British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
BA PDF Symposium 2005
26 April 2005
Abstracts
Dr Sam Barrett
The Music of the Early Medieval Latin Lyric
While the texts of the early medieval Latin lyric have been known and admired for some time, the music has remained for the most part unheard and unevaluated. Difficulties faced in gathering and reading the notations that survive from the ninth century onwards have resulted in a tension between the importance accorded to the music by philologists seeking to explain successive stylistic developments and the scholarly silence maintained by musicologists. The task of identifying notations has recently been eased by a new philological interest in particular manifestations of texts, leading to several surveys of the manuscripts of early Medieval Latin poetry that have included detailed reference to musical notation. The problem of how to read the musical notations has nevertheless remained and provided the central obstacle to further understanding.
In the course of my research, I have developed two interlocking approaches to analysing the partial information about melodic contour transmitted by the neumes alongside analyses of the prosody of the verse texts. The first has been to analyse the neumes without recourse to melodic reconstruction, identifying patterns that enable conclusions to be drawn about transmission and general principles guiding the setting of lyric verse to music. The second has been to align this knowledge with parallel repertories whose melodies are known and whose melodic procedures can be reapplied to the lyric notations. The main result of these analyses has been a partial recovery of the sound of the early Medieval Latin lyric in performance through both fragmentary musical reconstruction and an identification of techniques of recitation that underpinned more elaborate musical realisations.
The wider significance of this repertory arguably lies in its transformation of late antique lyric forms primarily intended for reading into an early medieval culture of song. The immediate context for this transformation appears to have been cathedral schools and monastic centres renowned for their learning, where elaborate sung ritual was complemented by an interest in antique learning. An earlier justification for this shift in poetics was nevertheless provided by St Augustine’s De musica, which arguably stands at the very beginnings of an interest in new forms of sung poetry among the educated elite of the Latin West.
Dr Sam Barrett read Music as an undergraduate at Merton College, Oxford, where he was also an organ scholar. He continued to postgraduate study in Music at Clare College, Cambridge, where he completed a PhD entitled 'Notated Verse in Ninth and Tenth Century Poetic Collections' under the supervision of Dr Susan Rankin. In 1999 he became a Junior Research Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge, and in 2002 was awarded a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship. He has published numerous articles relating to early Medieval Latin song as well as preparing the musical portion of a digital edition of rhythmical Latin songs composed before c. AD 900. He is currently completing a commentary on neumatic notations added to Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae. Most recently, Dr Barrett has developed his lifelong interest in jazz into a second area of academic expertise and has had an initial article accepted for publication. In the coming months he will take up a newly created position of Director of College Music at Pembroke College, Cambridge.