The Transmission of Medieval Music

tion and explication of language.23T h e encoding of pitch intervals in west-

ern notation was accomplished through the introduction of principles or
devices, all of which can be understood as controls: diastematic neumes, the
horizontal line as pitch referent and the extension of that idea in the staff,
the use of pitch letters, signs of equivalence between notes at different levels,
custodes at the end of a line to indicate the first pitch of the next line,
and clefs.
T h e increase of controls in the pitch domain, a phenomenon mainly of the
eleventh century, was followed and closely parallelled about a century and a
half later by the institution of controls in the rhythmic domain. As with
pitch, the earliest rhythmic notation ("modal notation") was not a blueprint
for performance, but set the performer under way in his own construction
of the rhythmic patterns. Into that notational system were introduced signs
with explicit durational meaning, which functioned as controls. These devel-
opments make an especially strong impression when the sources for a single
piece transmit essentially identical contents, save that the later sources substi-
tute more explicit signs. Then there has been, in effect, a notational revision,
a purely written process.
Any system of notation that functions as a system of controls is based on
the assumption that the performer will approach the book with some notion
about what he is to perform. T h e notation gets him started, perhaps, and
keeps him on the track. T h e idea of a control system is just the right way to
think about the role of notation in an oral performing tradition. Yet there is
a point beyond which controls operate so closely and so constantly that the
notation becomes in actuality a system of direct representation rather than of
controls. When it functions that way, notation has realized an ideal that was
expressed by writers on music during the entire period under discussion
here, from Carolingian times to the thirteenth century - for explicit nota-
tions that could be read off by performers coming to them cold, for pre-
scriptive rather than descriptive notations.24 Thus Hucbald of Saint-Amand
(ca. 840-930): "As the sounds and differences of words are recognized by
letters in writing in such a way that the reader is not led into doubt, musical
signs were devised so that every melody notated by their means, once these
signs have been learned, can be sung even without a teacher. But this can
scarcely happen using the signs which custom has handed down to us and
which in various regions are given n o less various shapes, although they are
of some help as an aid to one's memory. . . ."'j Guido of Arezzo (ca.
1000-1050) claimed that by means of the staff notation for which he is
known "boys who until now have been beaten for their gross ignorance of
the psalms and vulgar letters" will be able to sing antiphons "correctly by
2"ee RitvaJonsson and Leo Treitler, "Medieval Music and Language," in Studies zn the I-iotory
of Music. 1: Texf and rMuszc (forthcoming).
2 4 See Charlea Seeger, "Prescriptive and Descriptive Music-Writing," Thr Musual Quarterly 44

(1958), 184-9'7.
2'Melorllc In.rtrzcctzon, trans. Warren Babb (New Haven, 1978), p. 36.
 The Transmission of Medieval Music
themselves" and "without a master, . . . something which, with God's help,
any intelligent and studious person will be able to d o if he try to understand
the intention with which we have arranged the n e ~ m e s . "And ~ ~ an English
writer of the thirteenth century, known only as "Anonymous IV," noted: "In
the old books the notation was equivocal because the simple signs were all
alike. T h e singers proceeded only by their intellect, saying 'I think this one is
a long, that one a breve.' Thus they worked a long time before they learned
well something which now everyone can easily learn by means of these
explanations, so that today every student will achieve more in one hour than
formerly in seven."*'
T h e one condition that could make possible the realization of this long-
desired ideal for musical notation is a conception of writing that is funda-
mentally different from that of controls functioning in an oral tradition. For
the writing down of speech John of Salisbury articulated the new idea in the
twelfth century: "Fundamentally letters are shapes indicating sounds. Hence
they represent things which they bring to mind through the windows of the
eyes. Frequently they speak uoicelessly the utterances of the ~hcent."~%n exact
counterpart for music writing is this definition by Johannes d e Muris (ca.
1319): "The musical note is a quadrilateral figure arbitrarily representative
of numbered sound measured by time," which gives a very precise sense to
his claim that "what can be sung can also be written d ~ w n . " ~ W ~ writing
hen
is thus conceived in the light of a complete equivalence between uttered
sound and written sign it can function as an autonomous mode of direct
communication, and no longer just as an aid to memory, as Hucbald put it.
It means, furthermore, that writing is to be read; reading is the correlate of
writing. These two conditions, an autonomous script and the parity of
reading and writing, are defining characteristics of a literate t r a d i t i ~ n . ~ ~
This line of reasoning was introduced with the suggestion that there are
two approaches to an understanding of the eventual predominance of writ-
ten process in the transmission of medieval music. T h e first proceeds from
the viewpoint of the nature of notation. T h e second proceeds from the
viewpoint of the contents that are transmitted. If content is represented with
increasing specificity, were there changes in the nature of the contents that
called for, or at least exploited, a more explicit notation? In the passage
quoted from Johannes d e Muris there is a hint of what was in fact a change
of the most radical sort in what musical notation had to represent. His
attention there is not to pitch, but to time. This reflects the major new

2"'I'rologue to His Antiphoner," in Oliker Strunk, Soltrrr Rmdixgc in iZliuic H ~ c t (New

o ~ York,
1950), p. 118.
'' Reckow, Xflcszktraktat, 1:49-50.
Z n Cited b? Clanchy, From ,l.lemory to U ' r i t t r ~Rrrord,
~ p. 207.
' ' A r s nozvzr V~N.~ICUP,
in Strunk, Source Rradingi, p. 175.
" Havelock points to the individuality of written creations as a mark of literate tradition
("The Pre-Literacy of the Greeks"). It hardly needs to be said that an autonomolls script is a
precondition of such individualism.
 The Transmission of Medieval Music 49 1
preoccupation of composers and theorists of music in the twelfth and thir-
teenth centuries: the coordination of time, a newly recognized dimension for
musical ordering, with pitch.
T h e concern with the duration of notes was not prompted only by a new
interest in organizing melodic sequences in rhythmic patterns as a matter of
stylistic preference. Because most of the new music of.the period involved
two or more voices, it was the coordination of voices that forced attention to
duration; more specifically and essentially, it was the control of the sequence
of consonances and dissonances formed by the voices. T h e regulation of
voices in respect of both pitch and time created a new level of complexity. It
called for decisions to be made in advance and communciated, through
notation, to performers. T h e effect of this was a tendency to fix music, both
conceptually and notationally - not for canonical reasons, or initially for
aesthetic ones, but primarily for practical reasons.31
Musical literacy is the transmissional side of that radically new situation.

" This point is fully developed in m y "Regarding Meter and Rhythm" (see above, n. 17).