Medieval Music Lessons

“It’s not rocket science, but it is if you’re the first person to do it,” professor Thomas F. Kelly said about the medieval advent of musical notation during “Capturing Music: Writing and Singing Music in the Middle Ages.” The lecture-performance event, which took place Sunday, was a collaboration between Kelly and the Blue Heron Renaissance Choir. Kelly, a music professor who teaches the popular Gen Ed course “First Nights,” took his First Church audience through the processes that took Europe from “ut-re-mi” to polyphony, a musical texture Kelly describes as Western music’s greatest contribution to the world.

Kelly began his lecture with the pre-notation years of liturgical music, during which songbooks acted solely as compilations of lyrics. He then related the Italian monk Guido of Arezzo’s invention of staff notation, which, according to Kelly, led sight-reading to “spread like fire.” With the advent of Gregorian chant, notation grew more sophisticated, moving closer to the system we know today. In examining this evolution, experts have been able to trace back modern symbols to the seemingly inscrutable medieval lines and lozenges that were the subject of Kelly’s discussion. “You have to think of these tiny units building up to enormous structures, in the way of Gothic architecture,” Kelly said. However, as he noted, some of the earliest notation present in medieval songbooks is so complex that it has yet to be decoded.

Throughout the event, members of Blue Heron, a Cambridge vocal ensemble well known for its historically informed performances of early music, illustrated Kelly’s points by singing several incarnations of the Easter hymn “Alleluya Pascha nostrum,” with each version changing dramatically in response to the corresponding musical style of the time. Beginning with a simple, monophonic rendition of the piece, Blue Heron then performed versions composed by the 12th-century polyphonist Léonin and the ars antiqua master Pérotin that were noticeably more complex, incorporating increasing numbers of vocal lines.

In addition to the polyphony provided by Blue Heron, the audience was treated to images of the medieval songbooks which were the original hosts for songs performed during the event. These songbooks are incredibly precise, often featuring entire pages taken up by a single word of chant. “This is going to be a long mass,” Kelly joked, looking at one such page. The songbooks, which Kelly translated from Latin for the audience, also frequently employed specific instructions about the number of performers demanded for each piece; one called for “at least three, but not two” singers to each line. “Good for those smart people who brought this music to parchment,” Kelly said. “It still lives.”

Kelly’s upcoming book, “Capturing Music: The Story of Notation,” expands on the topics covered in his lecture and will be released with a corresponding album of performances by Blue Heron. Such releases are somewhat uncommon in the world of classical music—medieval music sees relatively few performances compared to other genres due to its demanding nature, according to Kelly. “Why don’t we hear this more often? Probably because it’s very difficult to sing. They had the very best singers in the world at the cathedral in Paris, much like we have here this afternoon.”