AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

Abstracts saturday morning 119
chants (the Compiègne and Albi gradual-antiphoners). It is also the earliest example of a fully
“Benedictine” Office liturgy, not otherwise attested until the tenth century. It would seem
that Prüm was especially prompt in obeying the command of the Aachen Synod of 816 that
all monks should celebrate the Office “according to what is contained in the Rule of St. Benedict”
(canon 3). The presentation of the chants in Trier 1245/597 as short incipits, a format
widely attested in early chant books, raises questions about how any “archetypal” repertory of
Office chant, if such existed in Louis’s reign, could be transmitted and controlled. The textual
flexibility characteristic of unnotated early sources of Office chant would seem to preclude
melodic stability. What can it really have meant for the inmates of a ninth-century Frankish
monastery to sing the “Roman” music of the Office?
TO SPEAK WELL AND TO SING WISELY: LITURGICAL CHANT
AND THE CAROLINGIAN PRINCIPLE OF “CORRECTIO”
Susan Rankin
University of Cambridge
The poet-monk Gottschalk of Orbais ended his life imprisoned at the abbey of Hautvilliers
close to Reims. During that confinement (849–868) he composed a grammatical treatise, including
a substantial commentary on the grammar and theology of chants sung in the divine
office. Since the earliest extant office antiphoner dates only from the 870s, Gottschalk’s earlier
commentary is a source of enormous interest for liturgical historians—yet it remains almost
unnoticed in musicological literature. It is not for its liturgical significance, however, but for
what it conveys about how a mid-ninth-century Carolingian scholar responded to chant texts
that I use it to introduce this paper.
Musicologists have studied the history of liturgical chant in the period 750–900 almost
exclusively through musical questions, enquiring into the source of the melodies of the Gregorian
chant (Rome or the Frankish north, or a combination) and the supposed oral and
written means of transmission of those melodies. Evidence provided by the early, unnotated
chant books about what was being disseminated/received and when has been largely ignored.
Yet these early books reveal a process of editing the chant over a prolonged period, and open
up a new view of how the Carolingians treated the chant they inherited—one more complex
than has yet been envisaged in the scholarly literature.
Carolingian articulation of the relation between formal learning and the Christian faith
reveals a central concern with Latinity, as the basis for the expression of correct doctrine.
For our understanding of the history of the Gregorian chant, shifting the focus of enquiry
from the dominant scholarly concentration on transmission to Carolingian concerns with
correct language is crucial: it offers powerful new tools for exploring Carolingian treatment
of chant melodies. Carolingian effort invested in establishing new forms of chant texts inevitably
shaped their treatment of the melodies. Rational discourses about music based not on
antique number-based knowledge but on linguistic grammar were developed by Carolingian
music theorists (now set out with detail and clarity in Atkinson’s Critical Nexus). Reading
ninth-century music theory texts alongside the central Carolingian texts on language, and
especially on language in the liturgy, makes tangible the ways in which grammatical and rhetorical
concepts were transferred to the practice of music.
Moreover, if tools analogous to the grammar of language could be used to control good musical
performance then our scrutiny of the relation between Gregorian chant and Carolingian