Singing Musical Fragments: Halifax

This beautiful page comes from a manuscript known as The Beauvais Missal. The manuscript was produced in France in the late 13th century for use by a priest in the Beauvais Cathedral of St. Peter. After the secularization brought on by the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century, the Cathedral library was dispersed and the Missal disappeared into private hands. In 1926, it was purchased at auction by none other than American industrialist William Randolph Hearst, who brought it to the United States. After sixteen years of happy ownership, he sold it in turn to an antiquarian bookseller in New York named Philip Duschnes. Working with his business partner Otto Ege of Cleveland, Duschnes dismembered the manuscript in 1942. He and Ege sold its leaves one by one to collectors and institutions across North America, knowing they would make more money selling single leaves than if they had sold the complete manuscript. This destruction in the name of capitalism was, unfortunately, quite common at the time, and thousands of manuscripts were destroyed this way, their leaves scattered to the wind. This destruction of cultural heritage objects cannot be undone, but digital tools offer reparative possibilities. The Beauvais Missal is currently the subject of a digital reconstruction project; so far, 122 of the original 309 leaves have been found. This leaf, preserving chants from the Common of Martyrs, now belongs to the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University. - Lisa Fagan Davis, Executive Director, Medieval Academy of America

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In January, 1854, the Reverend John L. Irwin, Rector of Thomastown, County Kilkenny, donated to the Kilkenny and South-East of Ireland Archaeological Society pieces of a manuscript that had been found by his friend in the wall of a house in Ashprington, near Totnes, Devon. It was a missal, a book for celebrating the Mass, which probably belonged to medieval parish of St David's. The full book would have had a little fewer than 200 folios, but only 63 of these survive to show modern admirers the ornate handy-work of this mid-14th-century text scribe. Most of the book does not contain musical notation, but the leaf on display here shows some chants for Saint Anne, mother of Mary, whose celebration was officially sanctioned by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1383. The beautiful, gilded initial ‘G’ truly does illuminate the first chant for her celebration, Gaudeamus omnes - “Let us all rejoice!” - Kate Helsen

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This fragment comes from a pair of leaves taken from a book of very early polyphony, as it would have been sung in northern France, especially Paris, in the 1280s and 1290s. It uses the whole width of the parchment leaf to line up three different voice-parts, vertically one on top of the other. The lowest of the three voices carries the text, which would have been sung by all three voices. In reading this, remember that the music is therefore grouped in three lines of music together, thrice. In this case, we have the text for the ‘Agnus Dei’ chant repeated three times, which is still a staple of the Latin Mass today, sung during the preparation of the Bread and Wine of Communion. The way the square note-heads are grouped here indicate the presence of particular rhythmic rules that tell the singer which notes are ‘short’ and which are ‘long’. This is called ‘mensural notation’ – the first way medieval singers sought to encode a sense of measured time into the look of musical notes on the page. With three different people, all singing at the same time, the necessity of keeping them all in synch with each other seems to have been the mother of graphic invention. Even though the use of time signatures would still be generations away, the lilting pattern of this Agnus Dei hold the three voices together in intricate and fast-moving harmony. - Kate Helsen

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The famous diarist of 17th-century London, Samuel Pepys, began to gather and organize medieval manuscript fragments towards the end of his life, ultimately compiling ‘Calligraphical albums’ to display the evolution of handwriting over time. His associate, Humfrey Wanley, provided supplementary notes for each fragment in the collection, ordered chronologically. Perhaps it was the colours in this 12th-century example of Northern Textualis script that drew his eye at the time, or perhaps it was the alternation between sung text and notation that intrigued him. The chants notated here have a special kind of structure; they are Sequences, meaning that they repeat each melodic gesture with a pair of rhymed poetic text written for a special occasion. The first five and a half lines show a Sequence for St. Eadburh of Winchester, a 10th-century nun renowned for her singing voice and her excellent chanting skills, especially when singing Psalms. After this, the large red and green decorative rubrics announce that the next chants are to be sung in the week following Easter, referred to as the ‘Octave’. The keen observer will notice that the first Sequence is notated with a ‘b’ sign as the clef, at the far left side of every stave, while the chants following Easter have the ‘c’ line indicated. - Kate Helsen

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This 14th-century fragment is one of many such leaves now kept in Trier, Germany, a testament to a vibrant and nuanced chanting tradition in the region. The scribal hands responsible for the notation and the text share a sense of graphic clarity and precision characteristic of German manuscripts during this time. This fragment contains sequences for St. Elisabeth and St. Katherina, two saints with a particular history of veneration in Germany. A Dominican cloister dedicated to St Katharina was founded on the banks of the Moselle river running through the city, around the same time as this fragment was written. . - K. Helsen

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