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New music in the Office of Thomas Becket from the Diocese of Trier
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 March 2009
Abstract
This article examines aspects of variation and transmission in the Office of Thomas Becket in the Diocese of Trier, Germany. Palaeographic evidence suggests that by the mid-fifteenth century, liturgical sources in Trier exhibited numerous transmission errors and disruptions in the modal scheme of the Thomas Office. However, a subset of late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century manuscripts from St Florin and St Castor in Koblenz displays efforts to restore the theoretical modal scheme of the Office by composing new melodies for four items; the uniqueness of these items has been confirmed with the assistance of a large-scale electronic project cataloguing the Office of Thomas Becket across Europe, headed by Andrew Hughes at the University of Toronto. The present study provides a detailed melodic and modal analysis of the four newly composed items: the invitatory, Adsunt Thome martyris; the fourth responsory for Matins, Post sex annos; the ninth responsory for Matins, Iesu bone per Thome; and the fourth antiphon for Lauds, Ad Thome memoriam. Numerous melodic allusions to the Office of St Gorgonius – a martyr also venerated in Koblenz from the turn of the fifteenth century – have been uncovered in the four newly composed items. The re-ordering of the modal schemes of the Thomas Office and the colourful array of musical and theological echoes and allusions between the Becket and Gorgonius Offices suggests a desire to establish, reflect and cultivate a local liturgical identity within the community in Koblenz.
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References
1 For a detailed account, see Kay Brainerd Slocum, Liturgies in Honour of Thomas Becket (Toronto, 2004), 136–46.
2 László Dobszay refers to this change as a ‘fashion that persisted until the end of the Middle Ages’. It could perhaps be more accurately described as a major stylistic and compositional change. He nevertheless gives a succinct description of the salient features of the old and new styles. See László Dobszay and Janka Szendrei, eds., Antiphonen, 3 vols. Monumenta Monodica Medii Aevi 5 (Kassel, 1999), 1:32.
3 David Hiley, ‘Style and Structure in Early Offices of the Sanctorale’, in Western Plainchant in the First Millennium: Studies in the Medieval Liturgy and its Music, ed. Sean Gallagher et al., (Ashgate, 2003), 159–60.
4 According to Richard Hunt, abbot Benedict of Peterborough composed the Office of Thomas Becket prior to 1193, and it was almost certainly a monastic Office. See Richard W. Hunt, ‘Notes on the Distinctiones monasticae et morales’, in Liber Floridus: Festschrift Paul Lehmann, ed. Bernhard Bischoff and Suso Brechter (St Ottilien, 1950), 355–62.
5 All abbreviations for manuscripts follow RISM sigla.
6 ‘Thomas Becket: Sources and Variants in his Office’ is an extensive electronic research tool of over 1200 Thomas Offices across Europe headed by Andrew Hughes at the University of Toronto. Included thus far are the main Office, Office for the translation, and suffrage in manuscript sources, and about 300 printed sources will soon be added. Countries surveyed include those in the British Isles, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Spain, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Portugal, Netherlands, Poland, Scandinavia, Czech Republic, Yugoslavia, as well as European sources held in libraries in the United States and Canada. The project consists of numerous relational databases, facilitating searches in texts, melodic variants and modal schemes among many other features. In the case of melodic variants, all chants are compared against a ‘base melody’, which is a compilation of stable Sarum melodies from some 120 British sources. This project is currently supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I am grateful to Andrew Hughes for making this project fully available to me.
7 Andrew Hughes, ‘Modal Order and Disorder in the Rhymed Office’, Musica Disciplina, 37 (1983), 31 and Slocum, Liturgies in Honour of Thomas Becket, 148–55.
8 Iesu bone per Thome is the ninth responsory in secular use but the twelfth in monastic use.
9 ‘Provenance’ is a notoriously difficult term in that it refers to location but does not distinguish between the place where the manuscript was made, used, or is currently held. For more detailed discussions on the use of the term, see Andrew Hughes, Late Medieval Liturgical Offices: Resources for Electronic Research, Subsidia Mediaevalia (Toronto, 1996), 29–30 and László Dobszay, ‘Reading an Office Book’, in The Divine Office in the Latin Middle Ages, ed. Margot E. Fassler and Rebecca A. Baltzer (Oxford, 2000), 49. All the manuscripts listed in Table 2 are currently held in the Bistumsarchiv, Trier. One cannot be sure whether these books were both produced and used in the same location, that being the Trier Dom and St Castor and St Florin in Koblenz. The Koblenz sources, however, do contain coats of arms particular to the region and TRb 491 and 492 contain highly distinctive notational guides, signalling an expanded system developed under scholasticus Johannis Otton, resident in Koblenz during the early 1500s.
10 The dates and provenance are taken from Peter Siffrin, ‘Die Liturgischen Handschriften im Bistumsarchiv Trier’ (Trier: unpublished typescript in Bistumsarchiv, 1969). It should be noted that Siffrin does not provide explicit evidence for the dating of these manuscripts. Since the script and notation in medieval liturgical sources are frequently extremely conservative, judging the age of a book by visual appearance can be very misleading. Given Siffrin's hesitation on the provenance of TRb 486 and the current information surrounding chant variation in the Trier area, it would be reasonable to reconsider the dating and provenance of this manuscript.
11 Since there is no ‘original’ Sarum manuscript and one cannot speak of ‘original’ Sarum melodies to use as a point of comparison, the base melody was derived from some 120 Sarum manuscripts in the British Isles. A Cluniac breviary from the Fitzwilliam museum (Cfm 369) served as a point of departure, although it contained variants in two items that were particular to itself. These two items were then altered to reflect consistent use of these items in the rest of the manuscripts in the British Isles. While some variation does exist, the Sarum melodies on the whole are reasonably stable. This base melody served as a point of departure for comparing melodic variants in Andrew Hughes' ‘Thomas Becket: Sources and Variants in his Office’, described in note 6.
12 While the four new melodies restore the modal order at various points in the Office, other items are re-arranged and TRb 521, a noted breviary, contains two new lessons, which alters the narrative substantially.
13 Translations for the four items are taken from Slocum, Liturgies in Honour of Thomas Becket, 170–206.
14 This material has been presented in a paper entitled ‘Paleography as a Research Tool in Musicology’ (March 2001) at the Faculty of Music, University of Toronto, during which the audience members were kind enough to sing at sight from facsimile. Both the augmented fourth as well as the clef changes did in fact cause most singers to stumble, if not stop entirely. The performance implications of these transcription errors should not be underestimated.
15 Ruth Steiner and Keith Falconer, ‘Invitatory’, in New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 29 vols. (London, 2nd edition, 2001), 12:513–16.
16 Walter H. Frere, Antiphonale Sarisburiense: A Reproduction in Facsimile of a Manuscript of the Thirteenth Century with a Dissertation and Index (Edinburgh, 1901–1924), 1: 63.
17 Dobszay and Szendrei, eds, Antiphonen, 1:25.
18 Hiley, ‘Style and Structure in Early Offices of the Sanctorale’, 159.
19 Melodic echoes and allusions, though thought to be widespread in plainchant, have received relatively little attention, primarily because the tools to compare chant-words within such a large repertory of rhymed Offices have not yet been developed. Most recently, Andrew Hughes has developed a chant-word dictionary to facilitate this type of investigation. The chant-word dictionary is an electronic resource designed to facilitate (among other searches) a systematic investigation of one of the frequently cited melodic characteristics of plainchant for rhymed Offices: that of modal integrity. Drawing on sixty Offices from Hughes, Late Medieval Liturgical Offices, as well as the complete antiphonal from Humbert's Codex, the chant-word dictionary contains some 96,000 chant-words from Offices, facilitating searches of text, melody, mode, position of the word within the item, as well as the starting and ending pitch of each word.
20 Madeleine Bernhard, ‘Les offices versifiés attribués à Léon IX (1002–1054)’, Études Grégoriennes, 19 (1980), 89–164.
21 These two sources are cited in Bernhard, ‘Les offices versifiés’, 92; Historiae rhythmicae: Liturgische Reimofficien des Mittelalters, ed. Clemens Blume and Guido M. Dreves, Analecta hymnica medii aevi 26 (Leipzig, 1897), 72; and Hughes, Late Medieval Liturgical Offices, GO71.
22 Two sources for St Gorgonius are noted in Analecta hymnica: ‘Brev. ms. S. Florini ad Confluentes saec. 14. cod. capit. Treviren. 173. A. – Brev. ms. S. Florini saec. 14. Cod. Semin. Magunt. s.n.B’. See Blume and Dreves, eds., Historiae rhythmicae, 72.
23 Six manuscripts currently held in the Bistumsarchiv in Trier, but originally from Koblenz (St Castor and St Florin), contain a liturgical Office to St Gorgonius: TRb 491, TRb 492, TRb 494, TRb 495, TRb 499 and TRb 521. All these manuscripts also contain the new Koblenz melodies for the Thomas Office.
24 The earliest source for the new melodies in the Thomas Office and for the Gorgonius Office is one and the same (TRb 521).
25 For a discussion on trivial and substantial variants, see David Hughes, ‘Evidence for the Traditional View of Transmission in Gregorian Chant’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 40 (1987), 377–404.
26 Bruno Stäblein, Schriftbild der einstimmige Musik, Musikgeschichte in Bildern 3 pt. 4 (Leipzig, 1975), 162–3.
27 John Stevens, Words and Music in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1986), 252 and Andrew Hughes, ‘Chants in the Rhymed Office of St Thomas of Canterbury’, Early Music, 16 (1988), 193–6.
28 The notion that musical cadences correspond to poetic phrases is at least implied by many writers. See for instance, Kay Slocum's analysis of the phrasing of the second responsory for Matins, ‘Thomas manum mittet’ in Slocum, Liturgies in Honour of Thomas Becket, 157–9. The phrasing, however, accounts for one, two and often three lines of poetry, and relies therefore on larger units of poetic text. The idea that the beginning and ending of each line of poetry in rhymed Offices is tied to modally important pitches has not yet been systematically investigated. I hope to examine this notion using the chant-word dictionary, which has now been adapted to search the starting and ending pitches of individual lines of poetry as well as individual words.
29 Dobszay and Szendrei, ed., Antiphonen, 1:43. On the trichord as conceived of by Dom Jean Claire, see also the essays in his honour in Plainsong & Medieval Music, 17/2 (October, 2008).
30 For a discussion of repetition in responsory melismas, see Thomas F. Kelly, ‘Melodic Elaboration in Responsory Melismas’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 27 (1974), 461–74.