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by
Cynthia J. Cyrus
Women's involvement with medieval music took a variety of forms; they
served at times as audience, as participant, as sponsor, and as creator.
The evidence for their roles, like that for their male contemporaries,
is sporadic at best. Many musical sources have been lost, and those sources
that do survive only occasionally provide composer attributions. Information
on specific performances is virtually non-existent, and the references
to musical performances gleaned from literary allusions must be read critically.
Similarly, an art-work portraying a women musician may be representational
or symbolic--or both. Yet despite these handicaps, modern scholarship
reveals many ways in which medieval women were engaged with--and enriched
by--the music that flourished around them.
Egeria: An Early
Witness
One of our earliest
witnesses to Christian liturgical practice was the nun Egeria (ca. 400),
whose account of her pilgrimage to Jerusalem provides evidence for the
nascent Office services and for the development of the mass. She was writing
for an audience of fellow-nuns, and assumes that they will understand
the liturgical details (including terms such as antiphon and hymn which
may not have their modern meanings), but her descriptions give hints of
the divisions of services and the types of chants used, as well as details
about the ritual involved. In discussing Sunday mass, for instance, she
indicates that the people gathered "with the dawn, because it is the Lord's
day," and explains that they listen to several hours of sermons, since
any priest who wishes to may preach. Eventually, the catechumens, who
have not yet received baptism, are dismissed, since they are barred from
the portion of the Sunday mass devoted to the Eucharist. The last portion
of the mass includes an elaborate entry into the sanctuary basilica, in
which the bishop enters to the accompaniment of "hymns"; there follow
prayers, blessings, and an elaborate close as "all kiss the bishop's hand."
The overall service, she says, does not end until the fifth or sixth hour
after dawn. Elsewhere in her account she gives more specifically musical
details; in a pre-dawn service on the Lord's day (Sunday), for example,
there are hymns and antiphons alternating with prayers before the service
begins, and the service itself begins with the recitation of psalms:
[W]hen the
first cock has crowed, forthwith the bishop descends and enters inside
of the cave to the Anastasis (the sanctuary). All the doors are opened,
and the whole crowd streams into the Anastasis. Here innumerable lights
are shining; and when the people have entered, one of the priests says
a psalm, and they all respond; then prayer is offered. Again one of the
deacons says a psalm, and again prayer is offered; a third psalm is said
by one of the clergy, and prayer is offered for the third time, and the
commemoration of all men is made.... [Bernard, p. 47]
We cannot reconstruct
the service that she witnessed, for she never explains what the congregation
said or sang as a response to the psalms, nor does she identify which
psalms were recited. We cannot even tell for certain what format the "commemoration
of all men" followed or what the other ritual activities are later in
the service. Nevertheless, from Egeria's account of the services at Jerusalem,
we can tell several things:
Nuns and Canonesses
What monks
did, nuns did too. With a few exceptions, monastic women's participation
in the liturgy closely paralleled that of their male equivalents. Canonesses
(residents in a monastic community who had not taken permanent vows) and
nuns were responsible for reciting the Divine Office throughout the day,
and they participated as choir members and as soloist (the so-called cantrix)
in the performance of the Mass. Many of the women's monasteries lacked
the wealth and opulent display of nearby male communities, but they frequently
had a set of liturgical books containing both text and music for the chants
in which the choir, soloist(s), and readers would partake. Of the 3354
manuscripts surviving from women's monastic libraries in medieval Germany
and Switzerland, for instance, 834--nearly one-quarter--are liturgical
sources intended for the choir or the soloists. (Krämer,
unpublished tally made by Olivia Carter.) Ordinals (books which address
the rite and spell out the content and method of the services, often listing
items by incipit) and customaries (books which address the ceremonial
and specify the roles of the various participants, explaining who says
or does what) also survive from many women's communities. Some sources
also indicate women's roles within liturgical dramas performed at the
convents. Fewer books survive that provide the priest's segments of the
services, perhaps because women's monasteries had to import one or more
male celebrants to serve as priest; the celebrant might well supply his
own books. Nevertheless, the surviving musical sources corroborate the
Rules, such as the Rule of St. Benedict from the early to mid-sixth century,
that regulate liturgical participation: both the sources and the rules
themselves indicate that monastic women had active liturgical roles.
In the mass,
then, nuns or canonesses would have sung all of the major musical items
(a table of mass items is available). The choir, which usually consists
of all of the nuns, presents the ordinary chants with their unchanging
texts (Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Agnus Dei). If the ordinary chants
were troped, the choir would still sing the host chant (the Agnus Dei,
for instance), but the cantrix would perform the new material that introduces
and comments on the host chant. Similarly, the choir would perform the
antiphonal chants of the mass (the Introit, Offertory, and Communion),
though the cantrix might sing the psalm verse as a solo. Finally, the
responsorial chants (the Gradual and Alleluia) gave the cantrix a chance
to shine, for these elaborate, melismatic chants were primarily sung by
the soloist, with the choir chiming in only at the ends of sections. (In
modern chant books, the entrance of the choir is usually marked with an
asterisk.) The celebrating priest was responsible for the text of the
Canon or Eucharistic prayer (which was said silently at every mass) and
for three orations and the Preface, while the scriptural readings might
be said by either supporting (male) clergy or by a woman from the convent.
Women and Polyphony
In at least
some convents, women performed polyphony. (An extensive discussion can
be found in Yardley, pp. 24-27.) Some of this repertory is
preserved in the Las Huelgas codex which stems from the Carthusian monastery
for women near Burgos in Northern Spain which housed approximately one
hundred nuns and forty choirgirls at its prime in the thirteenth century.
The manuscript itself contains an extensive collection of polyphony, including
three styles of organum (note-against note; melismatic; Notre Dame), motets
and conductus, and tropes and sequences. Although the manuscript was copied
in the fourteenth century, the repertory comes from earlier, especially
1241-1288.
The contents
of the Las Huelgas Codex follow:
-
24 polyphonic
ordinary movements:
2 kyries and 3
troped kyries
1 troped Gloria
1 Credo
1 Sanctus
and 7 troped Sanctus movements
9 troped
Agnus Dei movements
-
7 Polyphonic
Propers
-
31 Benedicamus
Domino settings:
7 polyphonic settings
14 troped
polyphonic settings
10 troped monophonic
settings
-
31 "Prosae" (also
known as sequences):
11 polyphonic
prosae
20 monophonic
prosae
-
"modern" thirteenth-century
genres:
59 motets
The prevalence of
polyphony and the heavy use of tropes suggests that this convent, at least,
placed a premium on up-to-date musical styles. Other convents may not
have had the resources to keep up with the latest musical fashions, but
small clusters of polyphonic pieces survive from sixteen different women's
convents, suggesting that women religious had at least some interest,
and perhaps some training, in composed polyphony.
Women as Scribes
Women not only
read musical books, they also copied them, at least in some instances.
While no investigation of women as music scribes has been published, evidence
for women's roles in scriptoria has been accumulating. It is now known
that women's monasteries as well as men's often had active scriptoria.
Moreover, an index of colophons from France reveals a significant number
of women who signed their scribal works. Though text sources naturally
predominate, a few musical sources were signed by women (Colophons,
passim). Similarly, though no musical sources survive in her name,
Sister Lukardis of Utrecht from the fifteenth century is known to have
copied musical manuscripts, for a Dominican friar writes of her activities:
She busied herself
with ...writing, which she had truly mastered as we may see in the large,
beautiful, useful choir books which she wrote and annotated for the
convent... (as quoted in Edwards, p. 10)
Judging by handwriting,
notational styles and repertory, a number of unsigned chant manuscripts
also stem from the convents in which they were used. Indeed, though relatively
few women music scribes are known, many of their sisters may have legacies
that hide amongst the unsigned manuscripts of the era.
Women as Composers
Perhaps the
most famous of the medieval women composers is Hildegard of Bingen. Her
repertory of sequences and antiphons (sacred songs) stand somewhat outside
of the musical tradition, for she writes in a loosely formulaic melodic
language that works more by motivic allusion than by strict adherence
to modal range and standard melodic gestures. She collected her 77 musical
works in a volume called the Symphonia harmoniae caelestium revelationum
(Symphony of Harmony of Heavenly Revelations). Her morality play, the
Ordo virtutum, is appended to one manuscript copy of the Symphonia.
Hildegard's training is not particularly exceptional; education at convents
was focussed on the performance of the liturgy, and included literacy,
Latin, and music. Thus, other nuns may have composed plainchant--or even
polyphony--for new feasts and special celebrations. Since most medieval
music is anonymous, however, their contributions are impossible to trace.
Secular composers
fared better, probably because secular music is more often copied with
composer attributions. Twenty-one trobairitz (or women troubadours) are
known by name. Though only one composition survives with both text and
music copied together (the canso "A chantar" written by the Countess of
Dia), other works can be reconstructed by supplying a tune to match the
poetic structure. Further examples of women's compositions can be found
among the tensos--debate poems, usually with alternating stanzas
by the speakers. A few women trouvères were active in the thirteenth century,
but none of their works survive with music. Some scholars have speculated
that songs "in a women's voice," that is, songs in which the speaker is
identified as a woman, may reflect women's contributions to the lyric
repertory. At the very least, these songs reflect sentiments and musical
styles that seemed to their contemporaries to be appropriate for a woman.
(Several articles addressing such songs can be found in Vox Feminae.)
Women as Performers
Women were
active performers of secular music. Many women performed as amateurs,
either in the home or in courtly or urban settings. Boccaccio's Decameron
identifies women singing and dancing, along with their male companions,
as do many of the courtly romances of the twelfth and thirteenth-centuries
(Page, Owl, esp. pp. 102-6). In the romance Cleriadus
et Meliadice (discussed in Page, "Performance"), for
instance, girls as well as boys perform for the assembled company by harping
or singing. Adults too participated actively in the festivities, first
dancing their fill to the music of minstrels, then singing. "There might
you have heard men and women singing well!", says the narrator (Ibid,
p. 443).
In addition
to informal musical participation, however, women were also active as
menestrelles and jongleuresses. Performers themselves, they traveled as
part of small groups of entertainers, and were often wives or daughters
to male minstrels. In some instances, however, women had independent roles;
they were granted permission to participate in the Guild of Minstrels
in Paris from 1321 to the seventeenth century.
Women as Patrons
The role of
the patron has often been neglected in histories of music, but a strong
patron could form a center of musical production by gathering and supporting
musicians of all calibers. The lands that Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122-1204)
brought to her marriages, first to Louis VII of France and then to Henry
II of England, made her one of the most politically influential figures
of her day, but her cultural endeavors had an equally profound impact
on European civilization. Eleanor's efforts at the court of Poitiers shaped
a culture centered on courtly love and chivalric behavior; her sponsorship
contributed to the success of the troubadours and to the spread of the
Arthurian legends. Other noblewomen may have had a less dramatic impact
on musical culture, but they often had musicians in their personal retinue
and so helped to shape the prevailing musical style. Indeed, because women
often married far from home, they served as a kind of cultural network
for importing and mingling new ideas, styles and tastes with the established
norms of their husband's court.
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