Table Of ContentTHE CALLIGRAPHY OF MEDIEVAL MUSIC
MUSICALIA MEDII AEVI
1
Collection dirigée par
Olivier Cullin
John Haines (ed.)
The Calligraphy of Medieval Music
2011
(cid:9)
Mise en page
réalisée par M&O
© Brepols (cid:11) Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium
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D/2011/0095/165
ISBN 978-2-503-54005-4
Introduction
This volume of essays would not have appeared without funding from the Canada
Research Chair (CRC) programme. Around the year 2000, when I was working at a
small college in the South of the United States, but actively looking for a research position,
Canada instituted a – so far as I know – unprecedented programme of academic chairs.
These were actually one-time renewable grants: five plus five years for junior appointments,
a so-called Tier II (CRC II), and seven plus seven for senior hires. The objective was, as
recently explained to us in a conference celebrating ten years of the CRC programme1, to
prevent the traditional ‘brain drain’ of Canadian academics to foreign lands and to secure
productive young researchers for the future. The scheme appears to have worked. At a
time when academia suffers internationally along with many other institutions, Canadian
universities still maintain a healthy international research profile. Although it was cut
short following the 2008 financial collapse, the University of Toronto’s Medieval Music
CRC II came to me in 2002 as a great privilege. Among other things, it provided funding
for a project called Nota Quadrata, devoted to the origins of the so-called square notation
of the Middle Ages.
In the early days of thinking about the Nota Quadrata project, it occurred to me that a
volume of contributions by senior scholars dedicated to the question of the origins of square
notation might be useful. That is how this volume came to be. When I first approached
Michel Huglo with the idea in the early days of 2005, he kindly offered to help identify the
appropriate experts on different musical scripts of medieval Europe. At the time, Michel
was a remarkably energetic eighty-three years of age, and the first of no less than four
volumes culled from his half century’s work on medieval music had just appeared.2 As I
write, Prof. Huglo will celebrate his ninetieth birthday on 14 December 2011; this volume
celebrates that occasion. In May 2005, he and Albert Derolez led a session devoted to late
medieval music writing under the aegis of Nota Quadrata, at the International Congress on
Medieval Studies, in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Following this, thanks to Huglo and another
eminent medievalist, David Hiley, I began the work of organizing a conference entitled
‘The Calligraphy of Medieval Music’, which eventually took place at the University of
Toronto’s Trinity College on 21-23 September 2007. Most of the contributors to the
present volume participated in that event. In addition to the CRC II, major funding for
1. « Canada Research Chairs: Thinking Ahead For a Strong Future », Conference series, Ontario region,
November 24-25, 2010, Metro Toronto Convention Centre.
2. Huglo and Huglo , p. 1-3.
DOI 10.1484/M.MUMA-EB.1.100918
8 John Haines
the conference was provided by Gage Averill, then Dean at Toronto’s Faculty of Music.
As director of the university’s Centre for Medieval Studies, and later, Provost of Trinity
College, Andy Orchard also provided personal and financial support. Other sponsors
included the University of Toronto’s Book History and Print Culture Programme, the
Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations, the Fine Art Department, Victoria
University and the University of Toronto Art Centre. I am especially grateful to Meghan
Forsyth and Keith Johnston, then graduate students at the Faculty of Music, who helped
me in the organization of the event.
This volume was already in the planning stages before the conference took place,
and was conceived essentially as a written version of that event. I must confess that its
publication has not been an easy task. If it had not been for Olivier Cullin, this volume
would surely not have seen the light of day. I am deeply indebted to him for all of his
work from 2007 to 2011. Prof. Cullin worked hard to defend the merits of the proposed
volume to the Belgian academic publisher Brepols, who accepted it late in 2008 as the
first in their new music series, Musica Medii Aevi, headed up by Cullin himself. Publishing
academic books is a difficult and generally tedious experience, especially books consisting
of essays by different authors. During the two years it took for all of the contributions
found in this volume to come in, I was fortunate to receive the help of Kate Helsen, then
a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Toronto. I am grateful to Kate for helping me in
the thankless work of re-formatting essays and making corrections of many minutae. I am
also, of course, grateful to each and every one of the contributors (and even to a few who
bowed out at the last minute), and especially to those who submitted their essays on time,
carefully formatted following Cullin’s guidelines for the series.
It is common in prefaces such as this to summarize each contribution at length, but
this seems to me superfluous. The chronological ordering of the volume is transparent,
and follows the schema that Michel Huglo, David Hiley and I originally planned for
the volume. The following essays aim at surveying the dominant types of music writing
in Europe in the Middle Ages, with a focus on writing style and technique. Part one
opens with general considerations: writing (Huglo), layout (Derolez) and the traditions
of Ethiopia as a helpful comparison with the medieval West (Haile). Part two treats
early medieval notations from England (Rankin), Brittany (Deuffic), Spain (Zapke),
Italy (Baroffio), Northern France and Sicily (Hiley) and Aquitaine (Huglo). And part
three continues this chronological journey with the late medieval notations of Chartres
(Fassler) and Cambrai (Haggh), and those of the Carthusian (Cullin), Dominican and
Franciscan orders (Huglo); special topics within late notations include ‘ligatures’ (Haines),
the production of the manuscripts of Guillaume de Machaut (Earp) and, finally, the Ars
nova (Busse Berger). Needless to say, individual topics are approached from each author’s
singular point of view, which is hopefully what makes this volume interesting.
My choice of the word ‘calligraphy’ may seem odd to some – as it did to one of the
contributors who wondered out loud during her talk what exactly I meant by ‘calligraphy’ –
and warrants a brief explanation. ‘Calligraphy’ means beautiful writing. This best describes
musical notes. Musical notation may relate to sound, and we may be tempted at times
to extract long lost sounds from it or to extrapolate other meanings from it; but it is,
first and foremost, a graphic phenomenon, the product of specific processes of writing
and bookmaking. The word ‘paleography’ (or ‘palæography’, following an archaic practice
along the lines of ‘Mediæval’) carries with it the baggage of centuries of scholarship. From
Jean Mabillon to the monks of Solesmes, the study of medieval writing has a distinguished
