The Liber Ymnorum of Notker Balbulus ed. by Calvin M. Bower (review)

Notker Balbulus (†912), monk of Sankt Gallen, is so well known to students of both music and poetry that it may come as a surprise that Calvin Bower's edition for the Henry Bradshaw Society (vols. 121 and 122) is the first to take on the challenge of presenting the words and music in a way that Notker's achievement can be more readily experienced and evaluated. The first volume contains an introduction in three parts, of which the first is cleverly structured as an extended commentary on Notker's dedicatory letter. The letter contains a concise, yet (as Bower demonstrates) lucid and essentially reliable description of Notker's poetic and musical goals, describing the process he devised to retain in memory the long melodies sung after the Alleluia verse. Bower demonstrates Notker's careful attention to, and artful manipulation of, rhythmic stress patterns that both organize the words and help to measure or to tie down the melodic gestures. Bower also illuminates Notker's report of his growing ability to match the opening words of his new texts to the Alleluia so closely that liquescent and intervocalic consonants would fall at the same points.

Bower clarifies the genesis, order, and content of Notker's Liber, pointing out that the dedicatory letter confirms that individual pieces were first circulated on rotuli. This points to a complex transmission history of individual pieces in the collection even within Sankt Gallen. Although Bower's conclusions concerning the order and content are similar to those of previous editors, his argument differs in that he makes no claims about Notker's authorship of any particular ymnus beyond four that are specifically mentioned in the dedicatory letter. instead, Bower's argument is liturgical rather than stylistic. He finds that the initial series of sequences of Einsiedeln, Stiftsbibliothek, cod. 121 (plus one from its second series) provides an integral liturgical repertory representative of ninth-century Sankt Gallen liturgical practice consistent with the letter's description of the Liber ymnorum.

Bower's analysis of the dedicatory letter concludes with an analysis of Nokter's poetic strategy for supplying rhythmic versus to pre-existing melody. He lists the most common variants of accentual patterns for two-note, three-note, and four-note melodic gestures, pointing out that Notker has a preference for relatively consistent accentual patterns for each gesture of the melody. The notation developed at Sankt Gallen towards the end of Notker's life enables Bower to summarize them as a variety of musical ascents and descents with accentuation on the either the initial note (if a two-note neume), first or second note (if a three-note neume), and on the first and fourth, or second note only (if a four-note neume). Variations in neume shape often indicate not only the direction of the movement but also where the accent is likely to fall. Since only a set of the possible patterns was cultivated, the technique results in larger isotonic accentual patterns in the words when longer melodic segments repeat. Bower notes that there are regular variations of the patterns for poetic effect (for instance, to highlight the name Maria or divine attributes), so a careful examination of the interaction between melody and accentuation in the whole of the repertory is necessary to come to appreciate Notker's poetic process. Bower has very helpfully provided accent marks for the main accent of every word over two syllables, and has a useful summary of the ways in which accentuation can occasionally shift in rhythmic poetry (e.g. shifts of the accent to proclitic particles, such as réfove instead of refóve). These shifts are used from time to time in the edition when warranted by the neumation.

The second part of the introduction addresses the connection of the neumed sources to the repertory of the Liber ymnorum in its early transmission. In all early sources of the texts, including [End...