An Uncommon Early Form of Pre-Stave Medieval Music, Neumes (Groups of Musical Marks), from Twelfth Century Italy

One of the enduring legacies of the Middle Ages is the variety of music produced. Surviving medieval lyrics and musical notation demonstrate the great range of styles developing in different contexts. The Gregorian chant, attributed to Pope Gregory the Great, was used by male and female monastic communities to celebrate the Divine Office.

The Southern French troubadours and German Minnesänger performed a similar function of producing music for a courtly audience. Themes of these songs remain the basis for modern popular music—yearning for love, putting the beloved on a pedestal, the immediacy of the necessity of attaining love, as well as aggrandising the singer’s attributes and occasionally scorning another singer for faults (think in the style of a modern rap battle). Ballads about folk heroes such as Robin Hood were sung across the English countryside in the 1400 and 1500s.

An important innovation was the moment in the development of making performance replicable. Rather than the notes on a 4-lined stave that we are used to seeing, they would use diastematic neumes, or marks along a single line to indicate relative pitch between the marks. Over the course of the Middle Ages, the relative pitch would be replaced by square notes written on a 4-line staff and move towards the notation that we know today. This evolution allows for a more precise repetition of the performance.

The early Renaissance artist, Heironymous Bosch, embedded a nod to such importance of the visual representation of musical notation in his richly symbolic and esoteric Garden of Earthly Delights, which is the pride of the Prado Museum in Madrid. Bosch depicts a choir manuscript laying open with legible musical notation, which was reconstructed and performed in the mid-2000s by a musicologist.

A rare neumatic musical sheet, from Southern Italy in the 1100s, the same time frame as the Second Crusades, being a gradual “Michael Prepositus,” with neumes to be sung in alternativing fashion by two monks or groups of monks. Such manuscripts with this early form of musical notation are very uncommon, very few having reached the market in decades.

Like Bosch’s painted choir book, this twelfth century Italian fragment would have been part of a book intended for group celebration of the litany. The chant on this page was to be sung for the feast of Saint Michael, during a Mass, as a responsory verse. One monk would have sung the text marked with A for antiphon, and he would be responded to with the text following the V for versicule. The shortened text following the P indicates that the abbreviated text corresponds with a Psalm, which would have been memorized perfectly and need only the slightest mnemonic to be recalled.

Both Leo Treitler and Carl Parrish have extensively categorized the regional differences in musical notation. In the same way that we can precisely locate a manuscript based on handwriting, neumes also reveal the origin of the scribe. This scribe appears to have been operating within a scriptorium in the orbit of the Beneventan influence in Southern Italy. While the handwriting is not the classic Beneventan script, the neumes suggest this affiliation.

Translation:
Recto:
Michael, the prefect of paradise, whom the angels of heaven honor, they say, “You have appeared gloriously in the sight of the Lord, therefore the Lord has clothed you in beauty/ Lord of Eternity/ Michael the archangel came to the sanctuary of the blessed people of God. Do not be afraid when you ascend in the sight of the nations, for you in…

Verso:

Thousands upon hundreds stood by him. An angel stood near the sanctuary of the Temple holding a golden thurible [religious vessel] in his hand, and he was given much incense, and aromatic smoke rose in the sight of God.

Further details:
Cutting from an early choirbook, in Latin, decorated manuscript on parchment [Italy, first half of the twelfth century], 138 by 200mm, Rectangular cutting from upper lefthand part of a leaf, with remains of 6 lines in an attractively elegant gothic bookhand with music in neumes arranged around a red clef line, small initials in looping penwork strokes in main ink, rubrics in red, two simple red initials, recovered from reuse in a later binding and hence with scuffs, stains and losses (reverse somewhat scuffed), overall in fair and presentable condition.

Text in Latin
Recto:
Michahel prepositus paradisi quem honorificant angelorum cives/ Caeli enarrant/ Gloriosus apparauisti in Conspectu domini propterea decorem induit te dominus/ Domini aeterni/ Michahel archangelus venit in aduitorium populo dei/ Benedicta/ Ascenditsu/ In conspectu gentium nolite metuere vos enim in ….

Verso:
[Millies cents centeni] millium ad sistebant ei. Stetit angelus iuxta aram templi
habens thuribulum aureum in mana sua
Et data sunt incensa multa, et ascendi fumus
aromatum in conspectu dominum …

See also:

The Cantus Database: A Database for Latin Ecclesiastical Chant