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Medieval Music Literature

Thomas Christensen, University of Chicago

Draft Chapter for THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL MUSIC

Edited by Thomas Kelly and Mark Everist

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Note to the Reader:

This is a DRAFT of a chapter to be submitted to the forthcoming Cambridge History

of Medieval Music under the rubric “Medieval Music Literature.” As such, I have
tried to make this a generalized account accessible and useable for a variety of
possible readers. (The overall History will contain some 40 additional chapters on
specialized topics of medieval music.) Needless to say, it is not meant to offer
original, ground-breaking research. I imagine the primary audience will be
musicologists who may well be innocent of many of the paleographic or codicological
issues that regularly confront Medieval historians. I thus suspect many of you will
find much in here that may be obvious.

It will be clear to most of you that I am not a Medievalist myself. Thus I have felt
more than once immensely insecure in writing this chapter (which I should add is not
even complete yet!). I thus—with some trepidation and humbleness—submit this to
the workshop for its searing critique. With gratitude, I will welcome any comments
or suggestions for improvement, and corrections stemming from my naivety regarding
medieval scholarship. TC

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L iterature on music in the Middle Ages poses special challenges to the historian.

There is first of all the obvious fact that there is a great deal of it. (The number of
extant medieval music theory texts alone exceeds 800 in number.) There is
furthermore a substantial body of regulative literature concerning the usage of music
in the church or monastic orders. Music is a topic that finds mention in many
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philosophy and theological texts, in scientific writings, in commentaries of Biblical or

classical literature, in academic lectures and religious sermons. On a more informal
level, we can find mention of music in quotidian or secular writings such as letters,
diaries, and chronicles, not to mention as a subject allegorized in court poetry or
chivalric legends.

It is not simply the quantity and variety of writings on music that challenge the
medieval historian, though. There are complex paleographic and codicological
issues associated with a manuscript culture that must also be addressed. It is the
exception in medieval literature to have a manuscript that is without outstanding
textual questions. Often—and in some literary genres, typically--we do not know
the author of a given text or even its provenance and approximate date. For that
matter, determining just what a text is may be no obvious matter; lacking in virtually
every case a verifiable “original” source, scholars must rely upon manuscript copies
that are often incomplete or corrupt. Paleographic tools may help in reconstructing a
genealogical stemma of competing manuscripts. But even then, much may remain
unknown and uncertain. Furthermore, in a culture in which originality and
authorship were not understood as today, the whole question of textual authority
arises; a text could easily be a copy, compilation, excerpt, redaction, commentary
and/or gloss of some earlier literature. In short, the medieval manuscript text is a
notoriously unstable entity.

While it will obviously not be possible in this short essay to analyze with any detail
the vast range of Medieval literature on musical topics, let alone to address all these
many intractable paleographic issues, I will try to offer a general topography of genres
of Medieval music literature and indicate in a few cases some of the textual and
hermeneutic challenges that arise for the historian.

With that in mind, we might begin by provisionally grouping this literature into one of
the following four categories:

1. Musica: the classical legacy

2. Cantus: music in the church and monastery
3. Music theory
4. Music in secular life.

Needless to say, these groupings are necessarily elastic and entail obvious overlaps.
Still I believe they can be a useful heuristic for the historian in seeking to navigate the
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broad terrain of music-literary genres in the Middle Ages.

1. Musica: The Classical Legacy.

Knowledge among Medieval readers of ancient Greek literature concerning music

was quite limited. Only a handful of such writings circulated in the Middle Ages in
Latin translation. (For example, the sole work of Plato dealing with music known in
the Medieval period was Calcidius’s translation and commentary of the Timeus.) A
larger number of Aristotelian texts became available in the 12th and 13th centuries via
Arabic translations (notably, in the case of music, the Problemata). But by and large,
until the greater recovery of Greek sources that began in the later 15th century, what
knowledge there was of Greek thought about music stemmed from about a dozen or
so Latin writings of varying lengthy—and varying detail--stemming from late Roman
antiquity. i

These writings include a number of short texts such as Censorinus’s De die Natali (c.
238) and Fulgentius’ Mitilogiae (c. 5th-6th century). There are also sections from
more encyclopedic works by Martianus Capella (De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii,,
before 439), Cassiodorus (Institutiones,, after 540), and Isidore of Seville
(Etymologiae, early 7th century). There were two 5th-century commentaries on the
Somnium Scipionis of Cicero by Favonius Eulogius and Macrobius, and as just
mentioned, Calcidius’s translation and commentary of the Timaeus (from the later 4th
or early 5th century). Augustine’s treatise on music (De musica, 387-89) was
important given the stature of the author, although it had little to offer musicians since
it is more on poetic meter (with a few tantalizing comments on music that hint at the
longer text on melody that Augustine seems to have been contemplating writing but
never finished.) And then, of course, there was De institutione musica of Boethius
(early 6th century) the indisputable magnum opus of music theory stemming from late
antiquity—a text that we will have occasion to return to many times in this essay.

Obviously, these texts are not Medieval literature, properly speaking; they represent
more the embers of a waning classical tradition. Still, the influence and importance
of many of these writings in the Middle Ages was so profound, their presence in the
writings of so many Medieval authors so evident, that it is proper here to consider
them as foundational to Medieval thought concerning music.

To begin with, it was through these authors—but above all, Boethius--that whatever
knowledge of ancient Greek music theory known in the Middle Ages was conveyed—
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however imperfect that information was. It was also through these writings that many
of the great Greek legends and myths concerning the power and ethos of music were
transmitted (Orpheus, Pythagoras, Amphion, etc.). Through Macrobius, Eulogius,
and Calcidius, Medieval readers learned the little they could know of Platonic musical
thought, while through Martianus Capella, Cassiodorus and Isidore, they could
glimpse an educational ideal of the artes liberales in which musica occupied an
honored position. Together, these texts provided the foundation for a tradition of
classical learning concerning the ars musica that was to prove catalytic to the Middle
Ages.

As mentioned, by far the most influential of these writers was Boethius, whose
writings on music (mainly in his De institutione musica, but also parts of his De
institutione arithmetica) made him the closest thing to a canonical auctoritas in the
Middle Ages. The 9th-century Carolingian theorist Aurelien of Réôme voiced a
commonly-shared sentiment when he called Boethius the “vir eruditissimus” and
“doctissimus.” (As late as 1487, the Italian theorist Nicolò Burzio defended Boethius
as the “Monarch of Musicians.”) As but one empirical indication of his importance,
we might note there are over 137 extant manuscript copies of Boethius’s music text
from the Middle Ages—far more than exist for any other single musical text (Bower,
1988). And this manuscript tradition continued (with some notable fluctuations to
be discussed) until the first print publication of the Institutio musica in 1492.

The importance of Boethius’s work to the Middle Ages was manifold. First of all, it
conveyed with more detail and authority than any other extant source the classical
Greek tonal system to its Latin readers: pitch and interval names, scale systems, tonoi,
and genera. (But we must always keep in mind that Boethius himself was removed
by at least half a millennium from the period in which any of these concepts might
have had any real vitality.) His highly sophisticated mathematical discussion of
interval ratios and proportions remained authoritative—and often impenetrable—for
Medieval readers until at least the 14th century. Moreover, Boethius introduced an
alphabetic (Alypian) notation system that would prove catalytic (if at times
bewilderingly confusing) to Carolingian theorists. We will have frequent occasion in
this essay to return to Boethius’s writings and see their continued resonance
throughout the Middle Ages.

For now, though, it is enough to underscore that the greatest legacy of Boethius’s text
was simply the prestige and legitimization it gave to music as a subject of
philosophical inquiry within the seven artes liberales. Along with the disciplines of
arithmetic, geometry and astronomy, music was part of the great “Quadrivium” of
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numerical sciences (the other canonical grouping being the “trivial” subjects of
grammar, rhetoric and dialectics). Of course his conception was fully a Platonic one
in which musica was understood as an abstract science of discrete numerical relations.
It had nothing to do with anything that we would consider “practical” music making.
In his famous disciplinary hierarchy, musica mundana stood at the head of musical
study as the harmony of heavenly bodies. It was followed by musica humana—the
harmony of the human soul and body--and finally musica instrumentalis--actual
sounding music. The first two categories constituted musica and were worthy of
study and contemplation by the true philosopher of music (which he designated
simply as a musicus), while the later discipline was the province of the untutored
singer (what Carolingian theorists would designate condescendingly as a cantor),
clearly a subject beneath the dignity of the musicus.

With its powerful rhetoric and intimidating array of classical and mathematical
learning, its clear exegetical ordering (characteristic, as Leo Schrade has noted, of the
ancient Greek genre of the protreptikos—an exhortation to the study of philosophy—
as well as an eisagogé—an introduction to a given discipline) it is not surprising that
upon its re-appearance during the ninth-century Carolingian revival of learning, De
institutione musica quickly assumed the position of a canonical text (Schrade 1947).
As the first European Universities were established in the late 12th and 13th centuries,
it became prescribed as a required text, a position it maintained in some institutions as
late as the 17th century. There were few learned writers on music throughout the
entire Middle Ages who were not aware of Boethius’s work, and in many cases, drew
from it liberally for their own writings.

Yet if we look closer at this picture, a more complex story emerges that might lead us
to re-examine the authority—and autonomy--of Boethius’s treatise in the Middle Ages.
This complexity stems from a range of codicological questions regarding the text’s
origins, compilation and reception history. As these are problems that are endemic
to the overall manuscript culture of the Middle Ages, it will perhaps be of value here
to pause briefly and review what some of these are, problems that are relevant,
mutatis mutandis, to most other texts of musical literature that confront the Medieval
historian.

To begin with, there is the basic philological problem of simply determining what the
authoritative text of De institutione musica is. As with virtually all other writings of
the Middle Ages, we do not have an original autograph manuscript to consult. (The
first autographed copies of a music theory text in the Middle Ages that have survived
are only from the 15 th century; Bernhard 1990b, p. 67). In the case of Boethius’s
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work on music, the earliest manuscript we have is from the late 9th centur y. But
simply because a copy is prior in a stemmatic reconstruction, it need not necessarily
be the most reliable. Many of the earliest manuscripts seem to be corrupted by
copying errors, omissions, additions, or decay and mutilation over time. (A later
manuscript could well be based on a more authoritative earlier copy that is now lost.)
It is rare to find two copies of the text that correspond in all details; and in many cases,
the variances are substantive.

Thanks to the philological work of several generations of medieval scholars, we now

can reconstruct as close as we may ever get to an authoritative recension of Boethius’s
work. Yet this still may not bring us any closer to what its medieval readers knew.
For many of the surviving copies of the work are only partial in content, containing
often just the first one or two “books” of the text.

Still, even for those copies that contain the “complete” five books (amounting to
about 2/3rds of the surviving 140 copies), Bowers has plausibly argued that there are
at least two now-lost books that were probably meant to conclude the original text
(Bowers 1989, p. xxxviii). Then again, De institutione musica seems to have been
conceived as but one treatise among four that would each detail the quadrivial
sciences, although none of these treatises survive save for fragments of the arithmetic
treatise. How would reading this text within its broader (or narrower) intellectual
context and program change how one understands its arguments?

As it turns out, Boethius’s text was often found copied in single codices along with
appropriate excerpts from Cassiodorus’s Institutiones, a short treatise entitled
“Commemoratio brevis de tonis et psalmis modulandis,” and the so-called
“Enchiriadis” treatises, musica and scolica. These groupings are so prevalent
among surviving 10th-century codices that scholars have suggested it likely represents
a tradition of Carolingian pedagogy (Bernhard, 1990b, p. 70).

The compilation of various writings within a single codex was in fact commonplace
in the Middle Ages. Oftentimes, just single sections of a text were excerpted—and
just as often without authorial attributions. But it turns out that many canonical
“treatises” in the Middle Ages are nothing but compilationes of such excerpts, good
examples being the Brevarium of Frutolf of Michelsberg (late 11th century) or the so-
called “Berkeley” manuscript (14th century). Still, a compilation could be more than
a random collection of excerpts; a skilled compiler knows not only which texts to
draw from but how to strategically order them (ordinatio) to create an effective
pedagogical curriculum (Meyer 2001, p. 52, 161). ii
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If Boethius’s own writings were frequently drawn upon by his admirers throughout
the Middle Ages, we should also not overlook that he too was standing on the
shoulders of giants. For it seems that a good deal of what Boethius wrote was
actually a translation (with commentary) from a now-lost work of Nichomachus, the
Eisagoge musica (constituting substantial portions of Books 1 through 4), the
Euclidian Sectio canonis (Book 4), and of Ptolemy’s Harmonica (Book 5).
Obviously, concepts of authorship, not to say originality and plagiarism, had quite
differing values fourteen hundred years ago than in our age. To borrow, excerpt and
perhaps even fully appropriate a text without citation was both acceptable and
commonplace for an “author.” Yet this does underscore for us today the fragility of
textual authority for many medieval writings.

And then there is the vexing question of textual accretion and additions. Many
copies of Boethius’s texts—as with many canonical manuscript of the Middle Ages—
are laden with glosses (marginalia comments and textual annotations). These
glosses range from short grammatical, lexical or etymological notations to
surprisingly extensive commentaries, exempla, elaborations, illustrations, questions,
disputations, or explanations (especially of his difficult mathematics)
(Bernhard/Bower 2000; also see Bernhard 1990c). To view these glosses as mere
appendages cluttering the “authentic” text of Boethius is to woefully underestimate
the potential insight they might offer us. When carefully studied, glosses may reveal
a reception record, if you will, of the text over many generations of manuscript copies.
In many cases, a persistent gloss might eventually become incorporated within the
text by scribes during the copying process, in essence becoming part of De
institutione musica and its reception history.

I have rehearsed these many problems of the textual codicology and reception of
Boethius’s De institutione musica as it helps to underscore the precariousness of the
written text in medieval manuscript culture. Disentangling the many sedimentary
layers of commentary, borrowings, interpolation and glossa in a text such as that of
Boethius requires exquisite hermeneutical skills on the part of the scholar. But if the
case of Boethius’s treatise is a particularly complex and rich one, the cautionary
lessons it teaches us are worth keeping in mind when attempting to assess any other
manuscript from the Middle Ages. The full meaning of De institutione musica is not
revealed simply by the reconstruction of some original and “autonomous” recension,
no matter how rigorous the philology, but also through its unfolding reception,
interpretation, and absorption by generations of readers spanning almost a thousand
years.
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II. Cantus: Music in the Church and Monastery

We now turn to writings on music that originate in the Middle Ages and concern the
value, presence, use, and regulation of music in the church and monastic orders--in
short, issues of interest to the “cantor” rather than the “musicus.” It is not surprising
that the bulk of Medieval literature on music concerns the role of music in the church.
For the there was no other institution throughout the Middle Ages that rivaled the
Catholic church in terms of its patronage of music and musicians as well as one that
cultivated such a rich literary culture. As the quantity, diversity, and complexity of the
church music increased over the course of the Middle Ages, we should not be
surprised to find copious quantities of literature written by Church authorities
addressing it.

We can distinguish three kinds of writings concerning music and the church which
together may be said to comprise the central “cantus” tradition: 1) writings that
defend—or in some cases qualify--the place of music in Christian worship; 2) formal
regulations concerning the proper use of music in the liturgy; and 3) guidelines
concerning music in the Monastic orders. These writings are to be distinguished
from the classical literature discussed above. For this cantus tradition is most
definitively about musica instrumentalis: the sounding music sung and heard in
liturgical settings. (It would be reasonable, of course, to also include music theory
literature within this cantus tradition. But as this literature is so substantial and
offers such special challenges to the historian, I will defer discussion of it to the next
section of this essay.)

The earliest Patristic writings on music that we know of actually offer a dim view of
music. As James McKinnon has shown, a good many of the church Fathers in the
earliest centuries of Christianity often seemed to hold music in suspicion. Their
denunciations of pagan musical customs were vehement in tone, with ever the worry
that much of this practice (or ethos) may contaminate Christian worship (McKinnon
1987, pp. 1-4; and also Page 2010). Yet there was too much testimony in Biblical
sources to bar music altogether from the liturgy. Counter to this Patristic
“Puritanism,” a number of church Fathers such as Saint Basil the Great and St. John
of Chrysostom (both 4th century) spoke approvingly of sung psalmody (Strunk xxxx,
pp. xxx-xxx; Quasten 1930). Augustine’s approbation of music in the service of the
church, so passionately expressed in his Confessions, was frequently cited by later
medieval writers (Gérold 1931).
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Of course it did not take a directive from Patristic sources in order to sanction music
in the church. The Christian faithful were singing hymns and psalms since their very
earliest conclaves. The real question was never so much whether to allow music in
the church as it was of regulating music’s place. By the 4th century we have the first
church documents that prescribe the proper use of music in liturgical and monastic
settings (McKinnon 1987, pp. 9-11). A major concern that emerges from these
documents is the curtailment of perceived abuses of singing in the church, whether of
non-canonical repertoire, the use of musical instruments, or of inappropriate and
lascivious singing practices. It was a perpetual problem. There appears almost no
break in the history of the church in which church authorities were not issuing various
edicts, adhortatio, decrees, bulls, regulatio, and admonishments in order to prescribe
proper usage of music and to correct its abuses. Particularly important to historians
of music are those Papal edicts mandating the adoption of Roman chant by the Franks
in the 8th century: the Ordines Romani. Pope John XXII (1324/25) was only the first
of many Popes to issue a bull regulating the use of polyphony in church music
(Strunk xxxx, pp. xxx-xxx; Hayburn 1979).

Music’s place in the monastic orders was also an important subject for documentation.
With the establishment of the Rules of St. Benedict around 530, the monasteries
became one of the greatest incubators of musical practice and preservation through
the Middle Ages (Strunk xxxx, pp. xxxx-xxx). Many of the most important
pedagogical documents of music theory originated in the monasteries (particularly of
the Cistercian order). And the choir schools (schola cantorum) that were established
within many monasteries can be seen as the predecessors to the later Universities in
which music occupied such an important position. We should also not forget that it
was largely in the scriptoria of the medieval monasteries that the vast bulk of
manuscript copies we have of classical writings and theory texts originated.
{Editor’s note: Cross reference to Busse-Berger article?}

If much of this literature on music found associated with the church and monastic
orders is legislative in character, we should not overlook the substantial body of
writings by church figures throughout the Middle Ages that looked at more subjective
facets of the musical experience: moralistic, aesthetic and spiritual. A number of
church Fathers continued the traditions of John of Chrysostom, Basil and Augustine
by writings on music’s spiritual value (as seen in the essays, letters and sermons of
Johannes Scotus Eriugena and Thomas Aquinas). For many of the Medieval faithful,
music offered a sonorous viam to the Divine that was unique in its affective power.
We frequently encounter in the mystical writings of Bernard of Clairvaux, Meister
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Eckhart, and above all, Hildegard of Bingen, descriptions of musical experience that
at times seem to border on the ecstatic, not to say the erotic (Diehr 2000; Holsinger
2001; Furhmann 2004). Later writers such as Gilles Charlier and Jean Gerson
continued in this same tradition. Given the emphasis musicologists often place upon
the theoretical literature of the Middle Ages with its often fearsome rationalizing and
scholastic systematization, these more interior writings on music—paradoxically
spiritual and corporeal at the same time--are a welcome corrective towards a more
balanced, humane place for music in the Medieval Christian experience.

A few brief words on the literature of music in Jewish and Arabic culture from the
Middle Ages is also in order here. Both the Mishnah and Talmud contain musical
references, although more practical information on the uses of music in Jewish liturgy
is contained in many rabbinical writings that stem from the Middle Ages, e.g. the
extensive responsum of Maimonides (1135-1204) on the performance of Arabic song
with instrumental accompaniment. There is a rich tradition of Jewish mysticism
beginning in the 13th century in which music occupies a key place, with consideration
of its ethical, magical, and theurgic powers (Idel 1997).

One of the glories of medieval literature is the large corpus of Arabic writings on
mūsīqī. We know of at least one hundred Arabic texts on music between the 9th and
15th centuries (Shiloah, 2001). And for much of this time, these Arabic writings
dwarfed their Western counterparts in scope and sophistication. Certainly in the 9th
and 10th centuries, there was nothing in the Christian world that rivaled the
encyclopedic theoretical writings of Al-Munajjim (856-912), one of the first to
attempt a codification of the Arabic modal system, Al-Kindī (c. 801-c. 866), who
offered an encyclopedic survey of Greek speculative harmonics, and above all, Al-
Fārābī (d. 950), whose “Grand Book on Music” was one of the most expansive
treatises of music theory in the entire Middle Ages, not be equaled by any Western
writer until Jacques of Liège in the 14th centur y. It is to Arabic writers, of course,
that we owe the preservation and eventual transmission of much Greek philosophical
literature into the West, especially of Aristotle. While regrettably none of the major
Arabic musical treatises were ever translated into Latin, parts of Al-Fārābī’s
Classification of the Sciences was translated in the 12th century by Gerard of Cremona.
This later work contained a precise of the author’s Aristotelian division of musical
science into both speculative and practical (“active”) parts (Randall 1976). It would
be a fateful pairing with profound resonance in the musical-theoretical tradition of the
Middle Ages, a subject to which we now turn.
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III. Music Theory

As mentioned above, the number of extant medieval texts classified as music theory is
enormous. Michael Bernhard has calculated these to be around 820 in number. iii
It is not simply the number of theory manuscripts that poses a challenge to the
historian, however. There are textual issues (many discussed above in relation to
Boethius’s De institutione musica) that pose challenges. First of all, of the 820 or so
texts that Bernhard estimates to exist, only about 120 of them may be securely tied to
a specific author. (To make this arithmetic explicit, that means that there are some 700
anonymous texts of Medieval music theory—almost 6 out of every 7 known
manuscripts.) Fewer still can be associated with a secure date and place.

Beyond the question of authorship and provenance, though, there are numerous
outstanding questions of textual integrity for many of these treatises. While none of
them exist in copies to rival those for Boethius’s Institutio musica (the most-copied
authors we have are Guido, Pseudo-Odo and Jehan de Muris--from 49 to 78 copies
extant for each author), there still are intractable problems for scholars in reconciling
discrepant copies of these texts.

Secondly, the range and variety of these writings is enormous. There are mammoth
summae of encyclopedic knowledge running to tens of thousands of words as well as
short fragments of discant and counterpoint exercises; the styles of these writings
range from highly mathematical or pretentiously scholastic in tone to the prosaic and
pedestrian to the poetic or satirical; the works treat a range of problems and
repertoire: from elementary pitch notation and chant theory (musica plana) to the
most sophisticated problems of rhythmic notation and polyphony (musica
mensurabilis). A large number of texts are obviously written for church singers (the
cantor) while a number of others appear to be University texts (appealing to the
musicus, presumably). iv

In order to start making sense of this diversity of theory texts, it is tempting to begin
as a first gambit dividing them into speculative and practical categories, musicus and
cantor. As appealing as this move may be, it is one that does not always work for
every text. To begin with, the Aristotelian distinction between practice and theory was
one not adopted by medieval writers until it was introduced—as we have seen—via
translations of Al-Fārābī in the 12th century. (As far as I can determine, the first writer
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to explicit invoke this partition in the West was Johannes de Grocheio at the start of
the 14th century.) More importantly, though, it does not allow for those texts that
partake organically of both approaches. The glory of much medieval theory is how
it so brilliantly mediates these two epistemological extremes (if not fully reconciling
them), how it seems to claim the speculative tools and intellectual aspirations of
classical harmonics for the service of the church musician. v Still, we will probably
find it useful to retain these categories as a heuristic when trying to sort out the
orientation of a given text (or section of a text), while recognizing that few writings
fall exclusively in one or the other. They are less disciplinary divisions than they are
epistemological distinctions.

We can see the Medieval alchemy forging speculative and practical claims already in
the first group of Medieval theoretical writings that have come down to us from the
9th and 10th centuries from the hands of Aurelian, Hucbald, Regino, and the authors of
the Enchriadis treatises. All of their writings, products of the great Carolingian
renovatio in learning that slowly helped to awake Western Europe from its deep
intellectual slumber, testify to some awareness of the classical intermediaries
discussed in the first section of this essay. Above all, Boethius’s presence is marked
throughout their writings, whether it is borrowing his Greek terms to name pitches,
intervals and scale systems, appropriating his Alypian alphabetic notation, or adopting
his classification of music as a quadrivial science (Bower 2002; Meyer 2001, p. 83).

Yet there is ultimately little that is truly “speculative” about this first generation of
medieval music writings, at least in the abstract sense that Boethius and his classical
forefathers would have understood “musica.” For their focus seems ever pragmatic;
each attempts to explain, rationalize, and facilitate the singing of chant (and in the
case of the Enchiriadis authors, even a little organum). The concerns of the church
cantor are never far away in their writings (not surprisingly since the little we know of
the authors suggests that each was a church cantor), witness the continuous citations
of chant repertoire and the (often tortuous) incipient efforts to invent a notational
language for conveying this chant repertoire as well as to understand pitch space for
the learning and categorization of chant.

If we wish to identify the true legacy of Boethius and his classical forefathers upon
our medieval writers, it is not so much in the appropriation of any specific vocabulary,
notation, or classification system. Rather is was simply the validation Boethius gave
musicians to try and understand, rationalize and systematize many of the practical
problems they faced. Their aim was to raise the lowly cantor, if not to the august
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heights of the classical musicus (an idealized occupation that, for all practical
purposes, would have been an impossibility in the Middle Ages) at least to that of a
peritus cantor, and perhaps even a cantor peritus et perfectus. .

Probably the greatest example of such “practical theorizing” among the first
generations of Medieval cantors was the construction of the system of ecclesiastical
modes. This feat entailed far more than simply classifying a received chant
repertoire into ready-made tonaries, for there was little in the practice of chant as
received in the 9th century to organically suggest a single, symmetrical 8-fold
categorization of toni. Rather, the “modern” modal system of the Middle Ages arose
as a result of the desire of certain classically-aware writers (such as Aurelian, Hucbald,
and the author(s) of the “Alia musica” texts) to fit chant practice retrospectively
within a model inspired by the 8 Greek tonoi delineated by Boethius and possibly also
the Byzantine octoechoi. (Powers, 2001; Cohen 2002, pp. 309-11) But once
theorists had decided that chant should conform to an 8-mode system, all sorts of
intellectual exercises were proffered to fit a recalcitrant chant repertoire procrustean-
like into this schema. The fact that later additions to the chant repertoire conformed
more easily to this modal typology does not change the fact that this system was
largely a construction of theory (albeit a brilliant one at that), not an obvious
deduction from practice.

It is in the next generation of music theorists from the 11th century—Guido of Arezzo,
Johannes Affligemensis/Cotto, and the author of the Dialogus de musica (attributed
by many earlier scholars to an Italian abbot named Odo)---that we see some of the
most vigorous and imaginative “theorizing” of the entire Middle Ages. This was a
heady time in the development of medieval music. It saw the establishment of our
modern pitch gamut and staff notation. These notational accomplishments
consequently helped church authorities to stabilize and consolidate the chant
repertoire. Supporting these pedagogical reforms were the numerous cathedral schools
for the teaching of this newly-canonized chant repertoire, and finally, the beginnings
of a sustained polyphonic practice improvised around this chant—or at least in a few
progressive cathedrals.

Guido of Arezzo (ca. 991-after 1033) receives much of the credit for the pedagogical
advances of the day. (And he received credit even for the most famous innovation
that was actually not of his own design: the Guidonian “hand” in which the student
could navigate the full diatonic gamut using solfege mutations of overlapping
hexachords.) It is little wonder that his writings were some of the most widely
14

copied and disseminated in the Middle Ages (aside from Boethius, of course). Soon
attaining the status of an “auctoritas” in his own right, Guido enjoyed the almost
unique distinction of being an author whose several writings on music were early on
consolidated as a single corpus in most manuscript copies.

In all this animated theorizing, there was little new here that we can credit directly to
antiquity. But that does not mean that ancient writers had lost their appeal to
medieval musicians. The most obvious evidence is found in the writings of those
Parisian musicians from the late 12 th and early 13th centuries who discussed rhythmic
issues of mensural theory. While there was little help Boethius could offer Medieval
musicians on this topic, it turned out that a much earlier classical auhtority could
provide surprising intellectual stimulation: Aristotle. For with the dramatic entry of
the great bulk of Aristotle’s logical and metaphysical writings (the logica nova) in the
13th century thanks to translations from the Arabic (and dramatic is hardly an
overstatement in describing this epical event in intellectual history) music theorists
found a compelling intellectual paradigm by which to conceptualize and systematize
the rhythmic relations demanded of the new polyphonic practice. The theory of
rhythmic modes of the 13 th century is virtually inconceivable without the scholastic
apparatus—terminology, concepts, and logic—by which it is articulated. It is not
surprising to find that virtually all of the earliest theorists of mensural music in the
13th century were associated with the University of Paris, where the new scholasticism
took firmest hold: Johannes of Garlandia, Lambertus, the author of the Anonymous
1279, Franco of Cologne, and the English author of the Anonymous 4 treatise (Yudkin
1990; Tanay 1999). Nor was it just in rhythmic theory that the telltale signs of
Aristotle may be found. Even in coterminous discant and counterpoint treatises, the
rhetoric and logic of Aristotle found surprisingly fertile application (Dyer 1992;
Cohen 2001).

It is in the 14th century, though, that we can find probably the most full-scale evidence
of scholasticism among the encyclopedic authors who wrote their extensive summae
of music knowledge along Aristotelian lines: Jerome of Moravia, Johannes de
Grocheio, Johannes Boen, John of Tewkesbury, Walter of Odington, Jehan des Murs,
and above all, Jacques of Liège. As a literary genre, the summa continues the earlier
medieval tradition of compilation mentioned in an earlier section of this essay, in
which diverse treatises—or excerpts of treatises—are collated by an author to form an
integrated curriculum of musical study, often with encyclopedic aspirations.
(And, in fact, Jerome’s “Summula” turns out to be a compilation of earlier authors,
although--almost uniquely—he is scrupulous in crediting his sources.)
15

In any event, we find adopted in most of these encyclopedic writings Aristotle’s

strong demarcation between theoria and practica (or as it was more commonly put in
Latin drawn from Al-Fārābī: musicae speculativa and musicae activa). Books of
learned speculation (often extended commentaries on Boethian harmonics) are paired
with extensive tracts on practical problems of the day: modal species and
classification, mensuration, rules of contrapunctus, etc. All this seems to return us to
the musicus/cantor polarity of previous centuries. Yet differences should be noted.

First of all, the activities of the musicus and the cantor were no longer understood as
personifications or careers (if indeed they ever really were). A good musician
could—and was indeed expected to—embody both. This is how it could be that
authors such as Jehan des Muris or Jacques of Liège could write treatises that had
both speculative and practical parts. As Johannes Galliscus put is so effectively in his
Ritus canendi (mid 15th century) “aren’t all modern musici also practical musicians”
(Quid ergo? Musici non sunt hodiernis temporibus nostri cantores). To put this in
the scholastic terminology of the day, the speculative writer asks “propter quid”
(why?) while the practical writer asks “quia” (what?) (Dyer 2007, pp. 44-46; Haas
1984, pp. 116-24). But it was rare for any writer to continue insisting, as had Guido,
that musicians must be divided into the two non-adjacent categories of the musicus
and cantor (“magna est distantia….”) More common was the argument of
Lambertus that theory and practice were but two parts of a single ars musica . In an
ideal dialectic, theory (ars) would explain practice , while practice would show the
application (usus) of theory.

Secondly, the kind of speculative music theory penned by authors after the 13th
century began to take on a very different hue than that found in Boethius. While
there was still a strong mathematical component, the mathematics were more often
applied to very concrete problems of tuning and interval generation (such as divisions
of the whole tone and the construction of useable temperaments). Questions that had
occupied many earlier authors such as the harmony of the spheres were now almost
completely neglected (or ridiculed). And new topics that had hitherto found little
attention in ancient harmonics—such as the physics of sound—garnered intense
interest and study. In short, music’s hallowed place in the venerable quadrivium was
slowly but surely being eroded by the persistent onslaught of Aristotelianism. It is
telling that, by the end of the 13th century, Boethius was largely dropped from most
University curricula. vi Outside of a few exceptions in England and Central Europe,
Boethius was no longer prescribed reading for University students, replaced in many
16

cases by the more up-to-date musica speculativa of Jehan des Muris (Dyer 2009). Of
course the winds changed again in the late 15th century. With a strong revival of
Platonic thought and literature well underway, Boethius’s text elicited new excitement
and readership, although for reasons quite differing than that which motivated earlier
generations of readers. vii

A good example of the more practical species of “speculative” theorizing can be

found in the large number of monochord treatises that have come down to us.
Christian Meyer has analyzed over 150 of these treatises ranging between the 9th and
15th century (Meyer 1996). Many of these earliest treatises rely on time-honored
concepts, terms, and techniques of classical harmonics bequeathed by Boethius.
(Indeed, some include in their incipts “secundum Boethium” or “Mensura Boetii.”)
Not surprisingly, the tuning these authors advocated was largely Pythagorean. Yet this
same tool—the monochord—could also be used for quite radical and subversive ends.
Many later theorists used their monochord to plot out ratios and proportions that stand
outside of classical Pythagorean tuning, whether they were the new consonances of
just thirds and sixths proffered by Ramos, or the small divisions of the whole tone
calculated by Marchetto (Herlinger 2002). If there is anything speculative about this
monochord literature, it is not in the sense of qualitas--abstract musical proportions
with little acoustical reality. Rather, it is in the sense of potentia—the exposition of
a mathematical idea that may have very concrete practical realization.

An entirely new type of musical speculation is evident in the writings of a number of

academics and physicians who attempted to analyze music as an acoustical
phenomenon (soni accutas) subject to physical analysis. (See Dyer 2007, p. 48;
Hentschel 1998). viii For Robert Grosseteste, music was not so much “numerus
sonorous” (sounding number) as it was “sonus harmonice numerato” (sound
harmonically numbered; Panti 1998; Dyer 2007, p. 39, p. 65). The shift of
grammatical subject from number to sound signals a profound reorientation of music.
If the numerical aspects of musical ontology were never completely abandoned by
any Medieval music theorists (and given the empirical demonstrations possible on any
monochord, how could one possibly ignore these correspondences?), the numerical
aspects of musical correspondence were largely restricted to sounding music, and
usually without a great deal of metaphysical baggage. Complementing this change of
perspective were studies of the acoustical and physical properties of bells and organ
pipes (described in Hunt 1978).

By the 14th century, then, music was beginning to lose its traditional home within the
17

quadrivium. It is thus ironic, though perhaps understandable, that at the same time it
was finding increasingly safer harbor in the trivium. Throughout the century, we can
track an increasing interest among Medieval writers of music’s relation to grammar—
and to a lesser degree, rhetoric— both disciplines that were traditionally enfolded
within the trivium (Bielitz 1977, Bower 1989). To be sure, this was a development
that had earlier precedents. Already in the Carolingian period theorists had used
grammatical terminology to analyze and teach aspects of chant melodies (Duchez
1981). But it seems that in the 14th centur y, a number of musicians turned to study
more systematically the grammatical sides of music, especially Jehan des Murs
(Notitia artis musicae) and Johannes Ciconia (Nova Musica) (Bent 2002).

Part and parcel of this “trivialization” of music was a concern with music as a
compositional product—a res facta in which rules could be established for its creation.
Aristotle actually had a perfectly good label for such a pedagogy—musical poesis—
although it was oddly little invoked by Medieval writers. Still, beginning with a
family of anonymous organum treatises in the 12th century that have been analyzed by
Hans Eggebrecht and Frieder Zaminer, we have the first of a series of writings that
teach a musician literally how to compose (or more accurately, to sing on the spur)
above some given chant (Eggebrecht and Zaminer, 1970). It might be odd for us to
think of these treatises as “literature,” in that some of them have virtually no text and
consist merely of exempla of florid organa or discant progressions that the student
presumably is to memorize and emulate (Fuller 2002). What prose there is might be
a simple enumeration of rules to guide possible interval successions (such as the 31
“rules of organum” in the Vatican treatise). Still, they formed part of a program of
musical education that increasingly included a creative element: the skills to create a
musical “work”(opum facere) as Marchetto wrote in the 14th-centur y. (check)

The didactic literature for the composition of music is seen flourishing in a

remarkable group of 15th-century theory treatises all originating from Italy by writers
such as Prosdocimus de Beldemandis, Ugolino de Orvieto, Johannes Tinctoris, and
Franchinus Gaffurius—to name only the most prominent. By this point, the most
vibrant culture of active music theorizing seems to have migrated across the Alps
from France to Italy (much as the gravitational center of so much music composition
seems to have shifted southward). Many of these theorists knew one another, and they
were all steeped in a vibrant compositional and intellectual environment that
encouraged thoughtful—and sometimes polemical—reflections on contemporary
musical practice.
18

The texts we have seem notably more organized and unified than so many earlier
theoretical writings, their literary sophistication also markedly elevated. One might
attribute this to a nascent humanist movement that was just beginning to show signs
of life in Italy. There may also be the simple fact that there are fewer paleographic
problems. (For many of these treatises, we have only a single manuscript copy to
consult, a few of them even original autographs. ix) And of course there was the epical
introduction of printing. (Gaffurio’s Theoricum opus musice discipline of 1480
marks the first major music text to be published--and also, incidentally, the first to
employ the term “theory” in its title.) All in all, we sense a new professionalization
and sense of confidence among music theorist.

If the 14th-century summa looked backward, summarizing a theoretical tradition often

dating back hundreds of years and sometimes unsympathetic to new musical trends
(viz. Jehan des Murs or Jacques of Liège), this new Italian literature was decidedly
forward looking, responding to contemporary practice and challenges to composers
with some of the most sophisticated theorizing seen since the Carolingian period.
Above all, the pedagogy of counterpoint was thoroughly updated and reflected the
most progressive developments of polyphonic style than being cultivated in the major
Italian centers of musical activity.

The culmination of this tradition is undoubtedly found in the corpus of writings by

Johannes Tinctoris (1435-1511). While Tinctoris was a Burgundian by birth, he
spent most of his life in Italy where he composed all 12 of his extant treatises (two of
which were published). Together, these works might at first glance be seen as
continuing the tradition of the medieval Summa, as they offer an encyclopedic
coverage of all knowledge of music, practical and speculative: mode, mensuration,
counterpoint, notation, classical harmonics, tuning, and even—uniquely for its day—a
dictionary of musical terms. And indeed, it seems that Tinctoris very much did see
his scholarship as a unified corpus of encyclopedic knowledge of music. But
Tinctoris was truly a progressive observer of his day, and he was explicit that only the
music of the “moderns” (beginning with Dufay) was worth the attention of
musicians—and presumably theorists.

Still, it would be a mistake to conclude from the example of Tinctoris that by the end
of the 15th century we have finally moved beyond the many codicological and
hermeneutic problems endemic to medieval theory that was outlined earlier in this
essay. It is easy to let the luminosity of these major Italian works eclipse other
contemporaneous, if more subaltern, currents of theoretical activity. And there is no
19

better reminder of this reality that the case of Johannes Hollandrinus.

Hollandrinus is not a name well known to musicologists today. In fact, we know

virtually nothing of the person. He seems to have lived somewhere in Central
Europe during the second half of the 14th century and was active as a teacher of chant
theory. But not a single text has come down to us that we could attribute to his pen.
Still, there is an extraordinary group of some 30 manuscripts stemming from Central
Europe and spanning the early 15th century until the second quarter of the 16th century
that invoke his name and seem to represent the core of his teachings. Lacking any
original work that we can identify as the source of these teachings, the Hollandrinus
“tradition” can only be reconstructed through painstaking paleographic work—and
then, of course, only partially. x At a certain point, though, it becomes impossible—
and ultimately irrelevant--to disentangle any “original” text or teaching that we might
attribute to the elusive Hollandrinus and instead view this complex as a dominant
“teaching tradition” that spanned a wide geographical area for over a century and a
quarter. Through careful analysis of these texts’ topics, terminology, locutions, and
mnemonic devices, it is possible to see a core of teachings that seem to have been
disseminated and assimilated among music theorists active in large swaths of
Southern Germany, Bohemia, Hungary and Poland.

Most of these manuscripts are partial, unsystematic, and unpolished; they seem to
represent more notes of teachings (reportiones) that were passed on orally. Their
substance, as we might expect, is many layered, with some of it traceable as far back
as the 11th century (borrowings from Johannes Cotto, Lambertus, and Jehan des Murs
have all been identified). Their focus is uniformly upon chant practice, with
problems of modal classification and the fundamentals of “musica plana” the central
concern. If one looks for any sign of the more “progressive” music theory being
taught in Italy, one would come away disappointed.

Still, there are truly profound implications of this tradition, and they offer a cautionary
tale to historians of music theory. First, there is the obvious lesson that theoretical
teachings were taking place throughout Europe in the 15th century outside of the more
familiar Western centers. In addition to Paris, Padua, or Oxford, we must also
remember Prague, Cracow, Leipzig, Budapest, and Breslau as places of music-
theoretical activity—and no doubt many more.

Secondly, we are reminded that chant theory remained a dominating concern of most
practicing musicians throughout the 15th century (and well beyond for that matter).
20

It is all too easy for us to be dazzled by the summits of polyphonic composition in the
15th and 16th centuries and forget that this was still a highly specialized—and
professionalized—genre of music making. For most church musicians throughout
Europe, monophonic chant, not complex polyphony, either sacred or secular,
remained the primary staple of their craft and musical world. And for many of these
musicians, the pedagogy they continued to teach and learn in the midst of the most
opulent polyphonic practice was one firmly rooted in medieval tradition.

Finally, the Hollandrinus manuscripts remind us that music pedagogy and theoretical
teachings should not be reconstructed only by relying upon a canon of monumental
texts. We have in these manuscripts a glimpse of a robust oral teaching tradition that
must have existed for centuries across the whole of Europe. Indeed, this was surely
the norm in music pedagogy than the exception. It may never be possible to
reconstruct this oral teaching tradition as fully as we have for the Hollandrinus
tradition of central Europe in the 15th century; but it does caution us to think about the
scope—and limits—of the more canonical “elite” theory literature upon which
musicologists have traditionally relied.

4. Secular music literature. (unfinished)

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RISM (Répertoire international des sources musicales).

Waesberghe, Joseph Smits van. 1961. The theory of music from the Carolingian era
up to 1400, I: descriptive catalogue of manuscripts. B/III/1. Munich-Duisberg:
G. Henle Verlag.

Fischer, Pieter. 1968. The theory of music from the Carolingian era up to 1400, II:
Italy. B/III/2 Munich-Duisberg: G. Henle Verlag 1968).

Huglo, Michel, and Christian Meyer. 1986. The theory of music: manuscripts from the
21

Carolingian era up to c.1500 in the Federal Republic of Germany (D-brd).

B/III/3. Munich: G. Henle Verlag.

Huglo, Michel, and Nancy C. Phillips. 1992. The theory of music: manuscripts from
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Meyer, Christian, et al. 1997. The theory of music from the Carolingian era up to
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Shiloah, Amnon. 1979. The theory of music in Arabic writings (c.900 - 1900):
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On-line data bases (HELP!)

1. Thesaurus musicarum latinarum.

2. Lexicon musicum Latinum medi aevi
3. The Brepolis family of databases?

http://apps.brepolis.net.proxy.uchicago.edu/BrepolisPortal/default.aspx
• Papal Letters
• Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Collection of texts concerned with the
German and Frankish Kingdom from 500-1500 CE
• Aristoteles Latinus Database: The critical edition of the Medieval Latin
Aristotle, including the entire corpus of all known Latin versions and all
Medieval Greek-Latin translations, forming the main tools for the study of
science and philosophy in the Middle Ages
22

4. Acta Sanctorum: Collection of documents examining the lives of saints,

organized according to each saint's feast day
http://acta.chadwyck.com.proxy.uchicago.edu/all/search

5. ) Patralogia Latina: Covers the works of the Latin Fathers from Tertullian
around 200 AD to the death of Pope Innocent III in 1216.**The most important
forerunner to the Corpus Christianorum series, which is contained in the
Library of Latin Texts Series A http://efts.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/PLD/(Latin
search terms, e.g. musica 1535 hits)

6. ORB: The Online Reference Book for Medieval Studies http://www.the-

orb.net/libindex.html

7. Codicology.com

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Endnotes

i
Discussed extensively in Bernhard 1990a; also see Bower 2002 and Huglo 1988, pp.
28

231-42 for bibliographies of editions, translations, and commentaries.

ii
Although it is well to keep in mind that not all codicies will necessarily show the
same level of integration. The incoherence of a “text” such as Coussemaker’s
“Anonymous XI” can only be explained to result from the compilation of a large
number of un-related excerpts by some scribe that Coussemaker wrongly presumed
must have represented a unified whole (Balensuela 2001, p. 698).

iii
Bernhard, 1990b, p. 44. Bernhard presumably gets his numbers from RISM, The
Theory of Music,” whose sixth and final volume published in 2003 completes an
almost fifty year project to inventory every extant theory manuscript known from the
9th century until the late 15th century presently lying in libraries and archives around
the world

iv
Scholarly editions of many of these writings are available from a variety of well-
established academic sources. It would woefully extend the length of this essay to
indicate in the footnotes all the various editions and translations of theory works that I
will cite. Thus I will restrict myself to mentioning the names of authors (when
known) for major treatises, or to give generally agreed-upon titles or incipits, and
encourage the reader desirous of more information to consult one of the following
works.
First and foremost there is the Quellenverzeichnis in the Lexicon Musicum
Latinum Medii Aevi (Bernhard, 2006, xcl-cxxvi). This is the currently the most
comprehensive published listing of theory texts from the Middle Ages; it includes
the author and date of a text (if known), a siglum to identify each work, and a listing
of published sources and editions for each text along with a cross listing of incipits.
Most usefully, this comprehensive list is updated with each new fascicle of the
Lexicon that is issued in seriatim. (on line edition?)
Less exhaustive, but still useful listings, of scholarly editions of major
theoretical texts can be found in Van Waesberg 1969; Meyer 2001; Zaminer 1990,
287-97; and Williams and Balensuela 2007. The later work is especially useful for
its comprehensive inventories of secondary literature as well as its many cross-
references.
Finally, mention should be made of the on-line data base of Latin theory
treatises—the Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum. The “TML” is sponsored by the
Center for the History of Music Theory and Literature at Indiana University under the
direction of Thomas Mathiesen. At present, the texts and musical illustrations of
over 700 Latin treatises drawn from published scholarly editions are available on line
29

in a searchable database. At present, the web address for the TML is:
http://www.chmtl.indiana.edu/tml/start.html.

v
It is an unfortunate reality that today most musicologists writing in English use the
locution “music theory” to designate a wide swath of medieval historical literature
that would hardly have been recognized as musica theorica to its authors. Let alone
that the Greek term theoria was more commonly rendered in the Latin as speculatio
by Medieval writers (and hence making the profession of “speculative music theorist”
an absurd-sounding redundancy to any ear attuned to the Middle Ages), a large
number of treatises we today might call theoretical were understood as being purely
practical in nature (hence, by the same logic, making the profession of a “practical
music theorist” a paradoxical oxymoron for any Medieval musician). (See
Rietmuller 1990, p. 170; Christensen, 2002, 5) I trust the reader recognizes that
when I use the locution “music theory” I do so in a more capacious, non-historical
sense, reserving speculatio or theoria in their more historically-contingent meanings.

vi
Dyer 2007. Not surprisingly, The number of extant manuscript copies of de
Institutione Musica show a parallel drop starting in the 13th century (Huglo 1990, p.
167).

vii
The same is true of Plato, by the way.
There is only a single copy of Calcidius’s
translation of the Timeaus stemming from the 14th century that has survived, this in
comparison to the numerous copies that preceded it (and, of course, that would follow
in various published editions) (Huglo 1990, p. 168).

viii
It should be noted that it was Arabic writers who made the most significant study
and advances in musical acoustics during the Middle Ages (Hunt 1978, pp. 69-73).
But virtually none of this literature was known in the West.

ix
The first autograph manuscript of a theory text in which we can make a firm
attribution is by Prosdocimus de Beldemandis in the 15th century (Bernhard 1990b, p.
67).

x
I rely in this section upon the important study of Michael Bernhard and Elzbieta
Witkowska-Zaremba which has recently been published (Bernhard and Witkowska-
Zaremba, 2010).