Rankin On The Treatment of Pitch in Early Music Writing

Early Music History (2011) Volume 30.
Cambridge University Press

doi:10.1017/S0261127911000039
S R
Email: skr1000@cam.ac.uk
O N T H E T RE ATME N T OF PITCH IN
E AR L Y MUSI C WR I TING
When a practical way of recording music in writing was invented in the early ninth century, it defined
neither the pitches of specific notes in a melody, nor the intervallic relations between successive notes.
Nineteenth-century views of such notations considered them primitive; more recent descriptions have
recognised that precise pitch notation was not a basic aim. But how did ninth-century neumatic
notations deal with pitch, and, if the role of memory was not usurped by written records, what role did
notation fulfil? In this study, the interaction of memory and writing is explored. Notations written by
a French and by a German scribe (F-La MS 239 and S-SG MS 359) are seen to follow different
strategies for the arrangement of signs above the text, striking divergent visual balances between pitch
information and the text–music link. In each notation the reader is led along a path of recall, with more
or less emphatic written signals provided as required.
The invention of writing in several parts of the world between the fourth
and the first millennia  ultimately served to encourage the development
of new knowledge systems; in its many varieties and functions, writing
would become a foundation for changes in cognitive processes.1 Whether
read as marking the transition from a savage to a civilized culture,2 or in
This study had its beginnings in the Lowe lectures delivered at the University of Oxford in
spring 2008 (‘Impressed on the Memory: Musical Sounds and Notations in the Ninth
Century’); I was able to pursue that work during a happy semester spent at the Institute for
Advanced Study, Princeton in 2009. To both institutions, and to the many friends and
colleagues who have helped in the development of these ideas, I express grateful thanks.
Abbreviations used:
Benevento Benevento, Biblioteca Capitolare
BnF Bibliothèque nationale de France
SG Sankt Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek
1
J. Goody, The Interface between the Written and the Oral (Cambridge, 1987), p. 3. Bibliography on
the history of writing, and on its influence on culture, is huge: a small number of references
are given here, without any attempt to be comprehensive. I. Gelb, A Study of Writing (rev. edn,
Chicago, 1963), but note that Gelb’s evolutionary explanation of the tripartite typology of
writing has now largely been set aside; G. Sampson, Writing Systems (London, 1985), which
considers the history of writing using linguistic methodology; F. Coulmas, The Writing Systems
of the World (Oxford, 1989); P. T. Daniels, ‘The Study of Writing Systems’, in Daniels and W.
Bright (eds.), The World’s Writing Systems (New York and Oxford, 1996), pp. 3–17; P. Damerow,
The Origins of Writing as a Problem of Historical Epistemology (Preprint 114; Berlin: Max-Planck-
Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte), <www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/Preprints/P114.pdf>;
S. D. Houston (ed.), The First Writing: Script Invention as History and Process (Cambridge, 2004).
2
This is central to the general argument advanced in J. Goody, The Domestication of the Savage
Mind (Cambridge, 1977). See also Goody, The Interface, Pt. IV, ‘Writing and its Impact on
Individuals in Society’, pp. 209–300.
105
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Susan Rankin
less evolutionary fashion,3 the availability of writing rendered it possible to
pass information of specific kinds from one generation to another, and to
others beyond them. That in turn supported aims as diverse as the
registration of administrative and economic data, the recording of the
history of societies, the rendering of precedent consultable, and sacred
display;4 eventually, writing became a primary tool of language and in this
guise has achieved its most developed forms. The invention in western
Europe in the late eighth or early ninth century of ways of notating music
– the record of detailed instructions for the delivery of words – can hardly
be compared to those earlier moments of invention, so much was the
creation of neumatic scripts set within the context of already highly literate
communities. Moreover, while the ways of writing verbal language known
to Carolingian cantors depended on phonetically formulated groups of
symbols and a web of semantic rules, the task they undertook in designing
music writing was not to deal with something autonomous, separate from
and comparable to verbal language; rather they undertook to show in this
music writing specific ways of modulating the Latin language in delivery.
Yet, invention it was: the musical sign systems devised by Carolingian
cantors did not rely on those models available to them of musical sounds
which could be written. Such models were inherited from Greek theory, as
transmitted by late antique Latin writers, above all, Martianus Capella and
Boethius.5 Greek music theorists had been extremely aware of two ways of
thinking about musical sounds, as ‘discrete’ or ‘continuous’, this latter
described by Boethius through analogy with the rainbow.6 But it was only
3
On literacy, civilization and evolution see, e.g., W. J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing
of the Word (London, 1982); R. Finnegan, Literacy and Orality: Studies in the Technology of
Communication (Oxford, 1988); B. V. Street, ‘Introduction: The New Literacy Studies’, in B. V.
Street (ed.), Cross-Cultural Approaches to Literacy (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 1–21; B. Trigger, ‘Writing
Systems: A Case Study in Cultural Evolution’, in Houston (ed.), The First Writing, pp. 39–68.
4
See most recently the papers collected in Houston (ed.), The First Writing, including an
overview of the early uses of writing: Houston, ‘Overture to The First Writing’, pp. 3–15.
5
On the transmission of Greek music theory to the early Middle Ages see M. Huglo, ‘Le
développement du vocabulaire de l’Ars Musica à l’époque carolingienne’, Latomus, 34 (1975),
pp. 131–51; M. Bernhard, ‘Überlieferung und Fortleben der antiken lateinischen Musiktheo-
rie im Mittelalter’, in Geschichte der Musiktheorie, 3: Rezeption des antiken Fachs im Mittelalter, ed.
Frieder Zaminer (Darmstadt, 1990), pp. 7–36; C. Bower, ‘The Transmission of Ancient Music
Theory into the Middle Ages’, in Thomas Christensen (ed.), The Cambridge History of Western
Music Theory (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 136–67; C. Atkinson, The Critical Nexus: Tone System, Mode,
and Notation in Early Medieval Music (New York and Oxford, 2009).
6
‘Just as when a rainbow is observed, the colors are so close to one another that no definite line
separates one color from another – rather it changes from red to yellow, for example, in such
a way that continuous mutation into the following color occurs with no clearly defined median
falling between them – so also this may occur often in pitches.’ Anicius Manlius Severinus
Boethius, Fundamentals of Music, trans. with an introduction and notes by C. Bower (New
Haven and London, 1989), 5. 5, p. 167. For the Latin text see Anicii Manlii Torquati Severini
Boetii De institutione arithmetica libri duo, De institutione musica libri quinque, accedit Geometria quae fertur
Boetii, ed. G. Friedlein (Leipzig, 1867).
106
On the Treatment of Pitch
for the discrete model that Greek theory provided systems rationalised in
word and number; such sounds could be heard as a series of individual
pitches. These pitches could be named, and their distance at measured
intervals systematized; of course, once they were articulated in language,
these sounds could be captured in writing. The Greek system set out in
Boethius’ De musica names each discrete pitch (proslambanomenos, hypate
hypaton, etc.);7 through the use of names, and knowledge of the place of
each pitch in a larger framework such as the ‘greater perfect system’ (two
octaves, each of seven steps), it was possible to internally compute the
intervallic distance between any two specific pitches.8 Such ways of
thinking about and handling sounds were certainly available in parts of
Carolingian Europe in the first half of the ninth century.9 Carolingian
music theory provides two further ways of writing discrete musical sounds:
both are found in the late ninth-century Musica and Scolica enchiriadis
treatises, probably composed in northern France.10 In one of these
systems, ‘dasia’ symbols function like the Greek names for notes; they
represent a kind of code, each sign denoting one pitch within a distinct
tetrachord. Such signs are much more concise in written form than the
7
Boethius, Fundamentals, trans. Bower, 1. 20–5.
8
In Greek learning this constitutes the discipline of harmonics: on the transmission of this
discipline to the early Middle Ages see the studies cited in n. 5 above, and B. Sullivan,
‘Alphabetic Writing and Hucbald’s artificiales notae’, in M. Bernhard (ed.), Quellen und Studien zur
Musiktheorie des Mittelalters, 3 (Munich, 2001), pp. 63–80.
9
It has been argued by Claudio Leonardi that Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis was already
available on the Continent in the eighth century (through insular transmission); the earliest
manuscript source extant (Karlsruhe, Badische Landesbibliothek, Aug. Perg. LXXIII) dates
from the second quarter of the ninth century and was probably copied for Louis the Pious. See
C. Leonardi, ‘I codici di Marziano Capella I–II’, Aevum, 33 (1959), pp. 443–89 and 34 (1960),
pp. 1–99, 411–524; B. Bischoff, ‘Die Hofbibliothek unter Ludwig den Frommen’, in J. J. G.
Alexander and M. T. Gibson (eds.), Medieval Learning and Literature: Essays Presented to Richard
William Hunt (Oxford, 1976), pp. 3–22; id., Katalog der festländischen Handschriften des neunten
Jahrhunderts (mit Ausnahme der wisigotischen): I, Aachen-Lambach, II: Laon–Paderborn (Wiesbaden,
1998–2004), i, no. 1609; M. Teeuwen, Harmony and the Music of the Spheres: The ‘Ars Musica’ in
Ninth-Century Commentaries on Martianus Capella (Mittellateinsche Studien und Texte; Leiden,
2002), pp. 22–5; also M. Teeuwen, ‘The Study of Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis in the Ninth
Century’, in A. A. McDonald, M. W. Twomey and G. J. Reinink (eds.), Learned Antiquity:
Scholarship and Society in the Near-East, the Greco-Roman World, and the Early Medieval West (Leuven,
Paris and Dudley, Mass., 2003), pp. 185–94. For the manuscript sources of Boethius, see C.
Bower, ‘Boethius’ De institutione musica: A Handlist of Manuscripts’, Scriptorium, 42 (1988),
pp. 205–51; and Boethius, Fundamentals, trans. Bower, pp. xl–xliii. The earliest extant source
of this text (Paris BnF lat. 7201) dates from the first quarter of the ninth century.
10
Musica et scolica enchiriadis una cum aliquibus tractatulis adiunctis, ed. H. Schmid (Veröffentlichungen
der Musikhistorischen Kommission, 3; Munich, 1981); Musica enchiriadis and scolica enchiriadis,
trans., with introduction and notes, R. Erickson, ed. C. V. Palisca (New Haven and London,
1995). The earliest extant sources of the Enchiriadis treatises date from the late ninth and the
early tenth centuries, but the text may have been composed decades earlier. On the
manuscript transmission see N. Phillips, ‘“Musica” and “Scolica enchiriadis”: The Literary,
Theoretical, and Musical Sources’ (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1984).
107
Susan Rankin
Greek names.11 In the other system of discrete-pitch notation used in the
Musica and Scolica Enchiriadis treatises, a set of horizontally parallel lines,
analogous to strings, represents successive steps within and between
tetrachords; onto this foundation text syllables are set, each written on the
relevant line.12 Where a text syllable is sung to more than one note, part
of that syllable is simply repeated from line to line. However close this
might seem to the later stave system worked out in eleventh-century theory
and widely adopted at that later date, its limitation to texts of music theory
in the ninth and tenth centuries is not surprising, since it was cumbersome
– greedy for space and slow to write.13 None of these discrete-pitch systems
was adopted by those concerned with notating the often elaborate chants
of the mass and office in the ninth and tenth centuries:14 quite the
opposite, since none of the diversely initiated neumatic types invented in
different parts of Carolingian Europe seems to have set the clear notation
of discrete pitches as its principal aim, and none of them achieved that end.
The widespread use of notation systems in which pitch – as a quality of
musical sound which could be measured – is precisely indicated in writing
can be usefully traced back not to the ninth but to the later eleventh and
early twelfth centuries.15 Indeed, it can be claimed that the invention and
development in the eleventh century in both northern and southern
Europe of systems of stave notation is the direct consequence of ‘feedback’,
a cognitive change brought about by the extensive use of musical notation
– and the new attitudes thereby developed as to how such a technique
might be exploited.
11
On these symbols, and the harmonic framework they outline, see N. Phillips, ‘Notationen und
Notationslehren von Boethius bis zum 12. Jahrhundert’, in Geschichte der Musiktheorie, 4:
Die Lehre von einstimmigen liturgischen Gesang, ed. T. Ertelt and F. Zaminer (Darmstadt, 2000),
pp. 293–623, esp. pp. 305–14.
12
In the Musica enchiriadis, such diagrams appear from ch. 8 onwards, and in the Scolica, in Pt.
II. On such ‘line-diagrams’ see Phillips, ‘Notationen und Notationslehren’, pp. 315–21, with
reproductions of diagrams from early sources.
13
On the relation between these early diagrams and the Guidonian stave system, examined
through ruling patterns and measurements, see J. Haines, ‘The Origins of the Musical Staff’,
Musical Quarterly, 91 (2008), pp. 327–78.
14
The earliest notated chant sources to provide considerably more precise records of pitch
include Paris, BnF lat. 903 and (in the form of letter notation) Montpellier, Bibliothèque
Inter-Universitaire, Section Médicine, H.159, both books copied in the first half of the
eleventh century; for facsimiles see Le Codex 903 de la Bibliothèque nationale de Paris (XIe siècle,
Graduel de St. Yriex), introduction by P. M. Ferretti (Paléographie musicale, 13; Tournai, 1925);
Antiphonarium tonale missarum, XIe siècle, Codex H.159 de l’École de Médecine de Montpellier,
introduction by A. Mocquereau and J. Beyssac (Paléographie musicale, 7/8; Tournai, 1901,
1905).
15
See B. Stäblein, Schriftbild der einstimmigen Musik (Musikgeschichte in Bildern, III/4; Leipzig,
1975), pp. 54–7; Haines, ‘The Origin’.
108
There is a strong case for arguing that it was the place of music in
Christian ritual which primarily determined the nature and forms of the
earliest notations for chant melodies.16 In the Roman chant tradition
inherited by the Carolingians, music acted to render the words of
Scripture audible, to interpret the words of Scripture, and to enhance
those words, through beauty. On all these levels, music could be perceived
as a quality of the delivery of language, its melodies as movements of
the voice.17 Models for the modulation of language in delivery could be
found in the grammatical texts of late antique writers much beloved by
Carolingian scholars.18 In order to theorize the reality of sound the
Carolingians turned to those grammatical models,19 above all to their
metaphor of a continuum of sound from ‘acute’ (pointed) to ‘grave’
(weighty) quality. By the mid-ninth century at the latest, those concepts of
acute and grave had been metaphorically transferred one step further, and
could now be expressed in spatial terms, the familiar ‘high’ and ‘low’
sounds.20 This paradigm of high and low – the primary element in the
notation of pitch and represented in notation by movement up and down
the page – has formed a basic principle of music writing in the West ever
16
This is not to say that musical notation was first invented for purposes associated with Christian
ritual: on the uses of musical notation in the Carolingian period see especially L. Treitler,
‘Reading and Singing: On the Genesis of Occidental Music Writing’, Early Music History, 4
(1984), pp. 135–208; repr. with a new introduction in his With Voice and Pen (Oxford and New
York, 2003), pp. 365–428; K. Levy, ‘Charlemagne’s Archetype of Gregorian Chant’, Journal
of the American Musicological Society, 40 (1987), pp. 1–30; id., ‘On the Origin of Neumes’, Early
Music History, 7 (1987), pp. 59–90; both repr. in his Gregorian Chant and the Carolingians
(Princeton, 1998), pp. 83–108 and pp. 109–40; J. Grier, ‘Adémar de Chabannes, Carolingian
Musical Practices, and Nota Romana’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 56 (2003),
pp. 43–98.
17
See, e.g., Boethius, De institutione musica, ch. 12; this theme has been most fully developed in the
notation studies by L. Treitler, ‘The Early History of Music Writing in the West’, Journal of the
American Musicological Society, 35 (1982), pp. 333–72 (With Voice and Pen, pp. 317–64); and id.,
‘Reading and Singing’.
18
On those elements of late antique grammar which interested Carolingian scholars see V. Law,
Grammar and Grammarians in the Early Middle Ages (London and New York, 1997), pp. 129–53.
19
On the reception of such texts, as perceived through Carolingian music theory and through
Carolingian commentaries on the grammatical texts, see C. Bower, ‘The Grammatical Model
of Musical Understanding in the Middle Ages’, in P. J. Gallacher and H. Damico (eds.),
Hermeneutics and Medieval Culture (Albany, NY, 1989), pp. 133–45; id., ‘The Transmission of
Ancient Music Theory’; Atkinson, The Critical Nexus, pp. 49–84. On the glossing of Martianus’
and Boethius’ texts, see also Glossa maior in institutionem musicam Boethii, ed. M. Bernhard and C.
Bower (Veröffentlichungen der Musikhistorischen Kommission, 9–11; Munich, 1993–6);
Teeuwen, Harmony and the Music of the Spheres.
20
For citations from commentaries on grammatical texts which make this transition concrete,
without dependence on music writing, see Atkinson, The Critical Nexus, pp. 54 ff.; for an
argument that the transition from ‘acute/grave’ to ‘high/low’ is closely associated with the
writing of music see M.-E. Duchez, ‘La répresentation spatio-verticale du caractère musical
grave-aigu et l’élaboration de la notion de hauteur de son dans la conscience musicale
occidentale’, Acta Musicologica, 51 (1979), pp. 54–73, at p. 65.
109
Susan Rankin
since. Beyond the height metaphor, at least one form of neumatic notation
– written as early as the mid-ninth century – drew even more on
grammatical systems for marking changes of delivery in writing. The basis
of some palaeofrankish neume forms in the acute, grave and circumflex
accents of antique grammar has recently been convincingly demonstrated;
moreover, it has also been shown that it was in terms of grammatical
accents that the mid-ninth-century music theorist Aurelian of Réôme
described musical signs.21 Given the issues raised by a 150-year-long
dispute about the relation of early musical notations to grammatical
accents,22 that well-supported conclusion is significant in that it establishes
the fact of a perceived link between the two (in the mind of one
Carolingian music theorist, at least), and allows further speculation about
a stronger association. Whatever the relation between written accents and
musical notations, the basis of early neumatic notations in rational
thinking about the inflection of language by the singing voice is now
beyond dispute.
But why, if Carolingian musicians were familiar with a variety of ways
to notate pitch precisely, did they choose not to use such methods for the
notation of ecclesiastical chant? Although we cannot know to what extent
the use of expensive materials (parchment) and resources (scribes’ time,
availability of light) was a factor in this choice, it is likely that issues of
manufacture were secondary to the realities of musical transmission and
the introduction of music writing. Before the ninth century, musicians had
been able to consult books of chant texts;23 the action of reading through
21
See J. Handschin, ‘Eine alte Neumenschrift’, Acta Musicologica, 22 (1950), pp. 69–97; C.
Atkinson, ‘De accentibus toni oritur nota quae dicitur neuma: Prosodic Accents, the Accent Theory,
and the Palaeofrankish Script’, in G. M. Boone (ed.), Essays on Medieval Music in Honor of David
G. Hughes (Isham Library Papers, 4; Cambridge, Mass, 1995), pp. 17–42; id., ‘Glosses on
Music and Grammar and the Advent of Music Writing in the West’, in Sean Gallagher et al.
(eds.), Western Plainchant in the First Millennium: Studies in the Medieval Liturgy and its Music in Honor
of James McKinnon (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 199–215; id., The Critical Nexus, pp. 106–13.
22
On this see further below; the hypothesis that neumes derived from prosodic accents has a
long history, first proposed (in print) in C. E. H. de Coussemaker, Histoire de l’harmonie au moyen
âge (Paris, 1852), p. 173, and worked out into a substantial historical hypothesis by
Mocquereau (see nn. 34 and 51 below). Useful accounts of parts of the debate appear in
Handschin, ‘Eine alte Neumenschrift’; S. Corbin, Die Neumen (Palaeographie der Musik, I/3;
Cologne, 1977) pp. 3.16–19; Treitler, ‘The Early History of Music Writing’ (With Voice and
Pen), pp. 338–9; Levy, ‘On the Origin of Neumes’ (Gregorian Chant and the Carolingians,
pp. 109–14); and E. H. Aubert, The Modern Life of ‘Medieval Neumes’: An Archaeology of Medieval
Notation (1600–1800), forthcoming. I am grateful to Eduardo Aubert for allowing me to see
this study before publication.
23
For edited texts from such books, with some reproductions, see R.-J. Hesbert, Antiphonale
Missarum Sextuplex (Rome, 1935); on the relation of those books to musical practice see S.
Rankin, ‘The Making of Carolingian Mass Chant Books’, in D. B. Cannata, G. I. Currie,
R. C. Mueller and J. L. Nadas (eds.), Quomodo cantabimus canticum? Studies in Honor of Edward H.
Roesner (Madison, Wis., 2008), pp. 37–63.
110
a visually available text formed part of the process of recall, prompting a
musician to bring to mind the melody to which it should be sung, phrase
by phrase, moment by moment.24 The addition of signs for musical
delivery over those texts simply shifted the balance between remembering
and reading: in the sense that the habit of memory cannot have been
destroyed overnight, the addition of musical notation was not a radical
step. That memory and recall continued to play a central part in musical
practice is abundantly evident in the notations created in the ninth
century. These notations remind the reader of sounds that he has heard,
but do not provide primary instructions as to how to make those sounds.
One aspect of the sheer diversity of these notations is itself indicative of
their bond to a practice stored in memory. They could contain infor-
mation about a great variety of qualities of sound – the shape of a melody,
the articulation of each melodic segment, speed, timbre, emphasis, even
voice production,25 all of this within a overall scheme determined by the
layout of text and the link between parts of the melody and text syllables.
But, while the ‘aide-mémoire’ character is common to all ninth- and
tenth-century chant notations, the ways in which these various elements
were handled in writing, and the balance between them, differed from one
notation to another. That this should be so is hardly surprising: if oral
practice was the primary basis of transmission, the purpose of notation was
to lead the reader back into remembrance of it. Many notational marks are
so specific to tiny melodic segments – ‘sing this note quickly’, ‘sing this
strongly’, ‘use a soft tone here’, ‘in this phrase this note is the climax’, and
so on – that they would guide the reader to the immediacy of a previous
musical event rather than to a notional ideal. Therefore, divergence of
approach to the importance of one element of sound over another in these
early notations need not be read as an indication of the insufficiency of
notational techniques: for it may spring from the differing judgement of
those who designed specific notational types, the habits of individual
notators, and the preferences of individual cantors. In other words,
divergence of balance between the notated parameters can be used as a
24
On techniques of recollection as described by late antique and medieval writers see M.
Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (2nd edn, Cambridge,
2008), esp. pp. 76 ff. In what follows I shall be constantly indebted to this study, above all to
the ways in which it demonstrates how memory was trained to act as a basis for the interaction
and interdependence of orality and writing in the Middle Ages. See also the useful discussion
of neumatic notation considered in terms of Augustine’s writing on memory in Sam Barrett,
‘Reflections on Music Writing: Coming to Terms with Gain and Loss in Early Medieval Latin
Song’, in A. Haug and A. Dorschel (eds.), Vom Preis des Fortschritts: Gewinn und Verlust in der
Musikgeschichte (Vienna, London and New York, 2008), pp. 89–109.
25
On voice production see the alphabet of significative letters explained by Notker Balbulus,
edited in J. Froger, ‘L’épitre de Notker sur les “lettres significatives”: Édition critique’, Études
Grégoriennes, 5 (1962), pp. 23–71.
111
Susan Rankin
lens through which to observe the mechanics of the interaction between
memory and writing. That is what will be attempted in this study,26 using
the ways in which pitch is treated by each of two scribes working in
different parts of Europe as a tool for analysis, and for the consideration of
attitudes to the possibilities offered by music writing.
CAROLINGIAN NOTATIONS FOR MASS AND OFFICE

CHANTS
The invention of music writing in the Frankish kingdoms in the late eighth
or first quarter of the ninth century was only one aspect of an intense and
manifold engagement with writing in this period.27 Above all, the
Carolingians were responsible for giving new impetus to the growth of
literacy east of the Rhine and to its diversification in a wide area of western
Europe; with their educational programme, directed towards the support
of understanding the Scriptures, came the development of a new minus-
cule script, designed to be clear to a wide readership (not only those
trained in a specific locality), and to look beautiful on the page.28 The
expansion of book production, the making of more fine books, and
changes to the presentation and arrangement of text on pages in order to
support correct reading aloud from them, are all evident consequences of
a cultural programme initiated in the last quarter of the eighth century and
supported by Charlemagne’s sons and grandsons through the 150 years of
their domination of western Europe.
This early context for the invention of music writing could not control
all the directions in which individual initiatives would lead, once the idea
26
On the interaction of orality and literacy in the transmission of Gregorian chant there has
been a long and intense discussion: my topic here is both more focused (on the mechanics and
palaeography of actual notations) and more restricted (in the nature of the sources with which
it is concerned) than much of that debate. Relevant studies include those cited in n. 16 above
and L. Treitler, ‘Homer and Gregory: The Transmission of Epic Poetry and Plainchant’,
Musical Quarterly, 60 (1974), pp. 333–72 (With Voice and Pen, pp. 131–85); id, ‘Oral, Literate and
Written Process in the Music of the Middle Ages’, Speculum, 65 (1981), pp. 471–91 (With Voice
and Pen, pp. 230–51); K. Levy, ‘On Gregorian Orality’, Journal of the American Musicological
Society, 43 (1990), pp. 185–227 (Gregorian Chant and the Carolingians, pp. 141–77); id., ‘Plainchant
before Neumes’, in his Gregorian Chant and the Carolingians, pp. 195–213; P. Jeffery, Re-envisioning
Past Musical Cultures: Ethnomusicology in the Study of Gregorian Chant (Chicago, 1992).
27
I have allowed a broad margin for the invention of music writing: the earliest examples which
can be dated with some accuracy – through their association with other securely dated
material, or through the style of text-hand – belong to the second quarter of the ninth century.
The case for a notational system having already been available in the late eighth century is
made in Levy, ‘Charlemagne’s Archetype’.
28
On the design of Caroline minuscule and its relation to reading see David Ganz, ‘The
Preconditions for Caroline Minuscule’, Viator, 18 (1987), pp. 23–44; M. B. Parkes, Pause and
Effect: Punctuation in the West (Aldershot, 1992), esp. pp. 30–4; D. Ganz, ‘Book Production in the
Carolingian Empire and the Spread of Caroline Minuscule’, in R. McKitterick (ed.), The New
Cambridge Medieval History II, c.700–c.900 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 786–808.
112
of musical notation had become concrete. The variety of uses (all within an
ecclesiastical framework) to which musical notation was quickly put
suggests that there were multiple factors working in favour of its early
development.29 Among the extant examples of notation written in the
ninth and early tenth centuries are instances of passages in texts of music
theory, passages to be sung by a priest or deacon, and individual examples
or repertories of more elaborate chants for the mass and office, sung by the
schola or by soloists. Although it has become something of a topos to
declare that sources of this latter kind do not survive for the ninth
century,30 the simple fact is that they do, and in numbers large enough
to demonstrate their considerable significance in terms of the functions
of music writing (see Appendix). To a scribe these musical situations
presented quite different writing tasks: notation in a book of music theory
might require different kinds of prompting and/or precision from those
needed in a book used in the liturgy, depending on the point at which the
theory writer was driving: as noted above, those texts include notations of
kinds which never appear in books prepared for liturgical practice.
Equally, passages of notation for texts delivered by a priest or deacon (such
as the Christmas Genealogy reading and the Easter Exultet) dealt with
relatively uncomplicated melodic content based on recitation patterns; the
main purpose of these notations was to indicate to the reader how to
modulate a simple pattern in relation to specific text phrases. It is only in
the chants for the mass and office – including not only the central chant
repertories but also the new tropes and sequences – that more elaborate
melodies are found. Among these are melodies which, on the one hand,
would have most challenged the memories of cantors, and, on the other,
presented scribes with the most complex notational tasks. In other words,
this is the musical material around which the interaction of orality and
literacy, the interface between modes of recall and modes of writing, will
have been most intense. This is therefore the material which will offer the
richest source of examples for the study of pitch treatment.
The number of sources of notated mass or office chants which can be
securely dated in the ninth and early tenth centuries amounts to at least
thirty.31 Within this body of material, just under half consists of pieces
29
On the variety of uses for music notation in this early period see esp. Treitler, ‘Reading and
Singing’ (With Voice and Pen), pp. 426–7.
30
See, e.g., R. Crocker, ‘Chants of the Roman Office’, in R. Crocker and D. Hiley (eds.), The
Early Middle Ages to 1300 (New Oxford History of Music, 2; 2nd edn, Oxford, 1990), pp. 146–73,
at p. 167; and, most recently, Grier, ‘Adémar de Chabannes’. Asking why ‘there are no traces
of a fully neumed antiphoner before 900’, he writes ‘a full century’s worth of lost sources,
without so much as a leaf remaining, constitutes a deafening silence indeed’ (p. 81).
31
There are many reasons to be cautious about the numbers: among the many published lists
of ‘ninth-century examples of neumes’ are often included sources for which the notation has
113
Susan Rankin
written into books which have nothing to do with music – sometimes just
one chant, but sometimes more. In a copy of John Cassian’s Institutiones,
copied in the seventh century in half uncials (Autun, Bibliothèque
municipale S28, olim 24), several chants were added, mostly on one
opening (fols. 63v–64r), but also in margins throughout the book;32 there
is enough text associated with these notations to allow a dating for most of
them in the middle third of the ninth century. Mostly, however, such
occasional additions to books comprise just one chant, as for example on
the last page of Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek clm 9543; here the
prosula Psalle modulamina is followed by a colophon identifying ‘Engyldeo’
as the writer, and linking the book with Regensburg in the second quarter
of the ninth century.33 More significant in the consideration of those
factors which determined notational design, and especially pitch treat-
ment, are extant sources of mass and office chants which represent
repertorially organized and notated chant books – since it is these rather
than the sources of occasional notations which will reflect the work of
scribes achieved over a longer period of time than one sitting; likely to have
been written at a home institution, and therefore responding to direct daily
needs; and, finally, based on notational practice which was to some degree
settled. A total of nineteen sources, drawn from nineteen separate books,
is composed mostly of fragments, but also two sizeable books (including
one in which a substantial portion was prepared for notation, but to which
little notation was added). As a group, these sources indicate a practice of
chant notation which stretches back to before the middle of the ninth
century, and which had become widespread in both western and eastern
Francia by the end of the century. These sources are listed in the
Appendix, divided into books for the mass and books for the office.
been added well after the book was made. In such cases there is usually no way of securely
dating the notation. On the other hand, scraps of early notation continue to be discovered and
identified. For the two most recent lists see Corbin, Die Neumen, pp. 3.21–3.41; and D. Hiley,
‘Notation, §III, 1(iii): Plainchant’, in New Grove II, xviii, pp. 65–119, at p. 89.
32
For the main book see E. A. Lowe, Codices Latini Antiquiores. Part VI: France: Abbeville–Valenciennes
(Oxford, 1953), no. 724. On the neumed entries see Bischoff, Katalog, i, no. 158a. Fol. 64r is
reproduced in B. Stäblein, ‘Zur Frühgeschichte der Sequenz’, Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, 18
(1961), pp. 1–33, as Pl. 1. See also Stäblein, Schriftbild, p. 32; C. Maître, Catalogue des manuscrits
d’Autun: Bibliothèque municipale et Société éduenne (Turnhout, 2004), pp. 102–4; B. Haggh and M.
Huglo, ‘Les notations musicales en usage dans l’église d’Autun’, in D. Saulnier, K. Livljanic
and C. Cazaux-Kowalski (eds.), Lingua mea calamus scribe: Mélanges offerts à madame Marie-Noël
Colette (Solesmes, 2009), pp. 131–45, at pp. 138–9.
33
On the dating of this scribe’s work see the references in Bischoff, Katalog, ii, no. 3108. For the
first discussion of the notation see E. Jammers, Tafeln zur Neumenschrift (Tutzing, 1965), Pl. 6.
The prosula, and its presentation in this source, is considered in H. Möller, ‘Die Prosula
“Psalle modulamina” (Mü 9543) und ihre musikhistorische Bedeutung’, in C. Leonardi and E.
Menestò (eds.), La tradizione dei tropi liturgici (Spoleto, 1990), pp. 279–96 and Pls. 1–5; see also
id., entry for catalogue no. XI.42, in C. Stiegemann and M. Wemhoff (eds.), 799: Kunst und
Kultur der Karolingerzeit, 3 vols. (Mainz, 1999), ii, pp. 851–3.
114
There is a second requirement of source material for this study: to make
sense of an investigation of the treatment of pitch, it is essential to begin
with fairly extensive examples of the writing of individual scribes. For this
reason, the main part of this study will include an examination of notation
in the gradual Laon 239, made in the last quarter of the ninth century.
None of the other sources listed in the Appendix has enough sustained
music notation (or in the cases of palimpsests enough legible examples) to
be sufficient for study of procedures of the kind envisaged. For another
comparative series of examples I have therefore chosen to use a book
notated in the first quarter of the tenth century (Stiftsbibliothek Sankt
Gallen 359). In the case of both this and the Laon book, the approaches
of their scribes to music writing can be matched to other sources among
the fragments listed in the Appendix. This second level of enquiry will
allow testing of the results from the first level – whether or not techniques
of music writing, especially of the treatment of pitch, can be traced in a
wider sphere beyond the two individual books, Laon 239 and SG 359.
Following the examination of notation in each of these two books, some
space will be dedicated to commentary on the relation between these and
the fragmentary sources.
THE TREATMENT OF PITCH IN EARLY MUSIC WRITING:

PREVIOUS STUDY
Notation through accents was not yet aware of the fertile principle of layering notes on
top of each other. The pitch of tones is not yet expressed by the respective position of
signs . . . perhaps no one would even have come to invent intervallic or ‘diastematic’
notation, if liturgical copyists had not had accent neumes available to them; these accent
neumes became the primary material with which they worked over a long period,
leading them eventually, through many successive transformations, to the perfect
expression of the musical scale of tones. (Dom André Mocquereau, writing in 1889)34
The primary function of musical notation is usually regarded as the indication of pitch,
but this was evidently not the case with the earliest notations. It is essential to realize
that the music represented was already known by heart as far as its tonality and pitch
content were concerned. The notation reminded the singer of details of phrasing,
rhythm, and dynamic, together with some refinements of performance . . . (David
Hiley, writing in 1993)35
34
‘La notation par accents ne connaît rien encore du principe fécond de la superposition des notes.
La hauteur des sons n’est pas exprimée par la position respective des signes . . . Peut-être
même personne ne serait-il arrivé à inventer la notation par intervalles, ou diastématique, si les
copistes liturgiques n’avaient eu à leur disposition les neumes-accents, qui furent comme la
matière première sur laquelle ils travaillèrent longtemps pour l’amener enfin, par voie de
transformations successives, à l’expression parfaite de l’échelle musicale des sons.’ Le Codex 339
de la Bibliothèque de Saint-Gall (Xe siècle): Antiphonale missarum sancti Gregorii, introduction by A.
Mocquereau (Paléographie musicale, 1; Solesmes, 1889), pp. 99, 123. The two series of
Paléographie musicale have now reached twenty-four volumes.
35
D. Hiley, Western Plainchant: A Handbook (Oxford, 1993), p. 341.
115
Susan Rankin
The publication of the first volume of the series Paléographie musicale
marked the beginning of modern study of early medieval notations.36
In the hundred years between this and David Hiley’s handbook of
Western plainchant, musicologists had understood that neumatic notations
represented the written reflection of an activity which remained funda-
mentally oral/aural. Nonetheless, the introduction of writing into the
domain of ecclesiastical chanting may have caused some shifting of musical
sounds from the aural to the visual domain,37 allowing cantors to
reorganize and reformulate musical material in a new way.38 At the very
least musical notation introduced a new aspect of textual literacy – a
means of writing down ways of delivering text – and thereby caused the
interaction between written and oral supports for the performance of
liturgical chant to be modified. Where previously a singer had access to
written records of the textual phrases which should be sung in the liturgy,
now a singer might have access to written records indicating how those
textual phrases were to be musically performed. Awareness of that
interaction marks Hiley’s description as firmly as it is absent from
Mocquereau’s.
The means of transmission of music was only of secondary interest in
these descriptions of early notations, however: it was the ability of early
neumatic notations (or lack of it) to indicate pitch on which these
writers were commenting. And on this matter there is less disagreement:
both writers note a deficiency of pitch information in these notations,
Mocquereau through his use of the adjective ‘fécond’ for the principle of
‘superposition’ of notes, setting systems which did not proceed in this
manner in a somewhat pejorative light, Hiley indicating that pitch
indications were not given a high priority in the ‘earliest notations’. It is in
their assessment of the reasons for the absence of pitch indications that the
two accounts differ: Mocquereau adopts an evolutionary and teleological
position, underlining the long period during which notators had to labour,
and the number of steps they had to take, in order to arrive at ‘the perfect
36
See Aubert, The Modern Life of ‘Medieval Neumes’; although this is not directly her theme, see also
Katherine Bergeron, Decadent Enchantments: The Revival of Gregorian Chant at Solesmes (Berkeley,
Los Angeles and London, 1998), pp. 92–142.
37
Goody, Domestication, p. 78.
38
Goody, Interface, p. 276; Goody’s ideas have been considered in relation to music in A. M.
Busse Berger, Medieval Music and the Art of Memory (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 2005).
For this early medieval period, Busse Berger’s suggestion that the ‘creation of tonaries’ was ‘a
direct result of neumatic notation’ (p. 84) needs reconsideration in the light of the fact that the
first tonary substantially pre-dates the first notations, and that the practice of singing depended
on modal patterns; the theory of modes, codified textually in tonaries, can therefore be
considered as one of two literate bases for the ‘memorial archive’ of an otherwise unnotated
musical practice (the other literate basis being the books of chant texts).
116
expression of a musical scale of sounds’, while, in contrast, Hiley appeals
to the purpose of musical notation – as support for a memory-based
practice – as a direct explanation for the paucity of pitch information in
these notations.
The positions taken by these two writers, at either end of a period of
intense historical enquiry into the ‘composition and dissemination of an
unwritten tradition of Gregorian chant’ and ‘invention of systems of
musical notation and their development as they were adapted for the
creation and dissemination of a written tradition of the chant’,39 engage
with and/or are replicated by others writing in the earlier and later
decades of this period. Most prominently, in a book-length study of
neumatic notations published in 1912 Peter Wagner dedicated two
chapters – ‘The beginnings of diastematy’ and ‘The perfecting of dias-
tematy and its effect on the transmission of chants’ – to examination of the
treatment of pitch in early medieval notations.40 It is in his study that the
fullest statement of the teleological view can be found: ‘it may well seem
peculiar, that the – for us so natural – concept of diastematy was arrived
at so late’.41 Wagner’s perceptions of this material are marked by concern
with new discoveries, with technical advances, with public acclaim for
those who are responsible for them.42 He sets out a series of steps by which
precise pitch notation was arrived at, without questioning why, according
to his interpretation of the source material, it took so long to arrive at the
set goal.43 He seems not to have considered the consequences of
juxtaposing to these neumatic notations early medieval knowledge of
Greek music theory, with its diatonic double octave scheme, or indeed the
notational systems based on tetrachords or parallel horizontal lines known
to late ninth-century music theorists.44 The idea that writers of neumatic
notation might deliberately have chosen not to integrate precise pitch
information into their scripts seems not to have crossed his mind. This is
underlined by his use of expressions such as ‘straining to express (in the
39
Treitler, ‘The Early History of Music Writing’ (With Voice and Pen), p. 319.
40
Ch. 12: ‘Die Anfänge der Diastematie’ and ch. 13: ‘Die Vollendung der Diastematie und ihre
Einwirkung auf die Überlieferung der Gesänge’ in P. Wagner, Einführung in die Gregorianischen
Melodien, ii: Neumenkunde: Paläographie des liturgischen Gesanges (2nd edn, Leipzig, 1912), pp.
258–77, 278–99.
41
Ibid., p. 258: ‘Es mag seltsam erscheinen, daß man so spät auf den für uns so natürlichen
Gedanken der Diastematie gekommen ist.’
42
Ibid., p. 272.
43
In chs. 12 and 13 of his Neumenkunde, Wagner sets out the following stages: the provision of a
rough melodic contour in neumes, the use of letters to enhance this, the development
of neumes which could be written with more precise diastematic information, the invention of
the custos, the use of a line.
44
Although he was puzzled by the fact that the early neumes did not reflect knowledge of Greek
interval theory (Neumenkunde, p. 258).
117
Susan Rankin
form of the neumes)’ (p. 258), ‘a primitive sort (of diastematy)’ (p. 266),
‘advances (on the attempts described)’ (p. 266).45
At the other end of a century of study of neumatic notations, the 1970s
and 1980s were especially rich in relevant publications. The two most
comprehensive studies to have been published since Wagner’s Neumenkunde
appeared almost simultaneously: in 1975, Bruno Stäblein’s Schriftbild der
einstimmigen Musik (in the series Musikgeschichte in Bildern) and in 1977 –
posthumously – Solange Corbin’s Die Neumen.46 These books include
extensive reproductions and transcriptions, and attempt to classify and
order examples of different types of neumatic script. On the heels of these
broad, palaeographically focused, examinations came a rich series of
interpretative studies, from scholars working both in Europe and the
USA.47 In all of this later material, the fact of a relation between neumatic
notation and memory had been realised (even if the consequences of that
relation were understood in different ways): the manner of interaction of
early notations and memory in musical practice was considered most
closely by Leo Treitler in a series of articles, above all ‘Reading and
Singing’ (1984) and by Kenneth Levy, also in a series of studies, notably
‘On the Origin of Neumes’ (1987). These remain the most recent
substantial studies of the origins and functions of musical notation in the
Carolingian period. And it is in the context of Treitler’s ‘Reading and
Singing’ that an extended consideration of the treatment of pitch in early
neumatic notations reappears. Setting notations used for different purposes
(pedagogical, liturgical recitation, chants for the schola) apart, Treitler
argued that, in this earliest period of use of musical notations, it was only
in notations used for pedagogy that the indication of pitch patterns was a
principal task, pointing out that ‘there are notational situations from the
earliest period in which pitch indication for its own sake really plays no
45
Wagner, Neumenkunde: ‘Man strebte danach, an der Form der Neume zum Ausdruck zu
bringen’ (p. 258); ‘Diese Diastematie ist eine primitive’ (p. 266); ‘Der Fortschritt gegenüber
den besprochenen Versuchen . . .’ (p. 266).
46
Corbin’s text was translated from her own French text, and augmented with extensive
passages provided by the editors, set in ‘petit-text’ (including all the examples provided with
transcription and commentary): see Die Neumen, p. 3.1. Other publications of this period with
reproductions of neumatic notations include Jammers, Tafeln, and Répertoire de manuscrits
médiévaux contenant des notations musicales, ed. M. Bernard and S. Corbin, 3 vols. (Paris, 1965–74).
47
To the studies cited in nn. 16 and 26 above should be added W. Arlt, ‘Anschaulichkeit und
analytischer Charakter: Kriterien der Beschreibung und Analyse früher Neumenschriften’, in
M. Huglo (ed.), Musicologie médiévale: Notations et séquences. Actes de la table ronde du C.N.R.S. à
l’Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes, 1982 (Paris, 1987), pp. 29–55; M. Huglo, ‘La notation
wisigothique est-elle plus ancienne que les autres notations européennes?’, in E. C. Rodicio,
I. Fernández de la Cuesta and J. López-Calo (eds.), España en la Música de Occidente: Actas del
Congreso Internacional celebrado en Salamanca (20 de Octubre – 5 de Noviembre de 1985) (Madrid, 1987),
i, pp. 19–26; id., ‘Bilan de 50 années de recherches (1939–1989) sur les notations musicales de
850 à 1300’, Acta Musicologica, 62 (1990), pp. 224–59, with extensive bibliography.
118
role at all’.48 The perception that it was not ‘a primary task of early
neumatic writing in practical sources to mark pitch differentiations’49 sits
convincingly with the account he set out of ‘the entrance of a writing
practice into the domain of an oral tradition’.50 This provided the basis for
Hiley’s 1993 statement.
Dom Mocquereau’s assessment of the pitch-indication capacities of
early neumatic script was only one element in a grander hypothesis about
the origins of musical notation and the position of extant sources in
relation to those origins.51 Critically important to his theory was a division
between systems of notation based on ‘neumes-accents’ and those based on
‘neumes-points’ (neumes built up from the acute, grave and circumflex
accent signs, and neumes built up from series of individual points).52 These
categories operated on two levels, on the one hand describing and
differentiating extant examples of neumatic notation, and on the other
providing openings through which a narrative of the history of musical
notation could be explained. Mocquereau’s examples of notation in
‘neumes-accents’ were largely drawn from manuscripts held in the library
at Sankt Gallen (and this, first, volume of Paléographie musicale was
dedicated to a facsimile of SG 339, a gradual copied at this Benedictine
abbey in the late tenth century).53 In contrast, in the main statement of this
theory, Mocquereau did not cite any examples of manuscripts notated in
‘neumes-points’, but provided the broad characterization ‘an immense
family of point neumes which, from the tenth century on, invade liturgical
manuscripts and end up by completely supplanting the primitive ac-
cents’.54 In fact he saw the writing of individual points to represent notes
as a modification of the system of accent neumes, in parallel to his theory
of the history of notation.
As with neume types, Mocquereau’s notation history had two parts, and
was set out in two phases: first, the earliest signs for musical notations
48
Treitler, ‘Reading and Singing’ (With Voice and Pen), p. 394.
49
Ibid.
50
51
Mocquereau’s analysis of the neumes in Stiftsbibliothek Sankt Gallen 339 was determined by
a more general theory concerning accents, the point in musical history at which these signs
were applied to music writing, and the mode of signification of neumes – according to which
theory the sign and the thing are in perfect agreement, the former being the natural
consequence of the latter (‘a trace to be interpreted and understood in relation to the thing
that caused it’). On this see Aubert, ‘The Modern Life of “Medieval Neumes”’. Aubert’s study
reveals the extent to which Mocquereau’s work was groundbreaking in its own time,
‘promoting the kind of profound investigation called for by many antecedents’.
52
Le Codex 339, p. 124.
53
Ibid., p. 1.
54
‘[une] immense famille des points neumatiques qui, à partir du xe siècle, envahissent les
manuscrits liturgiques et finissent par supplanter entièrement les accents primitifs’. Ibid.,
p. 124.
119
Susan Rankin
adopted signs for grammatical accents as a graphic basis but were shaped
and deployed on the writing surface in imitation of the hand gestures of
cantors. This was not an abstract representation of musical sounds of the
kind to which modern musicians are used, but a written representation of
a physical movement: it was therefore a notation ‘oratoire’ or ‘chirono-
mique’.55 In contrast, notations in which written signs (whether detached
points or longer ‘joined’ signs) indicated musical sounds directly could be
described as ‘musicales’ or ‘diastématiques’. Mocquereau then argued for
the anteriority of accent over point neumes, citing (a) the chronology of
extant sources; (b) the shapes of the signs in each of his systems (‘simple and
natural’ in the first, ‘strange and bizarre’ in the second); (c) the wide
geographical diffusion of accent neumes, and the comparative restriction
of point neumes; (d) the lack of variation in different examples of accent
neumes, compared to a noticeable variation in different examples of point
neumes.56 In this way he was able to argue for the greater antiquity of
accent neumes, and – most significant in the current context – that a
system of musical notation which is characterised by a greater amount of
pitch information must be younger than a system which has less ability to
convey pitch information. This historical relation allowed him to think in
terms of a perfected earlier system of accent neumes, which was then
corrupted by a later influence, ‘the invasion of points’, explaining why he
gave no direct examples of notations in point neumes, but only of notations
in which the transition from accent neumes to point neumes could be
seen.57 There is a curious quality of paradox in Mocquereau’s theory,
since he considered the early accent-neume system (in reality the notation
of specific Sankt Gallen books) to be ‘perfected’, ‘achevée en son genre’58
– only to be later corrupted by point neumes – and yet, at the same time,
‘musically’ insufficient.59
As an integrated theory of notational origins, and of the interrelation of
surviving notations, Mocquereau’s ideas have long been set aside: much
has since been learned about the dating of extant sources which would
force a reconsideration of fundamental elements in his theory, while the
goal-orientated treatment of techniques of pitch notation has become
55
Ibid., pp. 99 ff. See also M. Huglo, ‘La chironomie médiévale’, Revue de Musicologie, 49 (1963),
pp. 153–71, and in opposition to Mocquereau’s theory, Helmut Hucke, ‘Die Cheironomie
und die Entstehung der Neumenschrift’, Die Musikforschung, 32 (1979), pp. 1–16.
56
Le Codex 339, pp. 124–6.
57
Ibid., pp. 124–8.
58
Ibid., p. 125.
59
The paradox disappears once the foundations of Mocquereau’s theory of composition and
transmission of Gregorian chant are all set out together: he considers the Sankt Gallen
notation type to long pre-date the ‘point-notation’ type, this ‘notation oratoire’ having been
created in relation to simple melodic inflections, before the fully-fledged melody of the mass
Proper melodies (as transmitted from the ninth century on) emerged.
120
unacceptable as a way of reading source material. The issue of a
typological division between ‘accent’ and ‘point’ neumes will be taken up
again below. The dual ‘cheironomic/diastematic’ theory was last taken
seriously in Dom Gregorio Suñol’s manual of neumatic notation first
published in 1925, with a dedication to Mocquereau;60 it was here rather
than in volumes of Paléographie musicale that the Mocquereau theory was
most fully worked out in terms of actual neume shapes. On accents,
Mocquereau’s theory has proved to be, like the curate’s egg, good in parts,
bad in others. As explained above, certain palaeofrankish neume forms
were based on grammatical accent signs;61 and yet, in the face of this
direct connection, there is little evidence to support a universalist theory of
neume origins of the kind he proposed.
By the 1950s a new wind was blowing through the work not only of
scholars based in universities but also those at the abbey of Solesmes. In
this regard 1957 was a rich year: with two studies, both undertaken in
France, enormous steps were taken in the sorting out of regional notations,
that is, not only in the differentiation between typologies of notation
according to their repertory of signs, but also in the mapping out of
geographical areas in which specific notations were in use. Solange
Corbin’s dissertation for the doctorat d’état dealt with neumatic notation
in use in ‘les quatre provinces lyonnaises’ (covering large areas of modern
France),62 while that volume of Le Graduel Romain, Édition critique which
listed sources was able to establish relations between regions and notations
across the European continent.63 Already in 1951 Jacques Hourlier had
published a notational study which set a new palaeographical standard,
since he was able then to list over 300 medieval sources notated in one kind
of notation (Messine), and thereby to sketch out definitively the regions in
which such notation was in use;64 in 1963 Michel Huglo published a
parallel study on sources notated in the so-called ‘Breton’ notation.65 All
of this was the result of work sustained by the monks of Solesmes over
decades, collecting photographs and information about sources, studying
their notations, and transcribing and classifying their melodic contents.66
60
G. M. Suñol, Introducció a la paleografia musical gregoriana (Montserrat, 1925); revised, translated,
and with a preface by A. Mocquereau, Introduction à la paléographie musicale grégorienne (Paris and
Tournai, 1935).
61
See p. 110 and n. 21 above.
62
S. Corbin, La notation musicale neumatique dans les quatre provinces lyonnaises: Lyon, Rouen, Tours et Sens
(diss., University of Paris, 1957).
63
Le graduel Romain: Édition critique par les moines de Solesmes, ii: Les sources (Solesmes, 1957), with a
map linking notation types with regions.
64
J. Hourlier, ‘Le domaine de la notation messine’, Revue Grégorienne, 30 (1951), pp. 96–113,
150–8.
65
Michel Huglo, ‘Le domaine de la notation bretonne’, Acta Musicologica, 35 (1963), pp. 54–84.
66
See P. Combe, Histoire de la restauration du chant grégorien d’après des documents inédits (Solesmes,
121
Susan Rankin
It was only now, after the Second World War, that the discovery of a
hitherto unrecognised early notation type was announced. The Solesmes
team had long been familiar with this notation – named, in their house
terminology, ‘notation de St. Amand’.67 But the first public report of the
existence of ‘Eine alte Neumenschrift’ was made by Jacques Handschin in
1950;68 in 1952, Ewald Jammers announced that he and Handschin had
settled on the name ‘paläofränkische Schrift’, thus making a rather
stronger claim to antiquity than Handschin had seemed comfortable with
two years earlier.69
In terms of historical investigation into the origin and early period of
neumatic notation and the way in which the relation between neumatic
signs and pitch information was perceived, Handschin’s 1950 article
changed the parameters of discussion. Here he was able to demonstrate
that notations dominated by ‘point neumes’ could be dated at least as early
as those with accent neumes; with this he combined an extensive critique
of the accent theory of the origin of neumes, together with a detailed
reading of the mid-ninth-century theorist Aurelian’s use of terms related to
grammatical accents; and – of crucial significance for the present study –
he argued that diastematy was not a property of specific neume types, but
a way of writing any neumatic script: ‘every type of neume [script] can be
[written] in more or less diastematic [manner]’.70 With this he knocked the
legs out from under the earlier association of diastematy with chronologi-
cally later sources, so essential to the approach adopted by Mocquereau.
On the previously established division between accent and point neumes,
he had much to say; above all, he proposed a different typology, based not
on hypotheses about origin or the fact of signs for more than one note
being joined or separated, but on the relation between a written graph and
a musical tone.71 In the notations previously characterised as using point
neumes a pitched note was marked in one place on the writing surface,
through a point; for these he proposed the description ‘Tonortschrift’. In
contrast, the notations usually gathered under the heading ‘accent neumes’
1969); Bergeron, Decadent Enchantments, passim.

67
See Huglo, ‘Bilan’, p. 239.
68
Handschin, ‘Eine alte Neumenschrift’; Jacques Handschin, ‘Notitiae zu “Eine alte Neumen-
schrift” ’, Acta Musicologica, 25 (1953), pp. 87–8.
69
E. Jammers, ‘Die paläofränkische Neumenschrift’, Scriptorium, 7 (1953), pp. 235–59 and Pls.
26–7, at p. 238 (n. 16). On the palaeofrankish script see also J. Hourlier and M. Huglo,
‘Notation paléofranque’, Études Grégoriennes, 2 (1957), pp. 212–19; Stäblein, Schriftbild,
pp. 106–7; Levy, ‘Charlemagne’s Archetype’; W. Arlt, no. XI.36, in 799: Kunst und Kultur, ii,
pp. 841–2.
70
‘jede Neumenart mehr oder weniger diastematisch sein kann’: Handschin, ‘Eine alte
Neumenschrift’, 81.
71
Ibid., 80–1.
122
indicated an individual note through a ‘drawn out’ stroke (‘Strecke’) on the
writing surface, thus associating an individual pitch with a line, not a point.
Handschin’s discussion of the notation of a Greek Gloria in the
St-Amand sacramentary Paris BnF lat. 2291 (fol. 16r) demonstrated the
highly diastematic quality of a passage of notation which might have been
written in the ninth century: although there is essentially no way of dating
such neume entries, these might have been added early in the life of that
book – as Corbin later argued, before the book was taken to St-Germain-
des-Prés in 886.72 Through the identification of this entry, written in a type
of notation which belonged under the classification ‘point neumes’,
Handschin had broken the link between antiquity and accent neumes,
between antiquity and a lack of pitch information. In 1957, Jacques
Hourlier and Michel Huglo published a response to the palaeofrankish
studies by Handschin and Jammers.73 The change in approach from
Solesmes is noticeable, both in content, with the regional development of
scripts rather than their origin placed in the foreground, and then in the
way in which neumatic origins could be conceptualised, itself much more
informed by knowledge of the regional development of scripts. Hourlier
and Huglo proposed that all surviving neumatic scripts derived from a lost
original, representing the relation of extant notations in stemma form,
without giving chronological preference to what they now called
‘notations-accents’ over ‘notations-points’ or ‘notations-mixtes’.74
From this moment on, the older accent-origin based theory could no
longer be upheld. While individual elements continued to be supported,
they were no longer made to depend on each other: an interesting example
is the way in which Stäblein made a strong case for cheironomy in opposition
to grammatical accents as the basis for the earliest neumes.75 But the most
enduring element of the early theory was the idea of division between
two classes of neumes,76 generally described through regions of use, but
depending on physical attributes: Handschin’s own list set on one side
72
Corbin, Die Neumen, 3.37. This manuscript is usually dated in the third to fourth quarter of the
ninth century: see K. Gamber, Codices liturgici latini antiquiores (Spicilegii Friburgensis subsidia,
3 vols.; Freiburg (Switzerland), 1963, 1968, 1988), ii, no. 925 (dating by Bischoff).
73
Hourlier and Huglo, ‘Notation paléofranque’.
74
Ibid., p. 218
75
Stäblein, Schriftbild, 29. It should be admitted that Jammers did persist in linking neumes with
prosodic accents and cheironomy: see his Tafeln and Corbin, Die Neumen, pp. 3.16–19.
76
It should be recognized here that the division of neumatic notations into two types reaches
back beyond Mocquereau to Fétis and has outlasted the ‘accent theory’ with which
123
Susan Rankin
Aquitanian and Messine notations, and on the other, German, Italian,77
French-Norman and English. In Stäblein’s classification – to this day the
most comprehensive scheme of interrelations between regional neume
families set into a chronological framework78 – the division into families
defined as ‘Punktneumen’ and ‘Strichneumen’ was maintained, the second
now named the ‘zentraleuropäische Neumenfamilie’.79 This included,
besides the central French, Italian and German notations which allowed
the name, Spanish as well as English notations. The most significant new
aspect in Stäblein’s systematization of neumatic notations was the percep-
tion that not only the palaeofrankish but also the so-called ‘Breton’ neumes
belonged to an earlier chronological period than such regional families,
and effectively underlay the invention of those later notations. After this,
the only other study to attempt a chronological classification of regional
neume scripts has been Levy’s 1987 ‘On the Origin of Neumes’ and this,
for reasons arising from the aims and methodology of the study, was not
so much concerned with palaeographical kinship as with the different
natures and functions of neumatic notations at different points in the first
hundred years of their use. While Levy’s source materials and the
arguments he draws from them are entirely different from those employed
by Mocquereau, his division into Type 1 ‘graphic’ neumes and Type 2
‘gestural’ neumes mirrors that earlier attempt to categorise surviving
examples of notation through the relation between graphic sign and
musical sound.
Despite its importance in Handschin’s 1950 study, the subject of pitch
indication was not further investigated in studies of neumatic notation
published in the 1960s and 1970s. In many ways, the position widely
adopted did not differ so much from the views of Mocquereau. Stäblein,
for example, emphasized the insufficiency of the basic system, again
linking it to a hypothesis of origins:
The disadvantage . . . of all neume script is the impossibility of showing the size
[measurement] of intervals precisely. This situation was probably accepted by the
majority of singers, who learnt their melodies by heart and whose performance was led
by the hand gestures of a cantor; however, corruptions experienced here and there
Mocquereau linked it. See F.-J. Fétis, ‘Résumé philosophique de l’histoire de la musique’,
Biographie universelle des musiciens (Paris, 1835–44), i, pp. clx–clxvi.
77
These he described as ‘the common Italian’ (‘der gewöhnlichen Italienischen’), so differenti-
ating the script of central and southern Italy (‘Beneventan’) from that in books from northern
Italian centres such as Nonantola and Bologna. See Handschin, ‘Eine alte Neumenschrift’,
p. 80.
78
Stäblein, Schriftbild, pp. 28–43.
79
Ibid., pp. 30 ff.
124
could only be rectified according to a variety of solutions (useful and unuseful), until
around 1050 the problem was solved.80
But eventually, the subject of diastematy was revisited, now in a study
in which semiological theory was used as a tool to explore means and types
of representation in neumatic scripts, with the central question ‘How did
the systems of writing represent?’81 Examining Handschin’s idea of a
‘Tonortschrift’, Treitler pointed out the inadequacy of that description,
since no individual early script – including the palaeofrankish – showed
exact intervals; equally the idea of distance indicated by lines drawn
between points,82 with which Handschin had linked the other family of
notations, was also inadequate, since it described certain notations more
accurately than others (for example, Beneventan notation but not that of
Sankt Gallen). Treitler thus used Handschin’s own insight – that dias-
tematy is not a ‘constitutive property of scripts’ – to argue against him.83
He then demonstrated the existence of specific scripts written in both
adiastematic and diastematic fashion – the manner chosen by an individ-
ual notator depending not only on chronology but also function. All of this
was concerned with classification, according to a dual mode worked out on
the basis of Peirce’s iconic and symbolic categories of representation.84
The resulting groups are not unlike those which result from the earlier
accent and point neume contrast.
For the exploration of the treatment of pitch in early neumatic notations
two other features in this study are of more relevance than the discussion
of representational modes. One was Treitler’s basic methodology in the
examination of the behaviour of different neume scripts: this chose as its
basic analytical tool the fact of differentiation between two signs for single
notes, the punctum and the virga.85 The implications of this decision for
considerations of the treatment of pitch, and, more broadly, the relation of
80
Ibid., p. 31: ‘Der Nachteil, nicht nur der Neuen, sondern der Neumenschrift überhaupt, ist die
Unmöglichkeit, die Abmessung der Intervalle präzis darzustellen. Dieser Zustand wurde wohl
von der überwiegenden Menge der Sängerschaft, die ihre Melodien auswendig lernte und,
geführt von der Cheironomie der Kantors, vortrug, hingenommen, jedoch da und dort schon
als Mißstand empfunden, den zu beheben man auf mancherlei Auswege (brauchbare und
unbrauchbare) sann, bis gegen 1050 das Problem gelöst wurde.’
81
Treitler, ‘The Early History of Music Writing’ (With Voice and Pen), pp. 333 and 356 ff.
82
This is how Treitler understood Handschin’s rather ambiguous ‘Strecke’. ‘The Early History
of Music Writing’ (With Voice and Pen), p. 357.
83
Treitler, ‘The Early History of Music Writing’ (With Voice and Pen), pp. 357–8.
84
On the value of semiological analysis to the investigation of early music writing, and on
revisions to the 1982 version, see further in the new introduction to ‘The Early History of
Music Writing’ (With Voice and Pen), pp. 317–28; id., ‘Palaeography and Semiotics’, in M.
Huglo (ed.), Musicologie médiévale: Notations et séquences. Actes de la table ronde du C.N.R.S. à l’Institut
de recherche et d’histoire des textes, 1982 (Paris, 1987), pp. 17–27.
85
Treitler, ‘The Early History of Music Writing’ (With Voice and Pen), p. 338 (on the widely
accepted theory), and pp. 340–43 (for the central part of his argument).
125
Susan Rankin
early neumatic scripts, deserve fuller examination. The other, extremely
useful, step was a clarification of the meanings hitherto assembled under
the designation ‘diastematy’. Here Treitler distinguished between three
phenomena:
(1) directionality as a principle in the formation of individual neumes;
(2) diastematy, which is the representation of melodic interval-size through
vertical distance on the writing surface (his italics);
(3) a general tendency to reflect the contours of a melody in the overall
contours of the line of neumes but without sufficient precision to reflect the
actual intervals of the melody. In such situations one cannot tell whether
there was a representational intent or an unconscious response to the
melody as it was being written down.86
By ‘directionality’ Treitler referred to the basic correspondence between
‘an upward direction [in neumes written] on the page’ and ‘an upward
direction in the melodic figure’; this correspondence depended on the
height metaphor – a link between the movement of musical sounds and an
epistemological principle of spatialization.87 The convention whereby the
antique concepts of movement between ‘grave’ and ‘acute’ musical sounds
became associated with spatial perceptions of ‘low’ and ‘high’ depended on
the assimilation of grammatical thinking into rational ideas about music, a
process set thoroughly in motion in (and most characteristic of) the
Carolingian period.88 The most prominent expression of that new
convention is in the written treatment of music, in the physical manipu-
lation of written signs, so that they move in an upwards or downwards
direction. Thus the pattern of individual neume shapes which represented
more than one note themselves embodied information about the direction
of melodic movement – but not, before the eleventh century, precise
interval size.
With Treitler’s three categories of pitch treatment we can perceive a
final nail in the coffin of the historical narrative advanced by Mocquereau:
‘a general tendency to reflect the contours of a melody’ (category 3),
supported by neume shapes which were themselves ‘directional’ (category
1) would be enough to trigger the singer’s memory of a melody. The
absence of diastematy (category 2) could not be read as a lack of knowledge
of that principle in written form – in Carolingian pedagogical materials
there were enough diastematic notations to reveal widespread knowledge
of such an approach – but rather as a choice made not to proceed in that
manner.
86
Ibid., p. 340, n. 40.
87
Ibid., p. 330, n. 21; see also Duchez, ‘La Répresentation spatio-verticale’, p. 54.
88
See above, pp. 109–10.
126
***
It may seem easy now to explain how Mocquereau and later Wagner
got it wrong – imposing interpretations which reflected their own situation
more than Carolingian interests, and using relatively flimsy information
about the chronology of extant sources: somewhere along the way it was
realised that it was not the intention of early notators of chant melodies to
replace precise intervallic memories. And yet, as every scholar who has
participated in the long debate about early neumatic notation has grasped,
in the early centuries of the use of musical notation, there was no one
mindset;89 points of view about the notation of pitch were not one-
dimensional. Even if the treatment of pitch in notations before the
invention of the stave in the mid-eleventh century was not for every
notator and reader of notation a problem – to adopt Stäblein’s description
– nevertheless the fact of invention of the stave, not to speak of Guido
d’Arezzo’s own comments on the subject,90 indicates that some musicians
felt the need for more precise indications of pitch in practical notations.
The insufficiency of conventional notations (‘the signs which custom has
handed down to us’) was remarked on already in the late ninth century by
the theorist Hucbald.91 For this reason the limiting of knowledge about the
notation of pitch to the view that the primary function of musical notation
was not to notate pitch would effectively exchange one set of misunder-
standings for another, depriving us of insight into the variety and nuance
of ways in which pitch was actually handled, and the ways in which this
changed in relation to chronology, geography and function. Most directly,
in terms of the notations themselves, why was the treatment of pitch in
notations grouped under the headings ‘accent neumes’ and ‘point neumes’
apparently so different? How could Mocquereau arrive at such different
conceptualizations of their technical foundation? And, if the virga and
punctum neumes represented the basis of the whole system, why then were
these neumes treated so differently in dissimilar notations – indeed, in the
case of the virga actually absent from some notations? The exploration of
such questions through palaeographical examination may lead to insights
into the mechanics of interdependence between recall and writing,
between reading and remembering.
89
See, e.g., Treitler, ‘Reading and Singing’ (With Voice and Pen), pp. 401–2; also the various types
of musical tasks with which Levy works in ‘Plainchant before Neumes’ (Gregorian Chant and the
Carolingians, pp. 195–213).
90
For these see Haines, ‘The Origin of the Musical Staff’.
91
L’oeuvre musicale d’Hucbald de Saint-Amand: Les compositions et le traité de musique, ed. Yves Chartier
(Cahiers d’études médiévales (Cahier spécial no. 5); Montreal, 1995), §44 (p. 194).
127
Susan Rankin
THE TREATMENT OF PITCH IN THE GRADUAL LAON,
BIBLIOTHÈQUE MUNICIPALE 239
The earliest, more or less complete, book containing notations for the
chants of the mass is Laon, Bibliothèque municipale 239 (henceforth Laon
239).92 Although the date of its copying is not precisely known, the period
to which it belongs is the last quarter of the ninth century.93 Equally, it was
almost certainly copied for the Cathedral of Notre-Dame at Laon,94 and
thus in use by musicians close to one of the celebrated schools of the late
ninth century.95 The manuscript was notated throughout by one scribe,
with the exception of some of the offertory verses. The notation in this
book is so nuanced and detailed in its content that it is one of the two
neumed sources copied alongside square notation in the Solesmes Graduale
triplex.96
In comparing the notation for the Gradual In deo sperauit in Laon 239
with a version notated in precise pitches (Figure 1a, 1b),97 it quickly
92
Antiphonale missarum Sancti Gregorii, IX–Xe siècle, Codex 239 de la Bibliothèque de Laon, introduction
by A. Mocquereau, J. Beyssac and A. Ménager (Paléographie musicale, 10; Tournai, 1909).
See now also <http://manuscrit.ville-laon.fr/notice.php?cote=Ms239>.
93
Bischoff, Katalog, ii, no. 2094; this opinion is shared by John Contreni (personal communi-
cation to the author, August 1999).
94
Antiphonale missarum Sancti Gregorii, IX–Xe siècle, Codex 239, pp. 19–35; the relation between the
liturgy in this book and later books belonging to Laon Cathedral determined this judgement.
95
On this see J. J. Contreni, The Cathedral School of Laon from 850 to 930: Its Manuscripts and Masters
(Münchener Beiträge zur Mediävistik und Renaissance Forschung, 29; Munich, 1978); Codex
Laudunensis 468: A Ninth-Century Guide to Virgil, Sedulius, and the Liberal Arts, ed. J. J. Contreni
(Armarium codicum insignium, 3; Turnhout, 1984); D. Ganz, ‘Codex Laudunensis 468’,
Peritia, 4 (1985), pp. 360–70.
96
Graduale Triplex (Solesmes, 1979). On the notation in this manuscript see esp. Antiphonale
missarum Sancti Gregorii, IX–Xe siècle, Codex 239, pp. 177–207; R. Fischer, ‘Laon, Bibl. de la ville,
239’, Beiträge zur Gregorianik, 21 (1996), pp. 75–9; J. Kohlhäufl, ‘Die Tironische Noten im
Codex Laon 239’, Beiträge zur Gregorianik, 27 (1999), pp. 21–32; S. Zippe, ‘Ceterum censeo:
Volutam esse exquaerere’, Beiträge zur Gregorianik, 41/(2) (2006), pp. 267–77.
97
For neither of the manuscripts studied here in detail is there any one closely matching source
notated on lines: the issue of how to handle pitch in transcriptions is not therefore
straightforward. My procedure has been to choose one heighted source to which the neumes
of the specific example are closely related; where the neumes call for small adjustments, these
are made according to a second source (and listed). The background to all melodic versions
has been studied through the mediums of the Graduale Triplex, the discussions of restoration in
the Beiträge zur Gregorianik, and with several individual diastematically notated manuscripts of
the eleventh and twelfth centuries. It is worth noting that those points at which different
notations have different pitch readings are often in the same parts of a specific chant; as far
as possible I have attempted to avoid using those passages for argument in this study.
Therefore, although the question of melodic versions would seem fundamental to the
evidence-gathering exercise for a study of pitch, in practice the differences between versions
of the melodies considered has hardly altered the conclusions. Much more variable than pitch
are the ways in which notes are grouped – joined or separated; I have not hesitated to arrange
notes on the stave in relation to the groupings suggested by the specific neumatic notations
considered here. In noting differences between the melody presented here and the pitched
versions used to provide a transcription I mention different pitch readings only; where a tone
128
becomes clear that this northern French scribe invested effort into
mapping signs in the space above the text in some representation of (or
response to) changes of pitch: between syllables 1 and 2, the movement
upwards is clearly seen; on syllables 2–6 the neumes are positioned along
a virtual horizontal line corresponding to one repeated pitch (F); and then
the step up (a tone) for the first note on syllable 7 is seen in the higher
position of the next neume. The first point at which this careful placement
of signs in the space above the text in relation to pitch levels breaks down
is between syllables 7 and 8: despite being sung at the same pitch, the end
of the neume on syllable 7 ‘cor’ is at a different (and lower) vertical level
from the first punctum in the falling group of three notes, followed by
another three, on syllable 8 ‘me[um]’. The reason for the displacement
upwards of that first falling group is easily identified: the scribe needed
space to write two groups each of three falling notes, and had to place the
first punctum high enough in the space available to be able to fit the rest in.
Reading through the rest of the chant simply produces more examples of
both situations: the reasonably accurate representation of melodic move-
ment in the placing of marks on the written surface, and the abandonment
of this procedure when the combination of neume shape, available writing
space, and melodic movement clash in their demands. Certain passages
are striking in their clarity of pitch representation: on syllables 15–19 (‘et
refloruit’), sung to three pitches set a tone apart (F, G, a), the signs for a
succession of separate syllables can be easily read straight from the page;98
the same is true of the puncta above syllables 24–7 (‘et ex uo[luntate]’).
This way of responding to the movement of a melody is like later
approaches to pitch notation in that signs are moved up or down (or kept
on the same level) within the space above the text, but unlike later
approaches in its general disregard for the size of intervals: movement up
or down is just that, and it is not precisely measured (even if sometimes
handled in a careful manner). In consequence, specific vertical positions
are not linked to specific pitches. Thus, representation of pitch in terms of
height in the space above the text is sequential rather than abstract: above
all, the open space is not itself read as mapped in relation to pitch (as in
is repeated (or not repeated), where a liquescence or quilisma is present (or absent) these are
not listed. In deo sperauit: pitched version from Verdun 759, fol. 60r, with Paris BnF lat. 776,
fol. 46r. Syllable 8: Verdun has aGFE FEDE ED (Laon agrees with 776); syllable 23, second
and third group: Verdun has GEFGD FD (776 followed here). Verdun 759: Verdun,
Bibliothèque Municipale 759, Missale (Codices gregoriani, 1–2, ed. Nino Albarosa and Alberto
Turco; Padua, 1994); also Graduale Triplex, p. 311 and Beiträge zur Gregorianik, 43 (2007), p. 11.
In this and all the following musical transcriptions, the use of the treble clef does not indicate
a sung pitch, merely a notational strategy: no treble 8 clef was available in this font.
98
Of course, the way in which they should be read is not through fixed visual levels, but through
the flow of the neume graphs.
129
Susan Rankin
Gradual In deo sperauit (Laon 239, fol. 33v, ll. 4–5)
Figure 1a
130
Figure 1b Gradual In deo sperauit (Laon 239, fol. 33v)
the string model available in the Musica Enchiriadis and, since the
mid-eleventh century, on a stave with clefs).
Apart from the positioning of neumes, other characteristics of this
notation provide information about pitch. The neumes themselves contain
directional information, often rendered visually easy to understand by the
way in which the graph of a sign sketches out movement – two ascending
notes (pes) shown by (syllable 5) or (also a pes; syllable 15) and two
131
Susan Rankin
descending notes (clivis) shown by (syllable 18) or (syllable 9). Yet not all
of these Laon signs are straightforwardly ‘iconic’ in their manner of
representation: indeed, the means by which some neumes for two or more
notes are rendered more pitch specific, over and above their fundamen-
tally directional design, is certainly by convention. These are the neumes
which incorporate at their beginning or end a wavy or curved stroke: such
signs are written four times in In deo sperauit. At the end of the neume series
over syllables 23, 35 and 37, a sign which can can be read as a modified
clivis, representing two falling notes, is written. In this sign, the formation
of the opening stroke, before the pen is turned to write a long downwards
stroke, is recognisable as this special, modified graph: in each of these three
cases, the first note of the modified clivis repeats the previous pitch. The
fourth example shows the wavy stroke added not at the beginning but at
the end of a sign – in the neumes over syllable 36, attached to a torculus
(which itself represents the pitch pattern low–high–low); here the fourth
note of the neume is to be sung at the same pitch as the third.
Among the signs for single notes one in particular has a meaning in
relation to pitch which renders it both more clarified and more limited in
use than other signs for single notes. This sign is written as a line sloping
upwards to the right, with both ends turned ( ); it marks one rising note.
In In deo sperauit this sign is written in the neume groups over syllables 14
(twice), 15, 23, 34 and 37 (twice). As in this Gradual chant, so throughout
the book: this sign is never written on its own, but only as part of longer
groups. That contrasts with other graphs which represent single notes, all
of which can be written as independent signs, indicating a single note on
a single text syllable: the punctum ( ) and uncinus ( ). Like other signs in this
notation the diagonal stroke is malleable, and may be written long (as the
first time over syllable 14, and over 15), short (as over syllable 23), and in
lengths in between (all the rest). (At this stage it is unclear whether meaning
resides in these differences of size; it is possible that the length of the sign
was controlled by the graphic necessities of each context.) The way in
which this sign is used in In deo sperauit is unambiguous: it means, in relation
to the preceding notes, ‘go up’, and, following the note marked by this sign,
‘go down afterwards’. Both conditions are true for six of the seven
instances in this chant; and, read in relation to the descending liquescence
on the preceding note group, true also for the first instance on syllable 37.
Use in such positions is standard throughout the book. This description of
the use of this sign requires qualification, however: in melodic situations of
movement up to a single note and then immediately down the sign is often
written, but not always. Thus, the sign and the melodic context do not fully
correspond to each other. Indeed, the sign can also be found in another
132
Figure 2 From Gradual Exsurge domine fer opem (Laon 239, fol. 35v, l. 9)
melodic context, in the middle of a rising series of pitches (see Figure 2).99
Thus, while the sign always indicates that this note is higher than the
preceding one, it does not always indicate that this note is higher than the
one which follows.100 Nevertheless, in the latter situation, the positioning
of neumes in terms of height above the text always clarifies the pitch
relations.
My avoidance of the term ‘virga’ for this diagonal stroke is deliberate.
It is evident that, as a written sign, the Laon diagonal stroke with turned
ends matches the angled or perpendicular stroke used in central French
and German (and English and Italian) notations and, since the eleventh
century, named ‘virga’.101 But the use of this sign in the Laon notation is
not at all parallel to its use in the other notations.102 In this Laon book it
99
This extract is from a chant which challenged those writing it on lines more than most (on
which see R. Fischer, ‘Gr. Speciosus forma und Gr. Exsurge domine’, Beiträge zur Gregorianik,
25 (1998), pp. 81–104), but the intervallic relations in this very short passage are fairly
standard. Here from Verdun 759, fol. 60v. In Paris BnF lat. 776, fol. 48v, the melody for ‘nos-’
is notated a tone higher than in Verdun, but ends on b on the second syllable, ‘-tri’; this is the
version adopted by the Graduale Triplex, p. 115.
100
The possibility of a virga in Sankt Gallen notation acting ex parte ante or ex parte post was explored
by E. Cardine in his ‘Sémiologie grégorienne’, Études grégoriennes, 11 (1970), pp. 1–158 (at
pp. 6–8); however, while there are clear analogies between the SG virga and the Laon sign
discussed here, the ways in which each is used and treated do not map precisely onto each
other.
101
On the names of neumes and the sources in which tables of neumes appear see M. Huglo, ‘Les
noms des neumes et leurs origines’, Études grégoriennes, 1 (1954), pp. 53–67, and M. Bernhard,
‘Die Überlieferung der Neumennamen im lateinischen Mittelalter’, in id. (ed.), Quellen und
Studien zur Musiktheorie des Mittelalters, 2 (1997), pp. 13–91.
102
The one regional notation type in which this sign is used similarly is the Aquitanian; there is
also considerable overlap between the use in Laon 239 and that in the early tenth-century
Gradual notated in ‘Breton’ notation, Chartres 47. For this see Antiphonale missarum Sancti
133
Susan Rankin
is never written on its own, but only within longer groups of signs
(‘compound neumes’); there is, strictly speaking, no ‘virga’. Indeed, the
ways in which any signs for single notes (punctum, uncinus and the long
stroke) are used in the Laon notation cannot be matched directly to any
other neumatic notational system: the sign most often used for one note –
the uncinus – has no equivalent in any other type of neumatic notation, and
exemplifies a specific and unique design made by the person responsible
for shaping the type of notation written by the scribe of Laon 239. The
proposal to drop the term virga is more than empty pedantry in this
context, since much theorization about the basic procedures of neumatic
script, and about the ways in which neumes were fashioned, has taken as
its basis a pitch differentiation read in the contrasted graphs of ‘virga’ and
‘punctum’.103 As we have seen, that visual contrast is exploited in this
Laon book, but only in limited circumstances: in the case of single notes
sung to single syllables the Laon scribe does not use contrasted graphs to
indicate different pitches but instead the contrasted positioning of signs.
(For single notes matched to single syllables, this scribe is certainly
interested in contrast – using the punctum and uncinus signs – between which
the differentiation sits in the domain of note length and emphasis, not
pitch.)
In summary then, the techniques for referring to pitch in the notation
for In deo sperauit consist of (a) the contrasted placement of signs in the open
space above the text – in a sequential process, not based on a fixed way of
reading that open space; (b) the use of signs which, in being directional,
reveal the shape of individual sections of the melody; and (c) the use of
specific signs which, by convention, contain further specific information
about pitch. In terms of pitch, it is evident that this is not a notation which
lies on the prescriptive/descriptive continuum: it would never be possible
to recreate the relative pitches of this melody from the notation alone.
Rather, the signs and their positioning must be read as a support for recall,
requiring of the reader that he find in his memory patterns which
correspond.
It is difficult to draw a boundary between a ‘prescriptive’ way of writing
instructions for something to be sung (or read) and an approach based on
recall, since most ways of writing language or music for reading or singing
are basically reliant on memory. If the difference between the categories is
defined more by focus than boundary, it is the balance between what is
written and what has to be summoned from the memory which comes into
Gregorii, Xe siècle, Codex 47 de la Bibliothèque de Chartres, introduction by A. Ménager (Paléographie

musicale, 11; Tournai,1922).
103
From Le Codex 339 (p. 129) on; the most detailed and nuanced consideration (based mainly on
Sankt Gallen notations) is in Cardine, ‘Sémiologie grégorienne’, pp. 6–16.
134
question. Thus a prescriptive notation would have a stronger balance
towards information recorded in writing, and would depend on memory
(or convention available through context) for limited and often quite
specific elements necessary for delivery. This is the model most familiar to
modern musicians, in a variety of guises, and especially as a result of
placing the responsibility for musical creation in the hands of individuals
whose musical activity may become quite remote from those who remake
their music. A recall-based notation would depend rather more heavily on
memory, on the flow of thought between the written, visual model and the
remembered, aural/oral object; and it will be subject to the ability of the
reader to use the guidance provided by the written artefact to delve into
and draw out from his memory something he has already heard. Such an
approach relies on lively oral exchange between generations and across
localities, on closeness between individual musicians, and on continuity in
a chain of transmission. In the context of early medieval musical notations,
distinguishing between categories of prescriptive and recall-based nota-
tions matters, since it helps to steer us away from setting early notations
alongside more recent, more prescriptive examples, leading to the evalu-
ation of the early notations as rudimentary and inexact forms of something
which was later perfected. Separated from such perceptions these early
notations can be read in terms of their own mode of functioning.
The extent to which this Laon notation, moment by moment, guides the
reader in useful directions – a hint here, a hint there – is striking, and
bespeaks the activity of recall in the way it is described in medieval books
about ars memorativa.104 Arts of memory teach the creation in the mind of
networks of objects and ideas, and of movement along paths through those
networks. Recall from a memory organised in this way can be prompted
through what Mary Carruthers has named ‘finding tools’, mental devices
which stimulate passage along the paths of memory. To understand the
handling of melodic pitch patterns in Laon 239 in this way is more useful
than thinking of these notations as rough approximations by a scribe who
didn’t know any better.
The placement of signs in some passages of In deo sperauit is strikingly
close to the pitch patterns of the melody. It was not always possible for the
scribe of Laon 239 to maintain such a high degree of accuracy, however,
the difficulties becoming greater the more elaborate the melody. And yet,
understanding his approach to the notation of pitch as mnemonic support,
the extent to which this scribe acted to lead his readers in useful directions
is marked.
104
Carruthers, The Book of Memory, pp. ix–xiv and passim.; see also the texts in The Medieval Craft
of Memory, ed. M. Carruthers and J. Ziolkowski (Cambridge, 2002).
135
Susan Rankin
Gradual Eripe me (Laon 239, fol. 38v, ll. 11–13)
Figure 3a
136
Figure 3b Gradual Eripe me (Laon 239, fol. 38v)
In the Gradual Eripe me the Laon scribe exploited the tools available to
him in conspicuous ways (see Figure 3a, 3b).105 The degree to which he
responded to pitch changes graphically can be seen in tiny details, such as
the two zigzag signs over syllables 17 and 18 (‘me fa[cere]’). Here the same
105
In this case, since the comparison of the version in Verdun 759 with early pitched notations
shows that Verdun has many changes typical of later modal practice (Es converted to Fs, and
Bs to Cs), the version in Paris BnF lat. 776, fol. 50v is used. Syllable 19: 776 has a single note,
G. See also Graduale Triplex, p. 121 and Beiträge zur Gregorianik, 26 (1998), p. 9.
137
Susan Rankin
neume is written over successive syllables (a sign denoting four notes in the
pattern high–low–high–low). But it is not written the same way: the second
has a deeper dip in the middle, and then a longer ending stroke: these
differences appear to match the different pitch patterns on the two
syllables, first cbca, and then cabG. Further along that same line, the
scribe had to write a neume to signify two rising notes (pes) covering the
interval of a fourth (G c) twice, over syllables 24 (‘[volunta]tem’) and 26
(‘[tu]am’). Constricted on the first occasion by the presence of text
immediately above (and the need to write another neume at a still higher
level), the perpendicular stroke of the pes is relatively restrained (although
still taller than that over syllable 10 ‘[in]i[micis]’ on the line above).
Coming towards the end of the second written line, he was less con-
strained, since the text line above much of the melisma for syllable 26
(‘[tu]am’) was empty. He knew then that he could set the neume which
had to be written above the end of the pes (the two-note descending clivis)
at a higher level, in turn allowing him to write the pes representing a jump
of a fourth in more extended manner than on syllable 24.
The accumulation of signs going in one direction could make things
awkward: on syllable 7 ([domi]ne), a series of four signs written at
successively higher points on the page is succeeded by falling signs. In this
group, the first sign (uncinus) represents a note sung at the pitch E, while the
beginning of the last sign (for a three-note group: torculus) – here written
higher on the page – represents a note sung a tone lower, on D. Yet here
again, the scribe’s intense response to his memory of the melody (or,
alternatively, awareness of his future reader) is prominent. The next phrase
is sung predominantly in a higher tessitura than the first, that is, between
G and d. But the melody of the next phrase does not begin immediately
at a higher pitch, rather it is launched from the low D on which the first
phrase ended. Therefore the scribe wrote ‘nl’ – ‘non levare’, ‘do not go up’
– beside the two-note group (pes) over syllable 8 (‘de’). It is interesting to
note that he judged the point at which a warning was necessary to be at
the beginning of the phrase, and not between its first and second syllables
(that is, syllables 8 and 9) where the melody jumps through a fifth from C
to G.
The notation in this Laon book can usefully be compared with that in
a group of fragments also present in the Bibliothèque municipale at Laon;
while these fragments are so small that it cannot easily be established
where they were written, it is likely that they originated in the same region,
and even possibly in the same establishment.106 These fragments represent
106
Three fragments from books of mass chants are listed in the Appendix; there are many other
instances of chants notated in Messine notation in books held in the Bibliothèque municipale
at Laon, including several probably written in the ninth or early tenth centuries.
138
a body of musically notated books made during the last third or last
quarter of the ninth century, and all notated in this same ‘Messine’
notation;107 they also share similar measurements of space between text
lines. A bifolium preserved in MS 266, and reported as probably being of
earlier date than MS 239,108 includes the Gradual Eripe me. Comparison of
the two notations is instructive, revealing a strong continuity of practice in
the choice of signs and ways of setting out the melody, and the same
general attitude to the placing of signs in the space above the text. On a
few occasions, the juxtaposition of the two notations for this gradual
exposes greater nuance and care on the part of the scribe of Laon 239, but
the differences are minimal, and do not disturb the general sense of a
shared attitude on the part of their scribes as to how to represent melodic
patterns in writing. Thus, in the case of Laon 266 and Laon 239 it can be
demonstrated that they share both a repertory of signs and a way of
arranging those signs on the written surface. This, and the further
comparisons which can be made between notations for specific chants in
Laon 239 and the fragments in Laon 9, 121 and 266, indicate an
established approach to how chants for the mass could be written down,
shared by several scribes working in or around Laon in the last quarter of
the ninth century.
THE TREATMENT OF PITCH IN THE CANTATORIUM

STIFTSBIBLIOTHEK SANKT GALLEN 359
The manuscript 359 in the Stiftsbibliothek at Sankt Gallen (henceforth SG

359) is the most celebrated example of a book type which contains only the
most elaborate mass chants (sung by the cantor, or other soloist), the
Graduals, Alleluias and Tracts.109 It is made in a long thin format, a shape
which corresponds to and may have been determined by the two ivory
tablets set on the front of its binding. These date from the sixth century;
otherwise the binding consists of patterned silk (dated c. 800), wooden
boards, gilded copper and carved pieces of bone. The manufacture of this
107
On this notation type see Hourlier, ‘Le domaine de la notation messine’; and Corbin, Die
Neumen, pp. 3.87–94.
108
P. Jeffery, ‘An Early Cantatorium Fragment Related to MS Laon 239’, Scriptorium, 36 (1982),
pp. 245–52 + Pls. 29–30, at pp. 248–9.
109
Cantatorium, IXe siècle, No 359 de la Bibliothèque de St. Gall, introduction by A. Mocquereau
(Paléographie musicale, 2nd ser. 2; Tournai, 1924); the whole manuscript can now be seen at
<http://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/de/csg/0359>. For a full codicological description and
consideration of the book with bibliography, see A. von Euw, Die St. Galler Buchkunst vom 8. bis
zum Ende des 11. Jahrhunderts (Monasterium Sancti Galli, 3; Sankt Gallen, 2008), pp. 470–2 (No.
131). On the book-type ‘cantatorium’ see most recently M. Huglo, ‘The Cantatorium, from
Charlemagne to the Fourteenth Century’, in P. Jeffery (ed.), The Study of Medieval Chant: Paths
and Bridges, East and West. In Honor of Kenneth Levy (Woodbridge, 2001), pp. 89–103.
139
Susan Rankin
Figure 4a Gradual Iurauit dominus (SG 359, p. 47, ll. 11–16)
binding has been dated through dendrochronology of the oak boards

between 923 and 931.110 The text hand of the book is consistent with this
date, although it would also allow an earlier dating, closer to 900. The
notation for the main book, leaving aside extensive additions at front and
back, was made by one excellent scribe. SG 359 is the second manuscript
used for the provision of neumatic notations in the Graduale Triplex.111
Set beside each other, the notation for the Gradual Iurauit dominus in SG
359 and in a pitched version appear quite different in their way of handling
pitch information (see Figures 4a, 4b).112 Set on a stave, the modern
notation is precise within the parameters of a simple modal scale of eleven
notes (C–e, including b P and b O).113 In contrast, the neumatic notation
gives a general impression of imprecision, made up of short passages which
behave differently – some following a contour which seems to match the
pitched notation, others ignoring pitch contour altogether, and still others
110
On the binding see von Euw, Die St. Galler Buchkunst, p. 471.
111
On the notation in this book see esp. Cardine, ‘Sémiologie grégorienne’, and R. Fischer,
‘Einführung in Handschriften des Gregorianischen Chorals. I: St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek 359:
Das Cantatorium von St. Gallen’, Beiträge zur Gregorianik, 19 (1995), pp. 61–70.
112
Iurauit dominus belongs to the same melodic family as Eripe me (3rd- and 4th-mode graduals),
and the two melodies share several melodic phrase patterns.
113
The pitched version is from Benevento VI.34, fol. 40v. See Le Codex VI.34 de la Bibliothèque
capitulaire de Bénévent, introduction by J. Gajard, R.-J. Hesbert, J. Houlier and M. Huglo
(Paléographie musicale, 15; Tournai, 1937). Syllable 4: Ben has one note less at the beginning;
syllable 10: Ben has ab; syllable 25: Ben GF; syllable 26: Ben abb. See also Graduale Triplex,
p. 486.
140
Figure 4b From Gradual Iurauit dominus (SG 359, p. 47)
going positively against the pitch-contour patterns in their use of vertical

positioning in the space above the text. It is not difficult to understand why
Mocquereau should have written of such notation that the ‘fruitful
principle’ of ‘stacking in layers of notes was not yet known’.114 But we
should look more carefully.
Syllables 1, 2, 3 (Iurauit)
1: The pitch rise from the first note to the group of strophae ( ) is mirrored
by change of vertical level. After this, the correpondence between pitch
and vertical level breaks down quickly, with the placing of the clivis ( , for
114
Le Codex 339, p. 99.
141
Susan Rankin
two falling notes).115 Instead of being written below the strophae so as to
indicate that the pitch it ends on is below these strophae, this clivis is written
with the end of its graph on the same vertical level.
2: The first sign ( , tractulus) is written at a vertically lower level than the
end of 1, although it is pitched a tone above. The neume group for this
syllable follows the pitch pattern in its contour.
3: As in 1, the strophae are succeeded by a clivis which begins and ends on
the same vertical level, despite the pitch pattern; and then the strophae
following the clivis are written at a higher level, matching the rise in pitch
from the second note represented by the clivis (D) to F. As a result notes
sung at the same pitch before and after the clivis are written at different
vertical levels.
Syllables 4, 5, 6 (dominus)
4: As in 2, the neume group mirrors pitch pattern in its shape.
5: Although standing for the same two pitches as the last two notes
on 4 (aG), this clivis is written far below the last part of the neume on
4.
6: The first sign ( , pes quassus) is one of those which convey pitch
information in their morphology: through the wavy line (equivalent to an
oriscus) this indicates that the pitch of the first note is the same as the last
note of 5. After this the neumes are set at successively higher positions in
the space, whether or not they indicate a rising or falling pitch:
Neume groups representing Ga EFa b PG FF DED
Pitch relation between groups & # & &

Vertical relation between written groups # # # #
Syllable 7 (et)
Just one sign (liquescent virga). This is written a little to the right of the text
syllable, but not to the right of the previous neume (at the end of the third
syllable of dominus). It represents a pitch above the end of the previous
115
On this occasion the clivis is written with a stroke across the top (episema), signifying some
degree of lengthening or emphasis.
142
syllable. The letter ‘i’ (standing for ‘inferius’) written beside the neume
reinforces the direction to be taken for the liquescent sound.
Syllable 8 (non)
Here there are four neume groups, each written successively higher than
the preceding one. As on 6 this does not necessarily correspond to pitch
contour:
Neume groups representing EGE GaG FF DED
Pitch relation between groups # & &

Vertical relation between written groups # # #
Syllables 9–12 (poenitebit)

9: The single note for the first syllable, at the end of the first line of writing,
is written vertically below the level of the previous neume, although the
intervallic relation is a rise of a fourth. Written as a virga, the sign contains
in itself the information that it represents a higher note than that
preceding.
10, 11, 12: these neumes are written without much vertical movement up
or down (except with the individual neume shapes). For 11, the salicus
( ), its second element equivalent to an oriscus is written: thus the fact
of repetition of a pitch is included within the sign.
Syllables 13, 14 (eum)

13: On this syllable the relation of the signs is very like that of 1 and 3: the
long stroke of the climacus ( ) which followed the strophae is written
stretching higher than the strophae which precede it, despite being sung at
the same pitch. What this stroke indicates is that the puncta which follow
are at successively lower pitches (although in written form they are not
much lower than the strophae). The last note of the last neume ( , porrectus)
should sound as an a, thus on the same pitch as the first note of 14, which
is written vertically far below.
14: As for other previous melismas, the direction of writing edges
gradually upwards, whatever the pitch direction between neumes. The last
four notes are written using another pitch-indicating sign, the virga strata
143
Susan Rankin
(virga + oriscus), so that it is clear that the pitches of the third and second last
notes are the same (a).
With the exception of ‘i’, all the letters in this passage of notation deal
with rhythm and articulation, as follows (in the order they appear):116
c celeriter ‘fast’
t tenere ‘hold’
tb tenere bene ‘hold well’
i inferius ‘go down’
st statim ‘immediately’
Reading this notation against a diastematic record of the melody reveals
a number of behaviours, each of which is repeated. Those behaviours
which act to convey pitch information include:
(a) the shaping of individual neumes according to pitch contour
(‘directionality’);
(b) the use of individual signs whose shape can be recognised by a reader
versed in the conventions of the notation as having pitch content (strophae,
virga, punctum, pes quassus, virga strata);
(c) the use of neume groups whose written pattern is common and
therefore, by convention, has a specific pitch content;
(d) the use of letters for clarification (in this case, just one, but others are
common).
Behaviours which do not coincide with pitch contour, and are not
controlled by it, include:
(e) the writing of signs representing notes to be sung at the same pitch
at different vertical levels, even in close proximity; this applies both within
neume groups and between them;
(f) especially in neumes written in series for one syllable (melismas), the
arrangement of the neumes as if between two parallel lines which rise
diagonally upwards.
To what extent are these behaviours typical of this notator’s practice
throughout the book? In fact, some are so basic to the system and well
recognised as such that they require no further study here.117 Others
deserve brief clarification, still others longer consideration.
The shaping of neumes according to pitch contour is a basic given of the
system; yet it is worth setting out some of the main conventions. The virga
written as a long stroke leaning to the right represents a note higher than
the punctum; this convention can apply in whatever order the two signs are
written. In the Gradual Iurauit dominus there are no passages where a single
116
On these letters see J. Smits van Waesberghe, Verklaring der letterteekens (litterae significativae) in het
gregoriaansche neumenschrift van Sint Gallen (Muziekgeschiedenis der Middeleeuwen, 2; Tilburg,
1932–42); Froger, ‘L’Épitre de Notker’.
117
For further studies of this notation see n. 111 above, and Corbin, Die Neumen, pp. 3.47–59.
144
note on one syllable is followed by another on another syllable, through
which this relation could be seen; but the neume formed from a long stroke
followed by descending points, the climacus, is a sign created on the basis of
this convention. That neume embodies falling movement in the melody.
The opposite direction, movement upwards, is graphically expressed in all
of those neumes which include individual strokes written at vertically
ascending levels: in Iurauit dominus the pattern formed by two short
horizontal strokes (tractuli) followed by another sign (over dominus, domi-
nus), and the series of strophae which begin with a single stropha written
lower followed by a series written at one vertically higher level (beginning
of the melisma on eum).
The category of neumes whose shape reveals pitch-contour information
through convention includes neumes which are made that way from the
outset, as well as ‘modified’ neumes – shapes which slightly alter the
standard way of writing a neume. For the former class of sign, the main
examples are those neumes which graphically incorporate a wavy line –
the characteristic pattern of an oriscus, which often represents a note at a
repeated pitch: the virga strata, combining a virga and an oriscus, usually
representing two notes on the same pitch;118 the pes quassus, combining an
oriscus and a virga, one of the significations of which is the most obvious, the
first note repeating the pitch of whatever preceded it.
The best example of a neume modified in relation to pitch pattern is the
extended clivis (see Figure 5); the normal clivis represents a descending
pattern of two notes and is written , while a modified form is written .
This extension can represent a large interval between the notes, such as a
fourth: in Figure 6 the extended clivis closely follows two clives each
representing the note group ca, an interval of a minor third.119 This
formula is highly repetitive (sung nine times between the beginning of the
verse and the point at which the extended clivis appears), and the notator
has taken care to warn the reader of a change, both through the extended
stroke of the neume and the addition of the letter ‘i’, ‘go down’. More
rarely, the extended clivis could represent arrival at a very low note (as on
‘secundum’ in Iurauit dominus, Figure 5). One other sign which can be
modified with similar intentions is the short horizontal stroke (tractulus).
Within groups of neumes this can be turned to point diagonally down-
wards, as in Figure 7:120 here two groups of notes following identical pitch
contours, but with different pitch contents, are clearly differentiated. Each
begins cd, the first continuing cb, the second falling to aF. In both cases
the group of notes is represented by a torculus followed by a tractulus, in the
118
On the virga strata see Cardine, ‘Sémiologie grégorienne’, pp. 90–6; Cardine shows that this
neume may also represent two rising notes, especially for an interval of a semitone.
119
Pitched version from Benevento VI.34, fol. 37v.
120
145
Susan Rankin
Figure 5 From Gradual Iurauit dominus (SG 359, p. 47)
first case with a normal tractulus written horizontally, and in the second
case, turned downwards. It is worth noting the combination of modes of
signification in some of these individual signs. In the case of the modified
clivis, for example, the basic sign represents through convention rather
than iconicity. But the modification of this conventional sign, to show a
large interval or a low note, is itself straightforwardly iconic.
It is not only at the level of individual neumes, single graphs, that this
notator’s writing functions through conventions of meaning, but at the
level of repeated successions of specific graphs. When the recurrence of
such written patterns is within chants in a specific mode, or even within
chants which belong to the same melodic family, the pitch content of these
neume series can be read through direct knowledge of the practice. One
such example in Iurauit dominus is on syllable 3 (see Figure 4 above): three
strophae followed by a clivis and three further strophae. In the way these are
written, on different vertical levels, the pitch contour of recitation on one
level, with one lower note shown by the second note of the clivis, is not
directly represented. But this way of writing that pitch pattern recurs:
Figure 6 From Gradual Misit dominus (SG 359, p. 48, l. 11)
146
Figure 7 From Gradual Viderunt omnes (SG 359, p. 40, l. 5)
within the melodic family to which Iurauit dominus belongs, the same neume
series written the same way, and representing the same pitches, can be
found in the Graduals Exsurge domine, Exaltabo te and Benedicite domino (see
Figure 8a–c).121 It can also be found outside this melodic family, for
example in the Gradual Tribulationes (Figure 8d),122 where it has the similar
intervallic content cccacc (recurring), in other words again from the note
above a semitone step, falling to a minor third below (‘fa re’ in later
medieval terminology). This melodic figure is perhaps even more charac-
teristic of the family to which Tribulationes belongs – the fifth-mode
graduals – than the smaller third-mode group. But the limits of significa-
tion can be quickly discovered in the fifth-mode melodies, as Figure 9
demonstrates.123 This is from the Gradual Adiuuabit, with, at the beginning
of the verse Fluminis, a series of neumes including a clivis between groups
of strophae, the first group written lower, the second higher. But the pitch
contour and intervallic pattern represented is different from that in the
series previously illustrated. What this comparison of examples exposes is
the association between a written pattern and a specific pitch series, and
equally the ambiguity of the writing system, since similar graphs really can
have different pitch contents. But it also underlines writing procedures –
the habit of writing a clivis starting from the horizontal level of preceding
strophae, and then of writing strophae which follow a clivis at a higher
horizontal level – that is, whatever the pitch content.
121
For Benedicite domino the Sankt Gallen book follows the Gallican psalter; the Roman psalter
(and modern Solesmes books) have ‘dominum’. Pitched versions from Benevento VI.34, fols.
82r, 101r, 168r.
122
123
Pitched version from Paris BnF lat. 776, fol. 28r.
147
Susan Rankin
Figure 8 (a) from Gradual Exsurge domine non prevaleat (SG 359, p. 75, l. 8); (b) from
Gradual Exaltabo te (SG 359, p. 87, l. 12); (c) from Gradual Benedicite domino (SG 359, p. 134,
l. 15); (d) from Gradual Tribulationes (SG 359, p. 68, l. 13)
Moving over to the behaviours which appear not to act in parallel to

pitch contour, it might be claimed that the diagonal rise to the right in
groups of neumes for a melisma is related to the attempt to accommodate
the requisite number of signs within a space restricted in its horizontal
dimension – as suggested by the treatment of neumes above syllables 6 and
7 of Iurauit dominus (Figure 4 above). Yet further examination of this
notator’s work exposes that argument as unsustainable. On every page of
this cantatorium there are examples of the rising treatment of neumes in
situations where there was no shortage of horizontal space: that is, this way
Figure 9 From Gradual Adiuuabit (SG 359, p. 55, l. 7)
148
of handling the signs was not always, indeed generally not, the result of the
placement of text syllables too close to allow enough horizontal distance to
write out the neumes. On the verso of the page which contains Iurauit
dominus the verse Confiteantur (for the Gradual Misit dominus) offers good
comparative examples on the syllables Confiteantur and misericordiae (see
Figure 10).124 Moreover, in this fine book, bound between ivory tablets
and gilded copper, with decorated ivory strips and silk, there is no evidence
of shortage of space – quite the opposite. The wide spacing between text
syllables is the most immediately obvious evidence of this, while it can also
be seen in the layout of chants (with incomplete text lines never filled up).
In the vertical dimension the question of restricted space hardly arises,
since here we are dealing with a behaviour which uses the space available,
even when not suggested by the pitch contour. All of this suggests that,
rather than considering the pattern of diagonal rise to be the consequence
of immediate musical circumstances, it must be the outcome of a writing
habit.
Likewise it might be claimed that the writing of signs representing notes
to be sung at the same pitch at different vertical levels, even in close
proximity, was the simple result of the notator’s not having in his head an
especially strong sense of the height metaphor: even if he thought in terms
of moving to higher positions on the writing surface for ascending patterns
of notes and lower for descending patterns, he need not have had an
especially precise measure. And yet, in the face of the extreme precision of
this scribe’s work in relation to articulation and length of notes (above all,
as demonstrated through the work of Cardine), an explanation built on
lack of awareness of an essential melodic quality, and a resulting
imprecision in writing, does not convince.125 Even if we allow that this
notator was not attempting to provide precise intervallic information, we
should admit that his writing is full of momentary references to pitch
contour, using a gamut of different techniques.
At this point it is worth bringing back into focus a sense of current ways
of understanding the treatment of pitch in such notations as this. The older
view whereby it was assumed that such scribes had not yet gained
knowledge of diastematically precise notation has certainly been replaced
by a kinder assessment: the precise indication of pitch was not the primary
aim of such notations, and, in any case, there were many ways of lending
a helping hand – through the many techniques of pitch clarification
124
In the case of ‘Confiteantur’ the pitch at the end of the melisma is the same as that on which
it began, and, on ‘misericordiae’, the pitch at the end of the melisma is a fifth below that on
which it began. Pitched version from Benevento VI.34, fol. 37v.
125
Cardine, ‘Sémiologie grégorienne’, which uses this book as one of its three principal sources
throughout.
149
Susan Rankin
Figure 10 From Gradual Misit dominus (SG 349, p. 48, ll. 10, 12)
mentioned above. Even in this reading, however, notation is treated as

limited in a way which would have critically reduced its usefulness in the
late ninth and early tenth centuries. Yet this notation was written by a
scribe acknowledged as one of the most outstanding writers of neumatic
notation in any extant medieval source. In relation to a situation in which
new levels of engagement with script are to be discovered all around, both
in the book culture fostered around the emperor Charlemagne and his
heirs, and in the local culture at the abbey of Sankt Gallen – by the early
tenth century producing books of the highest grade with texts of impec-
cable quality – to think in terms of a highly developed writing system for
music with such a serious design fault does not convince.
AN ALTERNATIVE VIEW
In the face of what have been considered shortcomings in previous studies

of the notation of SG 359, two qualities of this scribe’s work are extremely
150
Figure 11 From Graduals Iurauit dominus, Exurge domine non, Exaltabo, Benedicite (SG 359,
pp. 47 l. 12, p. 75 l. 8, p. 87 l. 12, p. 134 l. 15)
striking: his fluency and his consistency. The former is apparent in the
absence of signs of hesitation or confusion, and in the regularity of his pen
strokes (see Figure 4a above). This regularity becomes especially apparent
when notations for similar melodic passages in different chants, copied on
different pages, are compared (see Figure 11).126 Certain characteristics of
the placing of these neumes are repeated every time, whatever the verbal
context. Such consistency underlines the systematic quality of this scribe’s
work: a constancy in choice of symbols, a constancy in his manner of
handling them in relation to each other, a constancy of placing in the space
above the text. The fact and nature of that system must have been clear to
him, even if not to us.
The fluency and ease of this scribe’s work must in some way relate to an
immediacy of melodic recall. To copy neumatic notation well, without
turning it into nonsense, would always have involved musical memory,
besides a written exemplar (which would itself need to be read using
melodic recall). I set aside the possibility that he worked only from a
written exemplar, without using melodic recall, since the level of musical
literacy evident in this notation is as good as it gets in the history of
neumatic script (as it can be reconstructed from extant sources). His
approach would then have required that, for each chant, he bring to mind
a memory of how the melody sounded as he wrote the neumes,
remembering the musical delivery of a text, with some points drawn out,
126
For a pitched version of this melody see Figure 4 above.
151
Susan Rankin
others sung quickly, and articulations in specific places. That sound
memory of each chant must have been as prominent in his oral/aural
memory as any abstract sense of melodic contour, aural or visual.
But what he was doing was writing, not singing. And the primary
determinants of his positioning of neumes in the space above the text
become clear as soon as the signs are read as writing in their own terms,
not as a distant version of another system, and requiring translation into
that system. His first rule for the placing of neumes was to write the first
sign for each syllable beginning from a virtual horizontal line parallel to
the ‘x-height’ of the text.127 In Figure 12 three horizontal lines trace the
path of the line above which the text was written, as follows: (1) the text
line itself (ruled in the manuscript in dry-point, and therefore only easily
visible in the manuscript itself); (2) the x-height line along the top of the
letters; (3) and then the virtual line along which the scribe began neume
groups. Only in the case of one syllable, ‘non’, does the neume group begin
a little higher than that virtual line. Other cases in this chant where the
beginning of the stroke for the first neume does not begin on that virtual
horizontal line include ‘[e]um’ on l. 2, ‘[sacer]dos’ on l. 3, ‘ordi[nem]’ and
‘[melchi]se[dech]’ on l. 4. In several of these cases, the reason for the
different beginning can be easily deduced. On ‘[e]um’, ‘[ordi]nem’ and
‘[melchi]se[dech]’ the reason was probably an attempt to compensate for
a large vertical distance required for the first neume group, or the
following melisma; certainly in the third of these cases, a gap in the text –
because the next syllable was delayed to the next writing line – allowed
him to set neumes into the normal text space. Such a writing behaviour is
commonly seen elsewhere in the book, especially in the Alleluia cycle
begun on p. 145. Here, for the musical iubilus following the singing of the
word ‘Alleluia’, he commonly wrote the first neume for the last syllable of
‘Alleluia’ at a lower vertical level, after the letter ‘a’, and within the space
reserved for text (see Figure 13).128 Those situations in which he began to
write below his normal level can usually be explained in this way, as
advance compensation for rising writing patterns. For the neumes (in
Figure 12) which begin above the usual level, the possible explanations are
more various (although also including compensation). On ‘[sacer]dos’ he
had to continue writing a series of strophae, the same neume sign with which
the previous syllable ended, and which were sung at the same pitch. So he
127
On ‘x-height’ see M. B. Parkes, Their Hands before our Eyes: A Closer Look at Scribes (Aldershot,
2008), p. 87.
128
In this reproduction the ‘t’ under the last part of the Alleluia iubilus belongs to the line below.
Pitched version from Benevento VI.34, fol. 254r; there is considerable variation among the
diastematic sources for this Alleluia opening; crucially, however, all make a rising leap (of at
least a third) between the second and third syllable, and agree on a fall of one step between
the third and fourth syllables.
152
Figure 12 The Gradual Iurauit dominus (SG 359, p. 47), with lines added to show the
relation between the ruled text line, the ‘x’-height line and the line which defines the lower
starting point for series of neumes
kept them at the same vertical level. The only easily available explanation
for the treatment of the neume for ‘non’ (l. 1), beyond serendipity, is his
treatment of the neume for the preceding syllable ‘et’. There he wrote a
virga; but the liquescent modulation of that note was to go down, not up,
and this he indicated through the curved ending of the virga stroke and
through the letter ‘i’ (inferius). The strong sense of that being a lower note
may have forced his hand upwards for the beginning of ‘non’.
Such ways of explaining exceptions are interesting in that they suggest
a tension in the scribe’s thinking between his ‘x-height’ writing rule and his
Figure 13 From Alleluia V. Domine deus salutis (SG 359, p. 148, l. 1)
153
Susan Rankin
melodic recall: cases which support the hypothesis of struggle between the
two can be found on most pages of the book. In the middle of the first line
of the Gradual Specie tua, a series of three virgae over the syllables ‘et
pulchri[tudine]’ lead the level of writing up, corresponding to a rise of a
major third for the last of the three (Figure 14a, 14b).129 Then, at the next
syllable, ‘[pulchri]tu[dine]’, instead of writing a neume group consisting of
a clivis and three strophae back at the usual level, he maintained the high
vertical position, corresponding to the continuation of the same pitch level
in the melody; and this continued for the fourth syllable of the word. Only
on the last syllable, again repeating the same neume group (and sung at the
same high pitch) did he remember to observe his more usual practice. A
similar phenomenon can be seen in the neumes over ‘liberator meus’ in
the Gradual Adiutor meus.130 Leaving aside these exceptions, which are
common enough, but not to the extent of challenging the evidence of a
normality of practice, it is clear that this scribe’s general approach to the
placing of neumes in the space above the text when starting the signs for
a text syllable was to begin neume strokes at a specific vertical level. In
Iurauit dominus, out of thirty-three syllables, only five do not have neumes
starting at the same level. Simple perusal of the pages of this book will
reveal that this writing practice was standard throughout. The Sankt
Figure 14a From Gradual Specie tua (SG 359, p. 50, ll. 4–8)
129
Pitched version from Benevento VI.34, fol. 42v, with the verse Propter from fol. 29v (where it
is associated with the Gradual Diffusa est). Et mansuetudinem: syllable 5: Ben has a single note,
G.
130
SG 359, p. 72, l.7.
154
Figure 14b From Gradual Specie tua (SG 359, p. 50)
Gallen scribe’s treatment of the relation between the horizontally con-

trolled line of text and the placing of neumes is so fastidiously observed that
we must recognise it as a basic approach to layout of text and music
writing in this scribe’s work.
As the ‘syllable rule’ controls the placing of neumes at the beginning of
syllables in this scribe’s work, so there is one further writing habit which
controls the placing of subsequent neumes. In Iurauit dominus this habit is
apparent in the melismas in the first written line for ‘[domi]nus’ and ‘non’
(l. 1), and in the second written line for both syllables of ‘eum’ (see Figure
4 above). Within each of these melismas any new stroke begun after the
scribe has lifted his pen will usually be begun at a vertical level close to the
end of the last, or higher; although it may be written lower, this is
demonstrably the result of having to fit in tall shapes in what comes
immediately after. In none of these positions does the scribe return to the
lower level of the virtual line at which he wrote neumes at syllable
beginnings. This writing procedure – already visually evident in Iurauit
dominus – will now be explored in relation to pitch in the Gradual Specie tua
(Figure 14a above). At the beginning of the second written line, the syllable
‘tu[a]’ has two neume groups (Figure 14b). The scribe first wrote a clivis
ending with a horizontal stroke – this ‘episema’ signifies holding that note
longer than any not so modified. Then he lifted his pen and replaced it on
the parchment a little further to the right and higher, and wrote a longer,
wavy, sign, ending in a point. The pitch relation between the two separate
neume graphs is equality: the first ends at the level at which the second
155
Susan Rankin
Figure 14c From Gradual Specie tua (SG 359, p. 50)
begins (c), and most of the pattern represented by the second neume group
is sung at a lower pitch level. In the notation of long melismas, this gradual
edging upwards can be very pronounced. The melisma on ‘[veri]ta[tem]
on the fourth written line of Specie tua provides a typical example (Figure
14c). In the first, closely set, group of neumes, a virga with episema (1) is
followed by a torculus (2) and a porrectus (3, with an episema across its last,
rising, stroke). In terms of pitch, the opening virga represents a note sung
at the same pitch as the last stroke of the third sign, the porrectus – now,
because of this way of handling signs, one virga’s height above the first sign.
The next group, consisting of two puncta (4) and two virgae (5), both with
episemas, is begun a little below the end of the porrectus. These correspond
to a pattern which begins a fifth below the preceding passage, rising up to
the c already reached. Then the next group, a torculus (6) and porrectus (7,
each with an episema) is begun a little below the level of the preceding virga
(5), but again ends higher; this passage repeats a recitation pattern on c.
The final group, consisting of two puncta (8) and a porrectus (9), maintain this
steady rise in height on the page, now almost reaching the text line above,
and already in contact with the lower part of the g in ‘regna’; these neumes
again represent notes which recite around c. Thus the whole melisma has
one pitch level as its focus in sound, yet the written graph is decidedly not
written along one horizontal, but at an angle to it. What this reveals is that
the placing at a vertical level of any new stroke within a neume group or
156
melisma will not usually be determined by pitch contour, but rather by the
previous graphic stroke, and thus by the position of the scribe’s fingers at
the moment of writing.131
To a significant extent that diagonal rise was the direct outcome of the
use in this notation of a long, upwards slanted stroke to signify one note:
each time the scribe wrote such a sign (or a longer neume including such
a stroke) he arrived at a higher level on the writing surface. If his procedure
was to begin again close to the point at which he had taken his pen off the
writing surface then the direction of writing was bound to follow a rising
diagonal direction. But it is also clear that what may have developed
through necessity simply became habit: in this book lines of neumes rise,
whether or not they need to rise to avoid bumping into neumes for the
next syllable or not.
Just as in using the ‘x-height syllable rule’ the scribe sometimes
compensated in advance for problems which might arise, so also there is
evidence of close awareness of vertical positioning in the control of these
rising patterns. The passage of neumes over ‘[mansuetudi]nem’ in l. 5 of
Specie tua is informative in this regard (see Figure 14c). Here a series of
repetitive patterns, sung at different intervals and with different pitch
content, are written in similar neume shapes, consisting of a virga followed
by a form based on the clivis with an attached oriscus and punctum. Between
these groups the letter x (‘expectare’, ‘wait’) is written, five times in total.
From study of the width of strokes it can be seen that these letters were
written after the neumes with a different pen, but in spaces left for them by
the scribe: there is no reason to imagine a delay in adding them. With the
letters set aside, the pattern of the scribe’s work in writing the neumes is
exactly as described above, with the beginnings of new strokes placed very
close to the ends of previous ones: each punctum at the end of the five-note
group is very closely followed by a virga at the beginning of the next,
although on each occasion written just a little further up the parchment.
This applies whether the group of notes to be sung is at a higher or at a
lower pitch. It is worth noting that, within each of these groups, there is
also a moment when the pen was lifted and replaced on the parchment,
between the virga and the beginning of the longer neume; and here, having
written an episema across the top of the virga, the scribe must have
consciously moved his pen down to a lower point. Had the pen not moved
down at that point, the line of neumes would quickly have got out of
control.
131
It is worth remembering that an early medieval scribe would control his pen with his fingers,
his hand held away from the page and not resting on it, as in modern practice.
157
Susan Rankin
Once again we can see a line of neumes rising inexorably. I have argued
that this habit was not primarily the result of the need not to intrude into
the space for neumes for the next syllable – although often enough in this
book it had that effect. Yet it could also be the case that this way of writing
neumes long pre-dates the making of the cantatorium at Sankt Gallen,132
and that it developed in situations in which parchment was less available,
with text syllables placed more closely together. It could even be claimed
that, in an early stage of the production of notated books for the mass and
office, text scribes were not exactly sure how far apart individual syllables
must be placed; this would have caused the neumes for one syllable to
bump into those for the next so commonly that it could have become
second nature to avoid the possibility. Setting aside all of this conjecture,
however, we should recognise the interdependence of the syllable rule and
the habit of writing in rising patterns: one could not work without the
other. Thus, just as the ‘syllable rule’ serves to closely connect musical signs
to syllables in the visual dimension, so also this second writing habit
ensures that one neume leads clearly to another.
To the rule of beginning notation for each syllable at the same, low,
vertical level, and, within melismas, the calligraphic procedure of replacing
the pen on the page close to where the last stroke finished, can be added
one further strategy for the control of placing neumes in the open space
above the text. Other than the design of the virga itself, this is the only
approach to the vertical placing of neumes which appears to deal with
pitch content. In the Gradual Beatus vir (Figure 15), at the beginning of the
verse (‘Potens in terra’), two interlocking procedures indicate successive
rises:133 first, the horizontal stroke (tractulus) is succeeded by a virga –
indicating a higher note on ‘in’, and then, above ‘ter[ra]’, a second virga is
written conspicuously higher. Each of these distinctions corresponds to a
rising third. This procedure can be used extremely effectively: in the
Gradual Viderunt omnes, the rising stroke at the end of a porrectus is followed
by two further virgae, each of these diagonally written strokes continuing
from the last in an upwards direction (Figure 16).134 These three strokes
132
That this kind of music writing was known at Sankt Gallen decades earlier is clear from the
evidence of notation in Notker’s Liber Ymnorum (first prepared in the 880s) and from the
evidence of scraps of a ninth-century Versarium now used for binding in Hartker’s Antiphoner.
On the former see Susan Rankin, ‘The Earliest Sources of Notker’s Sequences: St Gallen,
Vadiana 317, and Paris, Bibliothèque nationale 10587’, Early Music History, 10 (1991), pp.
201–33; on the binding strips see M. Hermes, OSB, Das Versicularium des Codex 381 der
Stiftsbibliothek St. Gallen (St. Ottilien, 2000), pp. 14–15; K. Pouderoijen and I. De Loos, ‘Wer
ist Hartker? Die Entstehung des Hartkerischen Antiphonars’, Beiträge zur Gregorianik, 47 (2009),
pp. 67–86. Unfortunately, these strips are not separately reproduced on the codices electronici
website. On sources from outside Sankt Gallen see further below.
133
Pitched version from Benevento VI.34, fol. 51r–v.
134
158
Figure 15 From Gradual Beatus uir (SG 359, p. 56, l. 10)
Figure 16 From Gradual Viderunt omnes (SG 359, p. 40, l. 2)
correspond to the pitches d, e, f, right at the top of the range occupied by

this melody (F–f).
Because of the amount of vertical space available, the thinness of the
pen used, and the punctum/virga contrast, it was possible for this scribe to
indicate distinct pitch levels using this characteristic of vertical placing
when writing single neumes. For the words ‘Ad adnuntiandum’ (Figure 17)
he was able to distinguish four pitch levels (corresponding to F, a, c, d)
without difficulty.135 On occasion the placing of neumes could seem
virtually diastematic, so closely do the vertical positions of neumes relate to
intervallic pitch patterns (Figure 18).136 Nevertheless, the possibility that
135
Pitched version from Benevento VI.34, fol. 81r.
136
159
Susan Rankin
Figure 17 From Gradual Bonum est confiteri (SG 359, p. 75, l. 2)
Figure 18 From Gradual Tibi domine (SG 359, p. 84, l. 6)
this scribe’s vertical placing of neumes might occasionally be interval-

specific is surely illusionary: beside ‘ut quid’ can be set examples such as
‘inimici mei’ (Figure 19),137 where the rise of a tone between the first two
syllables is distinguished vertically by the same amount of space as a fifth
between the clivis and virga over the third syllable. Here the fact of four
different pitch levels is conveyed by the successively higher placing of four
neumes, virga, virga, clivis, virga, but no sense of larger or smaller intervals is
conveyed. Rather, the scribe seems to have been concerned with the
length of the clivis notes, adding ‘t[enere] b[ene]’. The distinction through
vertical placing of up to four pitch levels is relatively common in this book,
when mainly single notes are involved. On at least one occasion the scribe
137
Pitched version from Paris BnF lat. 903, fol. 44r. See Le Codex 903, Paléographie musicale 13,
p. 87.
160
Figure 19 From Gradual Adiutor meus (SG 359, p. 72, l. 11)
managed to indicate six different levels, with five rises (Figure 20),
stretching through a whole octave: F, G, a, c, d, f.138 For the last of the
neumes in this passage, a climacus (its virga element corresponding to the last
note in the rising pattern, f), the scribe was able to use space left empty
above the higher text line.
All of these examples of the exploitation of vertical space to indicate
pitch sit within passages of writing managed according to the other two
procedures studied above. Procedures which favour clarity of reading the
text and musical signs together are considerably more fundamental in the
Figure 20 From Gradual Saluum fac populum (SG 359, p. 73, l. 6)

138
161
Susan Rankin
design of the notation than purely musical phenomena – and they control
writing patterns on every line of every page in the book, while the patterns
which respond more immediately to pitch contour are more occasional.
These latter patterns confirm that the scribe of this notation was highly
conversant with the height metaphor – the relation between placing of
musical signs in the space above the text and their relative pitches, as well
as with the ways in which different elements in the notational system he
had learnt could be combined to produce useful indications of pitch
information (the symbolic qualities of the contrasted punctum and virga; the
placing of neumes; added letters). Thus, within a system of notation which
had been in use at Sankt Gallen since at least the 880s, this scribe strove
to clarify pitch contour whenever he could, employing both iconic and
symbolic techniques. Nevertheless, this was a notation which balanced the
need to show the correct delivery of words and their individual parts
against detail of the musical sound of that delivery, with the weight very
much on the first more than the second.
This discussion of the type of notation classified by Mocquereau as
‘neumes-accents’, by Handschin as ‘Strecke’ neumes, by Treitler as ‘type
A’ (‘symbolic’), has been dedicated exclusively to notation in one book. By
the end of the tenth century, notations of this type, but with upward and
downward strokes written at different angles (depending on the region),
can be identified as far distant as England, Spain, Italy, central and
northern France and throughout the whole eastern Frankish or Germanic
area. Without going into the detail of regional scripts, and their sometimes
very specific ways of handling individual signs, the basis of all of these
scripts lies in something akin to the notation written in SG 359. Turning
to the period before SG 359 was made, notation of this same broad type
can be identified in several sources written in the ninth century, including
three with melismatic chants, which may usefully be compared with SG
359. Study of these sources quickly reveals similar procedures for relating
text syllables and music and for laying out the neumes over individual
syllables. In the remnants of two folios from a gradual, now pasted down
at the front and back of Graz, Universitätsbibliothek 748, the movement
upwards over single syllables seems even more extreme than in SG 359, in
part due to the much more perpendicular axis of this French form of the
notation type. This source dates from c. 900 and was written somewhere
in western Francia. Another source, also with a Burgundian provenance,
provides evidence that these behaviours can be traced back to at least the
third quarter of the ninth century: in Autun S28 notation written by one
of the earlier notating hands shows the treatment of groups of neumes over
single syllables in exactly the same fashion as in SG 359, starting from a
low point just above the letters, and continuing in a diagonal direction
162
upwards to the right.139 Finally, another source written in the third quarter
of the ninth century leads us back to Reichenau, close to Sankt Gallen. A
bifolium from an antiphoner, now used as endleaves in Zurich, Zentral-
bibliothek Rheinau 26,140 has neumes laid out according to the same
procedures, syllable by syllable, and rising upwards to the right.
This conformity of procedures for organising neumes in the space above
the text in three ninth-century witnesses, written well before SG 359,
suggests that these approaches to the layout of music writing were part of
a specific set of writing strategies, up to the early tenth century at least.
Consisting of signs, ways of building further signs, and ways of laying out
those signs, this set of strategies appears to form an indivisible unit: even
when, as a result of its use in widely distant places, the basic sign set
became more developed and diversified, and written at different angles,
the procedures for writing those signs in the open space above the text
appear not to have altered.
There is one visually obvious way in which the layout of text and music
in SG 359 differs from one of these earlier sources. In Rheinau 26 the text
is written with the letters of the words close together, very few spaces
between words, and no space between syllables for melismas. In contrast
to this horizontal conciseness, there is plenty of open space between text
lines. In response, the notator wrote neume groups for single syllables in a
direction sometimes close to perpendicular – and usually had enough
space to do this. This contrast highlights the possibility that this way of
organising neumes above the text might ultimately have resulted from lack
of space – because of the high cost of parchment, or even from the lack of
knowledge of text scribes about how a text written out for musical notation
needed to be presented. Each of these factors is likely to have influenced
layout and treatment of music writing in some situations. However, it is
more difficult to argue for either condition as a primary determinant of
what was evidently a fundamental element in this approach to writing
music. Were lack of parchment to be the reason, then one might expect to
find this approach set aside when parchment was plentiful – as it was in the
preparation of SG 359. The work of the SG 359 music scribe reveals him
to have been a highly trained and sensitive musician, ambitious to use this
music-writing system to encode multiple layers of information. What he
was not was a mindless copyist, unaware and unthinking about the
possibilities and limitations of the system for music writing he had learnt.
139
On this source see n. 32 above. The seventh-century text, written over a palimpsested
fifth-century text of Pliny, may have come from ‘a monastic community in southern France’
(CLA VI, 724); its later provenance is the Cathedral of Autun, and that may well be where
the neumes were written.
140
On this source see the notes to the Appendix.
163
Susan Rankin
It is even more difficult to argue for text scribes as a body to be at fault,
not least because anyone trained in music writing will have known before
the text scribe put pen to parchment what was needed. At early moments
in the creation of this notational type, the requirement for spacing of text
syllables will not have been missed. That is, this manner of handling
neumes surely belongs to the fundamental design concepts of this way of
writing music, rather than resulting from unforeseen and uncontrolled
codicological circumstances.
THE TWO SYSTEMS
In this examination of music writing in each of two books and in further

groups of fragments, we have been confronted by two entirely different
systems for the treatment of pitch. Both systems share basic strategies: the
height metaphor; directionality in signs which are generally between one
and four notes long; the use of letters to make momentary clarifications;
and the movement of signs in the open space above the text, organised
syllable by syllable. But where the Laon scribe used movement up and
down in the open space above the text to provide much detail of melodic
movement, the Sankt Gallen scribe used the space above the text to
accommodate movement upwards of groups of neumes, generally without
reference to pitch content. Where the Sankt Gallen scribe presented the
link of text syllable and musical note or phrase in a way which could be
read quickly and easily, beginning each group of signs at a set vertical level,
and letting them move diagonally upwards away from the text, the Laon
scribe did not return to a set level for each new text syllable, nor do his
melismas always move inexorably in the same direction. While the
information about the linking of text syllables and melody in the Laon
scribe’s work is no different from that in SG 359, the presentation of that
link is visually much clearer in the Sankt Gallen book. Figure 21 shows the
Gradual Exsurge domine fer opem in each of the two books: especially in the
passage ‘opem nobis et libe[ra]’ it is simply easier to see quickly how parts
of the melody are linked to specific syllables in SG 359. Thus, set beside
each other, the main contrast between the two notations is in the balance
struck in each between visual clarity of pitch information and visual clarity
of the text/music link. Indeed, we now have to recognise not only that the
precise notation of pitch was not a basic aim of either of these notations,
but also that there existed in the ninth century two differently conceived
ways of approaching the notation of pitch.
The Sankt Gallen scribe’s approach to the relation between the
horizontally controlled line of text and the placing of neumes has two
graphic advantages: it combines control of the neume groups above the
164
Gradual Exsurge domine fer opem (Laon 239, ll. 7–8 and SG 359, p. 81, ll. 7–9)
Figure 21
165
Susan Rankin
text with visual harmony, the graphic succession of musical signs being tied
to and having some of the horizontal properties of the graphic images of
words. While the evidence of a source such as Rheinau 26 – where the
words (let alone syllables) are not spaced out – in some sense counters this
idea of visual harmony, the Reichenau fragment itself underlines the
parallelism of procedures – writing text in continuous lines, and writing
signs for delivery of this text in continuous lines, each of those lines
connected to individual text syllables by proximity. For this reason it may
be argued that the basis for these procedures lies not only in the harmony
of presentation, but, more fundamentally, in Carolingian views of the
relation of music and words.
Since music was primarily a medium for making audible the words of
Scripture, the ability of music to act rhetorically in projecting a text, and
thus as an interpretative tool for Scripture, was crucial to its importance in
the liturgy. The close relation between textual and melodic syntax in
Gregorian chant is now familiar to many: in Hucke’s words: ‘The basic
principle of composition in Gregorian chant is the division of the text into
units defined by sense: the melodic phrases correspond to these text
units.’141 The extent to which this syntactical relation of textual and
musical sounds is apparent to modern scholars depends on the reading of
sources themselves made by the Carolingians: written evidence does not
now go farther back. Whether or not the pronounced control of syntactical
relations is itself the result of Carolingian handling of the musical materials
they received from their predecessors, or a quality already strongly
articulated in that material, it is plain that there was a new level of
engagement with this issue on the part of Carolingian musicians: an easily
available demonstration is in the mid ninth-century Musica disciplina by
Aurelian of Réôme, where the correct association of text syllables and
parts of a melodic passage is a recurrent issue.142 This musical concern
itself depended on other cultural initiatives: the drive to improve speaking
and reading in Latin; the need to address God correctly; the communal
aspect of the programme, since cantors spoke to God on behalf of others;
and the importance of understanding the Scriptures in the right way. As
the means of opening an avenue to God for the praise and petitions of
those who sang and those on whose behalf they sang, music must relate to
this prevailing concern with correctio.143
141
H. Hucke, ‘Toward a New Historical View of Gregorian Chant’, Journal of the American
Musicological Society, 33 (1980), pp. 437–67, at p. 452.
142
Aureliani Reomensis Musica disciplina, ed. Lawrence Gushee (Corpus scriptorum de musica, 21;
n.p., 1975).
143
On the use of this term in Carolingian legislation see P. E. Schramm, ‘Karl der Große:
Denkart und Grundauffassungen – die von ihm bewirkte Correctio (“Renaissance”)’,
Historische Zeitschrift, 198 (1964), pp. 306–45; A. Angenendt, ‘Libelli bene correcti: Der
166
While the development of a new script, ‘Caroline minuscule’, may not
itself be a direct outcome of the correctio mentality, the widespread adoption
of this script supported the drive to address God in words correctly
formulated and delivered. Much information on reading in the monastic
office can be gleaned from Carolingian commentaries on the Rule of St
Benedict: in these the requirement to read correctly and clearly so that those
who listen will understand and be moved is given a great deal of attention.144
In a commentary written in the 840s by Hildemar, monk of Corbie, we find
the advice that if there are not enough good readers for the reading of lessons
in the night office, then one brother should read a series of lessons ‘for it is
better, that one who edifies should read three of four lessons or five or six,
than that many, who do not edify, should read’.145 Should a reader or singer
make mistakes ‘while reciting a psalm, responsory, antiphon or reading’, he
should immediately do penance.146 Much of this expands on ideas already
explicit in the Rule itself, or in the earlier Regula magistri.147 What is new in
the Carolingian reception of these monastic rules is concern with the state of
the materials from which a brother reads. Hildemar explains that the abbot
should name a brother whose responsibility it is to correct the books used
for reading during the Divine Office; those appointed by the abbot to read
should practise before this brother, before they read during the office (and
presumably, any errors in the book can be corrected at that stage).148 Even
so, errors may remain in the book: in the same passage Hildemar notes an
allowance that, should the book from which the brother reads [in the
office] itself be incorrect, then the brother is excused penance.149
“richtige Kult” als ein Motiv der karolingischen Reform’, in P. Ganz (ed.), Das Buch als
magisches und als Repräsentationsobjekt (Wiesbaden, 1992), pp. 117–35; M. de Jong, ‘Charle-
magne’s Church’, in J. Storey (ed.), Charlemagne: Empire and Society (Manchester and New York,
2005), pp. 103–35; R. McKitterick, Charlemagne: The Formation of a European Identity (Cambridge,
2008), pp. 292 ff.
144
RB 1980: The Rule of St Benedict in Latin and English with Notes, ed. T. Fry (Collegeville, Minn.,
1981), ch. 38. For two Carolingian commentaries see Smaragdi abbatis expositio in regulam S.
Benedicti, ed. A. Spannagel and P. Englebert, OSB, Corpus consuetudinem monasticarum, 8
(Siegburg, 1974); Smaragdus of Saint-Mihiel, Commentary on the Rule of Saint Benedict, trans. D.
Barry, OSB (Kalamazoo, 2007); Expositio regulae ab Hildemaro tradita, Vita et regula SS. P.
Benedicti una cum expositione regulae a Hildemaro tradita III, ed. R. Mittermüller
(Regensburg, New York and Cincinnati, 1880).
145
‘Si autem non sunt tanti lectores, ut unus legat solummodo per lectionem, debent legere sex
aut quatuor aut duo solummodo, qui audientes possint aedificare, quia melius est, ut unus
legat tres vel quatuor lectiones aut quinque aut sex, qui aedificat, quam multi legant, qui non
aedificant.’ Expositio regulae ab Hildemaro tradita, p. 428.
146
RB 1980, ch. 45; Expositio regulae ab Hildemaro tradita, pp. 469–70.
147
See the notes to Smaragdus, Commentary, pp. 402–6, p. 429.
148
‘Debet abbas constituere talem fratrem, qui corrigat librum, et debet illi jubere, ut vadant et
legant ante illum.’ Expositio regulae ab Hildemaro tradita, p. 469.
149
‘Si ille liber male habuerit in omnibus, pro quibus diximus, veniam petere tunc liberabitur.’
Ibid., p. 470.
167
Susan Rankin
The Sankt Gallen scribe’s habit of beginning the neumes for each
syllable at a position vertically immediately above that syllable has a direct
relation to this emphasis on correct delivery, on reading and singing which
enable the listener to understand the text, and, in consequence, on a
specific association between words and parts of a melodic line. This was
the most distinct way of making a visual association between a syllable and
the pattern of its musical delivery: the requirement for the musical notation
always to start at a specific level at the beginning of a syllable, whatever the
relation of this part of the melody to what preceded, had the effect of
separating the melody into parts. It can also be looked at from another
angle: this musical notation represents signs which outline the delivery in
sound of a text composed of words. And yet now this element of the
delivery of text was to be written discretely, in signs separate from the word
text. The syllable-writing rule ensured that there could be no ambiguity in
the visual image of links between the now distinctly written-out text and
signs for its delivery.
The way in which this manner of writing music above the text can be
linked with graphic qualities of the new Caroline minuscule script is
compelling. This was an ‘elegant and disciplined script’, ‘characterized by
well-proportioned letter forms’, with ‘few ligatures between letters’.150 As
a ‘product of the reform of written language, which sought to re-establish
a uniform system of orthography as well as handwriting’,151 Caroline
minuscule was ‘particularly clear to read’.152 One vital component in
producing this clarity was the treatment of letter forms: freed from the
all-pervasive ligatures of earlier minuscule scripts, Caroline letter forms
were distinct from each other. Yet they were also harmonious in their
appearance through a general roundness and equality of size. Above all,
‘the shape of each letter had to be traced so that the cues for legibility’ –
those graphic elements which guided the eye – ‘could be recognized easily
at the level of the top segment of the letter x’.153 We have seen that the
virtual line along which neumes are begun sits just above and parallel to
a line along the x-height of the letters.
That the Sankt Gallen scribe was well aware of possible shortcomings in
relation to pitch treatment in the system he used is evident: it is not so
much the possibility that he was aware of another way of writing music
(which is very likely),154 as that he must have been conscious of the
150
Ganz, ‘The Preconditions’, p. 23.
151
Parkes, Their Hands, p. 87.
152
Ganz, ‘The Preconditions’, p. 23.
153
Parkes, Their Hands, p. 87.
154
One need only think of Notker’s story about a monk fleeing from Jumièges, bringing with him
a book in which Notker saw sequences inscribed. For the preface to his Liber Ymnorum see W.
von den Steinen, Notker der Dichter und seine geistige Welt, 2 vols. (Bern, 1948), Darstellungsband,
168
moments when melodic recall could founder, when uncertainty (rather
than general forgetfulness) on the part of a well-trained singer could
engender doubt about exact pitch content. His notational system offered a
host of techniques for clarification where needed – that hardly requires
further elucidation. But it is worth offering one last example as an
illustration of the kind of situation in which he appreciated the need for
clarity in writing. The group of four canticles for the Easter vigil (Cantemus
domino, Vinea facta est, Attende celum, Sicut ceruus), share melodic content to a
marked degree, that is, not only do they belong to a melodic family
(otherwise identifiable in tracts classified in the 8th mode),155 but as a
group are even more closely related to each other than to the tract
melodies. Among the extended simple recitation patterns used in each of
the four, there are passages based on G, b and c.156 Those passages which
recite on c are identifiable through the intonation Gc, thus a simple leap;
and in these passages, the note c is repeated for each syllable, without
decoration. Those passages which recite on b are approached through a
scalic intonation, G, quilisma through a to b, c. And in these passages,
besides the simple b for a single syllable, a few syllables (usually the
accented syllable in any one word) may be sung to bc. It could be
imagined that, for a cantor, the difference between the ‘b’ and ‘c’
recitation passages was assured through these other contrasted features.157
But perhaps not: the way in which the SG scribe treated these passages
implies awareness of possible confusion. With complete consistency he
used repeated virgae for the passages on c, and repeated tractuli for the
passages on b (see Figure 22).158 No reader would have been left in doubt
about the tonal difference between these phrases.
Such an example as this underlines the extent to which SG 359 presents
matured notations, ways of writing music subject to a strong scriptorium
discipline and to local conventions of meaning. Those local conventions
were so well thought out and so consistently followed that the Sankt Gallen
pp. 154–62, 504–8; for a recent study and new translation of the preface see A. Haug,
‘Re-reading Notker’s Preface’, in Cannata et al. (eds.), Quomodo cantabimus canticum?, pp. 65–80.
155
On this melodic family see E. Hornby, Gregorian and Old Roman Eighth-Mode Tracts: A Case Study
in the Transmission of Western Chant (Aldershot, 2002).
156
For consideration of these melodies I have used the versions available in L. Agustoni, R.
Fischer, J. B. Göschl, L. Koch, H. Rumphorst, A. M. Schweitzer, S. Zippe, ‘Vorschläge zur
Restitution von Melodien des Graduale Romanum (Teil 8)’, Beiträge zur Gregorianik, 28 (1999),
pp. 7–33 (at pp. 11–13, 16–25); these differ from the version in the Graduale Triplex in
reinstating b as a recitation tone, based both on neumed sources and on several more precisely
notated sources using one or more lines (in this case Benevento VI.34, Paris BnF lat. 776, Paris
BnF lat. 903, and Montecassino, Archivio dell’Abbazia 546).
157
Of course, the fact that a version in which the b recitation was abandoned, and all of the
passages in question recited on c, underlines the real possibility of getting these passages mixed
up with each other.
158
169
Susan Rankin
Figure 22 Passages from Canticle Attende celum (SG 359, p. 104, l. 15–p. 105, l. 5)
adaptation of the notation type has offered a model of neumatic notation

which could be thoroughly analysed by modern scholars. Yet, while this
notation type has long been associated with Sankt Gallen, presumably
because of the long tradition of reproduction of Sankt Gallen sources,159
159
The first such full facsimile – of SG 359 – was published in 1851: Louis Lambillotte,
Antiphonaire de Saint Grégoire (Brussels). SG 359 had come to prominence in the field of neume
studies through the work of Théodore Nisard, ‘Études sur les anciennes notations musicales
de l’Europe’, Revue archéologique, 5 (1849), pp. 701–20; 6 (1849), pp. 101–14; pp. 461–75,
170
records such as those in the Autun and Graz sources underline the
possibility of the origins of this notation type being western rather than
eastern Frankish. In the context of the current discussion, this way of
handling text and music writing in relation to each other can be dated as
far back as the Laon procedures: there is nothing in the manuscript records
which gives chronological priority to either system. Indeed, the extent to
which these two approaches to the treatment of pitch and the visual link
between signs for text and signs for music share fundamental procedures
indicates a shared background: they must represent two refined manifes-
tations of an earlier stage of invention (or inventions). That earlier
invention of music writing did not set out to notate pitch precisely: even in
the Laon notation, with all its sensitivity to pitch contour, the space in
which the music writing is set was not itself mapped out in relation to
height; even here the space above the text was considered primarily in
terms of text, the neumes set into that space providing a guide to its
delivery.
That these early forms of music writing did not attempt to usurp the
central role of memory in musical practice is a timely reminder of the
context of their invention and development, in a culture which had been
formed with the habit of oral transmission and creation, but which
invested heavily in literacy of many kinds. Such an example as the Sankt
Gallen canticle notations is useful in providing a concrete sense of those
moments when melodic recall might founder, and writing could provide
especial support. Most of the time, there is likely to have been a wide
overlap between processes of melodic recall and music writing: such
notational systems as those written by the Laon and SG scribes could not
otherwise function. But perhaps not always: and reading these notations
may provide many more examples of the occasional narrowing of that
overlap, the need for notation to meet with recall in a very precise way in
terms of pitch content. Above all, what may look to a modern reader like
inconsistency and inaccuracy – lumpiness in terms of the varying amount
of information about pitch and lack of intervallic precision most of the time
– actually represents a kind of coming and going between recall and
writing. Once set on its way, recall could follow a path, directed by signs
which would assure its correct movement along the course of the melody;
and at those moments where it might be easy to take a wrong direction, a
more emphatic signal could be introduced. This is a way of using music
writing in a context of highly trained musical memory.
pp. 749–64; 7 (1850), pp. 129–43. On Nisard’s approach to neumatic notation see Aubert,
‘The Modern Life of “Medieval Neumes”’.
171
Susan Rankin
In these techniques for organising neumes in the space above the text
can be seen the two universal characteristics of early medieval musical
notations described by Treitler: these notations ‘were formed on the
principle of directionality – some more exclusively than others – which was
based on the spatial metaphor and the conception of melody as movement
of the voice; and they were signs for the inflection of language’.160 The
Sankt Gallen scribe’s system simply privileged the second requirement
over the first, the Laon scribe’s the first over the second. But in neither
book was the notation intended by its writers to supplant melodic memory:
in both the reader must use the written signs as a way of recovering
memories of or recreating from memory the pitch patterns of individual
melodies. It is in this sense that any simplistic conceptualisation of the one
system as preceding the other, as a foundation for the other – on the basis
of the treatment of pitch – misses the point. For that was not the focus of
either notation system: rather the information about pitch which was built
into each notation seems to have functioned as a starting point, a guide for
recall, renewed moment by moment as the reader moves through the
chant, and not as a substitute for memory. Given the imprecision of pitch
treatment in both books, in comparison with other notated parameters –
the music/text link, the articulation of short passages, the duration of
individual notes – it could be argued that these detailed notations for
elaborate mass chant melodies were designed to be read on two levels:
those elements which indicate pitch helped the reader to recall melodic
patterns. Then the notation built on top of these recalled patterns, adding
other signs or employing strategies of layout to specify how the melodic
patterns were to be handled in delivery from one instant to the next. This
way of understanding the mechanics of the interaction between memory
and music writing suggests that what a ninth-century notated book of mass
chant melodies set out to ensure was the good singing of chant texts with
correct articulation of text and of music. In order to achieve this, notators
relied on good melodic recall, around which they could weave, in writing,
the detail of musical delivery.
POSTSCRIPT
As argued above, the dates of copying of the scattered early sources in

which these two types of notation appear do not suggest chronological
priority of one over the other. What can be seen, as they became diffused
through Europe, is the more extensive use of one than the other. Notations
with a high proportion of ‘points’ – the Breton, Messine and Aquitanian
160
172
notations – were eventually written in western, southern and northern
France, the Low Countries, and in various northern Italian centres; the
type of notation characterised by Mocquereau as ‘neumes-accents’ was
transformed into localised regional scripts in northern and eastern central
France, England, Spain, northern Italy, Germany, and the whole eastern
area beyond. In evidential terms, it was the notation with the least pitch
information, not the most, which became the more popular in the late
ninth and throughout the tenth and eleventh centuries.
University of Cambridge
APPENDIX
Extant examples of notated books of Gregorian chant (including
fragments) written before c. 900
Date No. of folios Type of notation
Mass books
Albi, Bibliothèque municipale 44 s.x in 55 Proto-Aquitanian
Graz, Universitätsbibliothek 748 s.ix/x parts of 2 French
Laon, Bibliothèque municipale 9 s.ix 4/4 4 Messine
Laon, Bibliothèque municipale 121 s.ix 3/3 parts of 2 Messine
Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana s.ix 4/4 1 German
B48 sup.
Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek s.ix/x 10 German
clm 14735, fols. 9–28
Valenciennes, Bibliothèque s.ix 2/2 parts of 2 Breton
municipale 407
Wolfenbüttel, Herzog-August s.ix/x parts of 4 Palaeofrankish
Bibliothek Cod. Guelf. 510
Helmst.
Office books
Albi, Bibliothèque municipale 44 s.x in 75 Proto-Aquitanian
Darmstadt, Hessische Landes- und s.ix 28 ? [illegible]
Hochschulbibliothek 749
Leiden, Bibliotheek der s.ix 3/4 3 Breton
Rijksuniversiteit BPL 25
Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana B48 s.ix 4/4 1 German
sup.
Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek s.ix 4/4 2 German
cgm 6943
+ Vienna, Österreichische 4
Nationalbibliothek ser. nova 3645
173
Susan Rankin
Date No. of folios Type of notation
Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek s.ix/x 1 German

clm 29316/1 (olim 29164/I 1a)
Oxford, Bodleian Library Auct. s.ix 2/4 1 Breton
F.4.26
Vienna, Österreichische s.ix 3/4 1 German
Nationalbibliothek 612
Zurich, Zentralbibliothek Rheinau s.ix 3/4 2 German
26
Note
This table includes manuscripts which are fully notated, or for which there
is evidence in the ruling and layout of their having been prepared for
musical notation. For each source I provide a brief bibliography, including
reference to the Gamber and/or Bischoff catalogues, if the manuscript is
included there; when available, the date recorded is that provided by
Bischoff. K. Gamber, Codices liturgici latini antiquiores, 3 vols. (Spicilegii
Friburgensis subsidia; Freiburg (Switzerland), 1963, 1968, 1988); B.
Bischoff, Katalog der festländischen Handschriften des neunten Jahrhunderts (mit
Ausnahme der wisigotischen): I, Aachen–Lambach, II: Laon–Paderborn (Wiesbaden,
1998–2004). A list of office antiphoners, with and without notation, written
before 1000, appears in J. Stenzl, ‘Das Admonter Antiphonar-Fragment
aus Cod. 285 (A-Frag)’, Anzeiger der philosophisch-historischen Klasse, 141 (2006),
pp. 117–58. I have excluded from this list the plenary missal Milan,
Biblioteca Ambrosiana D84 inf. (426 folios). Although this has recently
been more securely dated to the late ninth century (probably made just
after 896), and has extensive musical notation, the book was not prepared
for musical notation, and it is unlikely that this was entered before 900. On
this book see especially F. Crivello, La miniatura a Bobbio tra IX e X seculo e
i suoi modelli carolingi (Turin, 2001), pp. 24–31, 91–2; and Bischoff, Katalog,
ii, no. 2616.
Bibliography (brief)
A 44: Bischoff dates this source in the tenth century (Katalog, i, p. 11);
Colette has suggested late ninth or early tenth century; Emerson has
argued for 890 (on liturgical as well as palaeographical grounds). See
M.-N. Colette, ‘Le Graduel-Antiphonaire, Albi, Bibliothèque munici-
pale, 44: Une notation protoaquitaine rhythmique’, in L. Dobszay (ed.),
International Musicological Society Study Group Cantus Planus: Papers read at the
174
6th Meeting, Eger, Hungary (1993) (Budapest, 1995), pp. 117–39; J.
Emerson, Albi, Bibliothèque municipale Rochegude, Manuscript 44 (Musico-
logical Studies, 77; Ottawa, 2002); on the notation see also E. H.
Aubert, ‘Writing Music, Shaping the Medium: Reading Early Notation
in MS Albi 44’ (forthcoming).
D 749: Gamber, CLLA, under no. 1305. See A. Dold, Palimpsest-
Studien I (Texte und Arbeiten, 45; Beuron, 1955), pp. 86–7. This
palimpsested antiphoner does not appear in Bischoff’s catalogue, but
this is probably on the grounds of its extreme illegibility, made clear in
Dold’s description.
G 748: Bischoff, Katalog, i, no. 1457.
L 9: Jacques Hourlier, ‘Trois fragments de Laon’, Études Grégoriennes, 22
(1988), pp. 31–42.
L 121: Hourlier, ‘Trois fragments’; Bischoff, Katalog, ii, no. 2078.
L 239: Gamber, CLLA, no. 1350; Bischoff, Katalog, ii, no. 2094.
L 266: Gamber, CLLA, no. 1313; Peter Jeffery, ‘An Early Cantatorium
Fragment Related to MS Laon 239’, Scriptorium, 36 (1982), pp. 245–52
+ Pls. 29–30; Bischoff, Katalog, ii, no. 2097.
L 25: Gamber, CLLA, no. 1304c; Bischoff, Katalog, ii, no. 2135.
M B48 .: Bischoff, Katalog, ii, no. 2625.
M 6943 and V 3645: Gamber, CLLA, no. 1304a; F. Unter-
kircher, ‘Fragmente eines karolingischen Chorantiphonars mit Neumen’,
Codices manuscripti, 11 (1985), pp. 97–109; Bischoff, Katalog, ii, no. 2918.
M 14735: Gamber, CLLA, no. 1338*; Bischoff, Katalog, ii, no. 3254.
This is a palimpsest, the pages folded and overwritten in the thirteenth
century. Arlt, no. XI.36, in C. Stiegemann and M. Wemhoff (eds.), 799:
Kunst und Kultur der Karolingerzeit, 3 vols. (Mainz, 1999), ii, pp. 841–2.
M 29316/1: Bischoff, Katalog, ii, no. 3421.
O F.4.26: Gamber, CLLA, no. 1304b; Bischoff, Katalog, ii, no. 3773.
V 407: Gamber, CLLA, no. 1304d (dating by Bischoff).
V 612: Gamber, CLLA, no. 1304*e (dating by Bischoff).
Wü 510: The dating is by H. Hoffmann, as reported in W.
Arlt, no. XI.36, in Stiegemann and Wemhoff (eds.), 799: Kunst und Kultur
der Karolingerzeit, ii, pp. 841–2.
Z R 26: Gamber, CLLA no. 1309*; see R. Puskas, Die
mittelalterlichen Mettenresponsorien der Klosterkirche Rheinau: Studien zum Anti-
phonar in Hs Zentralbibliothek Zürich Rh 28 (Baden-Baden, 1984), pp. 61–5.
175

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Early Music History (2011) Volume 30.

 Cambridge University Press

CAROLINGIAN NOTATIONS FOR MASS AND OFFICE

THE TREATMENT OF PITCH IN EARLY MUSIC WRITING:

1969); Bergeron, Decadent Enchantments, passim.

Figure 1b Gradual In deo sperauit (Laon 239, fol. 33v)

Gregorii, Xe siècle, Codex 47 de la Bibliothèque de Chartres, introduction by A. Ménager (Paléographie

Figure 3b Gradual Eripe me (Laon 239, fol. 38v)

THE TREATMENT OF PITCH IN THE CANTATORIUM

The manuscript 359 in the Stiftsbibliothek at Sankt Gallen (henceforth SG

Figure 4a Gradual Iurauit dominus (SG 359, p. 47, ll. 11–16)

binding has been dated through dendrochronology of the oak boards

Figure 4b From Gradual Iurauit dominus (SG 359, p. 47)

going positively against the pitch-contour patterns in their use of vertical

Neume groups representing Ga EFa b PG FF DED

Pitch relation between groups & # & &

Neume groups representing EGE GaG FF DED

Pitch relation between groups # & &

Syllables 9–12 (poenitebit)

Syllables 13, 14 (eum)

Figure 5 From Gradual Iurauit dominus (SG 359, p. 47)

Figure 6 From Gradual Misit dominus (SG 359, p. 48, l. 11)

Figure 7 From Gradual Viderunt omnes (SG 359, p. 40, l. 5)

Moving over to the behaviours which appear not to act in parallel to

Figure 9 From Gradual Adiuuabit (SG 359, p. 55, l. 7)

mentioned above. Even in this reading, however, notation is treated as

In the face of what have been considered shortcomings in previous studies

Figure 13 From Alleluia V. Domine deus salutis (SG 359, p. 148, l. 1)

Figure 14b From Gradual Specie tua (SG 359, p. 50)

Gallen scribe’s treatment of the relation between the horizontally con-

Figure 14c From Gradual Specie tua (SG 359, p. 50)

Figure 15 From Gradual Beatus uir (SG 359, p. 56, l. 10)

Figure 16 From Gradual Viderunt omnes (SG 359, p. 40, l. 2)

correspond to the pitches d, e, f, right at the top of the range occupied by

Figure 17 From Gradual Bonum est confiteri (SG 359, p. 75, l. 2)

Figure 18 From Gradual Tibi domine (SG 359, p. 84, l. 6)

this scribe’s vertical placing of neumes might occasionally be interval-

Figure 19 From Gradual Adiutor meus (SG 359, p. 72, l. 11)

Figure 20 From Gradual Saluum fac populum (SG 359, p. 73, l. 6)

THE TWO SYSTEMS

In this examination of music writing in each of two books and in further

adaptation of the notation type has offered a model of neumatic notation

As argued above, the dates of copying of the scattered early sources in

Date No. of folios Type of notation

Date No. of folios Type of notation

Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek s.ix/x 1 German

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