The Christian West and Its Singers: The First Thousand Years by Christopher Page (review)

Writing more than five hundred pages about a period in which we have secure information only at the very end is a quixotic challenge, to be sure. For the first two parts of his magnificent three-part treatment of these thousand years, Christopher Page must use the language of probability more often than one might like: we “might” imagine, it is “possible” that, and phrases of the kind, are found everywhere. It is not that he does not know the literature. He knows it all too well, and by no means only the musicological literature but that of the broader world of medieval studies. He brings to bear on his subject an enormous amount of thoughtful learning, amply documented, concerning geography, matters pertaining to familial successions, the absence of well-developed structures in the early church, and so on. But he cannot (nor does he try to) hide that we simply have very little solid information about the earliest periods of Christian or, later, Catholic worship. His use of the language of probability reflects our knowledge of what it is possible to know on the basis of surviving documents. Certainly his guesses make good sense and are used to build an imposing tale.

But the true surprises come later, when Page is able to demonstrate, following in part the work of Kenneth Levy, Tom Kelly, and Peter Jeffery, the extent to which our general understanding of the so-called Gregorian reforms of the chants of the church is faulty. He demonstrates amply that the search for a unified practice in chanting must be understood as a process that began in Frankish lands and then spread to Rome, just as the so-called Guidonian reform of notation, with the introduction of the staff, was only adopted by the Roman church on the impetus of the movement to establish uniformity in the service of the liturgy. Many musicological readers will be as surprised as I was to learn that Guido was the author not only of the four musical treatises long known to stem from him, but also of a fifth treatise that helps explain the motivations behind his notational reforms.

In short, this is a splendid book, to be studied and reflected upon for many years. One can legitimately wonder, however, whether the first two parts needed to be as long as they are: although one understands the need for the language of “probability,” one does tire of this usage after a bit.