Women and Their Sequences: An Overview and a Case Study
2019; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 94; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/704043
ISSN2040-8072
Autores Tópico(s)Libraries, Manuscripts, and Books
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreeWomen and Their Sequences: An Overview and a Case StudyMargot E. FasslerMargot E. FasslerMargot E. Fassler is Keough-Hesburgh Professor of Music History and Liturgy and Director of the Program in Sacred Music at the University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN ([email protected]).PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMorePrefaceFundamental to planning this lecture were warnings from a past president including the suggestion to engage with something particular to my own discipline, best of all from out of recent scholarship. This meant that I should talk about liturgical sources, especially those with music, and their varied contexts, but more narrowly, probably about either drama or sequences, and I chose the latter. As some of my recent work has focused on female institutions, I decided to continue that emphasis, which has led to some new understandings, by joining work on women's liturgies with work on sequences. But first I needed convincing that my topic, the late medieval sequence—fundamental to understanding the Latin Middle Ages in everything from politics to art history—would be unfamiliar to many in the audience. Test probes were revelatory: "What is a sequence?" A Dante scholar said, "Do you mean a sequence of ideas?" and a historian asked, "Are they the shiny objects sewn on vestments?" Enough. I planned the lecture to include an overview with plentiful definitions. For this printed recasting of the lecture, I have retained some of this introductory work. Accordingly, the piece welcomes other scholars into the workshop of the liturgiologist/musicologist, first with the introduction given in Atlanta, followed by overviews of late sequences among select female communities, and closing with an example of sequences written by and for women in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and their dramatic implications as found in one complicated manuscript.The Late Medieval Sequence: An IntroductionSequences are a genre of liturgical chant with texts proper to feasts and seasons, written from the ninth century forward, even in some places and for religious orders after the reforms of the Council of Trent in the mid-sixteenth century. They were sung first and foremost in the Mass liturgy, after the alleluia and before the intoning of the Gospel of the day, heralds of the Word; in many French-speaking regions sequences were called prosae, and both terms are used in scholarship today.1 If the manuscripts are any indication, sequences were intensely cultivated for centuries, and could move from out of the Mass liturgy, to the Office, especially to vespers, to processions, and to plays.2 Their texts migrated into books of hours and other devotional materials, frequently translated from Latin into the vernacular in later centuries, and their most famous melodies were incessantly reset. Their texts were parodied, as in the much-discussed Gamblers' Mass of the Carmina Burana, which mocks the widespread late eleventh-century Easter sequence, "Victime Paschali laudes."3 They are through composed, that is, the music is different for every strophe. But generally, with the late sequence, each strophe divides neatly in half, and the music repeats nearly exactly for that particular strophe, therefore begetting a double-versicle form, with music unfolding like this: AaBbCcDd, and so on.Regular sequences, the later ones to be discussed here, are composed in rhyming, syllable-counting, accentual Latin verse, with the most popular melodies of the genre frequently contrafacted.4 In the most skillfully made examples, the poetry is filled with tricks and puns that work upon the innate intertextuality of the form, each half strophe in a musical relationship with its "twin." The characteristic rich rhyme, which sometimes uses four syllables, as well as the propensity for intense assonance, makes each work a kind of game, which is part of the playfulness of the style and the joyful character of the genre as a whole. The playfulness extends to parody and contrafact, as many works make references to other more popular preexisting sequences.5 Sequences were generally not sung during Lent, although places with high Mariologies might make exceptions to this rule for Marian feasts falling in this solemn season. The music theorist Grocheio, writing in Paris in the late thirteenth century, compares the singing of sequences to the ductia: "But the sequence is sung in the manner of a ductia, so that it may lead and give joy";6 ductia, according to Grocheio, are measured songs with a beat, works arousing the spirit to move decorously "according to the art they call dancing (balare)."The rich rhyme of "Templum cordis," for the Purification feast (2 February), perhaps by Adam of Saint-Victor, is wonderful to read (silently or aloud) or to sing, as can be heard in its final half strophe; the nineteenth-century English translation provides an example of how scholars once wrestled with the rhythms and rhymes of late Latin verse; many aspects of the poetry don't make it across the linguistic divide with elegance.7 The sheer musicality of the poetry, while not evident in most English attempts to recreate the aesthetic, can be masterful, most especially as developed by the poet Adam of Saint-Victor and his school in the twelfth century.8 Indeed, to be able to read and sing late sequences is a reward of knowing Latin. Every eight-syllable trochee has a caesura after four syllables, and a major emphasis usually falls on the third syllable of each of these poetic cells. There are numerous internal rhymes as well in poetry of the Victorine school, as can be seen in this sonically loaded half strophe. But the final line of each section of this half strophe shifts dramatically, especially regarding the cadence, which has the accent on the antepenultimate syllable. This can also cause a major shift in the ways the internal rhymes work too, for as the reader/singer goes ever faster down a hill of interplay, the sudden shift provides a screeching halt, and then the process starts up again, in this long racetrack filled with hairpin turns and inevitable speed bumps. With just another syllable, the line "Unda tui rivuli" would have kept up the previous pattern of internal and end-rhyme schemes, and it has been constructed to underscore emphatically the fact that it does not.The greatest melodies for late sequences mirror the nature of the texts in their cellular and modular characters. Here, too, the cadences of the final lines of strophes have different qualities from the other lines of individual strophes, although final lines "rhyme" with frequent repeated notes proceeded by the dip of a single pitch. One of the most essential features of the style is the sophisticated way in which the best of the poets traffic upon deliberate interplay between the musical and poetic dimensions of the works, creating a sonic counterpoint. In fact, sequences, especially as Adam and the Victorine school conceived of them, made their meaning primarily through the interaction of words and music within their liturgical contexts. Comprehending the full range of their sophisticated intentions is not possible without interdisciplinary exploration; to "read" a Victorine text is to know only half of what it is about. In the example below (the final half strophe of "Templum cordis"), the strongest accents are in bold. The encounter with sound is profound and runs on two tracks, one textual, the other musical. But beyond this, this sequence is part of a family of texts deliberately interrelated through the use of a common melody, a melody probably written by Adam, and charged with Marian meanings through quotation of the well-known hymn, "Ave maris stella."9 The multiple settings created an interdisciplinary exegesis that explores the threefold system championed by Hugh of Saint-Victor, all sung within the context of the liturgy.Fons signate sanctitateRivos funde nos infundeFons hortorum internorumRiga mentes arescentes Unda tui rivuli;Fons redundans sis inundansCordis prava quaeque lavaFons illimis, munde nimisAb immundo munda mundo Cor mundani populi.Example 1. The musical setting of the final half strophe of "Templum cordis," from the Victorine sequentiary, Paris, BnF, MS lat. 14452, fol. 196r (early thirteenth century).View Large ImageDownload PowerPointDigby Wrangham's attempt to capture the style (his Latin transcription was somewhat faulty) demonstrates how difficult it is to make the system work in another language, especially a Germanic one:Fountain dulySealed as holy!Outpour for usRivers o'er us:Fount of showersFor hearts' flowers!Water everFrom thy river To all thirsting souls impart:Fount o'erflowing!Through hearts going,Grant ablutionFrom pollution:Fountain, givenPure from heaven!From earth, whollyImpure, thoroughly Purify man's impure heart!10Late sequences provided sharp musical and textual contrasts with the melismatic settings of the long-established Carolingian proper chants of the Mass, the great majority of which have prose texts chosen from the Psalms, and even with the syllabic chants of the Mass ordinary. No wonder the strictest and most liturgically minimalist of the new religious orders in the twelfth century, the Carthusians and the Cistercians, in general, did not incorporate them into their worship. They were especially beloved by Augustinians, cathedral canons, and Dominicans, with the Franciscans lagging far behind their counterparts. An emphasis on the common life was underscored by those who loved the sequences and composed new ones. As a result, sequences have a great deal to say about the religious life and its nature and often about the political concerns of institutions and of regions. Late sequences sound somewhat strange when performed in an utterly somber mode; joy is seemingly built into them. They are, in one basic sense, alleluia commentaries rendered in the heart of the Mass liturgy.11 The late thirteenth-century "Dies irae," which came to be sung in the Requiem Mass, is the exception that proves the rule. Here the force of the text and music switches gears and creates a statement of terror, which to medieval ears would have been especially powerful as it is so different in character from its counterparts in the late medieval repertory.Indeed, sequence repertories define what liturgiologists call a "soft spot." In this context, the sequence is a place in the Mass liturgy where changes might be made fairly rapidly and many new works could be incorporated or composed on the spot. Sequences were abundant from the late ninth century, marked by regionality. The genre was ever in transition, changing in style and character, providing some of the richest evidence that survives from the entire Latin Middle Ages for understanding what particular communities cared about and how they defined who they were, as community members sang these texts face to face in choir at Mass on major non-Lenten feasts throughout the church year, sometime in alternation with soloists or with the organ. Lori Kruckenberg has explored the ways in which the melismas from which the genre grew and the long association sequences had with bursts of textless melody fit into festal occasions and the architectural contexts of performance.12It is the ability of religious women to find voices for their own liturgical expression that interests me in this lecture, and I would argue actually that when it comes to the twelfth through the sixteenth century, the sequence as copied, as sung in the liturgy, and as prayed as a devotional text offers one of the best opportunities in the entire period to observe women, as editors, compilers, copyists (texts and music), illuminators, poets, composers, and, above all, as liturgists. Because sequences provided a soft spot, once we can find the books women possessed and contributed to in one dimension or another, we have a new way of looking and listening. Indeed, there is a wealth of information about late medieval religious women that we have not taken sufficient notice of and can now begin to uncover to greater degrees than in the past. In many ways, religious women used their sequence repertories to bring to life a variety of differing representations of historical circumstances from the Bible and saints' lives and, in some cases, could probe deeply into mystical meanings and human emotions, all within the heart of the Mass liturgy.Many of the characteristics reported in this study of sequences hold true for male religious houses, too, but here I am investigating the ways in which female communities related to their sequence repertories, across several centuries and across religious denominations. When it comes to sequence repertories written by and for women religious, there is much to do, and this lecture offers a beginning. At present, there is no catalog of the sequence manuscripts and of ordinals and other sources that specifically mention repertories of sequences that belonged to female institutions, including double houses.13 Preparing such a resource will be a complex task, but some of us have begun, much aided by the work of colleagues who patiently study the scribal habits and production of female monastics in many regions of Europe.14 The database of the manuscripts assignable to women's houses found in Munich at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Frauenklöster—Handschriften und Inkunabeln), curated by Eva Schlotheuber, is an example of how to proceed when dealing with major collections.15 It is clear that some sources remain hidden in a variety of archives, and not yet identified or published; catalog entries, when they do exist, are too often either faulty or incomplete, especially regarding whether we can discern if a manuscript belonged to a female house. And then there are the many sequence texts in prayer books, a vast group of sources not discussed here, but awaiting further study.Nonetheless the early evidence is provocative. It can be suggested, even in this early stage of the work, that individual women and female communities were especially attracted to sequences and wanted them in their liturgies just as much, in some cases even more, than their comparable male counterparts did. Much of the study of women religious and their liturgical practices has been of the Office, and rightly so, so rich is the evidence. But this particular genre of choral song, aspects of which were shaped by the women themselves, provides a view of the female presence in the liturgy of the Mass. Most studies to date have focused on the second half of the Mass liturgy, but the Foremass, with its sequences, readings, and other chanted works, is vitally important as well and offered women a significant degree of control as well as major choral participation in various aspects of the rite. Scholars need to decide eventually what this varied presence meant to women's understanding of the liturgy as whole as well as to their spirituality both as communities and as individuals. Those engaged in sound studies can look to the sequence for many ideas not only about what women heard in community and how they played their ongoing game of alternating verses of psalms, hymns, and sequences in their choirs, but also about how their sounds went out, and when, and what it meant to people outside the community and inside when the bell was rung to indicate that the sequence was being sung, herald of the Gospel that it was, perhaps the most ostensibly joyful moment the liturgy had to offer.As sequences and sequence repertories were always in flux, changing over time along with the communities who recorded them and sang them, to dig into their many layers and extract the evidence the repertories provide leads us into the very midst of religious communities and their most vital concerns. Sequence repertories provide understanding concerning how the past was encountered and reshaped, and more generally what attitudes were to the creation of new things and the retention of older ones.Three Benedictine CommunitiesBenedictine sequence repertories in the twelfth century bring to the fore two of the most famous women of the era: Heloise, abbess of the Paraclete, in Thibaudian lands near Troyes; and Hildegard, magistra of a newly founded Benedictine priory on the Rupertsberg, not far from Mainz. The women were contemporaries, Heloise dying in 1164 and Hildegard in 1179; both were in charge of instituting liturgical practices for newly founded female religious houses; fortunately we know a great deal about both of them, but few scholars realize, perhaps, that both women were deeply devoted to sequences as a genre of liturgical music. Because both women were reformers and builders of something new, they could indeed have merely adapted what was inherited. They didn't; rather they cared enough about their sequences to seek out new ones and to commission or to compose some themselves.It is difficult to say who did what and when in regard to the surviving liturgical texts and music from the Paraclete. Abelard said in the preface to the first installment of hymns that he wrote for the abbey that he did so at Heloise's request, incorporating her liturgical ideals. He also references a little collection he made of hymns vel sequences, which Chrysogonus Waddell thinks was a collection of both kinds of pieces that no longer survives.16 Several scholars have worked on the substantial collection of hymn texts that survive by Abelard, including Waddell.17 They are highly variable in their forms and meters and tied to the liturgical goals apparently shared by Abelard and Heloise. If what Abelard says about her platform can be trusted, Heloise worked in this regard as a commissioner of chants for the liturgy celebrated in the house where she was abbess. The fact that the melodies don't survive for any but one of these over one hundred hymn texts constitutes a major loss. Heloise praised Abelard's exceptional melodic gifts, and his hymns must have been a treasure trove of song. His six planctus bear out her testimony; they are brilliantly complex both textually and musically; and the argument can be made that he wrote them for her, to console her, but seemingly, too, to console himself.What of their sequences? We are in better circumstances in some ways when it comes to the sequences written for the Paraclete, or, more accurately, chosen to be sung at the Paraclete. The liturgical contexts of the pieces can be found in Waddell's edition of the ordinal, and this record of the liturgy proves, in spite of its late date and its copying in French, that the genre was extremely important in the liturgy designed by Abelard and Heloise. It is hard to say how many of the unusual sequences found in the repertory were actually composed by Abelard (or even by Heloise); only one—"Epithalamica"—is now attributed to him by all scholars who work on this material.18 But the repertory is significant enough to suggest that indeed they were highly attentive to the genre and that some of the pieces they chose related to the lives of women at the abbey and were sung in charged dramatic circumstances doubtless designed by them, for they are unique.In "Epithalamica," an exquisite and very long work, which is formally a cross between sequence and lai, the bride is the beloved of the Song of Songs who has lost her groom and rediscovers him in persona Christi on Easter morning; through this work the handmaidens become a chorus sometimes singing in alternation with the bride, until all join in a paragon of praise. Strophes 7 and 8, chosen as an example from this long work, are interrelated by the repetition of their striking and tuneful music, making a pair, in this unusually structured piece, the final couplets of which create cross relationships. The playfulness of the language is striking, and the piece is wonderful to perform. The melodies for the two strophes in Example 2 below are the same, including the couplets that close out each, the places where the cross relationships occur (in bold and italics). These repetitions create a relationship in the couplets between morning/day and the transformation of the sorrow at night. William Flynn has placed the sequence back into the context of the Easter liturgy at the Paraclete, and he says, of its functioning, "At the Paraclete, the choice of "Epithalamica" for the Easter sequence was inextricably tied up with its identity as an institution both created and maintained to address the specific requirements and special ministry of women."19 Through a new work such as this, the women became actors in a dramatic setting of their own acceptance and design; the incorporation of this piece into their practice was a decision of their own making. This is not the only place in their liturgy where the texts and their dramatic situations may hold references to the lives and circumstances of the first abbess, Heloise, and the founder, Master Peter. In this example, the letters reference the unfolding melodic units, beginning in this long work with A and proceeding through to O.Example 2. "Epithalamica," as transcribed in Fassler, Anthology for Music in the Medieval West, 71.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointText Melody7a. Iam video quod optaveram, I7b. iam teneo quod amaveram; I7c. iam rideo quae sic fleveram, I7d. plus gaudeo quam dolueram: I7e. Risimane, flevinocte; J7f. manerisi,nocteflevi. J8a. Noctem insomnem dolor duxerat I′8b. quem vehementem amor fecerat; I′8c. dilatione votum creverat, I′8d. donec amantem amans visitat. I′8e. Plaususdie, planctusnocte; J8f. dieplausus, nocteplanctus. J[I now see what I had desired; I now hold what I had loved, I now laugh when before I had cried; and I rejoice more than I mourned. I laughed in the morning; I wept in the evening; at morning I laughed; in the evening I wept. // Pain created a sleepless night that love had made severe; the pledge increased with the delay until the lover came to the beloved. Clapping by day; a lament by night; by day clapping; by night a lament.]Hildegard can be viewed not as commissioner, as was perhaps the case with Heloise, but rather as a liturgical poet and composer. Most of her chants were created for the Divine Office, including, I would suggest, her play Ordo virtutum. Her chants for the Mass liturgy are few—one alleluia and one kyrie—but then there are her sequences: she wrote eight long and highly wrought works, themselves constituting one of the most important genres in her compositional and poetic activities, and over a tenth of the whole: for the Virgin Mary; for the Holy Spirit; for saints of local stature, Disibod, Rupert, Matthias, Eucharius, Maximinus; and for Saint Ursula and the eleven thousand virgins, the latter a feast achieving major attention in her region at the time. This repertory is another testimony to the importance the genre held for her and her community.20Hildegard's chants survive primarily in two collections, both of which were copied on the Rupertsberg during her lifetime.21 A comparison of the writing down of these chants with those found in a local chant book from the early thirteen century demonstrates the great difference: the Hildegard manuscripts arrange the neumes precisely so the pitches can be read even by someone who doesn't know the chants beforehand. The chants in Engelberg 103, by contrast, written, we believe, in nearby Sponheim, are unheightened, or adiastematic, and required the use of memory for their recovery.22 It is fortunate that we have Hildegard's chants in this other form of notation, for if we didn't, the melodies could have been lost. Abelard's planctus, for example, are very difficult to transcribe securely for this reason. The style of notation used for Hildegard's chants is far from unique in her region, however, as study of several twelfth-century fragments now surviving in the Hessisches Hauptstaatsarchiv in Wiesbaden demonstrate; it is not possible to tell at this point from what monasteries these fragments originated.23 Hildegard's sequences are not in the style of the regular sequence, with its rhyming and accentual patterns. Rather, her works are written in a style closer to the earlier medieval sequence, created in a kind of heightened prose, with irregular numbers of syllables in the strophes as they unfold, but still with a kind of double-versicle form prevailing and discernable to greater and lesser degrees depending on the piece. Her provocative use and reuse of particular melodic cells provide numerous opportunities for text painting, and these come to the fore dramatically the more thorough a singer or choir's familiarity with a given work is.24The most famous of Hildegard's sequences is "O virga ac diadema" for the Virgin Mary, a chant that nuns in Hildegard's monastery after her death claimed they had heard her sing as she walked through the cloister, illumined by the Holy Spirit. Barbara Newman calls it one of Hildegard's finest works.25 Hildegard weaves her most important ideas about the cosmos into this text, a work perhaps to be proclaimed in community, making the liturgy, through her composition, a place for teaching and learning as well as for prayer. Whereas some of Hildegard's sequences stretch and transform the double versicle form described above, "O virga" is fairly straightforward and readily comprehensible in this regard, as the music pairs the meanings of each half strophe: in this poem Mary refreshes and transforms the cosmos through the floral song of the Son, and the new music sounding from her womb allows for humans to join temporarily in the angels' song from which they were once excluded by Eve.The work is much recorded, and it is easy to hear how different in style this work is from the twelfth-century rhyming accentual verse in the sequence attributed to Adam of Saint-Victor or even to Abelard, and yet the two "halves," if you will, of each strophe are paired through the musical setting, although nothing is precisely measured here. Hildegard builds a hermeneutic of praise into the singing, so the community becomes what it proclaims through her composition. Other composers do this too, as the sequence lends itself so well to this strategy, especially when there are several new and interrelated works that can play out across the entire year, as with Hildegard's newly composed works, and as with those composed by the Victorines in Paris. But the difference is that Hildegard emphasizes the recreation of the cosmos through the Virgin's newness, in the Mass liturgy, and she works out this theme like no other liturgical poet from the Latin Middle Ages did. Through this text (strophe 2 of "O virga ac diadema") the idea of the Mass ritual and the central place of every human partaker was emphasized and explored through female voices, adding a new dimension to the unfolding of the more traditional texts surrounding the sequence. In these proclaimed images, the resounding universe achieves sacramentality through the voice of the choir.262a. Ave, ave de tuo ventre alia vita processit qua Adam filios suos denudaverat.2b. O flos, tu non germinasti de rore nec de guttis pluvie nec aer desuper te volavit sed divina claritas in nobilissima virga te produxit.[Hail, hail! From your womb came another life, the life that Adam stripped from his children. O flower, you did not spring from the dew, nor from drops of rain, nor did an airy wind fly over you, but the divine radiance brought you forth on the noblest bough.27]Example 3. Strophe 2 of Hildegard's sequence "O uirga ac diadema."View Large ImageDownload PowerPointBarking Abbey, a Benedictine house once flourishing on the outskirts of London, has bequeathed very few liturgical manuscripts and no sequentiary. But the outline of the sequence repertory can be established through the early fifteenth-century Barking Ordinal, a much-studied source, which records the incipits of liturgical texts and many rubrics about performance as well, as Anne Yardley and Katie Bugyis have pointed out in recent work on the ordinal.28 It also contains a detailed calendar, with feasts interactive with the altars of the church. A chart of the sequence repertory (Table 1) at Barking provides a different kind of evidence from the repertories of Heloise and Hildegard, for both their institutions were founded in the mid-twelfth century. Barking, on the other hand, was claimed by the nuns to be ancient, its founding going back to the seventh century; the nuns ignored its refounding after the Danish invasions, and clearly they used their liturgical practices to substantiate this claim.29 Layers of development as they designed them are present in this record of its early fifteenth-century practices. Most of the work on the ordinal has focused on the Divine Office and on the richly described ceremonies associated with the unfolding of the feasts and seasons. The sequence repertory is less studied, by comparison, and rightly so, as we have the incipits of the pieces only, no music, and often not even enough of the text to distinguish what piece it might be in catalogs of possibilities; it is also not possible to tell the natures of unique works that do not survive. Still, the incipits alone provide a great deal of evidence about Barking and its sequences.Table 1. Barking Sequence Repertory Compared to Three English Traditions, Winchester, Twelfth Century, and Sarum (3 Sources), Earlier and Later1IncipitFeast in BarkingAHWinCotCalSarum1 Salus eternaAdvent I53:1YesYesYes/Yes/Yes2 Benedicta es celorumEve of Nativity54:252NoNoNo/No/Yes3 Nato canunt omniaNat. 153:24YesYesYes/Yes/Yes4 Celeste organumNat. 254:1NoYesYes/Yes/Yes5 Caste et incorrupteNat. 340:04YesNoNo/No/NoCeleste organumSun. within the Oct. 6 Magnus deusStephen7:221YesYesYes/Yes/Yes7 Novo rituJohn NoNoNo/No/No*8 Celsa pueri
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