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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 September 2010
The Beneventan Mass Propers are preserved in sources that are notated, for the most part, in campo aperto – without staff lines or clefs to indicate the pitch or placement of the semitone. Despite the absence of pitch-specific notation, it is possible to discern a great deal about the pitch of the Beneventan chant and to propose verifiable transcriptions. This article provides a systematic overview of the pitch placement of the Beneventan repertory through a study of the formulaic structure of the chant and through a comparative examination of the small number of exemplars of Beneventan chant notated on a staff line.
1 Facsimiles of the extant sources of Beneventan chant have been collected and published by Kelly, Thomas F. in Les témoins manuscrit du chant Bénéventain, Paléographie musicale XXI (Solesmes, 1992)Google Scholar , hereafter Pal Mus XXI; Kelly's monograph The Beneventan Chant (Cambridge, 1989), hereafter TBC, provides a comprehensive overview of the sources, detailed historical background and a discussion of Beneventan musical style.
2 TBC, 154–5.
3 Le Codex 10673 du fonds latin de la Bibliothèque Vaticane (XIe siècle): Graduel bénéventain, Paléographie musicale XIV (Solesmes, 1931), 248–433, hereafter Pal Mus XIV; includes transcription of all the items from Palm Sunday through to the vigil of Holy Saturday.
4 TBC, 154.
5 For more detail concerning the rise of the Beneventan chant and significant additional bibliography concerning the history of the Lombards in southern Italy, see TBC, 6–18.
6 Examples of the Beneventan chant labelled as ‘Ambrosian’ are discussed in TBC, 181–3.
7 Comprehensive listings of these sources are provided in Pal Mus XXI: xvi–xvii (list of sources) and 333–405 (commentary).
8 Manuscript descriptions in Planchart, Alejandro Enrique and Boe, John, Beneventanum Troporum Corpus, Recent Researches in the Music of the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance, vols. 16–28 (Madison, 1989–96)Google Scholar , 16:xvii (hereafter BTC), and in TBC, 302. Facsimile edition of Ben 40: Benevento, Biblioteca Capitolare, 40, Graduale, edited by Nino Albarosa and Alberto Turco (Padua, 1991).
9 The music of the doublets shares many melodic and formal features with music in several other south Italian sources that can be identified as Beneventan by the facts of its transmission (for example, pieces in several sources are preceded by a rubric indicating that they belong to the ‘Ambrosian rite’). The Beneventan ordo for Good Friday in BAV, lat. 10673, fol. 33 is prefaced by the rubric ‘officium sexta feria in Parasceben secundum Ambrosianum’. Matthew Peattie, ‘The Beneventan Antiphon and the Influence of Beneventan Style in the South Italian Office’, Ph.D. diss., Harvard University (2005) discusses a methodology for identifying Beneventan music by style and transmission.
10 The use of the term ‘ingressa’, rather than ‘introit’, is yet another testament to the shared Lombardheritage with the Ambrosian chant of Milan. See TBC, 184 and Terence Bailey, ‘Introits and ingressae – Milan and Rome’, in the present volume, 89–122.
11 Several of the antiphons for Maundy Thursday share much in common stylistically with the Mass Propers, but I have omitted these here as a complete consideration of the repertory of Office music lies beyond the scope of this study.
12 The pervasive use of formulas is described in less laudatory terms in Pal Mus XIV, 264: ‘l’emploi des formules est d'un usage si courant qu'il en devient meme souvent fatigant’.
13 The most common patterns are notated in virtually identical neume groups in the principal concordance, Ben 38.
14 The communions are shorter and less prolix, but rely on some of the same characteristic formulaic material as the other genres of the Beneventan Mass Propers. The offertories and communions tend to draw on a similar fund of melodic material.
15 John Boe has noted that Ben 40 contains the ‘richest repertory of Beneventan neumatic forms’, BTC, 16:xvii. Both the Gregorian and the Beneventan repertory in MS 40 contain numerous complex neumes, and a variety of ways to notate neumes of two and three notes (see also Rupert Fischer, ‘Die rhythmische Aussage von Benevento 40’ in the facsimile edition, Graduale, ed. Albarosa and Turco).
16 Treitler, Leo, ‘“Centonate” Chant: Übles Flickwerk or E pluribus unus?’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 28 (1975), 9–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar .
17 BTC, 16:xvii.
18 BTC, 19:xx.
19 BTC, 16:xvi.
20 Similar observations about the general accuracy of the diastematy in Ben 38 are made by the editors of Pal Mus XIV in reference to their transcription of material from the Mass for Palm Sunday: ‘Le manuscript, il est vrai, n’est pas écrit sur lignes: mais on peut aisément suppléer a cette lacune, tant est grandes la précision avec laquelles les intervalles ont été habituellement respectés’, Pal Mus XIV, 263. The authors conclude that the transcription of the melody onto a staff line does not pose excessive difficulties, but that a greater challenge exists in determining the placement of the clef on the staff lines.
21 BTC, 16:l–li.
22 TBC, 154. This observation suggests that the formulaic melodic surface and modal structure of the Beneventan music behaves in much the same way as the genres of Gregorian chant that make use of a repertory of common material or formulas, in that melodically identical phrases generally occur at the same pitch level.
23 The authors of Pal Mus XIV see the second podatus (sol-la) on the text ‘pedes lavare’ as a certain error in the manuscript (compare to the figure on ‘suorum dicens’ in the first line of this example), Pal Mus XIV, 276, no. 1. If it is a diastematic infelicity, it has no adverse effect on the relative heightening of any of the repeated material.
24 The relative diastematy appears to be equally consistent in the doublet Masses in Ben 38 and the Mass Propers preserved in Ben 35. There are, however, differences between the manuscripts that are beyond the scope of this study.
25 TBC, 154.
26 This phenomen is discussed by Kelly, TBC, 156, who observes that the upper tetrachord transposes to the upper fourth music more often found at the pitch of the finals. He illustrates this with an example from the ingressa Maria vidit angelum in which the distinctive cadence pattern figure 1 occurs at both transpositions.
27 The same situation occurs in Stolam iocunditatis, where a transcription based on the relative diastematy indicates that the melody moves into the upper tetrachord, before returning again to the pitch level of the finals.
28 Another example of figure 20 is in the ingressa Factus est repente (line 1), in which its placement indicates that the following figures should be notated in the upper tetrachord. If we understand figure 20 as a staff line/pitch holder for the upper tetrachord, this suggests that there are melodies notated in their entirety in the upper tetrachord (for example the ingressa Dum sacra misteria).
29 Boe and Planchart have suggested that the different graphic forms in Beneventan notation often indicate melodic direction, an observation that has some bearing on the stability of neumatic forms in the formulaic chants of the Propers; BTC, 16:xlii, no. 101.
30 A small number of Beneventan pieces notated on a staff line are preserved in antiphoners from the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries. These include antiphons from Holy Week, as well as antiphons in Beneventan style for feasts unique to southern Italy. These pieces are not preserved in purely Beneventan contexts, but are mixed within Gregorian-style Offices where they often appear to have assimilated some elements of Gregorian style and modality. These pieces can be included in the Beneventan corpus on the basis of musical style, but cannot be identified as Beneventan either by the facts of their transmission, or though their inclusion in doublets. For this reason I have omitted these pieces from the core repertory considered in this study.
31 Parallel transcriptions of ten alleluia verses have been published in Kelly, TBC, 120–1.
32 Planchart and Boe's study of this source indicates that a ‘red F line without a clef was added carelessly to most of the pieces notated by music scribe I’ (the scribe responsible for the folio in question), BTC, 16:xvi.
33 Figure 1 also appears at this pitch in a Beneventan antiphon copied by the same scribe on an earlier folio of this same source (see Congregamini omnes, Ben 35, fol. 15v) providing some further evidence for the accuracy of the added staff line in this example.
34 Ymnum canite is notated with a D final, a solution that, because of the limited range of this piece, has no effect on the pitch structure and can be understood as a transposition for notational convenience.
35 Several small figures that are illustrated in Example 8 as components of larger formulas are found with great consistency in diverse melodic contexts. For example, the repeated podatus in figure 14 appears almost always on the pitches G-A. When a podatus appears alone at the beginning of a phrase it is also often on those same pitches (as in figure 14). Another example is the porrectus in figure 28. Although there are occasional examples of this figure at several pitch levels, it appears pervasively throughout the repertory at the pitch DCD.
36 There are several figures in Lumen quod that are not catalogued in this study because they appear in fewer than four pieces in the repertory. The opening figure can be compared to the opening of verse 1 in the ingressa Surge propera, and the figure at the end of the first line is found in a Beneventan antiphon, Congregamini omnes, Ben 35, fol. 15v.
37 In reference to the Gregorian and trope repertories in Ben 40, John Boe notes that ‘numerous small adjustments of diastematy, as if for clef changes, occur’, BTC, 16:xvii.
38 For example, a literal transcription of the communion Ymnum canite (Ben 40, fol. 20) would place the repeated formulaic material in the two iterations of the alleluia one tone apart; similarly, in the ingressa Maria vidit angelum (Ben 40, fol. 159v), a literal transcription of the beginning of the terminal alleluia would begin a third lower than the cadence figure G5 that ends the last verse. The beginning of the alleluia should in fact begin on G, as indicated (with a custos) in the same ingressa in Ben 38, fol. 53 and in a similar passage from Sancti videntes (Ben 40, fol. 159v).
39 However, in transcriptions in TBC, Kelly has indicated these breaks with a notation indicating a specific pitch. This pragmatic solution has the advantage of economy and provides a clear indication of the place where the editor has decided to adjust the line.
40 Pal Mus XIV, 446.
41 However, in addition to the sections of Beneventan chant, the F line is not added to tropes and offertory verses that were no longer in liturgical use, suggesting that the Beneventan pieces had also ceased to be sung in the liturgy, Pal Mus XXI, 350.
