AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

54 Friday morning AMS Philadelphia 2009
MUSIC BEYOND MEASURE: TOWARDS A COGNITIVE
APPROACH TO THE RHYTHMS OF MEDIEVAL SONG
Warwick Edwards
University of Glasgow
The debate on the rhythms of non-mensurally notated medieval song has raged for a century,
and at the present time prospects for a resolution would appear slim. The impasse stems
in part from an absence of explicit references to the issue in contemporary writings on verse
and music. Interested parties today are thereby forced to draw inferences from a range of indirect
pointers, and tend inevitably to follow instincts conditioned by a cultural environment
very different from that pertaining many centuries ago. This has led to the adoption of a series
of mutually incompatible positions.
It is notable that each such position is founded on a view of rhythm centred on the durations
of musical notes and their associated syllables. Those who argue for the application of
“modal rhythm” take their cue principally from the incidence of quasi-mensural patterns in
certain chansonniers and in motets that incorporate song quotations. By contrast, advocates
of a “recitative”-like approach to the declamation of words do so on the basis of “freedom”
from any such system. Those who reject both approaches generally favour isochronous syllable
durations.
In the present paper I argue that discussion of rhythmic matters on the basis of syllable
and note durations alone is of limited value if we are to take at all seriously the idea that their
musical sounds are somehow, in Johannes de Garlandia’s words, “beyond measure” (ultra
mensuram) or, in Johannes de Grocheio’s, “not very precisely measured” (non ita precise mensurata).
Furthermore, we need to take account of the likelihood that those who wrote about
music in the thirteenth century saw the act of conceptualizing musical measure as one that
was novel.
In the circumstances, it is worth considering a cognitive approach to song rhythm consistent
with what we can know of a musical culture dependent on aural memory, one that saw
no need to incorporate rhythmic explicitness into its notation, and indeed had only limited
use for musical notation at all. In such approach an examination of how notes—or rather the
syllables they articulate—might be grouped and patterned in performance proves more tractable
as starting point than one tied to speculation about durations. Such basis for enquiry
has resonance with numerical patterning as basis for versification, and with contemporary
methodologies for recalling verses from memory. It also fits with what we can observe both
in later medieval song repertories recorded in mensural notation and in singing practices to
the present day in notationless cultures that use comparable verse structures and mnemonic
techniques. A characteristic of both traditions is that, once established, the rhythm of a song
remains remarkably stable from one strophe to the next. I will present a few examples of medieval
songs to demonstrate how a psychologically informed understanding of “music beyond
measure” can be used to circumscribe the possibilities for credible rhythmic realizations.