The Transmission of Medieval Music

here, for the opening of a verse after the first, is typical. T h a t is, its range
expansion is reserved for a later phase of the chant. Occasionally it is used
simply near the end of a long verse. In eighteen of its occurrences it is at the
same pitch level as in the second verse here. And almost always the melisma
exits to figure B , as here. Both the pitch level and the liquidation of the
melisma in the third verse are unique. T h e r e are two quite different hypoth-
eses to account for that: either the elevated pitch level is a deliberate effect
of intensification o r it is the result of a writing error. I incline to the second
interpretation because of the statistical facts and because the first suggests an
aesthetic for which evidence has not otherwise been found in this manu-
script. T h e hypothesis of a writing error means that the same sequence of
graphic figures was written out, but at a level that is higher by one scale
degree. ( T h e neumes in this manuscript are oriented to a single horizontal
line rather than a staff; hence such errors could occur more easily than with
modern notation.) T o account for the unorthodox continuation at the end of
the melisma one has only to imagine that the notator saw that he had ended
too high and could not conclude with figure B, so h e had to make u p
something else. Such an interpretation is consistent with a general view
about the status of this manuscript a n d its tradition that is summarized
below.
What has just been described is a generative system for offertories in F in
the Roman tradition. Given a text, a knowledge of the principles inferred in
the description should be sufficient for the making of such a chant." It also
constitutes the description of a genre. T h e identification of generative sys-
tems for the genres of plainchant answers the question about the nature of
the oral tradition, for neither the transmission and retention of the princi-
ples of such a generative system nor its realization as a particular chant
demands or even suggests writing. For that reason alone I call the making of
chants on the basis of such systems an oral process. But then there is no
reason to think that it is a fundamentally different process if the maker has
written the chant down in a book rather than singing it out in the service.
T h a t is what it means to suggest that the book may be understood as the
documentation of a performance practice, either at first hand or by way of
copies.
This situation has parallels in the study of literature. Parry, Lord, and
Magoun had claimed that formulaic style was an "indisputable sign" of oral
composition, whereas Larry Benson demonstrated that formulaic style is
"characteristic not just of the 'oral' epic of Beow@ but also of some written
composition in Old English, including Old English translations from Latin
originals. . . ." Benson concluded: "to prove that an Old English poem is
formulaic is only to prove that it is a n Old English poem, and to show that
such a work has a high or low percentage of formulas reveals nothing about

l 1 "Sufficient" is said here in the strict logical sense. There are other offertory genres in F that
d o not involve exactly the same set of rules.
 The Transmission of Medieval Music 48 1
whether o r not it is a literate c ~ m p o s i t i o n . " 'It
~ strikes me that the wrong
question has been asked of the evidence. Formulaic style, like the generative
system described for the Roman offertory, is what Walter Ong has called a
"residual" of oral tradition.13 Both are understandable in the light of a
continuity from oral to written practice. That seems a fundamentally more
important historical matter than the question of whether this or that produc-
tion should be classified as "oral" or "literate."
With respect to the "residuals" of oral tradition in written practice, it is
necessary to recognize yet another distinction, between those residuals that
are still active in the production of poetry and music in the written medium,
and those that are literally tags of oral production, transcribed and brought
down in writing through a generation or more of copies. Only through
control of the evidence is it possible to make judgments about what is
involved in particular cases. In Old English literature, as Benson recognized,
translation from the Latin is an instance of the first kind.
T h e Roman tradition represented by Example 1 is of special interest
because of the evidence it presents with respect to these questions. T h e
oldest chant books referred to above are Frankish. T h e Frankish tradition
has been the basis of the official chant of the Western Church ever since
Charlemagne, and there is a tradition going back to his time for tracing the
origins of that chant - known since then as "Gregorian chant" - to Rome.
But the oldest surviving chant books of Roman origin are three graduals
(among them Vat. 5319) and two antiphoners, the oldest of them dated to
1071 and the others to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Their tradition
is distinct from the Frankish one in style and partly so in content, but
sufficiently close to it in liturgical and melodic content to suggest a common
ancestry.
T h e written tradition of Frankish chant is more than a century older than
that of Roman chant. Furthermore, the Frankish tradition continued, in
some sense, into modern times, while the written tradition of Roman chant
ended with the establishment of the Frankish tradition in Rome in the
thirteenth century. By means of indirect liturgical evidence, however, it has
been possible to trace the indigenous Roman tradition back to the eighth
century.14 That means at least three centuries of oral tradition, followed by
at most one century of written transmission. None of the Roman books can
be very far removed from the oral tradition. Analysis of the written trans-
mission confirms this premise and also shows that the Roman tradition had a
longer period to develop the characteristic traits of an oral tradition.': In
fact the evidence suggests that during the century or less of writing, Roman

l2 Summarized from Finnegan, Oral Poetry, pp. 69-70.

l3 "African Talking Drums and Oral Noetics," New Literary History 8 (1977), 41 1-30.
l 4 Michel Huglo, "Le chant 'vieux-romain': Liste des manuscrits et temoins indirects," Sncris

erlrdcrz 4 (1954), 96-123.

' T h i s hypothesis is developed in my paper, "Homer and Gregory: T h e Transmission of Epic
Poetry and Plainchant," T ~ M E uszcal Quarter4 60 (1974), 333-72.
 The Transmission of Medieval Music
chant did not really develop a written tradition in the strict sense at all. T h e
Romans did not even develop a notational idiolect, as did every other region
with its own written tradition; they simply used the system of nearby Bene-
vento. And among the Roman office and mass books there is disagree-
ment on matters of every sort, disagreement that has earned the Roman
tradition a reputation for unreliability. It seems that the individual books
present more or less independent precipitations of the oral tradition. Ac-
cordingly they are close witnesses to the performance practice and primary
sources for the study of early written process in an oral tradition.
T h e realization of the Roman offertory out of its generative system has
already been characterized as an oral process. There are two indications that
written process entered into the transmission at the same time. T h e first is
the evidence of a Frankish source as a model, which seems to have interfered
with the Roman adaptor's correct application of the principles of his own
tradition. T h e second is the melisma at the wrong pitch level, which offers
especially good insight into the nature of writing in pre-literate circum-
stances. T h e melisma, one must presume, was fixed as a resource of the
performance practice for that genre. T h e notator wrote it out for the third
verse, either from memory o r copying it, perhaps from the second verse; it
doesn't really matter which. Either way, there was not the feedback of
content that we take for granted as an aspect of writing in a literate tradition.
And so when the notator ended too high at the conclusion of the melisma he
was taken by surprise and had to improvise, so to speak. T o be sure such
things happen often to copyists in traditions that we d o not hesitate to call
literate. But the point here is that this episode is an aspect of a transmission
that also entails oral processes. This notator was not a copyist. Like the
Brazilian editor of Le Dhsir, he was copying and remembering and compos-
ing, all at once.
T h e Roman offertory in Example 1 illustrates with unusual clarity the
phenomenon of writing down, with previously written models as reference,
in the midst of an oral tradition. Example 2, on the other hand, shows the
marks of oral process in a tradition that was evidently transmitted in writing
from the beginning - the tradition of the liturgical tropes. Their written
transmission began more or less contemporaneously with that of the Frank-
ish chant, and it spread over the same regions. If their transmission never-
theless shows signs of oral process, we shall have indication from the other
side that oral and written processes functioned quite consistently together in
the transmission of music between the introduction of the technology of
writing and the establishment of literacy.
Example 2 is a trope verse for the introduction of the second-mode introit
Mihi autem nimis, transcribed from two Aquitanian sources of the eleventh
century (a and b), a northern French source of the twelfth century (c), and a
Beneventan source of the twelfth century (d). Verses e and f a r e taken from
tropes for a different introit of the same mode. Their role in the argument
will become clear presently.
 The Transmission of Medieval Music
Example 2

'If N

a
pa-trem
L J
con -
-
1I
1
pel -
1
'
,
I I
.
I
-

,7 [A] - pos- to - 11 -
--- CIS ve - ne- ran-
e

a. B.N., MS lat. 1871, fol. 40'

b. B. N., MS lat. 887
c. B. N., MS lat. 1235
d. Benevento, MS VI 34
e. B. N., MS lat. 187 1, fol. 37'
f. B. N., MS lat. 1871, fol. 37

N (continued) 0
lans ta - Li - ter in - quit
484 The Transmission of Medieval Music
T h e first phrase (M) exemplifies a perplexing feature of the sources of
trope melodies - the often heterogeneous nature of the transmission. For
some trope melodies, however, there is a high degree of uniformity; there
can be a dozen sources for a trope melody that are virtual replicas of one
another. T h e tendency has been to take the uniformities as the norm,
reading them in the light of the paradigm of literacy and sweeping the rest
under the carpet. One could well d o the opposite: read the replicas in the
light of the production of multiple editions of Le Ddsir from the same
plates.16 In the end a satisfactory theory of transmission must take account
of both sorts of phenomena.
Often settings of a trope text that appear at first to be melodically inde-
pendent of one another turn out on closer examination to have common
features of structure and content at some underlying level. In Example 2 the
syllabic version of M in Paris, B.N. MS 1871, has done the analysis for us, so
to speak, by showing the simplest sort of structure, a circling motion about
the tonic, presented without any embellishment. T h e other inscriptions of
the phrase are all versions of that (which is not to imply that the version of
Paris 1871 is the original one; the priority that it has is only structural, so far
as we know). This structure is the simplest sort of generative system. Cer-
tainly there can be more complex generative systems for tropes, but they
would be realized in an equally wide range of versions. Just as in the case of
the Roman offertory in Example 1, the production of trope melodies from
such generative systems is an oral process.
Now that two examples have been given of oral process in the transmission
of medieval music, a more precise definition of that process is called for. It is
a process in which music is received and coded through hearing, retained
schematically in memory, and performed or transferred to writing from some
mental idea of it. Of course this is a definition in which place has deliberately
been left for the interaction of oral with written processes. Thus "hearing"
should be broad enough to include the situation in which a cantor, compiling
a book for his own use, sings - aloud or to himself - from written
exemplars and writes down a version of what he has assimilated from his
singing. There is a risk that this definition is so broad as to exclude little. But
it seems hard to justify distinguishing in any really fundamental way between
the situation just described and one in which a notator simply writes down
what he has heard somewhere. T h e intercession of oral process into what
has conventionally been regarded as straightforward transcription from one
source to another must be one characteristic of pre-literate written transmis-
sion.
T h e underlying structure identified for the phrase M in Example 2 is
not unique to this trope, as can be seen from e and f. In fact this structure is
just a common melodic turn of the mode. One might therefore conclude

'"he arguments for such an interpretation are developed in my paper, "Observations on the
Transmission of Some Aquitanian Tropes," Forum ~Musicologvum 3 (forthcoming).