Making Music: Performance and Pedagogy Across the Medieval World

“Music is so naturally united within us that we cannot be free from it even if we so desired.” In the first book of his treatise, On the Principles of Music, Boethius meditates on the integral relationship of music to the deepest part of human nature. The predominance of music across the boundaries of culture, gender, genre, language, and faith is as markedly manifest in the medieval period as it is today. This exhibition of Penn’s diverse collection of music manuscripts is a testament to this fact, as well as to the harmonizing power of music itself. The exhibition is organized in a tripartite structure in order to feature the primary archetypes of medieval musical material: theories of music, sacred song, and secular melodies.

The Kislak Center for Rare Books and Manuscripts counts an elegant copy of Boethius’s On The Principles of Music as one of its prized treasures on music theory (LJS 47). Though this particular copy is from the 15^th century, it embodies the culmination of the previous thousand years of theoretical development in music. As music was one of the four foundational branches of knowledge featured in the quadrivium, Boethius’s Principles became the seminal textbook for students of music in the medieval West. On the other hand, a student studying music in the Islamic East would have turned to the Kitab al-adwar, or the Book of Cycles (LJS 295). Like Boethius, the author of the Book of Cycles drew upon Pythagorean principles to illustrate his music-theoretical treatise. When paired together, these paradigms of early music theory exemplify the cross-cultural common knowledge base from which medieval scholars drew, and which they subsequently enhanced with their own discoveries.

Two other items in this collection, a liturgical miscellany (Ms Codex 1248) and a copy of a mass with The Life of Saint Blaise, blend theory and practice with depictions of Guidonian hands, used to aid singers in sight singing. The crafting of sacred music capitalized on the theoretical developments that had proliferated around the medieval world, translating theory into performance and memory within religious communities. Certain liturgical manuscripts in the Penn collection highlight the active participation of women in ecclesiastical life in particular. A primary representation of women’s involvement in the creation of medieval musical books is a century Cistercian Psalter written in the hand of a female scribe (Ms Codex 655). In addition to bookmaking, men and women also worshipped together, as demonstrated in a Processional that contains both feminine and masculine Latin forms in its liturgical directions (Ms Codex 1229). Such objects underscore the various roles of music manuscripts in religious orders, while proving that male and female members of these communities partook in their creation and their activation together.

            Although most extant notated music from the medieval era is ritual in nature, secular music in the vernacular was written down with greater frequency as the centuries progressed. One of the Kislak Center’s “greatest hits” is an early 15^th century Chansonnier, or songbook, which compiles poems by authors like Petrarch and Guillaume de Machaut (Ms Codex 902). The Kislak’s copy of a mid 16^th century anthology of Italian poems and canzone rounds out this section (Ms Codex 279), along with a chronicle of life in 16^th century Florence which includes a musical score for a song sung at Carnivale (Ms. Codex 564). Such collections provide invaluable insight into the relationship between poetry and music while demonstrating the evolution of that relationship over the centuries during the medieval period.  

This extraordinary collection of objects not only accentuates the strength and the diversity of the medieval manuscript material at Penn, but also demonstrates the transmission of musical knowledge in a wide variety of medieval contexts. As musical practices evolved, older liturgical manuscripts were frequently fragmented and repurposed in a way that poetry and liturgical texts rarely were. Medieval music scores are often found bound with other documents and scribbled in margins; in other cases, they only survive as incidentally recycled material attached to books as pastedowns, and even bindings. Many of the manuscripts presented in this exhibition feature such examples of music manuscript fragments, such as Italian codex LJS 450 whose central text is a collection of 15^th century legal treatises, but whose pastedowns come from a 12^th century antiphonal. Far from relegating music to the margins of medieval life, these pieces instead emphasize the omnipresent import of music during the period. Such survivals reveal details about the intended audiences, the functions of the books themselves, often enhancing the meanings of the songs they contain. The fragmentary, ephemeral nature of many music manuscripts yields unique insights into the broader study of the history of the book.

The manuscript tradition is the primary extant evidence for the performance and reception of medieval music. The central aim of this exhibition is to demonstrate the capacity of music manuscripts to transform the aural into the material and vice versa, while revealing aspects of the cultures in which they were produced. What resonates most throughout this collection are the ways in which these manuscripts were activated through pedagogy and performance. Music manuscripts such as these distinguish themselves from other genres of material texts through their communal activation, such as in the sharing ancient theoretical knowledge, the teaching of vernacular poetry, and the gathering of ecclesiastical communities around the collective performance of song. More than a vector for preserving knowledge and cultivating tradition, medieval music manuscripts performed an active role in medieval life. As such, they provide an essential, tangible link in the present to the past, merging the performance of a prior moment with the material object that survives into the present day.