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THE CALLIGRAPHY OF MEDIEVAL MUSIC MUSICALIA MEDII AEVI 1 Collection dirigée par Olivier Cullin John Haines (ed.) The Calligraphy of Medieval Music 2011 (cid:9) Mise en page réalisée par M&O © Brepols (cid:11) Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. D/2011/0095/165 ISBN 978-2-503-54005-4 Introduction This volume of essays would not have appeared without funding from the Canada Research Chair (CRC) programme. Around the year 2000, when I was working at a small college in the South of the United States, but actively looking for a research position, Canada instituted a – so far as I know – unprecedented programme of academic chairs. These were actually one-time renewable grants: five plus five years for junior appointments, a so-called Tier II (CRC II), and seven plus seven for senior hires. The objective was, as recently explained to us in a conference celebrating ten years of the CRC programme1, to prevent the traditional ‘brain drain’ of Canadian academics to foreign lands and to secure productive young researchers for the future. The scheme appears to have worked. At a time when academia suffers internationally along with many other institutions, Canadian universities still maintain a healthy international research profile. Although it was cut short following the 2008 financial collapse, the University of Toronto’s Medieval Music CRC II came to me in 2002 as a great privilege. Among other things, it provided funding for a project called Nota Quadrata, devoted to the origins of the so-called square notation of the Middle Ages. In the early days of thinking about the Nota Quadrata project, it occurred to me that a volume of contributions by senior scholars dedicated to the question of the origins of square notation might be useful. That is how this volume came to be. When I first approached Michel Huglo with the idea in the early days of 2005, he kindly offered to help identify the appropriate experts on different musical scripts of medieval Europe. At the time, Michel was a remarkably energetic eighty-three years of age, and the first of no less than four volumes culled from his half century’s work on medieval music had just appeared.2 As I write, Prof. Huglo will celebrate his ninetieth birthday on 14 December 2011; this volume celebrates that occasion. In May 2005, he and Albert Derolez led a session devoted to late medieval music writing under the aegis of Nota Quadrata, at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Following this, thanks to Huglo and another eminent medievalist, David Hiley, I began the work of organizing a conference entitled ‘The Calligraphy of Medieval Music’, which eventually took place at the University of Toronto’s Trinity College on 21-23 September 2007. Most of the contributors to the present volume participated in that event. In addition to the CRC II, major funding for 1. « Canada Research Chairs: Thinking Ahead For a Strong Future », Conference series, Ontario region, November 24-25, 2010, Metro Toronto Convention Centre. 2. Huglo  and Huglo , p. 1-3. DOI 10.1484/M.MUMA-EB.1.100918 8 John Haines the conference was provided by Gage Averill, then Dean at Toronto’s Faculty of Music. As director of the university’s Centre for Medieval Studies, and later, Provost of Trinity College, Andy Orchard also provided personal and financial support. Other sponsors included the University of Toronto’s Book History and Print Culture Programme, the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations, the Fine Art Department, Victoria University and the University of Toronto Art Centre. I am especially grateful to Meghan Forsyth and Keith Johnston, then graduate students at the Faculty of Music, who helped me in the organization of the event. This volume was already in the planning stages before the conference took place, and was conceived essentially as a written version of that event. I must confess that its publication has not been an easy task. If it had not been for Olivier Cullin, this volume would surely not have seen the light of day. I am deeply indebted to him for all of his work from 2007 to 2011. Prof. Cullin worked hard to defend the merits of the proposed volume to the Belgian academic publisher Brepols, who accepted it late in 2008 as the first in their new music series, Musica Medii Aevi, headed up by Cullin himself. Publishing academic books is a difficult and generally tedious experience, especially books consisting of essays by different authors. During the two years it took for all of the contributions found in this volume to come in, I was fortunate to receive the help of Kate Helsen, then a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Toronto. I am grateful to Kate for helping me in the thankless work of re-formatting essays and making corrections of many minutae. I am also, of course, grateful to each and every one of the contributors (and even to a few who bowed out at the last minute), and especially to those who submitted their essays on time, carefully formatted following Cullin’s guidelines for the series. It is common in prefaces such as this to summarize each contribution at length, but this seems to me superfluous. The chronological ordering of the volume is transparent, and follows the schema that Michel Huglo, David Hiley and I originally planned for the volume. The following essays aim at surveying the dominant types of music writing in Europe in the Middle Ages, with a focus on writing style and technique. Part one opens with general considerations: writing (Huglo), layout (Derolez) and the traditions of Ethiopia as a helpful comparison with the medieval West (Haile). Part two treats early medieval notations from England (Rankin), Brittany (Deuffic), Spain (Zapke), Italy (Baroffio), Northern France and Sicily (Hiley) and Aquitaine (Huglo). And part three continues this chronological journey with the late medieval notations of Chartres (Fassler) and Cambrai (Haggh), and those of the Carthusian (Cullin), Dominican and Franciscan orders (Huglo); special topics within late notations include ‘ligatures’ (Haines), the production of the manuscripts of Guillaume de Machaut (Earp) and, finally, the Ars nova (Busse Berger). Needless to say, individual topics are approached from each author’s singular point of view, which is hopefully what makes this volume interesting. My choice of the word ‘calligraphy’ may seem odd to some – as it did to one of the contributors who wondered out loud during her talk what exactly I meant by ‘calligraphy’ – and warrants a brief explanation. ‘Calligraphy’ means beautiful writing. This best describes musical notes. Musical notation may relate to sound, and we may be tempted at times to extract long lost sounds from it or to extrapolate other meanings from it; but it is, first and foremost, a graphic phenomenon, the product of specific processes of writing and bookmaking. The word ‘paleography’ (or ‘palæography’, following an archaic practice along the lines of ‘Mediæval’) carries with it the baggage of centuries of scholarship. From Jean Mabillon to the monks of Solesmes, the study of medieval writing has a distinguished