So I was intrigued (while following up references to medieval ornament, which I plan to return to in future) to come across a chapter entitled "A sight reading vielle player from the thirteenth century" in this book. The picture discussed comes from a manuscript of the songs of Gautier de Coincy (Brussels, Biblitheque Royale de Belgique, MS 10747, fol. 3r). It does not appear to be online, nor is the picture viewable in the link to the book given above, so I have made my own little sketch from the book itself:
There seems no question the vielle player (probably intended to be Gautier de Coincy himself) is portrayed as reading music, resting on the same bench as he is sitting on, as he plays. The author of the chapter, John Haines, notes also that the artist seems to have made some effort to show the music accurately (I've tried to copy this accurately as well). There is a single stave with neumes but no words, with details like the uneven number of staves on the two pages suggesting the artist had an actual example they were working from.
One could argue for the "exception that proves the rule". Gautier was a composer, and produced books, and was a literate monk, so perhaps the artist wanted to emphasise that he was not a mere minstrel, and did so by this exceptional depiction of the book. Nevertheless the pose seems naturalistic enough to suggest it was not a complete invention. Certainly food for thought...
Surely if medieval musicians always learnt by ear and played from memory, there would have been no need to develop a universally-understood system for writing down music?
ReplyDeleteI am assuming here that the 'stave system' was universal across Europe - does anybody know where it originated and when the earliest music manuscripts date to?
Note I specifically said 'medieval instrumentalists'! Although in fact I have in some earlier posts discussed evidence that even for church vocalists, learning by ear and singing from memory was the norm.
ReplyDelete