Date/Time
Date(s) - 17 Apr 2012
4:30 PM - 6:30 PM
Location
Princeton University McCormick Hall
Category(ies) No Categories
106 McCormick Hall, Reception to Follow
Charles M. Atkinson, Ohio State University, School of Music
“The Vatican Anonymous in speculo”
The “piccolo trattato sul canto ecclesiastico” that Peter Wagner first published in modern edition in 1904, known to most of us as the Vatican Anonymous, has assumed new importance in recent years as an early witness to the origins of musical notation and to the early history of the octoechos in the West. Despite its new-found fame, there is still much we do not know about the treatise and the manuscript in which it was copied, Biblioteca Vaticana, Pal. lat. 235. It is my purpose in this paper to examine the treatise in light of recent scholarship—to hold a mirror to the treatise itself, as it were. I shall look at the treatise’s use of terminology for notation (nota, neuma, with figura as an interlinear addition), its description of the notae or neumes as having arisen from the signs for prosodic accents, and the repertoire of antiphons it cites as examples of the mesoi or medii toni in an effort to determine what we may learn about it, its author, and the place in which it might have been written.
On the reading list: The text of the treatise “Quid est cantus?” is available in the two items by Peter Wagner and also on-line at Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum. Huglo mentions it at various points in Les Tonaires, and I treat it directly in the two articles cited. Marie-Elisabeth Duchez’s article is a fine treatment of the larger question of the relationship between grammar and music in the Carolingian period.
The reading list:
Charles M. Atkinson, “The Parapteres: Nothi or Not?” The Musical Quarterly, LXVIII (1982): 32-59
_____, “De accentibus toni oritur nota quae dicitur neuma: Prosodic Accents, the Accent Theory, and the Paleofrankish Script,” Essays on Medieval Music in Honor of David G. Hughes, ed. Graeme M. Boone, Isham Library Papers 4 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995): 17-42
Marie-Elisabeth Duchez, « Description grammaticale et description arithmètique des phénomènes musicaux: le tournant du IXe siècle. » Sprache und Erkenntnis im Mittelalter: Akten des VI. Internationalen Kongresses für mittelalterliche Philosophie (Bonn, 1977). Miscellanea Mediaevalia, 13/2 (1981): 561-79. Berlin/New York: Walter De Gruyter: 1981
[Ms. Duchez doesn’t treat the Anonymous Vaticanus directly, but provides an excellent survey of the relationships between grammar and music in the period in question.]
Michel Huglo, Les Tonaires : Inventaire, analyse, comparaison (Paris : Société française de musicologie, 1971) [See manuscript index under Biblioteca Vaticana, Pal. lat. 235.]
____, and J. Hourlier, « La Notation paléofranque, Etudes grégoriennes 2( 1957) : 212-19
Peter Wagner, “Un piccolo trattato sul canto ecclesiastico,” Rassegna gregoriana 3 (1904): 482-84
[Text of treatise «Quid est cantus ? » also available on-line: Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum: 9th-11th centuries : ANOQUID TEXT]
_____, Einführung in die gregorianischen Melodien. Vol. 2 : (Freiburg, Switzerland : Universitäts-Buchhandlung, 1921) : 104-108