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Round Table 1
Reinhard Strohm (Oxford) | Anne Marie Busse Berger (Univ. of California, Davis)
Reinhard Strohm (Oxford)
Early Music as History
I. The Early Music Argument (a brief summary)
‘Early Music’ (EM) is not a type of music, it is an argument about music that segments past music into preferred and rejected
repertoires.
‘Early Music’ (EM) is usually understood as the name of both a repertoire and an approach (or ideology), or of a repertoire that is defined by a certain way of thinking. EM is an argument about the character of music of the past; its
difference from mainstream thinking about music lies in its sharper segmentation of the past into good and bad or at
least into preferred and rejected. Thus EM creates a repertoire defined by empathy rather than strictly historiographical criteria. Certainly, value claims and empathies about the past had already been typical of historicism and Romanticism, and the selections arising from these empathies have become the canons of twentieth-century mainstream culture (although some differences will have to be considered below). However, EM applies its selection in a more general
way to practically all Western music.
‘Early music’ is not the same as ‘old music’ but implies an organicist criterion.
There does not seem to be a conceptual need for a separation of ‘early music’ from all other music. All music, as soon
as it has become the subject of classifications (in repertoires, styles, oeuvres or fashions), is already in the past and as
such ‘early’ by comparison with newly-created, present music. So why do we not always simply speak of ‘past music’?
When the phrase ‘early music’ is used, a special value claim or argument is made that promotes or defends a certain
type of music or musical performance against another. The phrase ‘early music’ stands in opposition, above all, to
‘recent’ or ‘modern’ music. It also sets itself apart from music tout court, claiming to be special; and, it rivals the simple
term of ‘old music’, being more euphemistic about age, as one usually is with human beings. The terms ‘early’ and
‘late’, when applied to historical chronology, introduce a notion of organic life and assign a natural life-span to the
things so named.
EM reflects an anti-modern sentiment characteristic of advanced capitalist societies.
The EM concept has different roots in different linguistic areas. The English term ‘early music’ probably goes back to
the years after 1945 when both Britain and the USA were concerned with their European cultural roots. Already in
the 1920s and 1930s, German listeners were aware of ‘Musik der Frühzeit’: concerts dedicated to the medieval repertoire were held under this or related titles, and the religious or mystic appeal of medieval music was being invoked.1
‘Frühe Musik’, ‘early music’ (and presumably also ‘dawna muzyka’ in Polish) sounds much fresher, much more
appealing than ‘old music’; the adjective was almost intended as an equivalent to ‘young’. ‘Junge Musik’ was, likewise,
an anti-modern movement in German culture of that era. Identity, particularly as a national culture, was asserted by
promoting roots, youth and innovation; the fear of musical modernism served as a stimulus for the appeal to deep
national traditions in music. It is only superficially paradoxical that an appeal to roots and tradition could simultaneously pose as a quest for innovation: there are many precedents for this phenomenon in European culture – the humanist device ‘ad fontes’ to name but one example. EM implied a big validity claim, as it was directed with some hostility
1
For some observations, see Lawrence Bernstein, ‘Ockeghem. The mystic Interpretation of 1920’, in Johannes Ockeghem: Actes du
XLe colloque international d’études humanistes, Tours, 3-8 février 1997, ed. by P. Vendrix (Paris, Klincksieck, 1998), 811-41.
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towards other types of culture, and was analogous to other anti-modern movements of the twentieth century.2 The
fact that no direct equivalent to the term has been created in the Romance languages, which have continued to use
synonyms of ‘old music’, may be linked to the observation that in those countries the presumed loss of cultural traditions and the fear of musical modernism have been less prominent. On the other hand, also in German, the term
‘Alte Musik’ is regularly used and appreciated by a more traditionally conservative social group: those to whom the
term ‘old’ is acceptable as a value statement in itself. The EM movement was a complex twentieth-century phenomenon within the ‘condition moderne’ of progressive capitalist societies, whereas in earlier forms of capitalism and in
socialist state-capitalism the tradition of nationalist /monumental/ museal uses of culture remained dominant,
alongside universalist claims and technocratic innovations.3
The EM argument attributes an alterity value to selected types of music.
EM or ‘Historically Informed Performance’ (HIP) is an argument pertaining to the nature of music and the nature of
history.4 It is a legitimacy argument – a narrative that strives to establish a value. Its central thrust is the ‘alterity value’
of its subject. The music in question is something rather than something else: primeval rather than progressive, old
rather than new but at the same time ‘young’ rather than ‘old’, root rather than branch, ascent rather than descent, far
rather than near. The practical demonstrations of this argument were often striking: replacing the piano by the harpsichord (Wanda Landowka), visiting the Peruvian Andes to study medieval instruments (David Munrow), reintroducing
the countertenor into Baroque music performance (Alfred Deller), admitting soprano registers to Gregorian chant
performance (Alexander Blachly) – these and many other actions of HIP demonstrated a historical mindset which was
seriously intended to change practice. But in order to do so within a generally historicist culture, EM had to propose a
difference in its view of history as well, had to state or imply that the music it was cultivating was other than what professional music history had declared. It proposed that music before Beethoven (or thereabouts) had not only been
different from after, but that it had been different from what it was commonly believed to have been. There was thus
a sort of Hegelian antithesis in the action of defamiliarising pre-classical music (and perhaps a synthesis following that
antithesis has meanwhile occurred), but there was also a Derridean contretemps in saying and playing things the other
way round apparently just for the sake of it, and there certainly was a Lyotardian disbelief in the grand narrative of the
monumental symphony and oratorio tradition.
Despite its anti-modern sympathies, EM is linked to modernism and positivism.
Although it is a historical argument, EM does not offer a fundamental change in its epistemology over that of mainstream history. Among the dominant trends of the 1950s academia were not only the traditional idealistic views of art as
individual expression, of authorship and progress (of which EM is critical), but also the positivistic belief in historical
texts, documents, monuments, watermarks, material relics (including musical instruments) and environmental contexts. The belief in textual objectivity in music was denounced by Adorno as ‘regressive’ – this was his verdict not
only upon EM but also upon Jazz, for example.5 Adorno recognised the internal contradictions of EM to be an integral part of twentieth-century culture, as he related its alleged ‘regressivity’ of hearing, its ‘resentment posture’, to mass
culture and the levelling of standards. But in focusing his observations on the victims of mass culture he perhaps underestimated the degree to which this positivism was sponsored by the leading intellectual institutions of the 1950s,
2
John Butt, Playing with History: the Historical Approach to Musical Performance, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), analyses in detail the status of Early Music /Historically Informed Performance in the culture of modernism and postmodernism. See
also Harry Haskell, ‘Early Music’, in Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy (Accessed 29 March 2006), http://www.grovemusic.com.
3 The study of ethnomusicology, for example, was centrally promoted in the Soviet Union and in Poland during
the communist era, more than the study of old music.
4 HIP is the term used in Butt, Playing with History; the precondition for this name-change was the replacement, by the 1990s, of
the concept of ‘historical authenticity’ in performance of old music by locutions such as ‘historically aware performance’or ‘historically informed performance’. The name-change at least ostensibly removes the reference to a particular repertoire or ‘type of
music’, introducing in its place a type of practice.
5 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Bach gegen seine Liebhaber verteidigt’, in: Th. W. Adorno, Prismen. Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft (Berlin,
1955); Theodor W. Adorno, Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie. Zwölf theoretische Vorlesungen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1962); Laurence
Dreyfus, ‘Early Music defended against its devotees: a theory of historical performance in the twentieth century’, Musical Quarterly
69 (1983), 297-322. See also Max Paddison, Adorno, Modernism and Mass Culture. Essay on Critical Theory and Culture (London, 1996),
81-105.
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for example in the new critical editions of the great composers. At that time the practice of EM was even more a
middle-class enclave within musical culture as a whole than it is now. The construction of a utopia of the past, with
positivistic means, had long been part of dominant culture, not least in the commercial sense, as for example when
Deutsche Grammophon produced its series “Wergo” (music by avantgarde composers) and “Archiv Produktion”
(EM) as useful satellites to its main series, for similar and overlapping although not identical audiences. That EM fulfilled a complementary cultural function to high modernism had been understood in 1960s Germany. Later Richard
Taruskin bluntly identified EM with modernism itself; in this first attempt at historicising the movement, he managed
at least to deny its contretemps, its presumption that it was not part of the establishment.6
Further entanglements of EM with establishment culture.
Meanwhile both individualism and mainstream attitudes have grown within EM/HIP, so that its postmodern credentials have come to the fore;7 its freshness has decreased with its relative success; the practical overlaps between EM
and mainstream production remain large or have grown, particularly in the music circulation field (EM is part of mainstream tourism and festivals, early opera is part of operatic fashion culture, and so forth), and other, technological
collaborations are being developed that may have begun already in the DG/Archiv Produktion era. The well-known
shifts of the EM concept, for example in redefining its ‘repertoire’(the Krakow conference defines it as ‘Middle Ages
to mid-nineteenth century’) have mostly been linked to twentieth-century exploration of the repertoires and to wider
developments, for example technological ones. They were also connected with changes in musicology, for example in
its critical debate of canons, work-concepts, musical notation, orality and acculturation. The trend in musicology to
separate nineteenth- and twentieth-century musical culture sharply from the antecedents, to which in turn an extra
alterity value has accrued, may have been a successful influence of the ideological position of EM upon musicology
(see also part III. below).
Continuing distinctiveness of EM.
Thus the legitimacy argument of EM, its claimed alterity value, has always been at stake and continues to require negotiation in practice and debate. An account of EM’s contributions to twentieth-century culture would have to consider not only its fleeting or inevitable liaisons with other aspects of culture, but above all the continuing distinctions
and exclusions that the EM argument has generated: what it has always stood for – internationalism, for example – or
always avoided – musical analysis, for example. These examples alone confirm again that the obedience of EM to
modernism is only partial and that it has maintained a wider eclectic attitude with different inferences. But it is perhaps a major exclusion that the practice of EM ‘falls short of the present’: it does not ultimately lead to the creation of
new early music, it is in fact wholly unconcerned with composing. This is philosophically relevant, because if the present can be filled entirely with music already heard in the past, then all music is ‘of the past’ and not only the early
branches of it.
II. The historical nature of music.
EM’s quest for sonority as a historical quality of music.
The nature of music is an object of historical investigation, but also an image or utopia that we present to each other
within our present cultural paradigms. The twentieth century was not only the first age that reproduced music electronically, but also the first age that systematically reproduced ancient acoustic instruments. The quest was for technological as well as historical control of sonority, an aspect of music which at the same time became a prominent parameter
in serialist composition (for example in Webern or Messiaen).8 This observation strongly supports the analogy or
alliance between modernism and EM. In the latter, a ‘past’ sonority speaks to the performer and listener mostly
6
Richard Taruskin, ‘The Pastness of the Present and the Presentness of the Past’, in Nicholas Kenyon (ed.), Authenticity and Early
Music, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 137-207; repr. in R. Taruskin, Text and Act (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 90-154; see also Butt, Playing with History, part 3, ch. 5.
7 On the recent years, see again Butt, Playing with History, part 3.
8 Initially this trend borrowed its terminology from the domain of visual art, as in the metaphoric names of Klangfarbenkomposition
or Farbklavier.
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through the instrument; the reconstruction of early instruments and ensembles is still the strongest original quest of
EM – more recently also including historical vocal techniques (‘the grain of ancient voices’). The contrasting sonorities of, say, Bach performances are hallmarks of difference which even the musically illiterate listener can apprehend
and occasionally remember. The slightly more experienced listener can easily identify the sound of certain ensembles,
more so than perhaps the respective pieces. (This is a parallel with pop music.) Recording technology has enormously
helped research of ‘performing practices’ by allowing comparisons between various historical recordings, which usually have the effect of demonstrating the contingency and volatility of the EM sonority over time. Some of the more
radical innovators of HIP made their statement in the domain of sonority, for example Joshua Rifkin and Andrew
Parrott with Bach performances using solo voices only. They attempted to legitimise a radically changed sound with
new archival research of its historical basis – so much so that they enriched the EM argument with both their new
sonority and their newly appreciated Leipzig documents, even if the two elements did not ultimately support each
other.9 History and sonority have become further intertwined in the recent developments of museum culture, heritage
industry and the media, where the production of ‘historical sounds’ has acquired a repertorial status almost in its own
right, a development that will surely gain momentum (see also part III. below).10 On the other hand, the general saturation of acoustic environments with ‘canned’ music keeps awake a nostalgia for pre-electronic sonorities and live
performances; recordings will increasingly have to mimick live performances or even informal music-making to meet
this nostalgia.11 In addition to the specific grain of live sounds of today, we could now reconstruct the properties of
historical acoustic environments – if not in the name of history then at least in that of alterity. EM has certainly kickstarted
a trend to experience sonority as historically differentiated. It has begun, although not yet achieved, the musical differentiation of industrial and pre-industrial life-worlds. It has in practice reflected the physical aura of twentieth-century
music more than it wished to admit, but has in theory reflected it less than its historicist project would have allowed.
The past of music...
The awareness, control, manipulation and historical categorisation of sonorities, as they are jointly promoted by sound
technology and EM, probably separates our musical experience more radically from that of the past than any difference of musical notations, uses of styles or even of socio-economical conditions could have ever done. It can hardly be
otherwise when we consider the special historical nature of music as sound. In fact, music seems to slip far more
easily and quickly into the past than does architecture, for example – but it also owes its aesthetic appearance much
more to the present than they do. Philosophers have noted the ephemeral nature of music, the transitoriness of sound
– a supposed drawback of the art which the advent of musical writing has not remedied (whereas the recording technology has also resuscitated nostalgia for live performances). Few have observed, however, that music seems so easily
to disappear in time because it has always belonged there in the first place. Does music have a different kind of past
than other artistic practices and traditions? And, may this different kind of past even have anything to do with the fact
that music is itself a performative and thus ‘temporary’art?
...is not a historical but an aesthetic construct.
If a project of EM has been the historicisation (or historical differentiation) of sonorities, then it may at first glance
seem to have fallen short of the mark. At least to the non-expert listener, the age of a piece of music, when played, is
irrelevant in the context of its sonority. If the sounds of the EM repertoire and of the mainstream concert tradition
9
The support was in fact expected to be mutual: the proposal to perform the works with vocal soloists first of all required support by historical data showing they had been performed that way in Bach’s own time; but then, the success of these modern
performances was to be heard as support for reading the historical documentation that way, in case it was ambiguous (which it
apparently was).
10 In his rich chapter on the heritage industry, Butt (Playing with History, part 3, ch. 6) only skirts the issue of historical sonorities,
but offers the example of modern sound technologies as allies of historical reproduction in broadcasting the acoustic environment of ‘inhospitable churches that have an ideal acoustic for certain types of music’ (p. 192).
11 Since the excitement of traditional live recordings of symphony concerts is so much enhanced (at least in my experience) by the
‘surround sound’ broadcasting of the buzz of the concert hall, including the orchestra’s tuning, HIP ensembles, too, may have to
learn to tune their strings before the microphone during transmission. The neatness with which in EM recordings the pieces are
separated from each other by absolute silence is obviously a modernist tradition. But the next generation will presumably draw
similar excitement from the noise made by traditional long playing records.
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are distinct, the listener does not draw a historical lesson from this, but rather blames (or praises) the performers. Pop
music or non-western music sound very different again, and surely not because they have different historical ancestries. Listeners may say that the base-line for the EM argument should not have been historical at all but aesthetic:
performers should have offered undated pieces seeking applause only for their different sensual appeal. In fact, the
legitimacy claim based on a revaluation of the past which EM has always fielded, was additional to the aesthetic claim
and only too obviously appealed to mainstream historicism and heritage culture; it was not a purely musical argument.
But I suggest that the anchorage of the EM argument in special historical repertoires will disappear in the twenty-first
century: EM performers will produce many types of music, including invented types; they will reconstruct much less
and construct more, following the fluctuations of how society will wish history to be sensually represented. This is
how aesthetics and history will come together: history will be constructed to accord with aesthetics.
Music lives in memory before it becomes history.
This touches upon the important question how deeply history can be ingrained in music at all. The time-character of
music (which of course it shares with drama, dance, film, sport, ceremony and other performative practices) is not
anchored in what we call ‘historical time’ but in what we perceive as lived or remembered time: memory.12 That is to
say, music does not last in a particular given form that slowly deteriorates with age, but unfolds ‘time and again’ in
lived time as directed by memory. In this sense, music certainly has a different past from that of sculpture, for example. Now it seems also clear that a live experience of sounds, stored in the memory, is essential to the recognition of
music as such and of differences between musics, and that the experience of sounds can be communicated through
other sounds. Together, the two forms of transmission – recollection and communication – may form something like
a chain, a mini-history, particularly when negotiation and agreement between transmitting individuals are required. A
song shared between two people (mother and child, for example) already transcends the individual memory and has
assumed some of the testifying and allegorical nature that historical artefacts usually possess. But as the formalisation
and therefore historicisation of such an artefact accrues, for example through writing, recording, telling about, or reenacting, it does not gain any additional historical sound, only new, present sounds. While newly unfolded in time, the
performance of the old song recapitulates history, aids the perception of the flow of time in the artefact itself. This is
not the case with, for example, an ancient painting or building, which remains basically the same object whether looked at today or tomorrow (save deterioration), whereas performed music appears as a new act situated differently in
the flow of time and thus apt to be used as its marker. The song can be used, for example, to recall the past, trigger
memory, document the ‘intertemporality’ of its performer or creator, or it can demonstrate the divergence of real time
(performing time) from memory (virtual, compressed time).13
The historical nature of music is re-enacted through performance.
It cannot be discussed here in detail how the mini-history just mentioned, the one attached to the shared song, may
ultimately become integrated in a ‘musical’ history. So much is certain, musical memory has an amazing longevity. Not
only does the ‘natural’, spontaneous and individual memory, for example of an old song learned in childhood, remain
with us for life, but even more the collective, consciously remembered and re-evoked memory, remembrance. It links
whole generations musically with the past.14 This can be demonstrated even with the aspect that is so difficult to historicise – sonority: if Josquin’s sound strikes us as different from Beethoven’s, then that is not because he belongs to
a far more distant age, but because we ‘hear’ in Josquin’s music the ideologically constructed alterity of the a cappella
sound of the last two centuries, an aesthetic which may have influenced personal memories and which is before us in
the form of narrated history and thinking of the past. The indispensable recapitulation or re-enactment of this sound
in performances, with its re-interpretations and possibly its undoing (for example through soloistic performances),
gives sensual presence to these volatile constructions, so that the historical imagination is constantly fed with aural
12
On relations between memory and history, see especially Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative vol. 3, trans. by Kathleen Blamey and
David Pellauer, U. of Chicago Press, 1988, ch. 4, ‘Between lived time and universal time: historical time’, 104-126, and (with more
emphasis on memory) idem, La mémoire, l’historie, l’oubli (Paris: Seuil, 2000).
13 Further on categories of musical time, see Jonathan D. Kramer, The Time of Music: New Meanings, New Temporalities, New Listening
Strategies (New York: Schirmer, 1988), ch. 1.
14 On the distinction between memory and remembrance, or memoria and reminiscentia (Aristotle), souvenir and rappel, see especially
Ricoeur, La mémoire, part I: ‘De la mémoire et de la réminiscence’.
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references. The sounding hieroglyphs of old music are credibly old, not simply because they happen to have first been
created a long time ago, but because we are constantly reminded of their ancienneté. This is of course not to deny that
also visual art or language possess historicity of a constructed sort – but the constant re-enactment (or reconstruction)
of music or ritual texts in performance seems to mark the historical time distances more ‘memorably’. These constructions of aural history are often literally accessible only to the educated, but in fact education and history are allies
in the enlargement of the memory they aim for.
The uses of memory and time in music are historical parameters.
The contributions of Anna Maria Busse Berger on the role of memory and writing in medieval music demonstrate
that music’s use of memory and time is constitutive to its own history: in the obvious sense that different uses of time
are almost as characteristic of historical musical styles as different uses of space are of the styles of architecture or
sculpture – and in the not so obvious sense that people whose consciousness of time is different, create and enjoy
different music.15 In this respect, the alterity claim of EM is far from established. Leaving aside certain experiments
with musical performance time (all-day performances, for example) which were rather promoted by avantgarde or
postmodern musicians, our perceptions of old music could have been challenged much more by earnest debates about, and creative work with, musical time. The serialist avantgarde (again) has long probed into extremes such as Webern’s Punktuelle Musik; minimalism, conversely, dissolves the uniqueness of the musical moment in time. Canned
music, a depraved form of minimalism, surrounds us like an acoustic conditioning. The possibly consciousness-raising
potential of full monastic offices or uncut Baroque operas listened to in real time – would they fade into musical wallpaper or not? – has too rarely been exploited. Even the question of historical tempi and time-shaping (Zeitgestaltung),
an aspect of style almost as sensually relevant as is that of sonority, seems to have been neglected recently.16 Nonwestern music can most palpably demonstrate uses of time in music that contrast with the western mainstream repertoire, but there may also be analogous European musical traditions that deserve further exploration, such as the
status of the musician who works from memory (the Greeks attributed the control of musical memory to the Muses
themselves), or the ritual functions of collective listening (for example in modern concert life).17 EM could make a
large contribution by demonstrating such cultural differentiations in their historical significance.
III. Early Music and the History of Western Music.
The contribution of EM to a historiography of Western music is meaningful, not only because it constitutes a present
practice that must ultimately form part of our musical history (just like any other musical practice), but even more
because it proposes an argument about the historical nature of music that may change our minds and thus our history.
In its empathies and antipathies for various musical practices and styles, in its segmentation of the past into ‘early’ and
‘modern’, in its reconstructions and revivalism, EM strives for a self-legitimation that is uncannily similar to the thrust
of Renaissance humanism: the revival of a partly utopian ancient culture, accompanied by a negative bias against more
recent traditions. Before enquiring about the reasons for this analogy, we have to describe some of its major manifestations.
Deconstruction of monuments and canons?
As far as EM has contributed (mostly through its practice rather than its theory) to the development of musical historiography, it has usually played an only quietly revisionist role. Although it has remained somewhat agnostic towards
the meta-narratives of great masters and schools, of national identities, and especially of progress in musical art, it has
just as often endorsed them at least indirectly. An anti-progressistic role could most easily be maintained in the field
of medieval music, where mainstream culture saw only the antecedents of greater things to come (Friedrich Ludwig’s
point of view, as characterised by Busse Berger). But even in this field, discussions of the so-called ‘a cappella heresy’
15 See also Anna Maria Busse Berger, Medieval Music and the Art of Memory (Berkeley-Los Angeles-London: University of California
Press, 2005).
16 Willibald Gurlitt, ‘Form in der Musik als Zeitgestaltung’,
Abhandlungen der geistesgeschichtlichen und sozialwissenschaftlichen Klasse,
Akademie der Wissenschaften Mainz no. 13, year 1954 (1955), 651-75
17 On the latter, see for example Hanns-Werner Heister, Das Konzert: Theorie einer Kulturform, 2 vols (Wilhelmshave: Heinrichshofen, 1983; tmw 87-88)
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have shown how little consensus there is about the relative alterity of medieval music, in its intellectual make-up and
even more its aesthetics. With early modern and especially ‘Baroque’ repertoires, the overlaps between EM and
conventional practice strongly increase, in both the repertorial and the aesthetic sense. For example, nationalism has
formed some fragile alliances with EM, for example in Poland, Spain and Portugal, where the indigenous music tradition provided alternative Baroque repertoires which had been waiting to be revaluated. More importantly, any ongoing controversies between EM and conventional practice in Baroque music largely happen within an inherited repertoire of great masters (Bach, Handel, Rameau, Monteverdi, Vivaldi) rather than between ‘central and peripheral’ authors
or genres. In fact this seems inevitable insofar as some of the earliest HIP practices had developed from within the
monumental tradition, for example in the (self-consciously named) ‘Handel-Renaissance’ of the earlier twentieth century.18 It is still impossible for the ordinary listener today to imagine the opera, oratorio, cantata, keyboard repertories
of the ‘Baroque’ in abstraction from the names of a few great masters, even if their number has perhaps slightly increased through HIP efforts (Lully, Cavalli, Biber). These monuments have not been deconstructed at all, and some have
been quite recently erected (Hildegard von Bingen), whilst professional musicology, along with literary criticism and
critical theory, have long declared the death of the author and the end of the cultural museum. The border trade between EM and canonic repertoires of the classic-romantic canon, on the other hand, has been lively: few conductors
of HIP, for example, have refrained from paying tribute to the symphony and oratorio canon once they had made
their names in earlier repertoires. This phenomenon suggests that commercial pressure is still powerful enough to
marginalise alternative repertorial choices. As for aesthetic alternatives in the performance of nineteenth-century music,
which might even be commercially viable, they are still blooming in deep shadow. In 2006 (but perhaps no longer in
2008) the chronological end of EM is perceived to be somewhere in the nineteenth century: but no genuine barrier
exists to prevent HIP performances of even later music, for which historical recordings could be a valuable guide. Is
EM so dependent on the ‘aura’ of the past masterwork that it fears the experience of its mechnical reproduction?19 In
any case, EM is far behind musicology and other branches of cultural debate in its debunking of canonic authority or
musical museum culture, whether or not we believe this is what it really has set out to do.
Divided retrospection in EM and musicology.
A major if implied contribution to musical historiography has already been identified above: the claim of a segmentation, or great divide, between the classic-romantic and the earlier musical cultures of the West. For perhaps partly
contingent reasons, EM identifies its musical ideal in what historians such as Jacques Le Goff have termed ‘the long
Middle Ages’: the period culminating in the ancien regime before the revolution, the pre-democratic and pre-enlightened
European past, as modernists have seen it.20 This periodisation of Western cultural and social history, which privileges
the changes of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as constitutive to our world today, has survived its
own revaluation process: where modernism saw decisive progress (for example in Beethoven, Napoleon, Hegel or
Marx), postmodernism saw our fall from grace. It has debunked the Enlightenment and developed a nostalgic view of
its predecessors. EM has been of the latter persuasion from the start; I suggest that its repertorial, aesthetic and philosophical engagement for the music from before 1800 has influenced musicology and musical criticism. Thus a ‘divided retrospection’ has taken hold which is capable of apportioning sympathy and antipathy between the two eras thus
distinguished.21 ‘Hating your father but loving your grandfather’seems a cultural-psychological attitude that inevitably
crept into EM as it attempted to deal with twentieth-century anxieties. The HIP conductor who conforms to mainstream aesthetics and repertorial canons when it comes to nineteenth-century music demonstrates the divided musical
retrospection as much as the historian who wants to make us believe that the hated musical work-concept emerged
only around 1800. Again, the analogy with Renaissance humanism is striking: the debunking of the Middle Ages in
favour of a utopian antiquity (without the pressure of its monuments and institutions) had to negotiate anxieties ari18
See Reinhard Strohm, ‘Ein Staatskomponist ohne Grenzen’, Händel-Jahrbuch 48 (2002), 261-77.
See Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner mechanischen Reproduzierbarkeit, 1961), in W. Benjamin, Illuminations, tr. by Harry Zohn, with an introduction by Hannah Arendt (New York, 1968), 21751. For Benjamin, mechanical reproduction and aura were opposites; EM seems not yet interested in disproving this modernist
concern.
20 Jacques Le Goff, L’imaginaire médiéval. Essais (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), viii-xiii.
21 See Reinhard Strohm, ‘The End of the Middle Ages and the End of Modernity’, in A. M. Busse Berger et al. (eds), Discordia
Concordans. Papers from the Novacella Symposium on Medieval Music, 1997 (forthcoming); idem, ‘Postmodern Thought and the History of
Music: Some Intersections’, Revista Portuguesa de Musicologia 9 (1999), 7-24.
19
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sing from technological and economical changes in the ‘Renaissance’ period itself. But also the Romantics, frightened
by the accelerating industrialisation and democratisation of their era, saw a need to turn their favours away from the
immediate past and towards the Middle Ages whose conflicts had faded from memory. This was the birth of ‘medievalism’ which gave rise to the early music movement of Cecilianism and of the sacred music restoration of Zelter,
Thibaut, Kiesewetter and Winterfeld. By the end of the twentieth century, the terms of the divided retrospection have
again been changed but a similar process has occurred: the early Modern Age has now confluenced with the Middle
Ages to form a revered and desired past (the ‘long Middle Ages’, the ideal realm of EM), whereas modernity from
c.1789 to c.1989 has become the new ‘Dark Age’ of the postmodern generation.
Revivals and reconstructions: building a new space for history.
It has rarely been recognised that some of the most cherished practices of EM, revival and reconstruction, do not
form unambiguous historical statements.22 When old things are brought back to our attention, their resting-place within written history is rather challenged. In music in particular, re-enactment through performance can upset established aesthetic norms and historical canons. Revivalist historicism can confound historiography, where the detail
recovered from the past takes on a lifelike presence and thus creates a new object for memory. The modernist term of
‘material history’, well applicable to the care for, and reconstruction of, historical instruments, used to be a contradiction in terms insofar as history was an abstraction from those instruments or materials, not what happened to them. Now,
material history is itself not only something said of the material but something materially constituted as history. Similarly, most re-enactments of historical performances – whether only of the transmitted musical notation and instruments, or also the supposed performing circumstances – now actually require a rethinking of the history of the music
in question (a new abstraction); they cannot be confined to illustrations of history already written. The EM argument
as a whole does not state a new version of written musical history – its relationships with historiography, and partly
its shortcomings in that field, have just been alluded to – but moves its objects onto a contemporary plane for consideration. For a last time, Renaissance humanism can be adduced, as it not only described or historicised antiquity but
also instructed people to recover ancient texts and sculptures, and to admire them. The role that these revived or
reborn artefacts would have to play in the European consciousness could hardly be foreseen at the time. Thus it is
foreseeable, conversely, that the revived and reconstructed objects of EM will not sink back into their usual historical
places but will play new roles in the consciousness of the following generations – roles that we cannot predict. This is
a different process from that of a change of the historical narrative or of its periodisations, for example. It is more like
the cumulation of object and thought, the spatialisation of the past; the creation of a non-narrative form of history.
Certainly the import of EM, HIP, postmodernism and indeed the critical reflection of them all will play a part in the
musical history-memory-space of future generations.23
22
23
But see again Butt, Playing with History, part 3, ch. 6, especially under ‘Heritage as bad history’.
Thanks are due to my wife, Brenda Strohm, for her revision of the English text of this paper.
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Anna Maria Busse Berger (Univ. of California, Davis)
Some Thoughts on Composition, Transmission and Notation
of Early Music
The Founding Father Of Medieval Musicology
Medieval polyphony was systematically catalogued and transcribed for the first time at the beginning of the last century by the great German musicologist Friedrich Ludwig. He was the first scholar to apply the methods developed by
classical philologists like Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf and Gustav Gröber to music. In fact, his Repertorium
(1910) is music’s equivalent to Gröbers Übersicht über die lateinische Literatur von der Mitte des VI. Jahrhunderts bis
zur Mitte des XIV. Jahrhunderts (1902). To this day the Repertorium remains the authoritative catalogue for medieval
polyphony. Ludwig catalogued and classified all known sources of organa and motets, tried to establish which was the
original and which a copy, and ordered them chronologically. He did his job so well that most musicologists since
have been reluctant to question his presuppositions. But, as any scholar, he did have preconceived notions about medieval polyphony, and many of these have remained unnoticed and unchallenged.
Ludwig saw the highpoint in the development of Western music in Palestrina and his contemporaries. He was
therefore eager to find the beginnings of Western polyphony. For him it was self-evident that the name of a composer
needed to be associated with a repertory that was transmitted in writing; thus, he established a chronology of the Notre Dame repertory and attributed the pieces to either Leonin or Perotin. The evidence for these attribution is weak,
since it relies on a theorist, Anonymous IV, who wrote his treatise almost a century after the music was first performed. Similarly, his chronology of the Magnus Liber is based on the presupposition that simpler compositions are
earlier, while those which show evidence of such compositional devices as voice exchange and imitation, or are for
three or four parts, must be later. (Edward Roesner challenged this hypothesis already in 1981, and it is surprising
how slow musicologists are to incorporate his ideas into their textbooks).
Medieval polyphony constantly reuses the same melodic material, from recurrent formulas to larger melodic
segments, entire voice parts, two-part frames to which a new part is added, all the way to contrafacta. Ludwig duly
noted most of these melodic quotations. But he did not make any attempt at explaining them, nor did he even seem
to think that an explanation was necessary. Perhaps Ludwig failed to address this issue because he also realized that
there was a contradiction between the Romantic ideal of the original composer and the practice of constant quotation.
He did, however, give low marks to composers such as Adam de la Halle because “of his constant quotations.”
It goes without saying that Ludwig and his followers were convinced that medieval polyphony was conceived
in writing. The idea that important music might have been transmitted orally did not even cross his mind. In addition,
Ludwig did not believe that music theorists were describing adequately what was going on in the music of the period.
Even though he regularly taught seminars in Göttingen in which he read some of the treatises with his students, he
made no real attempt to understand where they came from and what they were trying to say. He referred to their writings as “theorists’ babble.”
In short, even though a number of scholars have recently questioned some of Ludwig’s hypotheses, it is time
for a reevaluation of some of the central problems facing historians of medieval music. Let me go through some of
them.
Orality-Literacy
Recent work by literary historians and anthropologists has fundamentally changed our understanding of how
medieval texts came into existence and how they were used. Thus far, it had been generally believed that orality and
literacy were contradictory terms, that once music was notated it was no longer sung by heart. (Of course, one assumed that there was a short transitional period, where not everyone knew how to read or write music notation.) However, it is now increasingly clear that the invention of notation (and this is true of notation ranging from neumes to
mensural notation) did not do away with performance from memory, but, quite the opposite, allowed for new ways of
committing music to memory. Notating a piece of music allowed the performer to check if he had memorized the
music correctly, and thus permitted exact transmission for the first time in music history.
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The result is a considerable refinement in our approach to notated medieval music. Rather than assuming that
either the great composer was at work and every detail of the original manuscript has to be preserved in performance,
or that the music was orally transmitted, we can encounter a wide variety of options: for example, on the one hand,
someone (the composer himself, a performer, or a scribe) might have notated a particular version of a piece, but might have been just as happy to have what he notated entirely reworked the next time it was sung; on the other, there
might be a composition, as for example, the isorhythmic motet, where the entire structure would collapse if even a
single tone were changed. So how do we deal with the bewildering array of possibilities? How do we know whether a
piece was part of an oral tradition, or needed to be transmitted intact, or fell somewhere in between?
Notation - Text
Obviously, an important element is the notation in which the piece is written. Already Friedrich Ludwig had
observed that, in general, the notational system is adequate for the kind of music it is supposed to signify. And yet, I
believe that another of our influential predecessors, Willi Apel, has somewhat and completely unneccesarily complicated our approach to notation. He places neumes and thirteenth-century modal notation after his discussion of white
mensural notation in his fundamental book The Notation of Polyphonic Music, because he considers modal notation
most difficult and because the concepts involved have less similarity with our modern notational system. But once we
put ourselves into the shoes of medieval musicians, it becomes clear that for the uninitiated neumes were probably
most easy to read. Maybe for this reason so few theorists explain neumes; they were simply self-explanatory. They
concentrate instead on such matters as church modes, solmization syllables, etc. The neumes indicate the general
outline of a melody and rhythm which the singer already knew by heart. But you could not send, say a manuscript
from St. Gallen to Lucca and expect the monks to be able to decipher the melody if they have never heard it.
Apel placed modal notation so late in his textbook because the system is rigged with ambiguities: for example, a
ternary ligature can have many different interpretations depending on the context. And yet, if we stand away from the
modern work concept, and try to imagine how thirteenth-century singers would have approached an organum, it does
not seem so difficult: the pieces are organized into repetitive rhythmic patterns, and if they would sing from a manuscript, one glance at the ligature grouping would leave little doubt which of the modal patterns was intended. Alternatively, if they were to improvise, they would visualize the tenor, and after having agreed on a rhythmic mode, they
would remember to form consonances at regular intervals. What happened between these consonances could change
from one performance to the next.
Even though Ludwig attributed this repertoire to individual composers, I believe it makes more sense to imagine a group of highly trained singers improvising polyphony at Notre Dame. Notation was not necessary for the creation of this repertory. Most likely, it was written down in order to preserve it.
Mensural notation, on the other hand, is a different matter: it is a more or less unambiguous notational system,
where you cannot figure out how the music goes by looking at the manuscript unless you know the rules. Many composers and music theorists spent a lot of time explaining these very rules to students both orally and in writing. On
the other hand, once these rules have been internalized, one can easily send a manuscript from, say, Paris to Venice
and expect this piece to be performed correctly. This goes hand in hand with the fact that increasingly individual
composers are associated with their compositions and take pride in their authorship. More importantly, mensural
notation resulted in a new genre of composition, the isorhythmic motet, which could not have come into existence
without writing. Within a few years, composers begin to experiment with all kinds of notational games, such as retrograde versions of tenors and rhythmic manipulations, all of which were dependent on writing.
And yet, also these isorhythmic motets are related to the art of memory. First, most polyphonic music was sung
by heart, so these pieces had to be structured in such a way that they could be easily remembered. Second, there is
ample evidence that they were worked out in the mind, and only the final product was put onto parchment. So composers and musicians needed devices to keep control of the musical material. I believe they must have used architectural structures which they must have known from the ars memorativa treatises. Just as literary texts were planned in
the mind, entire compositions could be visualized in a background grid during composition and performance. In fact,
I would even go so far as to suggest that isorhythm was invented because composers needed to organize the rhythmic
and melodic possibilities into what psychologists would call “chunks” to keep track of where they were in the composition. It is significant that the Dutch theorist Johannes Boen identifies Vitry’s motets by their note groupings.
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The Role of the Performer Versus the Composer
If we accept that much of the Notre Dame repertory was transmitted orally, we have to re-evaluate the relationship between the performer and the composer. The performer then is no longer someone who recreates a work
of art conceived by someone else, but becomes a composer himself. In other words, the distinction between the two
may become blurred. Similarly, the scribe who wrote down the piece might well have actively particiapted in the compositional process and redone entire sections of the piece.
As a result, we would like to know what a medieval musician would learn throughout his life, or to use a more
technical term, what would constitute his memorial archive. Boys would begin by memorizing the entire chant. In
fact, as Craig Wright has shown for Notre Dame of Paris, that was a requirement for their appointment at the cathedral; they should know by heart “whatever they have to both at Mass and the hours including all Invitatory psalms
Venite, all responsories, graduals with verses, and certain other things.” The main tool for committing chant to memory were the tonaries. The tonaries typically classify antiphons for the Office, but also for the Mass. In addition,
they may classify Mass responsories, graduals, tracts, alleluias, and even sequences. The most distinctive feature of the
tonaries is that the chant is classified hierarchically. On the first level it is always arranged by mode. Then within each
mode there are a number of possibilites: melodies may, in turn, be arranged, a) liturgically, b) alphabetically, c) according to poximity of the first note to the final d) according to antiphon beginnings, e) according to the level of complexity. I believe that music theorists and singers compiled tonaries not only to make a transition from the antiphon to
the psalm verse, but also in order to memorize the chant. Classification of material is generally a sign that it was intended to be memorized. Similar cataloguing activity occurred in other disciplines in the Middle Ages. The bestknown examples are florilegia, which consist of excerpts and maxims of classical and biblical texts organized according to subject or alphabet.
Students would then learn elementary music theory, that is, the system of modes, the hand and the solmization
syllables. But for our purposes most important is the next item on the agenda, the singing of discant and counterpoint. The earliest treatise from which we can learn how the performance and composition of organa was approached is
the Vatican Organum Treatise, which dates from the first quarter of the thirteenth century. The main body of the text
consists of thirty-one “rules” which include altogether 343 melismas. The melismas are organized according to their
tenor motion and for every tenor motion we are getting a number of possible melismas which are becoming increasingly more elaborate. The term “rule” is used here as a classification device for an interval progressions, not as a rule
in the modern sense of the term.
Two points of fundamental importance are suggested by the way the “rules” are formulated and exemplified in
the treatise. First, Parisian organists thought primarily in terms of an underlying note-against-note counterpoint. All
the rules say something like this: if the chant ascends or descends by a given interval, and the duplum is at a given
consonance above it, it (the duplum) should descend or ascend by a specific interval, so that it can find itself making a
specific consonance with the chant. Second, the musicians thought there were alternative ways to realize the duplum
from the first to the second vertical consonance. These alternative ways are, precisely, our melodic formulas. This
suggests a two-stage compositional process: stage one, where one would decide which vertical consonance to choose
for the next chant note; and stage two, where one would pick one of the suitable organal formulas. It is significant
that these two stages are not treated separately in the Vatican treatise, while with most theorists from the fourteenth
century they are. There can be little doubt that the contents of the treatise were memorized by the musicians. A singer
who had mastered the material would have no trouble performing or composing pieces in the style of the Magnus
liber organi. He would be able to select a formula from his memorial archive for every tenor progression and expand
or contract it according to his wishes.
From the fourteenth century on, note-against-note counterpoint would become the central component of
discant and counterpoint instruction. Students would first memorize which intervals were consonant and which were
dissonant. Most treatises would include tables with all possible consonant intervals, and there can be little doubt that
these were memorized. Then students would move on to note-against-note progressions. It might be useful to compare our modern approach to learning counterpoint to that used in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. While we
also learn counterpoint starting with note-against-note progressions and then move on to diminished counterpoint,
Johann Joseph Fux, on whose treatise from 1725 our instruction is based, begins by listing all perfect and imperfect
consonances. Then, he defines and gives an example for direct, contrary, and oblique motion. And finally, he gives
only four rules for how perfect and imperfect consonances can follow each other.
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In contrast, Johannes Tinctoris lists every possible interval progression in his Liber de arte contrapuncti. The
treatise is 147 pages long in the modern edition (without the table of contents), and of these roughly eighty are listings
of interval progressions; in other words, more than one-half. Most modern readers skip over these pages because they
are so boring to read: we want general rules, not countless examples. And yet, these specific examples were crucial.
Once these progressions were memorized it was very easy to perform or compose polyphonic music. Composers
could plan entire structures in their mind without recourse to paper just as easily as performers could reproduce these
structures, because they could look back on so much training.
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