Calvin Bower's new edition of, and commentary on, the Liber ymnorum of Notker Balbulus, the first with complete musical transcriptions, is a monumental achievement in every sense of the word. It is divided into two volumes of A4 size (unusual for publications of the Henry Bradshaw Society, but essential for the successful laying out of the melodies). About two-fifths of the first volume is devoted to a penetrating exposition of Notker's creative work, the manuscript sources of the Liber ymnorum and the editorial method. The edition of forty-nine sequences makes up the rest of the volume. In the second volume, Bower gives an English translation of each Latin text and a discussion of any points of difficulty or special interest in interpreting particular words or expressions. But this is not all, for in an additional commentary the theological import of each text is considered in depth, and the interaction between musical–poetical form and the pattern of Notker's thought is elucidated.
The need for this multifaceted work will already have been felt by many readers. Notker, monk of St Gall, born c.840, died 6 April 912, wrote new Latin texts to the melodies usually known as sequences, sung after the alleluia – and in some sense a festal extension of the alleluia – at Mass on the main feast days of the church year. The collection was complete and presented to Liutward of Vercelli probably in the year 884. Although the texts can be read and appreciated as literature – one of their modern editors, Wolfram von den Steinen, called Notker ‘one of the few great poets between the Gospel and Dante’ – they were created for musical performance and demand a musical edition. So, while modestly admitting limits to our knowledge of how they might have sounded, Bower offers us ‘the possibility better to appreciate Notker's brilliant synthesis of melody and text’.
There are precedents for some parts of this mighty work. Perhaps hinting delicately at the oft-drawn analogy between a medieval monastery and a hive of bees, Bower says that ‘the publications and edition of Henry Marriott Bannister, Wolfram von den Steinen, and Richard Crocker have pollinated virtually every sentence I have written’. In von den Steinen's Notker der Dichter (1948), editions of the Latin texts with German translations appeared in one relatively slim volume, while a much larger Darstellungsband was devoted to a massive exposition of almost every aspect of the context and content of the texts; but not their music. In Crocker's The Early Medieval Sequence (1977), Notker's work was a crucial component but was also compared with the early south French repertories. Above all, Crocker grasped the sequence as a literary and musical whole, with consequences invaluable for both philological and musicological studies. His transcriptions of roughly two-thirds of the compositions now edited by Bower were not critical editions in the usual sense of the word. The early St Gall manuscript sources employ neumatic notation. The difficulties in arriving at transcriptions onto the staff are well known. The only St Gall source with (most of) Notker's sequences in staff notation, Stiftsbibliothek 546, was compiled in the years 1507–14, and does not always match well the neumes in the earliest manuscripts. So sources from outside St Gall, hopefully not too discordant in their renderings of the melodies, have to be located. Crocker paid special attention to early South French versions (with pitch notation) but also used the synoptic transcriptions from many sources compiled by Henry Marriott Bannister (preserved in the Bodleian Library). Crocker gives no one source for the pitches he chooses, while Bower does, together with references to facsimiles of manuscripts with pitch notation, and previous editions. I shall return to this point in a moment.
Notker studies have had to wrestle with the problem of establishing exactly which texts are his and which may have been written by contemporaries, yet still included in what he calls his ‘Liber ymnorum’ (at least in the form it has come down to us). Von den Steinen, observing the pattern of transmission among the earliest manuscripts from St Gall and closely related institutions, including their variant readings, but also exercising his judgement of Notker's literary style and thought, regarded forty pieces as authentic. (He also edited an additional forty texts found in early East Frankish sources but not, in his opinion, by Notker.) Bower gives us forty-nine.
Bower believes that Notker's original collection can be discerned in those pieces which appear in St Gall MS 381 in first position for each feast and which are included in the first series of sequences in Einsiedeln MS 121. In opting for these coordinates he is in general agreement with previous scholars. The resulting series includes sequences for St Eusebius and St Columbanus, which would not be of primary significance for St Gall itself but were important for the dedicatee of the Liber ymnorum, Liutward, bishop of Vercelli (for Eusebius) and abbot of Bobbio (for Columbanus). By this definition the Liber ymnorum would include Nostra tuba regatur fortissima, which appears to be Notker's refinement of an older text. It also includes eight other items which von den Steinen did not believe to be Notkeriana on stylistic grounds. This would imply that Notker did not compose an adequately complete liturgical cycle (among others Michael, Andrew and Otmar would be somebody else's work). Bower thinks the eight are indeed by Notker (Iste dies celebris (Epiphany Octave), Virginis venerandae (Agnes and other Virgins), Magnum te Michahelem, Sacerdotem Christi Martinum, Laude dignum (Otmar), A solis occasu (Columbanus), Deus in tua virtute (Andrew) and Miles inclite (a Martyr)). In each case he presents cogent arguments for accepting Notker's authorship, clearing up misunderstandings, pointing out parallels in other Notker texts, and so on. I find this restoration of Notker's liturgical and theological monument very satisfying.
Those who have followed Bower's very extensive work on music-theoretical texts of the Middle Ages will not be surprised by his assured handling of Notker's verses, although they are quite different in character from the treatises. Equally impressive and enlightening is his discussion of the way Notker reflects melodic contours in the accentual patterning of individual words and phrases. If we look at the melodies alone, and try to get a sense of their shape and momentum (reinforced by the prevalent double-strophe structure), certain patterns emerge, but much remains equivocal. For example, in a four-note group ascend–descend–descend, depicted in a particular neume and (hopefully) transcribable from a source with pitch notation, which if any of the notes carries a rhythmic accent? Bower shows how Notker's texts consistently suggest particular accent patterns, bringing to life the inherent rhythm of the melodies, or at least fixing a possible pattern. (Notker's dedicatory letter to Luitward, to which Bower constantly refers, uses the word ‘colligare’, a ‘tying down’ of the melodies.) Perhaps this is what Notker learned from Iso, the teacher he mentions in the dedicatory letter at the head of the Liber. (By a delightful coincidence Bower calls the repeating melodic/accentual patterns ‘isotonic’.) Reading these pages (vol. 1, pp. 32–5) I could almost imagine myself back in the song school at St Gall twelve hundred years ago. In the text edition, accented syllables are marked for words of three or more syllables.
The musical edition is set out, as in the early manuscripts, in parallel columns, with the Latin text on the left and a copy of the neumes for the corresponding melodic segments on the right (in the old sources the text was in the inside column, the neumes in the outside column). Above the text Bower places a musical staff, discrete in its dimensions, with a transcription of the melody. Again as in the early sources, each segment within the strophe is given its own line, and they are set out not as prose but as verse, ‘per cola et commata’. (The sources are not entirely unanimous in their line-breaks and Bower explains every editorial decision even about these details.) The neumes are copied from St Gall MS 484, which has none of Notker's texts, only melodies.
These forty melodies (‘Concordia’, ‘Duo tres’, ‘Graeca’, ‘Iustus ut palma maior’, ‘Iustus ut palma minor’, ‘Planctus sterilis’, ‘Romana’, ‘Virgo plorans’ and ‘Vox exultationis’ were each texted twice by Notker) share many generic features but are also quite individual, and one of the unexpected treasures of the Introduction is a chapter on the ‘melodiae longissimae’ (as Notker calls them in the dedication) in their own right, analysing their make-up, what they share with each other and where they go their own way.
No less than sixty-three (large!) pages are devoted to ‘The Manuscript Sources of the East Frankish Sequence and Notker's Liber ymnorum’, which describes some thirty-five sources (Bower invents his own sigla for them; one needs to keep a bookmark in the table listing them, p. 118). Six provide the foundation for the edition: St Gall 381 and Einsiedeln 121 are complete, the other four are incomplete or fragmentary – Paris 10587, St Gall Vadiana 317, Leipzig 190 and Munich 29308(1. As already mentioned, St Gall 484 gives the melodies alone. These seven sources date from the late ninth and early tenth centuries. Bower also takes into account four late tenth-century manuscripts, twenty-three from the eleventh century and one from the twelfth century. Right from the start, Bower identifies slight differences between St Gall 381 and Einsiedeln 121, and there are more in the earliest source of all, Vadiana 317, and the fragments. He filters out variants in the sources up to the end of the tenth century and uses these to assign the later collections to one family or another. This is an important and revealing exercise, and the critical variants should be useful for work on later German collections. Every text variant from thirty-five sources is recorded in the critical apparatus for the edition of each sequence (thankfully presented at the foot of each page).
The transcription of the melodies onto the staff presents quite different problems. As already noted, the neumes of St Gall 484 are copied in a right-hand column, their realisation on the staff appears on the left, over the Latin text, with slurs to link the notes according to their grouping in the neumes. In the absence of pitch notation across the whole East Frankish area before the twelfth century, how to decide the pitches? Later sources from the area with staff notation are compatible with the St Gall neumes much of the time but by no means always. One has to reckon with ways of hearing the melodies which differed not only geographically (the early French or Italian traditions, for example) but also over time (the above-mentioned St Gall 546 is an obvious case). Bower takes a down-to-earth approach, usually selecting just one diastematic source which gives a reading close to what Notker might have known, modifying it slightly if the neumes so dictate. Most of the chosen manuscripts are from the East Frankish area: Aachen 13 (providing three melodies), Einsiedeln 366 (eight), Munich 7919 (two), Munich 10075 (seven), Trier 2254 (one), Utrecht 417 (previously transcribed by De Goede, ten). Other sources are from more distant regions: Bologna 2824 and Rome Casanatense 1741 both from Nonantola (one each), Laon 263 from Laon (one), Paris 1105 from Le Bec (one), Paris 10508 from St-Évroult (one) and Paris 13254 from Chelles (one). Nostra tuba has to be transcribed with the help of a related West Frankish sequence, for which Bower uses Paris 1235 from Nevers. For five short pieces the oldest south French manuscripts provide melodies unknown elsewhere. No doubt other editors would have made a different selection, but not, I think, a radically different one. Those who have used Bower's vast online sequence database ‘Clavis sequentiarum’ (cantus.uwaterloo.ca/sequences) will know that for Notker he can have left very few stones unturned.
No source with pitch notation has been found for the melody ‘Planctus sterilis’ (Notker's Iste dies celebris and Benedicto gratias). At first sight one might think Bower's rendering has been printed incorrectly, but in fact he has chosen to reproduce the shape of the melody without printing any stave lines.
One point about the transcriptions is perhaps worth querying. The sign known as the oriscus is still a puzzle to most chant scholars. If it seems to represent the simple repetition of the previous note, Bower transcribes it with a normal note. If liquescence appears to be involved, he gives a special sign, modelled on the St Gall one. I would have preferred to use the special sign in all cases, in case we ever come closer to understanding it more fully. But then, the neumes of St Gall 484 are there for all to see.
Translations of the Latin texts (including Notker's dedicatory letter and the hexameters which Notker sets between the Temporale and the Sanctorale of his collection) start the discussion of each piece in volume 2. Since many sequences take an alleluia as their starting point, the translations give the Latin text and translation of the relevant alleluia as well, if appropriate. Bower's translations do not aim for high flights of poetic fancy but render the Latin in clear, coherent prose. The often arcane allusions and deeper layers of meaning are elucidated in the following notes and commentaries, drawing upon a wide knowledge of patristic texts and biblical exegesis. That the explanations are occasionally rather wordy is hardly a drawback, given the nature of the material and the clarity of the exposition.
The riches of these volumes extend right to the end. There is a word concordance with over 1,400 entries, an index of proper names, another of divine names, a fourteen-page bibliography, an index of sequences by Latin incipit (not just Notker's but all others cited as well), an index of melody titles with classificatory codes to denote their distribution and an index of manuscripts. Bower's hives are indeed well stocked.
My enthusiasm for this magnificent achievement will have become obvious. Calvin Bower has at last provided for these remarkable compositions the edition they deserve. And much more than an edition: a comprehensive exposition of what Notker's creative effort signified, of the intellectual and spiritual world in which it was accomplished and of the musical dimensions of this liturgical poetry. I should not omit to point out that these volumes, by including a fully fledged musical edition, mark a significant new departure among the publications of the Henry Bradshaw Society (henrybradshawsociety.org). It is no coincidence that the Chairman of the Society's Council, Susan Rankin, is herself a musicologist with an unrivalled knowledge of early St Gall chant books.
It bears repeating that Notker would not have composed his texts the way he did if the melodies had not already been ringing in his ears. He wrote many other Latin works, including the famous prose Gesta Karoli Magni, a metrical life of St Gallus, and some office hymns in conventional metre. The longissimae melodiae presented a quite different challenge, which Bower never lets out of his sight. These volumes raise Notker studies to a quite new level, one to which I sincerely hope not only medievalists but also musical performers may rise. I was interested to note Bower's recollection of singing the pieces from an older edition some four decades ago. To scale the celestial heights of Congaudent angelorum chori, to chant the whole history of redemption in Laudes salvatori, is indeed a wonderful experience for any singer. Notker's sequences could enliven many a Mass. Who could fail to respond to the culminating assertion of the Dedication sequence Psallat ecclesia: ‘Hac domo Trinitáti laus et glória semper resúltant’ (‘In this house praise and glory to the Trinity re-echo without end’)? May Calvin Bower's ‘libelli’ persuade us to enter these gates of rich musical as well as scholarly experience.
