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

The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.

—Muriel Rukeyser, "The Speed of Darkness"

History too is made of stories. Through assembling evidence, we try to make sense of people, places, and events in an informed narrative; that is, a story! Medievalists need to be especially scrupulous and imaginative in constructing their accounts of the period, given the paucity of surviving evidence. For musicologists the problem is compounded by the lack of musical notation for much of the early Middle Ages. In some happy instances, however, first-person accounts have survived that illuminate an otherwise obscure time and place. Such is the story left by the ninth century Swiss monk Notker Balbulus (the "stutterer") about how, in his home monastery of Saint Gall, he worked to master a new type of liturgical chant he had recently discovered. Setting text to pre-existing melodies, he compiled one of the most significant collections of Latin poetry of the Middle Ages around the year 884. He called his work Liber ymnorum("Book of Hymns") and offered it as a gift to one Liutward, bishop, abbot, and court chaplain, humbly sharing his story in the dedication.

Both text and music of Notker's work have been scrutinized, edited, and written about for generations, yet no one has produced a critical edition of music and text together. This is one reason Calvin Bower's remarkable new scholarly edition of the Liber ymnorumranks as a major contribution to musical and literary scholarship, building on the substantial foundation of previous research while offering new insights and hypotheses that will inspire current and future generations of musicologists, philologists, and performers. Bower received the 2017 Claude V. Palisca Award from the American Musicological Society for his edition, an honor richly deserved. In order to appreciate the significance of his work, however, a brief introduction to the intricate background of this genre is necessary.

Sequences, along with tropes, formed a large body of what has been called medieval, as opposed to Gregorian, chant. The music for the Roman Mass Propers was relatively set and stable by 800, whereas medieval chant arose during the ninth and tenth centuries, along with the rise of musical notation. The sequence was sung between the Alleluia and Gospel reading of the Mass, and appeared as a stunning new category of chant that spread relatively quickly throughout Europe. The surviving manuscripts from the West and East Frankish kingdoms contain distinctly different repertories of pieces, roughly corresponding to the regions on either side of the Rhine. Yet many of the melodies are common to both regions; that is, the same melodies are found with different texts on separate sides of the Rhine, with only a rare text common to both regions. Notker's dedicatory narrative provides important clues to understanding aspects of the early history of the genre.

Notker recalled how difficult it was as a youth to remember "very long melodies" ( melodiae longissimae) and how he might "tie them...