medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Bonnie, Thank you for these wonderful quotes. If I might offer another
few, though not entirely taken from medieval mouths:
Re: the performance of the medieval sequence, Richard H. Hoppin, in
_Medieval Music_ [Norton Introduction to Music History], New York: Norton,
1978, 171-70, says:
"The organ was by no means the only musical instrument to be mentioned in
sequence texts. We find phrases such as "Let the flute resound" ... and
"Let us sing to the acompaniment of the lyre". Liturgical purists insist
that references to these and other instruments are merely symbolic and that
instruments cannot have been used in the church service. Whether the
services really remained that pure is doubtful. Miniatures in an
eleventh-century manuscript of tropes and sequences depict both wind and
bowed string instuments, with performers ranging from King David to
ordinary minstrels [Hoppin has figures on p. 168, and refers to a St.
Martiale, Limoges ms at the BN, but doesn't give a shelf mark!]. Such
illustrations, of course, do not prove that instruments were used in
church. More positive indications come from prohibitions of performances by
jongleurs during religious services. Laws rarely prohibit nonexistent sins.
Whatever unauathorized instruments may occasionally have been used, there
can be no doubt that organ accompaniment was a normal procedure in the
later Middle Ages. Egidius de Zamora, a Spanish Franciscan who was tutor to
the son of King Alfonso the Wise (1252-84), wrote of the organ that "the
Church uses only this one musical instrument with diverse chants and with
proses, sequentiae, and hymns; other instruments in general are rejected
because of abuses by the players."
In James McKinnon, ed., usic and Society, From Antiquity and the Middle
Ages, From Ancient Greece to the 15th Century (Prentice Hall, 1990), p. 282:
"Minstrels, for example, were widely prohibited from perfoming in church,
where sacred music was sung and perhaps acompanied by the organ only. But
wind bands played sacred music outdoors( in processions, for example) and,
from the 1480s at the very latest, even polyphonic motets. In the context
of princely ceremonies, on the other hand, the use of wind instruments in
church is documented already in the fourteenth century--although what they
played can hardly have been liturgical."
What all this suggests very strongly is that instrumental accompaniment was
possible and probably frequent in paraliturgical ceremonies outside of the
church building itself for most of the earlier middle ages--voice held
primary place inside. I make the following suggestion, based on my reading
of liturgical commentary relative to spoken and written communication
(which dovetails so well with musical communication)-- There was a strong
connection between voice, breath and divine spirit. It was the voice and
breath of God the Father that gave shape and life to the world, and the
voices of the special faithful (the choir singers in this case) reiterated,
imitated, continued this voice/spirit [perhaps for a similar purpose, ie to
sustain the original creation] and perhaps would (could) be inhabited by
the original and divine breath. Musical instruments would be foreign to
this continuity, hence not "pure". Fear of pollution of the divine (and
fear of sapping its strength, or at least the strength of one's commitment
to sustaining the divine through song) runs through commentary on musical
instruments in sacred ritual, as Bonnie's quotes certainly support. This
goes back to the early church (as others have pointed out), for which see
the standard reference to these early sources: Johannes Quasten, "Music and
Worship in Pagan & Christian Antiquity," (National Assoc. of Pastoral
Musicians, 1983 [trans. of German orig. Musik und Gesang..., Aschendorff,
1973]).
The question of how accurately medieval reps. of musical instruments
reflect reality--both in terms of perfomance (where, when and and *under
what conditions*) and in terms of the shape/form of the actual
instruments--is an old one. I'm not sure how a musicologist would answer
the question, but I believe a response lies with the distinction between
heavenly and terrestial, ideal/real, sacred zone/secular zone (as Eliade
developed it). Choirs of angels and saints could play instruments, King
David (a special case) plays [though do we have a representation of him in
a "church"? --the ms illustration of David in Hoppin (above) shows him
unencumbered by architectural surroundings]. Here it is important to pay
attention to where the illustration occurs, the larger context/theme of
which its a part, and especially when the
illustration/sculpture/description was created.
Leah Rutchick
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