AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

116 saturday morning AMS Philadelphia 2009
frAnKish chAnt: Diverse resPonses to roMe
charles M. Atkinson, ohio state university, chair
We still lack a clear idea of what the Franks did to liturgical chant: the story told by every
specialist and in every textbook is different. We know that they imposed a tonal system (the
octoechos of eight tones) on an essentially modal repertory; we know that they conceptualized
a system of musical notation which would show how to sing a memorized melody (rather than
the pitch detail of the melody itself) and how that melody was tied to a specific text; we know
that they brought order to the singing of chant in the liturgy celebrated north of the Alps, by
directing that the cantus romanus should be adopted. But we do not know whether the melodies
that they were singing were more-or-less Roman (McKinnon, 2000), or fundamentally
Frankish (Levy, 2003) or a Frankish adaptation of Roman practice (Hucke, 1981). Nor do we
have more than suggestive accounts of why and how the music of the Frankish church was
fundamentally altered in the period between 750 and 900.
In our session, new studies of Carolingian manuscript sources will stimulate sharper and
more nuanced perceptions of Frankish engagement with older forms of liturgy. The Frankish
need to accommodate the liturgical chant inherited (earlier or later) from Rome represents
a starting point for explorations of its reception. Significant in their shared approaches is a
rejection of monochromatic conceptualizations of liturgical practice, including music, as either
“Roman” or “Frankish.” Our interrogation of the evidence follows dual paths: on the one
hand, we shall trace procedures for the adaptation of liturgical materials in order to render
them functional in liturgies formulated according to Frankish requirements. On the other
hand, we will demonstrate the manner and extent to which intellectual conceptions of music,
deriving from its place among the arts of the trivium and quadrivium, permeated both music
as sound and as visual object. This parallelism allows links between music as theorized and
music as practiced to be exposed as fundamental—to a extent not previously suspected.
The dissemination of an officially sanctioned liturgy throughout the Carolingian empire
belonged to the greater Frankish program to establish the Christian ethos as central to the
concept of society. Consequently, liturgy, as Christian worship, and music, as an artistic means
by which to formulate that worship, embodied an essential means of expression. As a group,
these papers underline the overwhelming significance of the centralized drive to elaborate
Christian practice in quite specific ways; yet they also reveal the nature and extent of diversity
in achieving the desired ends as well as the manifold steps which had to be negotiated in order
to reach them. Together they expose a layered and complex picture of the historical processes
which shaped music in this earliest period of its formulation as a European art music repertory.
THE TEXTUAL TRANSMISSION OF ORDO ROMANUS 1
AND THE FRANKISH RECEPTION OF ROMAN CHANT
Peter Jeffery
University of Notre Dame
Ordo Romanus 1, written in early eighth-century Rome, is the earliest description of how
the Pope celebrated Mass. Many medieval musical practices are described there for the first
time. The text circulated widely in Carolingian Europe, where it was used as the basic guide for
how to celebrate Mass the Roman way. The manuscripts display numerous textual variants, reflecting
local adaptations that were made as the Roman rite spread across the continent. More