Medieval Music and the Art of Memory

Introduction

Introduction While musicologists have long been aware that memorization played an important role in medieval education and that much of the music of the period was sung by heart, the role of memory in the creation and dissemination of polyphony remains to be studied. The reason for this neglect is simple. The music of the first important polyphonic collection, the Magnus liber organi, was written down in a notation that for the first time in music history attempted to specify not only pitch, but also rhythm. Consequently, the repertory has long been recognized as a milestone in the development of European art music . Thus, it was natural for scholars to approach the repertory with the same questions that were so fruitful for later European repertories, questions of authenticity and chronology. In other words, scholarship has tended to focus on the musical texts and their interrelationships, rather than on the cultural practices that produced the sources in which these texts are preserved. Underpinning this scholarship has been an unexamined assumption that the musical culture that produced the Magnus liber was literate in the same sense and to the same degree as later European music cultures. Yet the repertory exhibits many features that are characteristic of oral transmission. The three main manuscripts of the Magnus liber organi are so different that it is impossible to arrive at a critical edition. Thus, the editor of the most recent edition, Edward Roesner, has chosen to publish the versions transmitted in each manuscript separately.1 More than any later repertory, Notre Dame polyphony is characterized by what Fritz Reckow called “pasticciohaftigkeit,” an appropriately macaronic term.2 Scholars have generally explained the extensive interrelations among pieces as a re1 1. Roesner, ed., Magnus liber organi. 2. Reckow, “Das Organum,” 474. sult of the medieval habit of glossing and commenting on existing texts. Yet do we really know how and by whom the music was made and transmitted? None of the compositions is attributed to a specific composer in the manuscripts . Even though the performance of Notre Dame polyphony is attested in 1198 and 1199, all of the extant manuscripts were copied in the middle of the thirteenth century. It seems unlikely that all earlier manuscripts were lost. And finally, as Craig Wright has shown, there is every indication that the music was sung by heart; not a single manuscript is associated with Notre Dame.3 In fact, no manuscript of polyphonic music ever appears in the lists of choirbooks or the inventories of the library, the treasury, the bishop’s chapel, or the chapter house of Notre Dame. In short, there is every reason to investigate the possibility that this repertory was orally transmitted and that memory played a role in its creation. While it seems somewhat surprising that so few scholars have explored the role of memory in Notre Dame polyphony, it makes perfect sense that no attention has been paid to a possible relationship between the art of memory and fourteenth-century isorhythmic motets. These are compositions in the modern sense of the word, attributed to specific composers. Thanks to Ars nova notation, which for the first time gave explicit relative durational value to every single note, composers were able to notate essentially every rhythm they wanted. The compositions display sophisticated structures with repetitive melodic and rhythmic patterns that would be jeopardized if a performer or scribe altered even a single note. In fourteenth-century isorhythmic motets these patterns were often applied to all parts and subjected to various manipulations such as retrograde motion and diminution. Yet these works might also have benefited from the art of memory. First, it is generally assumed that they were sung by heart. Second, and more importantly , as Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and Jessie Ann Owens have shown in their pathbreaking studies, polyphonic pieces of the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries were not worked out in score but composed in the mind.4 To us it seems difficult to imagine how this could be achieved. The question we would want to ask is whether the art of memory might not have provided composers with methods for creating polyphonic structures in the mind. Just this short overview suggests that a study of the possible impact of the art of memory on music of the Middle Ages is long overdue. We would want to know how medieval singers managed to memorize and retrieve the chant. How was Notre Dame polyphony conceived? Was there such a thing as a...