In anycase, it delivers a meager harvest, since, at the end, all we can deduce is thatthese settings of Horace’s lyrics relate in some way to their meters, but we sim-ply do not know how.

The other subjects the author treats fare no better. For example, regardinghis second theme, the relationship between the melodies and the “form andcontent of the texts,” Ziolkowski reviews the evidence and arguments regard-ing the use of limited melodic materials for the setting of narrative poems, in-cluding the statement of Johannes de Grocheio that the chansons de geste usethe same melody for each line of poetry (pp. 111–16).8 Ziolkowski quite sen-sibly notes the tedium this approach might generate for the listener, eventhough it might be tempered by the quality of the text, and that scribes mighthave found it unnecessary to provide neumations in such instances. He furtherobserves that neumations in narrative texts do not always coincide preciselywith line ends, but sometimes end “at major transitions in sense, especially atthe conclusions of speeches or at least at the ends of sense units withinspeeches” (p. 116).

7. For example, I searched in vain for any discussion of these issues in David Hiley, WesternPlainchant: A Handbook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), which is otherwise remarkablythorough, particularly in its bibliographic coverage.

8. Johannes de Grocheio, De musica 125, in Die Quellenhandschriften zum MusiktraktatJohannes de Grocheio, ed. Ernst Rohloff (Leipzig: Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1972), 132; seealso Christopher Page, “Johannes de Grocheio on Secular Music: A Corrected Text and a NewTranslation,” Plainsong and Medieval Music 2 (1993): 17–41, at 27–28.



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Many readers will find these points useful in understanding why particularpassages receive musical treatment, but Ziolkowski fails to reach a conclusionregarding the initial point he makes about narrative poetry and recitation-likemelody. He does provide two plates, however, that illustrate narrative passages(as opposed to passages of direct speech) from Lucan’s De bello ciuili that havereceived musical settings, Saint Gall, Stiftsbibliothek, MS 863, and Paris,Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS latin 10315 (plates 11 and 14, pp. 146and 216, respectively). Both passages begin and end with complete lines, andthat in the Saint Gall manuscript (book 9, lines 531–37) coincides with a com-plete syntactical unit. (The passage comprises the last three lines on p. 233 ofthe manuscript and the first four on p. 234, of which Ziolkowski reproducesonly the latter. He also misidentifies the passage in the Table of Illustrations[9.528–43], p. xiii, and in the plate’s caption [9.540–43], but cites it correctlyin appendix 1, p. 260.)

The neumation of the passage in the Paris manuscript (5.791–801) con-cludes at the end of a syntactical unit in line 801, but does not begin with one,as the syntax begins with the second half of line 790, immediately followingthe direct speech of Cornelia that ends with the first half of the line. In any case,each line of poetry in both passages has different music, and so does not use thekind of recitation that Johannes de Grocheio stipulates for narrative poems. Wethus return to a point at which Ziolkowski hinted, namely that neumed pas-sages in narrative poems, whether direct speech or not, are set pieces that havereceived distinctive musical settings, which then merited the inclusion of theneumation. Whether the unneumed portions of such poems were sung at all,or if they were, sung to recitation-like melodies, remains unresolved.

Finally, Ziolkowski makes some curious statements about the demise ofmusical settings of Classical Latin poetry. He mentions some of the otherrepertories of song that musicians began to cultivate in the twelfth and thir-teenth centuries as potential competitors with or replacements for this music,but does not show how they might have appropriated the pedagogical rolethat neumed Classical poetry played throughout the Central Middle Ages.Instead, he notes that universities superseded monasteries as centers of educa-tion without explaining why university students needed music less thanmonastic oblates for education in Latin language and literature. Most curiousof all is his statement that polyphony replaced monophony as the principaloutlet for new compositions, and so made it impossible to enter the music,with its special layout of the page, in manuscripts of Latin poetry.

I begin with the regrettable myopia about monophony, which continuedto be practiced throughout the Middle Ages. Clerics at the cathedral of NotreDame in Paris, that bastion of thirteenth-century polyphonic music, sangmonophonic plainsong on most days of the liturgical year, and on those days when they did incorporate polyphony into the liturgy, it was surroundedby chants sung in monophony. They also cultivated the monophonic conduc-tus, alongside two- and three-voice examples of the genre, throughout the




thirteenth century. Moreover, Adam de la Halle and Guillaume de Machaut,important composers of polyphony from the thirteenth and fourteenth cen-turies respectively, created some of their most compelling original composi-tions in monophony. So, musicians who wished to supply musical settings ofClassical Latin poetry in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were by nomeans forced to write polyphony or nothing.

Second, the page layout is also something of a red herring. Scribes since theearly tenth century had created layouts, increasingly complex, and most com-plex for polyphony beginning in the twelfth century, to accommodate music.That the scribes who created the musical settings of Classical Latin poetry al-most universally failed to exploit these layouts speaks more to the secondaryrole of the music in these manuscripts than to the convenience of usingmonophony for these settings. Their successors in the thirteenth and four-teenth centuries could have continued creating relatively simple monophonicsettings, or, had pedagogical reasons dictated, they could easily have adopted amore spacious layout to accommodate the music, as the eleventh-centuryscribe of Montpellier, Bibliothèque de l’École de Médecine, MS H. 425, didfor Horace, Carmina 4.11 (see below, note 9). So, I believe we need to seekreasons for the passing of this music in the changing fashions not of musicalpractices, but of pedagogy.

In summary, this book leaves unanswered many of the questions it raiseslargely because it fails to identify an audience. Musicologists and philologistswill learn little about the music, how it was used in pedagogy or for any otherpurpose, and what precise relation it may bear to these texts of central impor-tance for the Western literary tradition. In closing, I would offer two modestsuggestions that might have helped make this book more useful to an audi-ence of Latinists and musicologists. First, Ziolkowski might have analyzed indepth the language and rhetoric of a single lament set to music in the narrativehexameters. We would then be better equipped to judge how these musicianschose texts for their musical treatment, and musicologists might be encour-aged to undertake a complementary analysis of the music, insofar as the nota-tion permits. Second, the author establishes that many of the neumedmanuscripts originated in an educational context, furnished with commen-taries, glosses, construe marks, and other signs of pedagogy. In most cases, themusic occupies a secondary position to the text.9 A detailed analysis, therefore,

9. A particularly good illustration of music’s status appears in plate 2 (p. 17) from Paris,Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS latin 9346, in which the neumes compete, not always suc-cessfully, for room between the lines of the principal text with interlinear glosses. I am aware ofonly one manuscript in which the page was formally prepared for the inscription of neumes alongwith the principal text: Montpellier, Bibliothèque de l’École de Médecine, MS H. 425, whichtransmits Horace, Carmina 4.11 with the melody of the hymn Vt queant laxis. For a facsimileand transcription, see Wälli, Melodien aus mittelalterlichen Horaz-Handschriften, 156–59, withdiscussion on 90–94, 283–87, 291–93. Ziolkowski discusses this piece, pp. 25–29, where, alas, hemisidentifies it as Carmina 1.2.



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of the contents and codicological structure of a single school manuscript couldilluminate the context in which this music was created, sung, and dissemi-nated. These two items, both well within the expertise of this distinguishedscholar, could have better placed all his erudition and the thoughtful contem-plation he has devoted to these texts and their musical settings at the disposi-tion of the wide audience this book could legitimately seek.

JAMES GRIER

Monteverdi’s Last Operas: A Venetian Trilogy, by Ellen Rosand. Berkeley andLos Angeles: University of California Press, 2007. xxiii, 447 pp.

In her discussion of Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, Ellen Rosandcalls our attention to the work’s dramatic momentum. “Once launched,” sheobserves, “Ulisse’s pursuit of his goal is unrelenting”: the opera progresses to-wards an inevitable resolution that is “carefully planned to accelerate over thefive acts” (p. 151). Indeed, it is perhaps not surprising that Rosand has con-fessed to favoring this one of Monteverdi’s operatic children a bit more thanthe others, for Monteverdi’s Last Operas shares some qualities with Ulysses’epic adventure. This is not merely because the book is the fruit of the author’sown long and persistent journey over the past several decades; it also has to dowith some of the fundamental features of this seminal scholarly contribution.Rosand takes the reader on an epic voyage across a vast and complex intellec-tual terrain: a perceptive overview of the scholarship and performance tradi-tions associated with Monteverdi’s final operas (chaps. 1 and 2) is followed bya comprehensive examination of the librettos, librettists, and scores (chaps. 3and 4), and a consideration of his treatment of the librettos in the context ofhis aesthetic principles and those of his librettists (chaps. 5 and 6). The finalchapters (7 and 8) focus specifically on drama, character, and other interpre-tive questions in the light of the previous findings, while a valuable set of ap-pendices include transcriptions of relevant primary documents.1 Rosand’sthesis about Monteverdi’s last operas unfolds over the course of the book withthe same sense of purpose that characterized Ulysses’ journey back to Ithaca.Moreover, we do not have to push the Homeric metaphor much further tofind the protagonist in Rosand’s epic tale. Claudio Monteverdi is the unam-biguous hero of the book, who, after a long and fruitful career, composes anauthoritative trilogy of distinctly Venetian operas that demonstrate not only

1. These include the relevant libretto prefaces, scenic descriptions and plot summaries fromthe printed scenarios, comparisons of the librettos to the treatments of Virgil and Homer by theprolific humanist Lodovico Dolce (1508–1568), and contemporary poems and descriptions ofthe singers.



nota bene: reading classics and writing melodies in the early middle ages

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