Music And Meaning In Old Hispanic Lenten Chants

The tradition of Old Hispanic liturgical chant is here examined through a new methodology, enabling striking new insights into its use.

Based on highly original archival and palaeographical research, this is the first methodological and factual primer in English on the distinctive liturgical tradition of early medieval Spain. It provides clear and approachable blueprints for future work on the description and analysis (musical, theological and cultural) of this and other liturgies. For non-specialists, the authors introduce the main features of Old Hispanic liturgy, its manuscripts, its services and its liturgical genres. For specialists, they model a variety of ways to work with the Old Hispanic materials in depth, incorporating notational, musical, theological and historical perspectives. For those interested in musical notation, the book lays out a method for working with unpitched neumes, with illustrative results, that will inspire and challenge others working on monophonic chant. For historians and liturgists, the texts and melodies are analysed in combination with the theological context that informed their creation.

This groundbreaking book offers the first detailed analysis of the textual, liturgical, and musical aspects of the vespertinus, the chant genre most central to the Christian practices that shaped the religious and cultural landscape of medieval Iberia.

Between the seventh and eleventh centuries, Christian worship on the Iberian Peninsula was structured by rituals of great theological and musical richness, known as the Old Hispanic (or Mozarabic) rite. Much of this liturgy was produced during a seventh-century cultural and educational program aimed at creating a society unified in the Nicene faith, built on twin pillars of church and kingdom. Led by Isidore of Seville and subsequent generations of bishops, this cultural renewal effort began with a project of clerical education, facilitated through a distinctive culture of textual production. Rebecca Maloy's Songs of Sacrifice argues that liturgical music--both texts and melodies--played a central role in the cultural renewal of early Medieval Iberia, with a chant repertory that was carefully designed to promote the goals of this cultural renewal. Through extensive reworking of the Old Testament, the creators of the chant texts fashioned scripture in ways designed to teach biblical exegesis, linking both to patristic traditions--distilled through the works of Isidore of Seville and other Iberian bishops--and to Visigothic anti-Jewish discourse. Through musical rhetoric, the melodies shaped the delivery of the texts to underline these messages. In these ways, the chants worked toward the formation of individual Christian souls and a communal Nicene identity. Examining the crucial influence of these chants, Songs of Sacrifice addresses a plethora of long-debated issues in musicology, history, and liturgical studies, and reveals the potential for Old Hispanic chant to shed light on fundamental questions about how early chant repertories were formed, why their creators selected particular passages of scripture, and why they set them to certain kinds of music.

"Songs of Sacrifice argues that liturgical music-both texts and melodies-played a central role in the cultural renewal of early Medieval Iberia. Between the seventh and eleventh centuries, Christian worship on the Iberian Peninsula was structured by rituals of great theological and musical richness, known as the Old Hispanic (or Mozarabic) rite. Much of this liturgy was produced during the seventh century, as part of a cultural and educational program led Isidore of Seville and other bishops. After the conversion of the Visigothic rulers from Arian to Nicene Christianity at the end of the sixth century, the bishops aimed to create a society unified in the Nicene faith, built on twin pillars of church and kingdom. They initiated a project of clerical education, facilitated through a distinctive culture of textual production. The chant repertory was carefully designed to promote these aims. The creators of the chant texts reworked scripture in ways designed to teach biblical exegesis, linking both to the theological works of Isidore and others, and to Visigothic anti-Jewish discourse. The notation reveals an intricate melodic grammar that is closely tied to textual syntax and sound. Through musical rhetoric, the melodies shaped the delivery of the texts to underline words and phrases images of particular liturgical or doctrinal import. The chants thus worked toward the formation of individual Christian souls and a communal, Nicene identity. The final chapters turn to questions about the intersection between orality and writing and the relationships of the Old Hispanic chant to other Western plainsong traditions"--

The Roman Catholic Good Friday liturgy includes a series of chants known today as the Improperia ("Reproaches") beginning with the following text: Popule meus, quid feci tibi? aut in quo contristavi te? responde mihi. Quia eduxi te de terra Egypti, parasti crucem Salvatori tuo ("My people, what have I done to you, or in what have I grieved you? Answer me. Because I led you out of the land of Egypt, you prepared a cross for your Savior"). The earliest witness to the chants is a Carolingian liturgical book from around 880, but it is agreed among scholars that their history extends back farther than this. Employing comparative analysis of Biblical exegesis, chant texts, and chant melodies, this study suggests that the initial chant verse, Micah 6:3-4a plus a Christianizing addendum ("My people... you prepared..."), originated in northwestern Italy between the end of the 4th century and the end of the 7th century and carried associations of the Last Judgment, the Passion, and Christian works, penitence, and forgiveness. Although previous scholarship has sometimes pointed to the Reproaches as a key text of Christian anti-Jewish history, it is clear that the initial three verses, the Popule meus verses, originally held allegorical rather than literal meanings. The fact that there are several preserved Popule meus chants across various liturgical repertoires and, moreover, several sets of Popule meus verses in a smaller subset of these repertoires--in northern Italy, southern France, and the Spanish March--bespeaks the pre-Carolingian origins of the Popule meus verses and raises the question of why the verses appear in the Carolingian liturgy when they do. This study proposes that the Popule meus verses were incorporated into the Carolingian liturgy at the Abbey of Saint-Denis under the abbacy of Charles the Bald (867-77). In the Adoration of the Cross ceremony adopted from Rome, paired with the Greek Trisagion, and carrying Gallican melody and meaning, the Carolingian Popule meus verses would have been an ecumenical declaration, as they spread, of the expediency of the crucified Christ and a penitent people, even in the face of impending political disintegration.

A Companion to Medieval Toledo. Reconsidering the Canons explores the limits of "Convivencia" through new and problematized readings and initiates the non-specialist into the historical, cultural, and religious complexity of the iconic city.

This path-breaking account of music's role in Venice's Mediterranean empire sheds new light on the city's earliest musical history.