Music Theory in Late Medieval Avignon: Magister Johannes Pipardi

A collaboration between Birmingham Conservatoire and the Institute of Musical Research. Chancellor’s Hall, Senate House, University of London, 9–10 October 2014.

Political factionalism in Rome and the increasing pressure exerted by the French King Philip IV, prompted Pope Clement V to move the papal capital to Avignon in 1309 where he remained until his death in 1314. After a two year period of botched elections, eventually Pope John XXII settled in the chair for a period of time unusual in this century, between 1316 and 1334. The popes who followed were not so long-lived: Benedict XII (1334-1342); Clement VI (1342-1352); Innocent VI (1352-1362); Urban V (1362-70) and finally Gregory XI (1370-1377) after which the papacy moved back to Rome. The papal court at Avignon was luxuriously brilliant with religious services being particularly opulent and graced densely with polyphonic settings of the liturgy trying out the very latest methods of composition. Manuscript evidence, particularly from the Ivrea and Apt codices supports this and also reflects the burgeoning growth in the evolution of the secular courtly song. This developing style has been called Ars subtilior and seen as an outgrowth of the earlier Parisian Ars nova. Jewish music also flourished under the Avignon popes since Clement V protected the Jews from the expulsion orders of King Philip and the musical tradition of the synagogue was preserved there. Although the Avignon papacy was overwhelmingly French, with all seven of the popes and 111 of the 134 cardinals newly created at this time being French, it warmly welcomed cultural immigration from elsewhere in Europe, particularly North Italy. This paper presents a discussion focussing on Ars subtilior as the product of cultural exchange of music theorists, composers and performers between the North and South of France, tempered by the influx of fresh ideas about the making and performing of music from Italy.

The British Library manuscript Harl. 281 provides a carefully structured anthology of texts, copied by a single hand, about the theory of music as interpreted in Paris in the early fourteenth century. 2 The first of its two sections (ff. 5r-38v) opens with what is presented as three distinct books by Guido of Arezzo (d. after 1033): 3 the Micrologus, the Trocaicus (a synthesis of various Guidonian texts, primarily the Regule rythmice), and a third book on music in the form of a dialogue, in reality the anonymous Dialogus de musica once attributed to Odo and often linked to Odo's oeuvre. These three books are expanded by additional material and followed by a fourth text, the so-called Tonale Beati Bernardi, an anonymous tonary that provides a Cistercian interpretation of plainchant performance concerns. The second section of Harl. MS. 281 (ff. 39r-96v) contains three more recent texts, possibly intended to create a group of seven. The first of these is the Ars musice of Johannes de Grocheio (Jean of Grouchy), presented here (ff. 39r-52r) without identification of its eBLJ 2008, Article 6

Vassilis Vavoulis, Brio: Journal of the UK branch of the International association of music libraries, Volume 52, Number 1, pp 38-40

Plainsong and Medieval Music, 2005

'Exactitude' is the title of a well-known Art Deco poster made for the French national railway company in 1929 by Pierre Fix-Masseau. A geometrically elegant black tube of a locomotive charges full tilt at the viewer, speeding into the present and on to the future with confident power. No lines are soft or sinuous, no ambiguities are evident, all is precision, simplicity and clarity. If words can ever be adequately contained in images, 'exactitude' has found its visual correlative in this picture. It was a perfect conceptual fit, so much so that the same locomotive appears in a series of posters advertising half a dozen different routes for the company. 'Sameness' and 'exactitude' are concepts that haunt many of the essays in Leo Treitler's new collection. The volume begins with a number of essays focusing on problems involved with the concept of 'improvisation', which, as Treitler so well brings out, immediately engages its High Modern value-opposite, 'stability'. It was this radical debate in Treitler's first chapters which brought to mind the Masseau posters, because the simple characteristics of the engine image and its stable repetition through a variant series of compositions captures so well the Modernist values of the Jazz Age which Treitler engages when he self-consciously problematizes the opposition of improvisation to stability as an analytical method. As Treitler comments: in the pejorative reading of 'improvisation' that we find in the literature on chant. .. there is the intimation. .. that improvised music is characterized by variation; the rendering of an improvised item is different from one time to the next: intentionally, if this is regarded as a value, inevitably when it is the opposite, usually called 'stability', that is valued. It is the latter conception that prevails in the literature on chant history, and that is why the possibility of improvisation in the establishment of the chant tradition has been thought to be ruled out by the homogeneity of the written transmission in the earliest notated books. (p. 6) Treitler has focused on this and similar problems for much of his career. His work has an enviable coherence, made even more apparent by his reflections on the previously published essays of this new collection. All of the chapters contain earlier

2013

This study examines the changes made to the biography and works of the Renaissance composer Josquin des Prez (c.1450-1521) through the eight editions of A History of Western Music and its associated score vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS  No undertaking as large as attempting two masters degrees at onceone in music history and the other in library science-is ever accomplished without the help and support of many family members, professors, colleagues, and friends. Family I should first like to thank my parents and grandparents for instilling in me at a young age a love of history, cultures, languages, and music. Being taken as a child to European castles, Early Music Now concerts, and the Bristol Renaissance Faire sparked a lifelong interest in all things medieval and renaissance, as is evidenced in the two papers presented here. Thanks are warranted to my father for encouraging my academic pursuits, and to my mother for driving me to all those violin lessons, and putting up with my early squeaking (and wailings when I didn't play things well), and for listening patiently to my rambling phone calls all these years. And for doing the final proofreading of both my papers. Any errors that remain are solely mine, not hers. Many heartfelt thanks to Mamie and Papie, one for loving opera and playing the (sadly now defunct) WFMR Mystery Quiz and getting me interested in composer's lives and music, and the other for letting me earn money for music lessons by mowing the lawn and operating the Linotype at the printing shop-and for my beautiful Jiang violin. vii My French grandparents, Mémé and Pépé, also merit recognition, one for the harmonica, and the other for the all the songs-"Le petit chat blanc," "La vie en rose," and an unforgettable rendition of "L'amour est un oiseau rebelle" from Carmen on a hot summer day when I was five, standing under the silver maple tree on the gravel driveway in front of the garage, in her navy blue polka-dot dress, pearls, and clip-on earrings. I miss both of you. Andrews University My professors and mentors from my undergraduate days at Andrews University in Berrien Springs, MI., helped shaped me personally, professionally, and academically. Dr. Lilianne Doukahn helped solidify my love for music history with her challenging, fair classes. She encouraged my interests in musicology, made the excellent suggestion I should take German, and was longsuffering as she guided me through my honors thesis. Both papers presented here are the germinations of ideas first planted while I was under the tutelage of Dr. Doukahn. Carla Trynchuk pushed me to excel and got my violin playing (and posture) into shape. I think I learned as much about courageous, solid living and caring about others as whole people as I did about repertoire, pedagogy, and technique. I also learned to always put compliments before criticism, both in and out of masterclass. viii Linda Mack gave me a job, helped me find my professional calling as a music librarian, and has mentored me in ways too numerable to mention. I will be forever grateful for the time and energy she invested in my trainingand for teaching me how to write a mean set of program notes. Dr. L. Monique Pittman's enthusiasm for English literature, critical thinking, and good writing is contagious. I'm glad I took Ren Lit-complete with tea and readings from the Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer-and decided I could handle graduate-level work.

BRILL eBooks, 2011

We oft en know quite a bit about music composed today. We typically know who wrote a piece because the composer's name appears with the title. We may know the purpose of the work from its designation, from the collection in which it exists, or from information provided by the composer. Music from the fourteenth century, on the other hand, rarely included this type of information. Medieval culture downplayed the idea that individuals should take credit for the music and other artifacts that they created. Indeed, the notion of "composer" or "artist" was hardly even viable before the end of the Middle Ages. Similarly, the means of preserving music in manuscripts, frequently organized by genre (all motets copied together, for instance), privileged the question "what kind of piece is this" over "how should this work be used. " Th e function of a musical composition was oft en obvious to those in the know because they understood the cyphers in the work, that is, the musical and textual symbols that pointed to the meaning of a piece and how it was used. Examining these symbols in individual works reveals fascinating diff erences between the culture of the Middle Ages and that of our own time. 1 Th e piece discussed here is found in the poem known as the Roman de Fauvel , a satire of political and ecclesiastical life from fourteenth-century France. Th is work exists in several copies, but the luxurious version found in Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, français 146 (hereaft er Paris fr. 146) is a true cornucopia. Not only does the manuscript encompass poetry and decoration, but also music, including new as well as older musical styles and genres. 2 Th rough verse, illustration, and song, Paris fr. 146 speaks truth 1 For a discussion of symbolism in music, see Wright , Th e Maze and the Warrior: Symbols in Architecture

Medieval and Renaissance Music Conference, 2020

The challenge of proposing reasonable descriptions about origin, age and history of manuscripts preserving Medieval and Renaissance music theory is usually addressed through the analysis of palaeographical and codicological characteristics. In addition to this approach, Medieval and Renaissance Latin philology can offer support to the musicologist by giving him tools and methods for a systematic observation of and a critical judgment about loci critici, linguistic and orthographical idiosyncrasies, para- texts (preface, glosses, marginal notes, etc.), and choice of contents (when the manuscript is, as it usually is, miscellaneous). Therefore, the integrated philological approach assures, on one side, increasingly compelling results in terms of quality of restitutio textus and widens, on the other, our comprehension of manuscripts as objects of cultural history, opening new perspectives on the relationship between musicians and musical institutions, society, the Church, etc. Jan Herlinger (1981) and Giuliano Di Bacco (2002) have already illustrated the main palaeographical and codicological aspects of the XVth century Italian compilation of music theory in Bruxelles, Bibliothèque royale, II 785. Anyway, the thorough philological analysis of some previously neglected texts, such as the preface (perhaps written by the compiler/copyist) or the fragments from Nicolò Burzio’s Florum libellus (whose readings are closer to the author’s drafts more than to the published edition entitled Musices opusculum), casts new light on the sources available to the compiler, and on the ordering principle of the collection and its ultimate purpose.

Intellectual History Review, 2017

ABSTRACT Medieval discourse about both the theory and practice of music featured much debate about the views of moderni and antiqui from when Guido of Arezzo devised a new way of recording pitch in the early eleventh century to the complaints of Jacobus in the early fourteenth century about new forms of measured music in the ars nova. There was also a shift from a Boethian notion that practical music was a manifestation of cosmic music, towards a more Aristotelian model, that privileged music as sensory experience. That this could have a profound effect on human emotion was articulated by Johannes de Grocheio writing about music c. 1270 and Guy of Saint-Denis soon after 1300 about plainchant. Jacobus, writing in the 1320s, was troubled by this shift in thinking about music not as reflections of transcendent realities, but as sounds of human invention that served to move the soul. He argued that musical patterns should reflect a transcendent harmony that was both cosmic and celestial.