Folk Songs and Material Culture in Medieval Central Europe: Old Stones and New Music (Studies in the History of Daily Life 800-1600) 9782503541327, 2503541321

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Folk Songs and Material Culture in Medieval Europe

STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF DAILY LIFE (800–1600)

Editorial Board Gerhard Jaritz, Central European University David Austin, University of Wales Lampeter Claude Gauvard, Université Paris 1 Christian Krötzl, University of Tampere Svetlana Luchitskaya, Russian Academy of Sciences Daniel Smail, Harvard University

Previously published volumes in this series are listed at the back of the book.

Volume 6

Folk Songs and Material Culture in Medieval Europe Old Stones and New Music by

Nancy van Deusen

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

© 2019, Brepols 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/2019/0095/76 ISBN: 978-2-503-54132-7 e-ISBN: 978-2-503-55838-7 DOI: 10.1484/M.HDL-EB.5.106075 Printed in the EU on acid-free paper

Contents

List of Illustrations

vii

Acknowledgements ix Preface xi Chapter 1. Introduction: Scenes from Life in Budapest

1

Chapter 2. Herder and his Influence: A Background for Conceptualization

17

Chapter 3. Historiography of Ideology: Conceptual Bases for the Collection of Folk Song

37

Chapter 4. Understanding Herder: Plato’s Timaeus and the Medieval Conceptualization of Sound as Material

57

Chapter 5. Aggregation: Cultural Properties Exemplified

83

Chapter 6. Old Stones, Useful Chunks: Working with Material

99

Chapter 7. Methodology and the Question of ‘Types’

121

Chapter 8. A Passion for Collection: Folk Music and the Sequence

147

Chapter 9. Transcription, Translation, Transmutation

159

vi

Contents

Chapter 10. Nationalism and Folk Music

175

Chapter 11. Conclusions

191

Appendices 211 Glossary 243 Bibliography 249 Index

275

List of Illustrations

Figure 1, p. 5. Map of pre-World War I Hungary. Figures 2 and 3, p. 16. Roman stones reused as ‘chunks’ (Budapest and surrounding countryside). Figure 4, p. 73. The concept of a ‘thicket’ of material, undergrowth, or forest recurring in an illustration for the opening lines of Mandelbaum’s recent edition/translation of Dante’s Inferno, frontispiece. Figure 5, p. 74. Virga as basic music notational figura for delineating particular sound, as well as accent. Figures 6–10, pp. 75–79. Figurae from Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fonds latin 1118, set of figurae, fols 104r–114r. Figure 11, p. 81. Recently discovered sketch of stage set for per­formances of nineteenth-century operas in the Ludwigsburger Schlosstheater. Figure 12, p. 95. Florence, Biblioteca Laurentiana, MS  Pluteo 29.1, fol.  383v (c. 1238), facsimile edn by Luther A. Dittmer, 2 vols, Publications of Medi­ eval Musical Manuscripts. Figure 13, p. 96. Florence, Biblioteca Laurentiana, MS Pluteo 29.l, c. 1238, from Hans Tischler, The Earliest Motets (to circa 1270): A Complete Comparative Edition (detail). Figure 14, p. 115. Transcription of Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fonds nouv. acq. latin 1235 (c. 1120), fol. 199r.

viii

list of illustrations

Figure 15–17, pp. 116–18. ‘Chunks’ in transcriptions by Kodály, published 1916. Figure 18–21, pp. 183–86. Transcribers’ priorities; transcriptions of instru­men­­ tal music. Figure 22 and 23, pp. 234–35. Two examples of recent Budapest concert pro­ grammes.

Acknowledgements

I

n 1989, just as Hungary was entering into a transition of astonishing proportion, László Dobszay travelled to Texas to attend an annual meeting of the American Musicological Society, at which I gave a paper on the subject of the reception of Aristotle’s Physics and its influence on the illustrative ‘ministry’ discipline of music in the thirteenth century. Professor Dobszay invited me to Budapest to work in the Széchényi National Library as well as the microfilm archives of the Musicology Institute, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, meeting me upon arrival at the airport with flowers and subsequently attending to every detail of my stay in order to make the best possible use of my time. Since that most productive period of study in Budapest in 1990, I  have returned nearly every year for the past twenty years, often at least twice a year. For László Dobszay’s generosity, unfailing collegiality, friendship, and tireless enthusiasm for music as well as for research, and that of his colleague, Janka Szendrei, together with their assistants and students, I  wish to express my heartfelt appreciation. They, together with their late distinguished colleague, Benjamin Rajeczky, have persisted, often through very difficult political and financial circumstances, to build an invaluable microfilm archive of central European Latin liturgical manuscripts, as well as to cultivate a community of scholars who have continued to work in close association with one another. Perhaps it could take place only in Budapest, initiated amongst Hungarians. To my colleagues in Ethnomusicology and Folk Music at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences I dedicate this work in gratitude for the community they have offered me, the openhearted acceptance of me and my presence year in and year out in the institute, as well as the encouragement they have unstintingly given me. They have shared the history of their disciplinary methodology, their conceptual bases, their persistence and dedication to long-term projects, again, often carried out in difficult circumstances.

x

Acknowledgements

I thank as well my medievalist colleagues within the Department of Medieval Studies, Central European University, Budapest, especially János Bak, György Geréby, Gerhard Jaritz, József Laszlovszky, and István Perczel. Their encouragement, collegiality, and friendship, as well as the many graduate students who have been most helpful in discussion topics related to nationalism and identity within central Europe in the Middle Ages, have been of immeasurable help during the several years of this research project. My research in Budapest as well as in the University, City, National, Cathedral, and Strahov Monastery Archives, Prague, and the University Library, Jagellonian University, Kraków, have been supported by two Fulbright Grants to Budapest, one for the study of liturgical manuscripts, the other for connections between the Western Middle Ages and central European folk music; an American Philosophical Society Grant for archival research with the collections of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences; and research funds for faculty research from the California State University, as well as Fletcher Jones funds for faculty research, Claremont Graduate University. I express, as well, my gratitude for the research funds attached to the Benezet Chair in the Humanities, School of Arts and Humanities, Claremont Graduate University, which I hold. Finally, I express my deepest appreciation for the support and encouragement of my late husband, Dr Elisha B. van Deusen III.

Preface

T

he purpose of this book is to deal with the present through the attainments of the past, namely through a system of analysis using terms and concepts taken over from centuries of thinking and writing during Latin Antiquity, through what is commonly known now as the European Middle Ages, enduring relatively unchanged well into the late nineteenth century. This is a programme of education in which all disciplines use the same conceptual language, but each component part not only fits well together (the concept of modulatio), but all disciplines — those dealing with sound substance in communication and those dealing with substance in terms of measurement — reinforced one another. A given topic was consciously viewed through a disciplinary window; all disciplines were necessary. Music, using the unseen materials of sound, time, and motion, was of utmost disciplinary importance, since music was not only subject to measure; it could be, and in fact by its nature required, that it be experienced. It therefore made plain the basic principles of the world, as they were made manifest in sound. Music bridged the gap between material and measurement of that material, and the unseen material, which could also be measured, of sound. In its measurement and expression of motion, music exemplified life itself. What became more and more clear to me as I worked through the types and recordings of the Bartók Archive, Budapest — a project of over two decades — was that this basic principle of education, and articulation concerning the use and properties of sound, was abundantly manifest in the musical material with which I was dealing. This book charts these connections, and it is hoped that its reading audience will include not only historical musicologists and medievalists, but also a much wider audience of ethnomusicologists and those interested in cultural studies. I have laced my report with narratives of doing field work in Budapest within a research project, believing, as I state,

Preface

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that archives and libraries are not only repositories of culture, they are themselves indicators of that culture. My experience reading manuscripts containing the medieval Latin sequence from c. 900 to c. 1600, in its immense manuscript transmission all over the European continent, has made me very much aware of the differences in library and archival culture from Palermo to Rouen, Barcelona to Kraków.1 The system of education described above endured so many centuries — until the very recent past, in fact — because it trained people to do useful things such as read, write, speak well and with appropriate manner suitable for the occasion, deal with reliability and understanding with numbers and diagrams, understand something of the physical world in which we make our lives, and lastly, importantly, read and write music notation, as well as use their voices, as exemplary of all of the disciplines. It comprised a training that prepared them to move, by and large, with ease from teaching to administration, and to courts of law and government.2 But, one also notices that this system of education in which music stood at the forefront, not only exemplifying the sciences but also communication, is far more unified and logically planned than the fragmentation of the sciences and disciplines today. For example, one not only is a ‘historical musicologist’, one is a ‘medievalist’, specializing further in what has become known as ‘chant’, or ‘polyphony’, or ‘music theoretical treatises of the Carolingian Period’, or ‘treatises between 1260 and 1300’, or of the ‘Ars Nova’ or ‘Ars subtilior’, or ‘the sacred music of Machaut’. Increasing specialization is, of course, not limited to historical musicologists. It is to be hoped that a potential audience for this volume will have some interest in breaking down boundaries between historical studies and ethnomusicology, and — although central Europe and the Hungarian archives in particular have been used as exemplary — breaking down boundaries between European studies and the rest of the 1 

Richard McKeon, in a seminal paper on the topic of ‘The Organization of Sciences and the Relations of Cultures in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries’, has provided the following summarization of this point (p. 151): ‘The culture of a people is discovered in its arts, its institutions, and its lore — in things made, things done, and things said. The culture of a time is the culture of peoples in contact and communication. Culture is a qualification of peoples and an order of “learning”, and learning is both a process of education and an organization of sciences. Sciences are organized and developed in cultures, and cultures are known and characterized by sciences.’ 2  The system outlined above constituted the foundation of the educational system of the British colonial rule, for example, in India, also for the reasons given above: it prepared one to move, as need and opportunity required, from career paths in education, administration, legal service, or statecraft.

Preface

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world and their music traditions. For these expressions of how unseen substance can be described and dealt with, although transmitted for centuries in the Latin language, are not by any means limited to European music culture. Further, ethnomusicology and historical musicology have much in common — common priorities, such as ‘form’, historigraphical trends, one after the other, during the course of the twentieth century, and, in the specific cases of folk song and the liturgical Latin sequence, a passion for collection. I would very much hope that those who are most intimately connected to the folk song — the Hungarian researchers themselves — would find new methodological input for the work in which they are engaged. This has seemed to be the case in terms of response to seminars that I have held within the graduate programme in church music, Franz Liszt Academy, as well as at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences; but it is to be hoped that reciprocity between medieval music structures set forth by Benjamin Rajeczky, Walter Wiora, László Dobszay, and Janka Szendrei, as well as myself in the present study, will prove to be a fruitful comparative methodology that transcends the arbitrary borders of time and space. Finally, the issues presented as priorities within the thought and writing, especially concerning music, of the European Middle Ages, seem to me to be the very issues that are being cogently, searchingly, discussed in ethnomusicological research today. These include the primacy of place, the nature and propensities of unseen substance — its materiality — the crucial differences between sound substance, the experience of sound, and its representation, as well as the overall question of the representation of the largely unseen substance of culture itself. The input and stimulus of recent publications within the discipline of ethnomusicology, and especially from personal conversation and correspondence, is only partially indicated by footnotes and bibliography; the overall impact of the analytical dynamism of this field has been great, and it is to this audience, as well, that I address this study.

Chapter 1

Introduction: Scenes from Life in Budapest

T

he Roma hawk their wares in the underpass leading to the bus depot where I meet the bus that is usually patiently waiting to take me to my apartment two miles away. Each seller has a tone for the product to be sold, whether peppers, radios, underwear, or tomatoes, and each differentiates his offering from the other with what I recognize instantly as a psalm tone. The radio seller in his nasal voice intones a figura that I recognize as the plagal Lydian, that is, cd ffffff, and so on, so that the concrete underpass reverberates with what seems to me to be a sonorous tapestry — with individual figures all woven together, yet each one clearly differentiated from those of the other twenty Roma intoning their wares. The impressions of individuation are as clear as that of overall totality, just as the Hungarian language seems, overall, familiar, even as I am constantly aware of countless differentiae which, in spite of their differentiation and recognizable outlines, are not yet, for me, meaningful. One learns a language, both all at once as a sonorous landscape and part by part, significant outline by meaningful outline. Remarkable, I say to myself, as I walk briskly to my bus. Much of my experience of Budapest as a city has to do with travel by bus, by subway, and by foot through long city blocks, and over the bridges — the socalled ‘Chain Bridge’, the Elizabeth, the Petöfy, the bridge by the Margit Island; each has a distinct personality, and from each bridge one has an entirely different view of both the city and the Danube River. One also, day by day, uses each one of the bridges for an entirely different purpose; in my case, it was the chain

2

Chapter 1

bridge to go to work on folk song, and back again to a lecture at the university and, perhaps, for dinner at the Academy of Sciences; the bridge at the Margit Island to go to the baths, to take a walk with a friend, and so on, back and forth, sometimes three or four times a day. The bridges not only often limit one’s rate of progress — the Danube is non-negotiable, it would seem, and owning an automobile does not make much difference, since the bridges stop one, quite literally, in one’s tracks — but they also arbitrate professional and personal life in this city. Most of my travel through the years to the university in Pest where I have held seminars, to the Franz Liszt Academy where I have also taught, to the libraries and archives where I have studied Latin liturgical manuscripts, Latin commentaries on Aristotelian texts, as well as the recordings and transcriptions of Hungarian folk music made by Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály — now more than three generations of continuing folk music researchers — and back again to my apartment, has been solely in my own company, that is, I have travelled by myself, together, of course, with some of the approximately two million inhabitants of the city of Budapest. In my own company, then, I have a chance to observe others around me, as well as the city itself, how it was made and how it has continued to survive materially, to register my observations, and to think my own thoughts. One day I got off the bus to walk to the archive to do what I had planned to do that day, namely select and listen to, transcribe, and compare some of my transcriptions with other transcriptions, as well as with some of the recordings Bartók made of the Székely laments in what is now part of Rumania. Suddenly, near the cathedral, on the most prominent piazza of Buda’s castle hill — actually the one spot in the city that all of the tourists visit, and where they all constantly intermingle, often to the accompaniment of a visiting North American high school band — I saw a small, old, shrivelled-up, Roma man playing a homemade zither-like stringed instrument. Folding himself over his instrument, he played the closest approximation to (as the archivists have designated it) an ‘old-style, small-ambitus, lament’ that I had yet heard. One of my colleagues from the Eötvös Lorand University mentioned to me that he himself was a paradigm of what is ‘Hungarian’, namely, that he was a composite, a walking grab bag of ethnic origins, predominately Allemanisch. ‘Hungary, after all, is a nation of immigrants, all the way back to the tenth century. Actually, what is “Hungarian” is an exceedingly small component of my so-called ethnic heritage’, he said, as we walked together to hear jazz played by a Budapest group that had enjoyed a reputation for improvisation for the past thirty years. All older men by now, they — a virtuoso bassist and leader of the group, a saxophone player, a percussionist, and a clarinetist — held forth in

Introduction: Scenes from Life in Budapest

3

one of the many Budapest pubs that featured and played ‘real Hungarian jazz’ nearly every evening of the year. But the composite nature of Hungarian life and society, outwardly exemplified by names, caught my attention anew each time I returned for a longer stay in Budapest. Here is a further example of what I came to regard as a Hungarian reality. My landlord and I shook hands as we parted, having struck a deal, that is, that he would see that I was provided with hot water in the kitchen, a functional washing machine as well, and that, in return, I would pay the rent. ‘I know that your first name is Gábor’, I said. This fact did not distinguish him from a considerable number of the male residents of Budapest. ‘But what is your family name?’ ‘MacKay’, he said, to which I replied, ‘But that isn’t a Hungarian name.’ ‘What is a Hungarian name?’ was his reply. Other vignettes from life in Budapest illustrate what is at stake here, how highly contrasting, and even recognizably contradictory, qualities are juxtaposed within a culture, and, eventually, how cultural properties become manifest in the music produced within this culture. Here are two of these vignettes. A  small, but energetic, middle-aged woman in a faded red housedress, an apron, coarse stockings, and high, black field shoes with stout soles was walking with determination and self-possession down the street. Her hair was carefully pulled back in a bun, and although her hands were rough and obviously used to what one could imagine to be constant work, she walked with a lightness, almost a jaunty air. She was carrying a basket with a towel that hid its contents from view, and as she walked along the underground walkway, leaving the metro station, I saw her disappear around the corner into the most fashionable shopping district of Pest — a ‘peasant’ woman walking briskly past Hugo Boss, Budapest. A second situation follows. We had gone to the baths at Heves and were strolling on the tree-lined promenade. A  ‘folk group’ composed of several adults and children were playing zithers, a homemade cello-type of instrument, an accordion. I eagerly took down what they were playing, which seemed to me to be an interesting composite of Roma, North African instrumental, and music that was clearly, quite benignly and thoroughly conventionally, tonal. A real hodgepodge, I thought. The group was wearing what they apparently considered to be native costume, that is, white shirts, black skirt-like pants, vests with brightly coloured flower embroidery, and black hats with wide brims — costume that one recognized as ‘folk attire’ whether the wearers of the shirts and pants were selling pottery on the castle mound in Budapest or, as was in fact the case, playing instruments on a Sunday morning in Heves. Afterwards, upon inquiry, I found out that the local high school teacher in the town of

Chapter 1

4

Heves had brought a group of his students and townspeople together, and as individual projects, they had composed the music we heard. These were people in towns, motivated and, to a certain extent, guided by a local teacher to place together chunks — almost as various-sized bricks — of recognizable sonorous material, to play, on a gloriously warm Sunday morning, for other townspeople, wearing dress typical of the eighteenth-century middle class. So were Kodály’s rigid categories of town, country people, authentic folk substance that could never adhere to the professional classes dissolved when placed alongside the reality of Hungarian town life. Hungarians, it would seem, have always lived in towns. The scene at the end of the twentieth century was, no doubt, a repetition of such a scene at the end of the nineteenth; I could imagine how Sunday mornings at the baths in Heves had not changed much for centuries, except for the architecture of the bath houses. Burned down in the 1970s, the buildings had been reconstructed to retain their towers, but instead of the perceived elegance of typical European late nineteenth- / early twentieth-century spa architecture that one finds frequently, as well, in Germany, Switzerland, and other countries of central Europe, as for example, in the Bohemian forests and on the Croatian sea coast, the towers and buildings had been built to reflect, self-consciously, what was perceived as ‘medieval’ Hungarian-‘Transylvanian forest’ buildings. Why was the ‘forest’ important anyway?1 What was wrong with town life, given the reality of the demographic past in central Europe that was — and is — comprised, for the most part, of towns, placed at periodic, consistent intervals all over this part of the world? What recognizable pieces were being shaped and placed together one by one in order to effect a totality? Each characteristic that gave individuality to each piece had a mythic, structural, delineative spareness. Further, these vignettes present the possibility that central Europe, specifically Hungary, eludes both recognizable categorizations and conventional polarizations. The map of pre–World War I Hungary gives a clue: this region is composed of chunks, of discrete, contiguous regions by which the entire country, as it appeared at that time, is divided up into nearly equal-sized segments (Figure 1). There are no outstanding boundaries, and there are no formative, delineating features, such as dividing mountain ranges or sea coasts with harbours. This is a country that is hard to recognize if one is looking at maps of the six1 

We meet the Transylvanian forest of course in Kodály’s opera Székely Fono in which the figures and action can be described to take place in and out of the forest from the beginning of the opera to the end. The topic of the forest will also constitute a recurring theme throughout the present study.

Introduction: Scenes from Life in Budapest

5

Figure 1. Map of pre-World War I Hungary. Map: author.

teenth century that concentrate solely on Hungary with no external points of reference. The Danube River as it moves through Hungary had never, until recently, provided a natural boundary, separating Hungary from other, surrounding countries. Further, until the last generation of the nineteenth century, Hungary had no major cities and no prominent universities. The great central European medieval universities and surrounding university cities — the Charles University in Prague, the Jagellonian University of Kraków, and the University of Vienna — are all quite obviously elsewhere, and students from Hungary gathered at these universities, almost from their inceptions during the last generation of the fourteenth century.2 In defining the importance of place for this region of central Europe, then, it is important to keep in mind that Hungary, in the centre of Europe, has prac2  This statement must be made with reservations since universities were already founded in the late fourteenth century in both Pécs and Óbuda, as well as in Bratislava (Pozsony). Cf. Vetulani, ‘Les Origines et le sort des universités de l’Europe centrale et orientale fondées au cours du xive siècle’, especially pp. 160–61, as well as Gabriel, The Medieval Universities of Pécs and Pozsony.

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tically no natural borders. This situation is ideal for a gathering of material properties that are modular and that essentially present a wide compass of possibilities. Rather than, as has been stated, that in the Hungarian region ‘there are naturally no relevant ties with the musical types of related peoples’,3 just the opposite appears to be the case, namely, that Hungary is not only an immigrant land, it constitutes a region in Middle Europe where people of all societal circumstances have had an opportunity to come into contact with one another and live with each other on a day-to-day basis. These identifiable groups of people have also come in contact with a large variety of music-textual materials, not only during the disruptive second half of the twentieth century, but previously for hundreds of years. This available reservoir of music-textual substance — a material available to use — includes cantus, sequences, and hymns, as well as metrical psalms. The sequence, for example, was apparently sung longer in what constituted the Hungarian territory, broadly defined, than elsewhere in Europe, as evidenced by the large sequentiaria or collections of sequences of the late fifteenth century. The material stockpile of which we are speaking also includes Roma instrumental music, Protestant chorales, hymnody composed in the nineteenth century that found its way all over the European continent and was taken to, and brought back from, the great North American evangelistic revivals of that century. Even ‘John Brown’s Body’ with Hungarian texts is to be found in this amazing material collection that, nevertheless, is identifiable, part by part, each component maintaining its identity, to be found in the rich collection contained in the folk music archive in Budapest. This collecting of varied and diverse characteristics is not only to be found today; it has been the case since the period(s) known as the Middle Ages. The Hungarian landscape is a gentle, even, landscape, full of minor, yet always related variations, as one leaves the Danube and moves by train through the wheat, corn, and sunflower fields northward into what is today Slovakia. Each part, in a sense, is a variation on itself. The subtle changes become more pronounced as the hills, plains, farms, and vineyards of Hungary, then Slovakia, turn into the forests of Bohemia. One considers borders and defining characteristics and realizes that, as with the music, so, as well, for central Europe, new constructs must be found that avoid conventional representations such as ‘layers of influence’, ‘pure, natural, authentic folk substance’, and bipolar constructs such as ‘old and new styles’,4 but, rather, take into consideration the multiplex, 3  4 

Paksa, Népdaltípusok, p. 37. ‘Old’ and ‘new’ styles are discussed on the basis of ‘form’; see Pesovár, ‘Les Types de la

Introduction: Scenes from Life in Budapest

7

yet modular, construction of this totality. We are speaking of a body of music and texts that constitutes a thoroughly composite culture. The culture itself constitutes a composition. The configuration of the landscape, a language largely constructed in the later half of the nineteenth century as a composite of medieval Hungarian words, Slavic, and German, full of diacritical markings — of accents and umlauts — a people, since Antiquity truly composite, all of these aspects are of importance in describing this culture as one attempts to move away from the rigid ideological standpoints that have provided an accepted frame of reference for the past century. In other words, the complexion of one specific geographical situation, or the concept of central Europe itself, is the overriding factor, of more importance than chronological or ideological considerations. Geography is more important than the distinction between ‘art’ and ‘folk’ music, ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture — in fact, it renders this distinction inappropriate.5 An example of this is that musical life in Budapest is focused upon central European music; central European composers’ works overwhelmingly constitute the musical content of an exceedingly rich concert life, year by year, season by season. One is able to hear, in Budapest, works by Franz Liszt that are rarely if ever performed elsewhere, and the same is true, understandably, for the works of Kodály, especially when these works involve the Hungarian language as text. Not only is place a decisive factor, but the talent for, will to, and habit of aggregation is an utterly basic societal principle in central Europe. A distinctive relationship to space and the propensity to aggregate can be observed on a daily basis in Budapest, removing distinctions between city, town, and countryside, as well as obliterating distinctions between educational, professional, classes, the so-called proletariat, the middle class, and the aristocracy. A common characteristic that is a relationship to space and the propensity to aggregate within danse folklorique hongroise’, who states that in the delimitation of old and new style, one starts out with the analogy of ‘form’, actually exactly the thesis that has been presented throughout the twentieth century within musicological research on the sequence. It will be observed in several contexts throughout this study that not only does one notice a curious continuity of conceptual structures and explanatory constructs between folk song and sequence research, but these explanatory constructs have remained in place for the last century, essentially unchanged, unquestioned, and unmodified. One reason for this is that in both cases, sequences and folk song, it is necessary to deal in some way with an almost staggering volume of material — the large mass of individual examples. Similar if not identical constructs have accordingly been considered to make sense of, and organize, the sheer quantity of these examples. 5  Geography was also the most important medieval consideration in describing both origin and difference, a subject to be treated in more detail below.

8

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this space also, interestingly, to a large extent, removes pronounced distinction between people who live alone and those who live in families. The woman who is standing behind my seat in the bus, waiting to arrive at her stop, does not move forward in order to occupy the empty space that would have been available to her, in line with the door soon to open. Rather, she occupies, as much as possible, the back of the seat in which I am sitting. I serve somehow as a magnet for aggregation, and we overlap bodily at several points, for example, my shoulders when I am sitting in a normal position rest against her back. I notice this; she does not, or at least appears to regard our proximity as normal. These particular circumstances, of one person, such as myself, appearing to attract an entire group, occurred over and over again during my daily experiences in Budapest, as well as elsewhere in Hungary, as we will see. Still another example of aggregation came from the researchers in the folk music archive who are together most of the time. Each day they bring food from the lunch they have cooked for their families, or for themselves, the night before, and at noontime they reheat their lunch by stovetop or microwave oven, all sitting by turns at the table and chairs in a small room adjacent to the kitchen. There is a hum of quiet conversation each day, and the odour of ten different varieties of food, as it is being warmed, wafts through the rather gloomy, underlit halls of the institute. These colleagues have been working together now for decades, and the notion that one could pursue one’s research in lonely isolation, working by oneself, is nearly inconceivable. One day, after four years of my regular returns to the archive, one of my colleagues there, in a confidential tone, asked me who had put me up to my work and with whom I was doing my project. She wondered what team was behind me, giving me cues and urging me on. It was quite unimaginable to her that one could work on one’s own, delineate the parameters of one’s project by oneself, and pursue the project to its conclusion. It is not so much that space has been at a premium in Budapest; actually, the institute occupies an impressive building, and the researchers’ offices are large and commodious. Rather, we are speaking here of a propensity to aggregate that would appear to be an internal property of this particular place, circumstance, and human complexion. These are just a few of these difficult-to-access features of what one can identify as cultural distinction and which differentiate one culture from another in perceptible ways. Further, these cultural properties reveal themselves slowly, in time, and in the motion of daily life lived in that particular part of the world. How does all of this influence music in this part of the world? Much, in every way, since music itself accesses and makes plain the most profound aspects of what is commonly designated as culture, but is not easily defined. In

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every case, in the chapters that follow, a research orientation will be presented that has been prevalent in the past century, followed by the music itself, and as a conclusion, observations that constitute a medieval point of view, expressed in descriptions of the compositional process. These are the voices, and carefully thought-out and articulated opinions, from the past that can, with profit, be considered today. The priorities seen clearly during the course of normal life and work in Budapest, the composite society with which one is confronted day by day, the capacity and appetite to aggregate, and the importance of place itself were, after all, medieval priorities, discussed with intensity and insight. Where does ‘folk music’ come from? What are its origins? Why is folk music important, and why has it constituted a field of study unto itself throughout the twentieth century? One finds spare, mythic images, topics, and structures, such as Orpheus, the mouthpiece and communicator of substance, so present and so important in the past, but recognizable in the present as well.6 We meet Ossian, too, repeatedly — a shadow figure, appearing to make a point that must be sought.7 This study of musical situation and culture in central Europe, using the resources of the Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest, seeks out identity — for a nation, for individuals, for a geographical situation, and, ultimately, for the music that serves as the most reliable and basic disclosure of that identity. Music always serves as the most direct access to a cultural situation, as was pointed out by Augustine many centuries ago.8 Music is also indispensable for understanding basic principles themselves and how these principles operate. Several of these will be presented and discussed: First, that geographical situation outweighs any other consideration, including class. Secondly, that peoples and music contain internal properties and propensities for movement, habit, and aggregation, as well as potential for actualization, development, and completion, fulfillment, or perfection. Thirdly, a musical culture, though a composite composed of many characteristic parts, is uni6 

The manuscript transmission of the Orpheus myth during the course of the Middle Ages fills a substantial volume. As is the case for all mythic structures, a decisive, delineative outline is always present, with differentiating details that vary from one case to another. The point of the Orpheus structure, that is, the search for a successful unification and reunification of word with substance, best illustrated in the unification of syllable and tone, must be sought out and understood by the reader or listener. 7  Ossian as a figure will be discussed below, as related to the works and mentality of Herder. 8  Both De ordine and De musica are of essential importance. See my articles on ‘Music/ Rhythm’ and ‘De musica’, as well as van Deusen, ‘Roger Bacon on Music’.

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fied; that is, the distinctions between so-called ‘art’, ‘popular’, or ‘folk’ music are arbitrarily imposed primarily for ideological reasons. All of these features are important topics of discussion in writings (to be identified much more precisely) of the so-called Middle Ages.9 Explanations of fundamental issues of material, nature, composite/composition, the compositional process itself, and the dichotomy between ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ are all issues that were discussed from what is known today as Late Antiquity to at least the end of the eighteenth century. These issues can be put into service to set up a core of investigative ‘tracks’ with which to describe and understand a particular cultural milieu, such as the one we will be specifically addressing, that of central Europe, and the Hungarian cultural region in particular. It is this area that will be defined and discussed in order to show that both the questions asked and the answers received, for example, for the topic of material in the thirteenth century, are important and illuminating, not as historical pursuits in what has been regarded as ‘history of ideas’, but, rather, as a rewarding and fruitful line of investigation in its own right. We are not here visiting an old curiosity shop of discarded notions that have been finally and forever replaced by modern and postmodern insights but, rather, are taking into consideration hard-won mental gains and carefully worked-over problematizations. Mental tools, expressed problems, and possible argumentation were all acquired, both by dint of effort and by the arduous acquisition of language skills that afforded the translation of essential texts into Latin that had been available only in the Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew languages. In other words, we are interested here, not in placing together historical chronologies and, ulti9  The comparative method in historical studies, in which two cultures removed in time and place are brought together for comparative purposes in order to gain a reciprocal understanding of both by means of this comparison, is well known; for example, Lafitau, Moeurs de sauvages amériquains comparées aux moeurs des premiers temps, in which the ‘savages’ of North and South America were compared with the early Greeks and Romans, as well as Fustel de Coulanges, ‘De la manière d’écrire l’histoire en France et en Allemagne’. Fustel de Coulanges’s Cité antique, one of the early and most important works involving this method, has been reissued in a German edition, Der antike Staat; the Cité antique was followed by an extensive re-examination of this method by Marc Bloch and Fernand Braudel (Gemelli, ‘Réflexions sur une ambivalence analytique’; cf. Raulff, Ein Historiker im 20. Jahrhundert, especially pp. 246–48). The methodology followed here, however, is not comparative but, rather, utilizes the insights of medieval writers to explain observable phenomena of the present, keeping in mind both the ubiquitous nature and longevity of what could be designated as a medieval thought-framework, articulated at least well into the eighteenth century, and of use as an analytical structure, as well as accompanying vocabulary of terms, today.

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mately, narratives, thereby, to a certain extent, distancing ourselves from the past (hence finding it difficult to take the past seriously), but, rather, in using insights that can be made available to us in order to understand a mentality, a musical milieu, a cultural situation.10 Rather than either consciously or inadvertently colonizing the past, we will respect its mental culture and the voices that gave it expression. The topics and principles as well as ensuing discussions presented here are also far more useful for explaining the nature of ‘folk song’, that is, have a more obvious connection to a sonorous, as well as performative, reality, than are the explanatory systems that have been advanced during the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Some often-repeated explanations of the folk composition and performance process have been based on a cumulative misunderstanding of Johann Gottfried Herder’s writing, especially the points of view advanced in the Origin of Language, as well as his treatises on both poetry and the soul,11 regarded as unique to Herder and understood as protest against the industrial revolution, particularly, but not by any means exclusively, within German-language literature.12 What Herder actually wrote is quite different from its outcome, namely, a field of ethnography-folklore in which ideological viewpoints comprise a structure of unquestioned assumptions. Examples of these ideological constructs include the progressive-evolutionary basis for a search for ‘origins’ — in this particular case the assumption of, and search for, ‘Finno-Ugric layers’ — hierarchies of folklore as expressions of class conflict 10  Marc Bloch came to a similar point of view by regarding history in general and the Middle Ages in particular as filled with an arsenal of tools with which to work in the laboratory of the present, with the conceptual and experiential material of the present, i.e. in his case, the two World Wars and, especially, the German occupation of France. See Bloch, Apologie pour l’histoire ou métier d’historien; and Raulff, Ein Historiker im 20. Jahrhundert with repeated allusions to the present as a laboratory for the experimental science of the historical discipline, pp. 24, 66–70, 80–81, 83, 92, 98, 161, 165–67, 171–72, 178, 192, 205, 212, 245, 269, 306, 369, 386, 418, 430, 434, 453. 11  See the discussion below concerning Herder’s Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache which must be read in conjunction with his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit. Cf. Herder, Werke, ed. by Brummack and Bollacher. Herder’s reading audience, of course, would have been well acquainted with both Plato’s Phaedo, as well as Aristotle’s De anima, a common and previously shared background that has diminished and all but disappeared during the course of the twentieth century. One brings one’s own background to Herder, a background that in many cases could not have been intended by the author, with his past, not our present, as a background for his discussions. 12  See Hädecke, Poeten und Maschinen.

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and confrontation, and presumed orally transmitted folk music regarded as ‘authentic’ when compared to written composition, categorized as ‘artificial’.13 All of these research directions, for which efficacy, veracity, and worth were seemingly taken for granted by the researchers themselves, relied heavily upon a predetermined ideology, rather than maintaining a basis of observation and communication of what appeared to actually take place within the creative ‘folk process’.14 This, in itself, is an interesting phenomenon, since the writers themselves, who repeated received ideology, often with identical formulation, for an entire century, were certainly intelligent, musical, well trained, and observant. Alternatively, ‘folk music’ can be explained by what are recognizable as essentially medieval topics, including the terminology and discussion of ‘material’, ‘composition’, characteristic features and gestures or figurae, the emotional substance found within and brought to actualization in motion within manners or modes of movement, and the process, as well as possibility, of translation and mutation that occurs when one transcribes music sound materia into notational figurae. Transcription itself is a process that involves transforming musical, sonorous material, or actual sound substance, into the representational, delineatory, and significative figurae of alphabetical letters as observable in written verbal syntax as well as in musical notation indicating the connected tones of a melody. (One should keep in mind that the two words/concepts, letter and notation, were related, therefore, unified within the Latin expression figura. In other words, what is unified in Latin is separated in the English language, an extremely important difference between the two languages and mentalities.) In bringing these topics that are almost commonplace, due to the longevity of 13 

Both ideological constructs can be found as underlying conceptual foundations to Kodály’s Folk Music of Hungary (published first as Magyar népzene in 1937), but are much in evidence elsewhere as well. The goal of research, as outlined by Kodály, and reiterated through all of the editions of his seminal work, was an attempt to come to conclusions regarding function, origin, and form of Hungarian folk music, that is, dating further back than the Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian basin, that is, ninth century. Finding out what Hungarians were doing musically during the Carolingian era is an impossible task, but considering elements of composition common to both ‘folk song’ and ‘musical composition’ (for example, the works of Kodály himself ) during the course of the twentieth century is a realistic project, to be undertaken in the present study. 14  Four generations of researchers were highly observant as well as being, so far as I am able to discern, utterly committed to their work. These ideological stances, however, proved to be an impediment to their observation of the music itself and the conclusions reached. The transcriptions themselves that resulted from all of this activity of song collection and recording throughout the twentieth century constituted a compositional corpus, to be discussed in the following chapter on composition and transcription.

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their discussion, together with actual musical examples, Hungarian folk music has been deliberately selected because of the abundance of material collected over four generations throughout the twentieth century by Hungarian ethnomusicologists-folklorists, as well as a parallel continuity of research literature, continuing to the present.15 The fascinating story of the historiography of this stream of research and writing is included as one of the chapters of this volume. Folk Songs and Material Culture in Medieval Europe exemplifies its own thesis. The function and potential area of usefulness is methodological, that is, in clearly bringing together elements that have been known to distinct and diverse readerships, thus separated. Before the second half of the twentieth century this had not been the case. At least a superficial acquaintance on the parts of most Europeans and Americans who could read — and a passing acquaintance on the parts of most who could not — with the basic principles presented in this volume could have been assumed. Today, the discussion of a topic such as ‘potential inherent within movement and properties within material’ would be significant, even commonplace, only for physicists whose training and interest were focused on material science, historians of philosophy specializing in thirteenth-century Latin translations of Aristotle and the ensuing vast commentary literature on Aristotle’s Physica, or professionals specializing in the Greek classics and their manuscript traditions. This has happened only recently; one needed not to specialize in anything at all to have come into contact with the concepts presented here — and to know where they could be found in more detail — quite as a matter of course. Part of this project, therefore, will be to bring together what is now, increasingly, either a forgotten or neglected heritage or, on the other hand, concepts that are mistakenly regarded as the contribution of the ‘Age of Enlightenment’.16 This present study is itself a composite, a composition, as are the songs it seeks to explain. Another example of a composite can be found in hymnody. Hymns do not come from one single class or level of society. The collection of hymnody contained in any hymnal, medieval or otherwise, bears witness to contributions 15  For a concise overview of this literature, see van Deusen, ‘Crossing Boundaries between Nature and Artifact’. 16  René Descartes is often given credit for originality, whereas he helped himself to what he found or expressed again what was then assumed. Cf. ‘Introduction’ to Dreyfus, Being-inthe-World, pp. 3–4, especially his discussion of Descartes as originating ‘the epistemological problem of explaining how the ideas in our mind can be true of the external world’. Descartes contributed to a long-standing, multivalent medieval discussion of the juxtaposition and equivalence of inner, unseen materia with outer, visible material — a part of a continuous line of thought rather than a point of origination.

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from the aristocracy, from scholars and other professionals, from the bourgeoisie, and often tunes and texts from illiterate members of society as well. They constitute an aggregate from more than one time period, often transcending centuries. It is also telling which hymns are retained, for how long, and which are discarded, and for what reasons. For example, among many, the hymn for Pentecost, ‘Geist vom Vater und vom Sohn’ (Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son) in the version sung most often today, has a text written by Heinrich Julius Tode (1733–1797), with a melody by Johann Georg Stoetzel (1711– 1795), following J. A. Freylinghausen (1670–1739).17 These ‘pieces of music’, as they are called, themselves then constitute not only composites of textual and musical substance, but the writers, as well, are dealing with their own mental stores of, for example, hymns, sequences, chorales, or cantus, a reservoir of impressions, musical tones, theological beliefs, scriptural phrases learned from childhood, ditties, aphorisms, and what not. It is not by chance or fortuitous, unrelated coincidence that the period of joining of all of the elements of the particular hymn cited above, that is, around the end of the eighteenth century, is also the period of incipient folk song collections.18 This repository of hymnody, from many sources, joined together not only into individual hymns, but also into a body of hymnology, so to speak, is like the Roman town of Aquincum just outside Budapest — or for that matter, any Roman town — which was, and still is, constantly reassembled (Figures 2 and 3). Walls were taken out, repositioned, reused, reappropriated; passages were walled up and reopened constantly during the four or five centuries of the importance of Aquincum as a large Roman town (around sixty thousand people at the height of its influence and prosperity). Those who came in touch on a daily basis with this civilization could easily imagine to themselves mental and conceptual building materials that served as analogous to the physical stones round about. So, in this way, they described the compositional process. It is 17 

Cf. Neues Gemeinschafts-Liederbuch, p. 140. I have chosen this particular hymn, but the comments made could be true of many other examples. 18  Cf. folk song collections of the late eighteenth century / nineteenth century either in manuscripts contained within the folk music archives or edited in a series of publications of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, such as Toth, Arias and Songs with their Verses, MS 8063, and Bartalus, Magyar népdalok egyetemes gyüjteménye. An interesting point concerns the variability and development of diacritical markings in the Hungarian language from the second half of the nineteenth century when the language was compiled, its vocabulary enlarged, and its grammar systematized. In this case, the nineteenth-century title of Bartalus’s work contains fewer accents than those included within twentieth-century references to the work.

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with good reason that those living among the building blocks of Roman ruins thought of the compositional process in those terms. Stones were all about. One noticed evidence of Roman building everywhere — and in fact this is true today. The stones or chunks of buildings could be, and were, appropriated for some use — at the disposal of those who could and would work with them.19 One also notices evidence of this process of consideration, appropriation, and conjunction everywhere in Hungarian folk song. There are analogies, as well, in Hungarian names. Alice introduced her husband, László, to me as ‘from a Hungarian family; that is, he is German, Swabian, Moravian, Croatian, Slovakian, Rumanian, and he chooses to claim his five per cent Hungarian as his natural identity, since he himself is living, and before that his family has lived, in Budapest for the last 150 years’. This is typical of Hungarian families. What one confronts, of course, as many others have also noticed and expressed,20 is the need for new ways of dealing with an explanation of ‘ethnicity’, as well as new constructs for designing a discussion of identity. The most vital, expressive, as well as energetic, mental results of the thought life of the Middle Ages can provide us with a vocabulary, as well as conceptual environment, for which one has increasingly sought.

19 

One notices the process of building with self-contained ‘chunks’ like building blocks in Kodály’s opera Székely Fono, in which the composer appropriates melodies from varied and diverse sources. A recent production in Budapest uses costumes from an eighteenth-century upper-class, even aristocratic, milieu, with Biedermeier designs. ‘Ostensibly old’ is the only criterion, it would seem, for ‘Transylvanian authenticity’. 20  Recent works on identity in central Europe abound; for example, Roman and Hofbauer, Transsilvanien Siebenbürgen, as well as a useful collection of essays edited by Wenhart and Zips, Ethnohistorie. One’s attention is also drawn to an issue of Newsweek (September 2000), concerning a ‘redefinition’ of race as uniquely and increasingly ‘typically American’, that is, composite racial identities composed of many national and racial groups. This is by no means uniquely American.

Figures 2 and 3. Roman stones reused as ‘chunks’ (Budapest and surrounding countryside). Photos: author.

Chapter 2

Herder and his Influence: A Background for Conceptualization

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or centuries, the walls, castles, abbeys, and churches built during the period now known as the European Middle Ages provided building material, chunk by chunk, stone upon stone, for new castles, abbeys, and churches. To whom this building material was accessible, either by virtue of ownership or by force, by plan or necessity, the stones of the past became the edifices of the present. And this was legitimately so; did not the Franks, the Goths, the Huns, to say nothing of the Visigoths, the Alans, and all of the other tribal peoples moving into central and western Europe do exactly the same with the great buildings of the Roman past? As the Romans had built their walls, arches, and viaducts, so medieval peoples were builders, prying stones from their places and recombining whole sections of visible building substance. The craft required was not so much in fashioning building material but, rather, in recombining chunks of pre-existent material, and some builders, now, of course, anonymous, did their work of recombination with more competence than others. There was a place for mastery over one’s material — of cool sovereignty — that constituted the power of composition. One sees the results of centuries of recombination everywhere on the continent of Europe, but it is particularly noticeable in central Europe, where financial resources for complete demolition and total rebuilding have not been as plentiful as in the West, nor the destruction of either the French Revolution or the World Wars, for the most part, so devastating. Medieval arches, windows, and walls have been incorporated into nineteenth- and twentieth-cen-

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tury buildings with an almost joyful abandonment of a sense of ‘style’. Available material was to be used, substance was on hand, to be recombined into new composites, with blocks of stone fittingly and appropriately placed together for new purposes. It was not only visible material left from older times, ancient purposes, and the Romans that were recombined into new compositions during the Middle Ages and well beyond. As Isidore of Seville (d. 636) had pointed out — to be quoted repeatedly — as chunks of intellectual material or verses were used by Virgil for his compositions, so both Virgil’s method and the material itself, as conceptual substance, were used by subsequent writers. Virgil’s method of placing one unified section of substance next to the other was consciously appropriated by the early Christian writer Proba, according to Isidore, and, hence, one understood the process of building intellectual-spiritual edifices not as creation out of nothing, but as recombination from what was there, as God had created the heavens and earth from pre-existent substance or material.1 Recently, for central Europe, the ‘Middle Ages’ constituted a stockpile of spiritual, emotional material, an authentic, pure ‘folk substance’ that could be appropriated and certainly should be sought. Heinrich Heine, who, for the benefit, as he himself states, of the French, summarized the Romantic movement as ‘État actuel de la littérature en Allemagne’, only slightly later publishing Die romantische Schule in 1835,2 described the unified priority of the Romantics — 1  This explanation appeared to have veracity and explanatory power and, accordingly, was quoted frequently throughout the Middle Ages, for example by Robert Grosseteste in his commentary on the book of Genesis, and by others as well. See van Deusen, Theology and Music at the Early University, p. 132. Herder, as we will see, also uses this analogy of building blocks; cf. Wirkung der Dichtkunst (Herder, Werke, i, 179): ‘Sowohl Dichtkunst als Sitten der Völker Europas war, damals ein so wunderbares Gemisch und zusammengesetztes Gebäude, daß wir von allen Seiten der Welt Materialien zusammen holen müssen, um den Einfluss des Einen ins andere zu zeigen’ (emphasis is Herder’s; As the Dichtkunst as well as the Sitten of the peoples of Europe were a marvellous mixture, and a placed-together building, so from all of the corners of the world, materials had to be brought together in order to show how one [building material] influenced the other). Dichtkunst, I believe, cannot be translated simply as ‘poetry’, nor Sitten as ‘conventions’, ‘morals’, or ‘ways of life’, being a combination of all three; accordingly, the German terms have been retained in this English summary of the passage. 2  Heine, Die romantische Schule, ed. by Altenhofer, especially pp. 15–16; cf. pp. 221–22. Published as ‘État actuel de la littérature en Allemagne: De l’Allemagne depuis Mme de Stael’ in L’Europe litteraire: Journal de la littérature nationale et étrangère, the German version followed as ‘Zur Geschichte der neuern schönen Literatur in Deutschland’, slightly later expanded into Die romantische Schule, 1835. Heine, in the Foreword to the 1835 edition complains that the publisher had arbitrarily ‘mutilated’ his work, hence his redress.

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in all of their personal diversities and quirks — as getting in touch, above all, with the authenticity of the medieval ‘Folk’.3 These were stalwart, pure, tribal essences, full of emotional vigour and affective substance that could be used as an authentic, potential material for almost any purpose. What purposes these might be were not explicitly stated by Heine, but these implied agendas were to become increasingly specific throughout the century that followed.4 With respect specifically to the German medieval Volk, all of this stood quite in contrast to the French who had had their say, as Heine stated, for some decades, having derived their legitimacy and importance in the arena of European civilization from their connection to Antiquity, specifically Trojan, then Latin, civilization. The Romantics, in contrast, according to Heine, were after genuine folk material that was untainted by classical civilization — Naturvölker — and, in this point of view, of course, drew heavily, either consciously or by that time unconsciously, upon the writings of Herder. 3 

This topic is addressed in numerous contexts in Heine, Die romantische Schule, but see Heine’s Reisebilder, pp. 6–7, in which the various ‘Germanic Tribes’ are enumerated. 4  The literature that deals with the ‘race wars’ of the nineteenth century is significant. See, for example, Weber, ‘Nos ancêtres les gaulois’, with its useful notes, pp. 332–36 (cf. Barzun, The French Race). Although this issue of authentic folk substance was particularly heated during the beginning years of the last century, the issues and agenda outlined in this chapter, that is, the search for, in this case, ‘Gaulish ancestors’, has not in the least diminished in recent years, as is evidenced by publications that appear on a regular basis, such as James, The Franks, published in an Oxford series entitled ‘The Peoples of Europe’ that includes Christie, The Lombards, Elton, The English, Galliou and Jones, The Bretons, Thompson, The Huns, Wilkes, The Illyrians, Collins, The Basques, Fraser, The Gypsies, Heather, The Goths, Todd, The Early Germans. See also Cunliffe, The Ancient Celts; Heather, The Goths, especially his chapter ‘The Gothic Problem’, followed by an extended section entitled ‘In Search of the Goths’. The writer states: ‘In the nineteenth century, anthropologists cheerfully asserted that race, language, and culture (ways of thinking and doing, moral values, etc.) were essentially coterminous. Thus there seemed to be adequate criteria to define ethnic identity in a straightforward and concrete manner. Any ethnic group would be recognizable by its unique racial, linguistic, and cultural profile. By the middle of the twentieth century, field studies had shown that ethnic identity was not so easy to define, but it was still regarded as an objective category. It could be measured in concrete ways. Research at this point concentrated on assembling a checklist of concrete categories: biological self-perpetuation, fundamental social values, interaction and communication, self-identification and identification by others. The underlying assumption was that, examined under such headings, a particular social group would display a unique set of objective cultural features, the component parts of its ethnic identity, which would distinguish it absolutely from surrounding groups. Each surrounding group would likewise have its own distinctive profile. […] When identity was understood in such a way, it was only natural to write about groups of the past, such as the Goths, as though they too were entities of a very concrete and coherent kind’ (Heather, The Goths, pp. 3–4).

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What had Herder to say that was of such influence and spoke so directly to what one was willing to accept? It would seem that his reading audience was, at that time, fully prepared to receive and understand what Herder had to say. In fact, Herder’s point of departure was not radical but, rather, grounded in subject matter that had long attracted interest and discussion and with which his reading audience was familiar, namely, the topic of what was indeed the substance of the soul, what could be made of this ‘soulish substance’, and how this ‘activated substance’, or, as Herder states, substance that had become belebt, could, as well, be differentiated and defined. In his Wirkung der Dichtkunst, and Vom Erkennen und Empfinden der menschlichen Seele (The Influence and Effect of Dichtkunst, and Knowledge Concerning and the Receptivity of the Human Soul), as well as in other works, Herder begins with what his contemporary reading audience would very quickly have identified as a familiar problem brought up by both Aristotle and Augustine, namely, the substance of the soul. This instant recognition of the commonplace with which Herder begins is no longer available to a reading audience today, an indication of how difficult it is to understand what Herder has in mind at all. His basic assumptions are no longer familiar. The topic of ‘soulish substance’ would have been a commonplace for Herder’s readers because they had also, as a matter of course, within their own education, during what today would be considered high school in North America or gymnasium in Europe, read Aristotle’s treatise on the same subject. Herder, together with both Aristotle and Augustine, wrote treatises on the soul. These treatises also give a basis for what, for each of them, followed, in the case of Augustine, his treatise on music, followed then in turn by his great theological works, for example, on Christian doctrine, faith, the Trinity, and free will. For Aristotle, a discussion of the soul deals specifically with substance in general, invisible substance in particular, and the properties that soulish substance, by its very nature, possesses. Aristotle begins, as does Herder, on the subject of soulish material, stating at the start that finding out anything at all about the soul is extremely difficult, but, at any rate, the material of the soul contained within itself motion, stuffed, so to speak, into space of its own. Aristotle thought that motion constituted the essence of material itself, and soulish substance in particular, and that it was imparted kinesthetically, or mechanically, throughout the body. Possessing and generating motion, the soul is composed of ‘soulish material’ that is, however, not unique to the soul. The soul perceives substance external to itself because the soul is composed of the same physical elements.5 In other words, the soul shares a common substance with what may 5 

The topics, one by one, are discussed in Aristotle’s terse style in De anima, Book i. Aristotle

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be outside of the soul. Furthermore, the soul is not entirely incorporeal. This composite nature of the soul displaces — as Aristotle summarily proceeds to do — the supposedly Pythagorean concept of the soul as an abstract ‘adjustment’ of physical constituents and the view, presented by Plato in the Timaeus, of soulish substance as tumultuous, uncontained, and disorderly material, or hyle, pervading all of the universe, existing everywhere and within everything.6 Soul, then, for Aristotle, is the actualization of a potential, the expression of internal properties, and, furthermore, soul is life, that is, the very substance of life.7 All substance/material is found in nature, having a definite potentitreats of the background to his work, namely, the scope of the work, earlier hypotheses, comments on earlier views, as well as their implied conclusions. In Book ii, he writes concerning the Nature of the Soul, as well as qualities of the soul, that is, nutrition, sensation, types of sense-object, sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, and perception of the ‘whole’ where perception is located and what is perceived. In Book iii, intellection in terms of sense perception, imagination, motivation, and goals are treated — a magisterial spectrum of topics, with key terms often misunderstood, therefore mistranslated, in modern translations, such as that of Hugh LawsonTancred (De anima (On the Soul)). The work, in Latin translation, was of such importance as it was read and discussed by the literate, hence Latin-reading, community, from the thirteenth century to the end of the eighteenth, that it has retained its Latin title, even in English translation today. A further remark: although the Latin translation may, as has been suggested, depart from the most widely accepted meaning of Greek terminology at the time of the writing of Aristotle’s De anima — meaning that is, in any case, extremely difficult to access with any certainty today — the Latin words themselves and their contexts within clusters of other words should be seriously considered, since these words as they are transmitted — becoming, increasingly, terms — were the terms/concepts that were used as commonplaces within a Latin-reading public from the reception of the Latin translation, De anima, in the thirteenth century until Herder’s time. It should also be stated that until the beginning of the twentieth century, or even later, doctoral dissertations at central European universities were often written in Latin, thus the language, as well as what was possible to communicate within it, provided and contained a conceptual structure well into the twentieth century. 6  Aristotle, De anima (On the Soul), Bk i, ch. 4, trans. by Lawson-Tancred, p. 145: ‘It is clear from these considerations that the soul can neither be a harmony nor be in rotation. And, as we said, it is possible for the soul both to be moved accidentally, and to produce its own movement, that is, that which contains the soul can be moved and its motion be produced by the soul. There is no other way in which the soul can have spatial movement.’ 7  Aristotle, De anima (On the Soul), Bk ii, ch. l, trans. by Lawson-Tancred, pp. 156–57: ‘And it is bodies that are most believed to be substances, and of those natural bodies, which are the origins of the others. Now of natural bodies some have life and some do not, life being what we call self-nourishment, growth, and decay. Every natural body, then that partakes of life would be a substance, and a substance in the way that a composite is. But since the natural body is still a body of the kind in question, that, of course, which has life, the soul would not be a body […] soul is the first actuality of a natural body which potentially has life’, an expansion of Plato’s dis-

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ality; some substance is capable of being vitalized, and this hard-to-describe vitality maintains equivalence with ‘soul’. One can speak, then, as Aristotle does, of ‘ensouled bodies’, displaying containment, characteristic shape, size, number, movement, and time. This aspect of containment is Aristotle’s most important contribution to an ongoing topic of soulish substance. Further, this soulish substance contains cognition, perception, and belief-states, on the one hand, as well as appetite, wishing, and desire-states on the other. It is this inner, unseen, motivating source, that is, of desire, that constitutes a source of locomotion, or directed movement, for animals, as well as human beings. In other words, desire or appetite is inherent, by its very nature, within soulish substance that, although unseen, is nevertheless substantial. It is through this thought process that one arrives at the conclusion that unseen, spiritual, emotional, or conceptual substance is, according to all of Aristotle’s criteria for material, indeed material, and at the same time, life. Soul comprises the material substance that all living beings possess, actually an important point, and one that certainly did not escape Herder’s notice, as he writes of substance that is belebt — enlivened substance. We return, however, at this point, to Augustine. Augustine lamented his primitive, and to his way of thinking entirely unsatisfactory, knowledge of the Greek language. This perceived lack of fluency marked him as a non-Roman, specifically in this case from North Africa, since a Roman of his family standing would have been fully bilingual in Greek, first of all as the result of contact from earliest youth on with a Greek nanny taken into the household specifically for this purpose, and in Latin; a fluency in both languages that was the result of both private life and schooling.8 Even compared to this absolute fluency in the Greek language possessed from earliest youth by his Roman contemporaries, Augustine probably knew Greek quite well enough, and it is a misunderstanding of his protests to imagine that he was ignorant of the language. At any rate, Augustine demonstrates, especially in his treatises on both cussion of ‘soulish substance’ in the Phaedo. See van Deusen, ‘Composite Harmony: An Aspect of the Conceptual Background to the Problem’, in Theology and Music at the Early University, pp. 113–26. 8  We read of this bilingual training, which Quintilian advocates in his Institutio oratoria, ed. and trans. by Butler, i.i.12–15. But bilingual education was not unique to Rome. Budapest, for example, until as recently as the first generation of the twentieth century was a bilingual Hungarian-German city, and the strategy for achieving this was precisely the same as that indicated by Quintilian. In Budapest, German nannies were engaged so that children would grow up speaking fluent German even before they attended school. Schooling then, as in Roman society, reinforced the dominant language, that is, at this time, Hungarian.

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soul and music, that he shared many of the same preoccupations as Aristotle, and he expresses these topics and his opinions on them in ways that either renew or conclude Aristotle’s arguments. One reason for this is that, in a sense, the topics Aristotle treated were, in fact, the only topics worth considering, so basic to an understanding of the seen and unseen universe, both within and without, they were. An overt similarity between Aristotle and Augustine is the manner in which they both choose to provide analogies to, and exemplify, difficult concepts. In placing his treatise on music as exemplary of his treatises on the soul, both by reason of its proximity of writing and because of continuation of content, Augustine was following Aristotle’s way of proceeding. Aristotle, too, placed, in a manner that became a matter of course, a musical example together with a consideration labelled as ‘highly abstract, yet utterly important’ — such as the issue of soulish substance. Just after Augustine has been discussing this very issue, he takes up, in his treatise on music,9 the topic of accent to exemplify what soulish substance is, its containment, making its presence known. Relationship to Aristotle’s ensouled body is not difficult to find in Augustine’s De musica. Accent, pulsus, for Augustine is ‘ensouled body’ — a delimited, self-contained piece of life that contained within itself soulish substance. By experiencing accent, as powerful vitality within the ordered time lapse of music — or as a self-contained module extracted from time as the material used by music — one understood this elusive material of life itself.10 9  Aristotle commonly employs a construct in which the philosophical concept under discussion is exemplified by an example that, in some way, uses or involves either music or a musical person distinguished by a capacity to make music. For an enumeration of these examples, influential upon the study of music, see van Deusen, Theology and Music at the Early University, in which every topic, in one way or another, requires and receives an example that refers to music, either seen or heard, or to the capacity for making and understanding music. 10  Augustine reinforces Aristotle on this subject, as well as others, and renewed interest in, as well as the influence of, Augustine’s works in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries encouraged the translational activity that resulted in multiple translations, directly from the Greek into Latin, of Aristotle’s works. I do not believe that it is purely coincidental that the Augustinian movement, with the foundation of Augustinian houses and the initial reception of Latin translations of Aristotle’s works, especially the Physica and the Metaphysica, occur simultaneously. The relationship between Aristotle and Augustine is also crucial for understanding the question of ‘soulish substance’ and ‘ensouled body’, but how and through which authors and in what language did Augustine have contact with the Philosopher? I am certainly not alone in raising this question, namely, of Augustine’s sources of points of view and the topics he chooses to take up. See, for example, Brown, Augustine of Hippo, p. 84, and Dorrie, ‘Porphyrius als Mittler zwischen Plotin und Augustin’. On the other hand, it was not necessary that Augustine

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A pulse — Augustine’s pulsus — was literally a self-contained piece of enlivened material, simultaneously containing the very essence of material and pre­­senting material as substance in a way that would exemplify three crucial con­­cepts: body as delimitation, soulish substance, and the nature of substance itself. Having settled, then, the questions of soulish substance and its nature, as well as the enlivening power of life within this soulish substance, Augustine, with methodical, systematic thoroughness, takes up pulsus in pattern and repetition, simple pulses, long and short pulses, and pulses containing two, three, four divisions, within the perception of an extended, enlivened entity or body. Augustine writes of a space that could be occupied by a long stroke, a sounding length (a tone sustained by the voice), but which could also be divided into two strokes, or feet. One makes sense of both long and the subdivision into two shorts through the principle of equality. A double stroke could be collated with, and mentally instantaneously compared to, a simple pulse, and two simple strokes could be collected, two by two, together. The human mind ordered this information first into a long stroke, reinforced by the sound substance of the concurrent syllable, followed by two shorter strokes, and so on, as one ordered the recurrence of longer and shorter strokes into three syllables with strokes and four syllables/strokes. The next step was to order the repetitions of all of these pulses into the contained, living body of the verse, versus, which also displayed the qualities mentioned for pulsus, namely, delimited, self-contained substance, or invisible material, and inherent, vivifying motion. Versus, then, too, was for Augustine an ensouled body.11 actually read Aristotle’s treatise on the soul; that is, it is possible that both, to a certain extent, independently had a markedly similar perception of ‘ensouled body’. 11  Cf. Augustine, De musica (PL, xxxii), chapters IV–VII of Book ii: an inquiry into whether and how the sound contained within and aligned with a verse moves by means of the seduction of the ears, with the contingent assertion that whatever sounds is always in motion, and within the space that is occupied by a long stroke. Two strokes, in fact, can occur within the space occupied by one long stroke, leading, finally, to chapter IV and a discussion of aequales, that is, the equivalence made in which two — or three, or four — strokes are related by the memory and ear to the space (spatium) of one long stroke, thus fashioning a coherent succession of strokes. The entity of a verse is perceived because of consistency of quantity (see chapter VII). From these observations, Augustine goes on eventually to write, in Book vi, of unseen, unheard, yet substantial realities. Perception of all of these matters combined true understanding based in experience — therefore involving actual practice — of what had been explained and led one to a comprehension of what occurs within unseen substance. See also a more extended treatment of pulse as a ‘piece of material’, in van Deusen, ‘Music/Rhythm’, and van Deusen, ‘De musica’. This textual context, included here, is appropriate to, and useful for, discussions of the important

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All of this might appear to be self-evident, even disappointing, since Augustine had been dealing with the subject of soulish material. Amazingly, from soulish substance, the writer moves to the topic of long and short syllables. But Augustine, in dealing with his chosen priority within music, has also selected what he considered to be the key to the power of music itself, as well as its reason why music exists as the most effective analogy to elusive philosophical realities, such as soulish substance and the material, yet largely unseen, nature of life. Pulse or stroke becomes, for Augustine, ensouled body, filled with substance, full of vitality, the component that, in actualizing material by means of motion, generated life and vitality within musical material. Pulse gave music dynamism. The pulsus as a contained, delimited body was a vessel, so to speak, for life. A succession of pulses within the contained body of a verse exhibited this same power or force. One question Augustine asks: What do ‘feet’ or perceptions of division, separation, and containment, in other words, embodiment, actually do? Why did he take up what one today considers to be ‘poetic’ considerations, that is, groups consisting of accent and repetition associated with rhyme, and the cursus, for example, of what even then could be regarded as ‘outmoded’ hexameters, as the priorities of a musical art and, accordingly, the secret to music’s transformational power? Where is music, and what is the ‘stuff ’ of which it is made, Augustine asks. It is remarkable that this real ‘stuff ’ or musical material, to Augustine’s mind, was contained within pulse, not specifically musical tone, that is, sound contained, not sound itself, although both pulsus and tonus12 serve as analogies to abstractions such as particularity, delimitation, and containment. The use to which he puts this particular concept of delimited, contained soulish substance within the space of one particular pulse was also both remarkable and influential. Further, what is emphasized by Augustine in De musica is repetition, not variation.13 The verity of this soulish substance becomes evident as one engages questions of ‘stuff ’, i.e. materia-substantia, as well as that of the kinesthetic connection between body/soul as viewed particularly by Plotinus in van Deusen, ‘Notions of “Stuff ” in the Middle Ages’, and van Deusen, ‘Ensouled Bodies’. 12  Tonus serves this function, particularly in writing concerning music during subsequent centuries, for example, for writers on music as an illustrative, representational discipline such as Boethius, Aurelianus, Regino of Prüm, and Guido of Arezzo. The particularity of tonus is indicated by a discrete figura. Further, as Augustine states, written figurae are separate from the sound material indicated. In other words, music notation is not itself the actual sound material, a principle that becomes abundantly clear in transcription. 13  See Augustine, De musica, PL, xxxii, col. 1081, in which pes or poetic foot is discussed.

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oneself with it, experiencing its recurrent energy, not just in considering it as an abstraction, although both reflection and experience are necessary to come to understanding. For Augustine, the soul of music — its life and source of power — as well as immense attraction, resided in the embodied soul and was comprehensible as the enlivened ‘soulish substance’ of a self-contained pulsus, or accent, which by its very liveliness produced an attraction that became irresistible, even addictive, in repetition.14 Herder, apparently, was both deeply influenced as well as fascinated by this discussion of soulish substance and incorporated what has essentially been stated, with many variations, into his own writing. In fact, Herder’s thesis in his treatise on Poesie, as well as his primary treatise on soulish substance, brings together significant contributions of both of these authors, Aristotle and Augustine, and, in essence, continues the major project as it was perceived in the late twelfth, as well as thirteenth, century, that is, of bringing about a logical and convincing harmonization between these two authors. Herder’s emphasis as well as manner of formulation on the subject of soulish substance and its containment within Poesie can be regarded as a fusion of the priorities of Aristotle and Augustine, but to an extent transformed by the actual words he uses within the thought-constructs of the German language. This is not an inconsiderable transformation.15 Herder begins with soulish substance, which he, as Aristotle, states is extremely difficult to describe convincingly.16 This soulish substance contains both motion,17 the motion of contraries, as well as the potentiality 14 

This is another topic: it is now, of course, known that substances produce alterations within the substance of the brain, thus at least partially accounting for addiction; pulse, as enlivened material, produces alteration, therefore can be addictive, in the same way, and for the same reason as other substances more commonly regarded as addictive. This reinforces Augustine’s concept of emotional-spiritual material as evidencing all of the qualities of material, even though conceptual substance cannot be seen or heard until it is actualized. 15  In many respects, language substance, i.e. Greek, Latin, German, and English, are incommensurable, their essential differences non-negotiable. This transformation is communicated in the Latin translatio which most frequently signifies metaphor, but not equivalence. Cf. discussion below of transcription as translation. 16  Herder, Wirkung der Dichtkunst, p. 152: ‘wie die menschliche Seele, ihre edelsten Kräfte in Wirkung und im Empfange fremder Wirkung. […] Nichts ist angenehmer und lehrreicher als ein solches Feld und solche Ausbeute der innersten Menschengeschichte; nichts ist aber auch schwerer.’ (German texts have been paraphrased above; lengthier passages are included in Appendix I under the topics addressed.) 17  Herder, Vom Erkennen und Empfinden der menschlichen Seele, in Werke, ed. by Brummack and Bollacher, iv, 329: ‘Bewegung ein fremder Trieb, ein mitgeteiltes fortwürkendes Streben, das

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by its own nature for realization according to that nature.18 Further, Herder explains Poesie (Augustine’s pulsus, versus) as containing soulish substance, indeed, as enlivened or energized by vital soulish substance, giving music as an example, and concluding with a metaphor that Herder’s own reading audience during his lifetime would have recognized as an allusion to both Plato as well as to Aristotle’s impression in wax — commonplace for Herder’s readership.19 die Ruhe überwindet, fremder Dinge Ruhe störet, bis es die Seinige wieder findet. Welche wunderbare Erscheinung ist die Elastizität? schon eine Art Automat, das sich zwar nicht Bewegung geben, aber wieder herstellen kann: der erste scheinbare Funke zur Tätigkeit in edlen Naturen’ (italics are Herder’s). Compare Aristotle, Metaphysica, the thirteenth-century Latin translation by William of Moerbeke of Book iii, chapter II.27, and the well-known topic of automata, such as puppets, for which the outward actualization is seen but the inner sources of motivation resulting in external movement are not apparent, therefore evoke a sense of wonderment, but perplexity as well — an attitude from which an investigational process can ensue, resulting eventually in conclusions that can be contrary to what was initially surmised, namely the ‘scientific process’ of step-by-step experimentation or research: ‘Incipiunt quidem homines, ut diximus, omnes ab admirari, si ita habent quemadmodum mirabilium automata, nondum speculantibus causam, aut circa solis conversiones, aut diametri non commensurationem. Mirum enim videtur esse omnibus, si quid numerorum non mensuratur’. One wonders at the motion that appears to have no source, as for puppets or in the case of eclipses. This passage is preceded by Aristotle’s thesis that fables consist of what evokes wonder or which generate perplexity: ‘Fabula namque ex miris constituitur’ (Aristotle, Metaphysica; cf. Aquinas, In duodecim libros Metaphysicorum Aristotelis expositio, ed. by Cathala, p. 17; see also Dronke, Fabula, p. 3 n. 2). The allusion to ‘automata’ serving as a marker for a common background of acquaintance with Aristotle’s Metaphysica — at least the first few chapters — would have been familiar to Herder’s reading audience, since Aristotle uses this topic to begin his discussion of theoria that underlies all of his treatises, and of which each one of his writings is exemplary. Cf. van Deusen, ‘On the Usefulness of Music’. ‘Automata’ identifies a writer’s acquaintance with the Latin Aristotle and this major concept contained, in one way or another, within all of Aristotle’s treatises, explained as a thought-construct in the Metaphysica. 18  Nature within substantia contains potential for its own actualization; see Aristotle, Physica, ed. by Mansion; for an extended discussion of how this issue was applied to music, cf. van Deusen, ‘On the Usefulness of Music’. 19  Speech (Sprache) as soulish/sonorous substance contains emotional substance (with emotions such as joy/pain arranged in contrast pairs), the substance of memory, and this substance also contains the potentiality for its own actualization. Herder, Wirkung der Dichtkunst, p. 154, beginning with the section entitled, ‘Was ist Poesie?’: ‘Ist Poesie das, was sie sein soll, so ist sie ihrem Wesen nach wirkend. Sie, die Sprache der Sinne und erster mächtiger Eindrücke, die Sprache der Leidenschaft und des allen, was diese hervorbringt, der Einbildung, Handlung, des Gedächtnisses, der Freude oder des Schmerzes, gelebt, gesehen, genossen, gewirkt, empfangen zu haben, und der Hoffnung oder Furcht, es künftig tun zu werden — wie sollte diese nicht wirken? Natur, Empfindung, ganze Menschenseele floss in die Sprache, und drückte sich

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Finally, importantly, Poesie, therefore Dichtkunst, containing soulish substance, is distinguished for, and by, its energy.20 This is the substance that earlier peoples knew and recognized, wrote Herder — a substance that must be recaptured. ‘It occurred to me that this and other questions were before me, that is, in the history of both cultivated and uncultivated nations, but also deep within the human soul — a consideration and questioning of the soul’s purest, innermost, and most efficacious powers, and in its own reception of outside impulses as well, evidenced in what we regard as ways and habits of life, conventions, character, both good and evil, in particular, and in general. This is also what is regarded as the well-being of people as individuals and as groups.’21 Although Herder wrote a great deal, bringing together, chunk by chunk, the building blocks of conceptual material he had in sie, ihren Körper, ab; wirkt also auch durch ihn in alles, was Natur ist, in alle gleichgestimmte, mitempfindende Seelen. Wie der Magnet das Eisen ziehet, wie der Ton einer Saite die andre regt, wie jede Bewegung, Leidenschaft, Empfindung sich fortpflanzet und mitteilt, wo sie nicht Widerstand finden; so ist auch die Wirkung der Sprache der Sinne allgemein und im höchsten Grade natürlich. Sie macht Abdruck in der Seele, wie sich dies Bild und Siegel in Wachs oder Leim formet.’ Herder comments in a note to this passage: ‘Es sind dies meistens Gleichnisse und Bilder, die Plato, Cicero, und noch mehr die Dichter selbst von der Art ihrer Wirkung gebraucht haben; es wäre aber zu weitläufig, die Stellen als blosse Blumen zu zitieren.’ It is of interest here that Herder begins this passage with the question ‘What is Poesie?’, indicating that the term is not accepted conventionally nor is there a consensus regarding the precise significance of this term. The distinction between Prosodie/Poesie is frequently mentioned, but by no means conclusively determined by Herder. (See also Appendix I, Section 2). 20  Herder makes this point prominently in a group of pieces he named ‘Kritische Wälder’ alluding by this title to, as the editors state, ‘Anlehnung an den Gebrauch mehrerer fremden Sprachen, in denen das Wort Wälder eine noch ungeordnete Stoffsammlung bedeutet’: ‘Energie ist das oberste Gesetz der Dichtkunst’ (in contradistinction to painting, for which energy is not such a consideration). For Herder’s use of this seminal concept of silva (a forest full of trees), see below. Cf. Herder, Werke, Auswahl in acht Teilen, ed. by Naumann, i.26, 128–30. 21  Herder is essentially bringing out the much-discussed medieval concept of habitus, a concept he knew well from his comprehensive knowledge of its importance for Cicero, Boethius, and Aristotle. (The differences between all three authors on the topic of habitus have resulted in a sizable literature for itself.) Further, concerning the materia-substantia of language itself: incommensurability is shown by translation from English into German; the German text requires the translation to be effusive in order for the English to be comprehensible: ‘Mich dünkt, diese und andere Fragen liegen vor mir. Ein weites Gebiet! gross, wie die Geschichte gebildeter und ungebildeter Nationen, und zugleich tief, wie die menschliche Seele, ihre edelsten Kräfte, in Wirkung, und im Empfange fremder Wirkung, zugleich in dem, was wir Sitten, Charakter, Gutes und Böses im Einzelnen und Ganzen, Menschen- und Völkerglückseligkeit nennen.’ Herder, Wirkung der Dichtkunst, p. 152.

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placed in another context, the coalition of these two contributions, regarded by their own authors as of much importance, remains at the heart of what Herder had to say to his own generation and to coming generations as well. One metaphor for Herder’s writing is that Herder built on a foundation — an edifice — that would have been known to his readers, a foundation that had been, essentially, in place since Late Antiquity. Another description of Herder’s way of proceeding with an available conceptual substance that is more to the point is that Herder helped himself to a vast mound — or, in his own words, a forest — of building material and, chunk by chunk, branch by branch, placed pieces of this material in place within his own writing, often also transferring one chunk, such as the topic ‘properties of soulish substance’, ‘nature as substance with potential and movement’, or ‘Poesie as equivalent to soulish substance’, from one place to another within his writing. Herder’s method of procedure lies in placing together, always in different order, building blocks of conceptual substance. If one is able to observe and identify this methodology — and not simply discount it altogether as derivative, unoriginal, even to the extent of Herder’s plagiarizing himself, a typical post-nineteenth-century point of view — one is able to see that Herder is proceeding as one would have since Augustine’s time, using a methodology of which Augustine himself was aware, which he ably used and was able to explain. In evaluating the relationship, outlined above, between Aristotle, Augustine, and Herder, one can be easily misled by the obvious differences in three nearly incommensurable languages used by these three authors, that is, Greek, Latin, and German, then translated into English. The essential qualities of these three languages not only differ, but also appear to shape the argument under construction. Translation is like transcription from sound into notation in that an irrevocable change in actual basic substance has occurred, in sound substance, in conceptual substance, and in potential. What is possible to be communicated in one language may be impossible in another, and the converse is also true.22 Nevertheless, Herder’s priorities, Poesie, Seele, Natur, are precisely those 22 

Augustine in his treatise on ‘The Order that Exists amongst the Disciplines’ (De ordine, ii.14), written at approximately the same time as his two treatises on the soul and on music, wrote that a difference exists between figurae and actual sound, that is, figura or letter of the alphabet and the sound-substance of that letter as it is spoken or sounded (cf. ‘De Grammatica, On Grammar’, pp. 398–99). This statement could have provided a powerful impetus to the use of notational figurae in the same manner for musical sound, thus playing a decisive role in making music notation at centres of study and learning in the ninth century ce — known as the Carolingian Renaissance in the West — conceptually possible. Furthermore, this observation, although seemingly self-evident, is important with respect to evaluating both separation and

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of both Aristotle and Augustine in their treatises on the soul. Further, as Herder proceeds to explain in his treatise on the soul, Vom Erkennen und Empfinden der menschlichen Seele, Seele is Natur, differentiating, as both Aristotle and Augustine had, between ‘tote Natur’ (‘dead nature’), and Natur that is enlivened, that is, ‘ensouled’: Seele.23 From the standpoint of the substance of the soul, Herder goes on to its properties, namely, emotional substance, potential based upon and leading out of inner properties, and, especially, appetite and desire inherent within soulish substance, enlivening it, generating, as Aristotle had pointed out, actualization according to its own properties.24 relationship between the notation or transcription of a melody and its actual musical sonorous substance, a subject to be taken up in more detail below. Finally, it is interesting that the principal works, most cited, concerning Homer and his ‘Poetry’, not only of the eighteenth century, but reaching well into the twentieth, are, for the most part, in the German language, including Wolf, Prolegomena ad Homerum; Lachmann, Betrachtung über Homers Ilias; Cauer, Grundfragen der Homerkritik. 23  The beginnings of treatises signal Herder’s overriding priority, as in this case: ‘In Allem, was wir tote Natur nennen, kennen wir keinen innern Zustand. Wir sprechen täglich das Wort Schwere, Stoss, Fall, Bewegung, Ruhe, Kraft, sogar Kraft der Trägheit aus, und wer weiss, was es inwendig der Sache selbst, bedeute?’ He then proceeds to discuss the physical world, including human beings, as analogies, another one of Augustine’s apparent priorities (Herder, Vom Erkennen und Empfinden der menschlichen Seele, p. 329). 24  The concept-pair of inherent properties within substance that can be actualized, thus finding fulfillment or ‘perfection’, is arguably one of the most important issues to be raised during the initial reception of Aristotle’s Physica, during the thirteenth century. Thomas Aquinas, whom Herder would certainly have read, discusses in several contexts, especially in his treatise on potential, De potentia, the participation of properties within materia (cf. Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, ed. by Kretzmann and others, pp. 394n., 395–96, 400–01, 407n., 453n., 502, 711, 849n.). Herder writes further in Vom Erkennen und Empfinden der menschlichen Seele: ‘So klein und dunkel dieser Anfang des edlen Vermögens, das wir Empfinden nennen, scheine, so wichtig muß er sein, so viel wird durch ihn ausgerichtet. Ohne Samenkörner ist keine Ernte, kein Gewächs ohne zarte Wurzeln und Staubfäden, und vielleicht wären unsre göttlichsten Kräfte nicht ohne diese Aussaat dunkler Regungen und Reize’ (p. 331); ‘Sind wir ganz ohne Reiz; — grausame Krankheit, sie heist Wüste, Langeweile, Kloster. Die Faser zehrt gleichsam an sich selbst, der Rost frißt das müßige Schwert. Daher jener verhaltene Haß, der nicht Zorn werden kann, der elende Neid, der nicht Tat werden kann, Reue, Traurigkeit, Verzweiflung, die weder zurückrufen noch bessern — grausame Schlangen, die am Herzen des Menschen nagen. Stille Wut, Ekel, Verdruss mit Ohnmach, ist der Höllenwolf, der an sich selbst frisst’ (p. 333). Herder’s discussion here has to do with the potential of unseen, internal properties that seek actualization, not, as an anachronistic interpretation could assume, affirming uncontrolled exercise — an outburst — of negative emotions. Actualization of potential, of course, is utterly important to Aristotle’s discussion of motion inherent in material: Physica (concerning seeds, cf. Book ii, 199b8–10; end and the means towards it follows; ii, 199b18–19), with the

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We began with a discussion of the soul, of what soul consists, what soulish substance was contained therein, as well as what soulish substance could affect, all, according to Aristotle, so difficult to access. The literature on the mind and its connection to the body bears witness to both the importance of and difficulties connected with this topic even today. Augustine explains ‘enlivening’ in terms of the contained, delimited body of the single pulse (pulsus) or accented unit, which he expanded to the enlivened body of the single versus, the basis for Herder’s Poesie concept as enlivened soulish substance, either contained or without delimitation as substance.25 If one places the pre-existent substance conclusion: ‘It is plain then that nature is a cause [or motivation], a cause that operates for a purpose.’ Fulfillment or actualization of potential is extensively discussed in Book iii. Cf. De anima, Book ii; in beginning again with roots of plants, Aristotle asks the question ‘What is soul?’, answering ‘It is substance in the sense which corresponds to the account of a thing’, at which point the Philosopher immediately goes into the topic of the actualization of the soul through the body, Book ii, 412b18–413a10; and accesses this topic of soulish substance again in ‘Sense and Sensibilia’, Book i, chapter 3, 439a12–14, which deals thoroughly with the actualization of internal sensation. Only three direct references have been included here, but the topic is approached repeatedly throughout Aristotle’s works to the extent that soulish substance can be considered to be a priority of Aristotle, and was, accordingly, of much influence on subsequent authors such as Herder, who, through his education, certainly knew these works well. (See also the description of Herder’s life, education, and the background that can be assumed for his works in Appendix I.) 25  Herder’s concept of Poesie is the Latin translation of hyle into silva, that is, undifferentiated, unlimited material that could be enlivened, therefore, coequivalent with anima/Seele. See below for the discussion of this concept that resulted from the translation of Plato’s Timaeus into Latin by Chalcidius. A separation of ‘Poesie’ or lyric substance from other kinds of communication, namely, prose, is reinforced by the authors Herder cites, that is, most importantly, Homer, whose works had been recently translated into German (Frankfurt am Main, 1773; and Herder’s translation, Leipzig, 1776). These were translation projects that not only made Homer’s works much more widely available, promoting widespread interest and influence that has extended, certainly, to the present, but are also indications of the potential within European mental culture that could, in turn, appropriate this pre-existent conceptual substance, actualize contemporaneous values through the vehicle of the German language, and digest this substance in terms of individual priorities. Herder also cites Woods, Versuch über das Originalgenie des Homers, a work of interest also for the concept Originalgenie with its emphasis on ‘originality’ as the most outstanding feature of ‘genius’ — a clear departure from the concept of genius presented in Plato’s Phaedo, transmitted to Latin reading culture through the twelfth-century translation of the Phaedo, in which ‘Genius’ is presented as a guiding spirit belonging to every human being — and Blair, Kritische Abhandlung über die Gedichte Ossians (later translated by Denis), as well as Schmid, Theorie der Poesie nach den neuesten Grundsätzen; Dr Brown’s Betrachtungen über Poesie und Musik, trans. by Eschenburg; and Pasch’s De variis modis moralia tradendi liber, which Herder regards as a ‘miserable compilation’ (‘eine elende Kompilation’). Herder’s enthu-

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from which Herder appropriated blocks of his own conceptual material, joining them side by side in the many contexts of his treatises, the impression one receives differs considerably from that of taking Herder’s writing literally — at face value — from a twenty-first-century point of view. Taking Herder’s writing literally and spontaneously, out of the context of other similar passages throughout his many works, means that one, today, understands what Herder has written from an entirely different standpoint — a way of regarding the conceptual material itself and what one did with it that would be totally incomprehensible, most of all, to Herder himself. Hence, due to a misunderstanding of Herder’s own intellectual and cultural background, Herder’s work method, contribution, and thus his conclusions, have also been misunderstood. Rather than the commonly used analogies of ‘layers’ or ‘fundamental strata’ as underlying thought constructs for analysis, not only of single works but of societies, the building metaphor of self-contained, diverse chunks of physical substance, available and present for the using, is more appropriate, not only for Herder’s immense output, but for the cultures he attempted to describe. Even Walter Wiora wrote, in 1950, of ‘fundamental strata’ in society whose cultures concurrently represented the ‘fundamental strata’ of the soul, the attitudes, emotions, and views that constitute the foundations of human existence and upon which basis cultures differ. Peasants, shepherds, seamen were listed as the social strata that shape, retain, pass on, and allow us to become acquainted with folk song, since these groups distinguished by work they did that they belonged to a layer that contained genuine folk substance. Townspeople, professionals such as teachers, lawyers, doctors, and those engaged in business of one kind or another, such as bankers, patently did not belong to the ‘layer’ of cultural retainers, practitioners, and enhancers. Moreover, the definition of who belonged to the fundamental strata had shifted during the course of history. Whereas the music of the urban population in the Middle Ages could be considered to be ‘folk music’, in the mass society of the twentieth century even ‘the peasantry’ had lost its specific character. At the same time, folk song has been considered to be the song of the community and not simply of individuals belonging to given stratum. I have summarized key issues both from the work of Walter Wiora, writing primarily in the middle years of the twentieth century, as well as from László Dobszay’s introsiasm over Homer is superficial and effusive, his underlying topici, as well as the conclusions he reaches with these conceptual modules, constitute a pre-existent material which he has, module by module, appropriated. One would, in today’s terms, name this an ‘agenda’, but this would not have been Herder’s point of view.

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duction to his Catalogue of Hungarian Folksong Types (1992),26 but a similar conceptual structure is also to be found, for example, in Bakhtin’s writing,27 as well as others contributing to the study of folk music within the disciplines of both ethnomusicology and folklore throughout the twentieth century. Finally, Herder’s Sprachhypothesen were nurtured from the same sources as his views on 26  Dobszay and Szendrei, Catalogue of Hungarian Folksong Types, pp. 8–9: ‘Folksong is the song of the “folk”, the vulgus (musica vulgaris), the common man, the multitude, the illiterate (musica illiteratorum). This is how the term was described in the Middle Ages. […] At the same time, folksong is the song of the community and not simply of individuals belonging to the fundamental strata. Folksong, as Bartók puts it, is the music that “many have sung for a long time”. So folksong becomes the song of the folk through longstanding use in the community. It expresses the people’s tastes, the realm of their emotions, and their inward attitudes.’ But this is also an example of looking at a term used in the Middle Ages (that is, thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries) with twentieth-century persuasion. The concept of vulgus in what we know as the Middle Ages is not so straightforward, nor does it take on the nuance of the ‘common folk’, the ‘popular’. For a recent discussion of the concept of vulgus, see van Deusen, ‘Plundering the Past’. One instance of the use of the term is directed towards the faculty of the University of Paris in the thirteenth century (by Roger Bacon) discussed in the above-mentioned article. Further, ‘music that many have sung for a long time’, for which we have irrefutable evidence of longevity, is not folk song, but rather the cantus (commonly translated as ‘chant’), as well as hymns and sequences of central Europe. The thoughtful, many-sided presentation of the concept of ‘folk song’ as well as differences between ‘composed’ music and folk music that initiates Dobszay and Szendrei, Catalogue of Hungarian Folksong Types indicates the difficulties of delineating exactly what folk music is and how it can be differentiated from what it is not, namely, customarily, ‘art’ or ‘composed’ music. Statements such as ‘During the course of its history, the concept of folksong has come into particularly close contact with the concept of a specific community character, of a nation. Ever since the age of Romanticism, a concept particularly evident in Central and Eastern Europe has been that folksong expresses most perfectly what is specific in a nation and distinguishes it from others. Folk culture is seen as representing the heritage of an earlier, less divided nation to which one must return as a pure image and source for the revival of national character’ (p. 8, 1c), will be taken to task in chapters to come, especially the discussion of nationalism below. Further, the concept of folk song, presented above, as ‘song of the community’, expressing the tastes, emotions, and views of a group for a ‘long time’ again is best exemplified in hymns, sung through centuries, evidencing both the taste and emotional persuasion of the community, but for which one can often precisely identify both writer of text and of the melody (or melodies) involved. So the distinction between ‘folk’ and ‘composed’ music breaks down here as well as at other points. 27  A fundamental theme that recurs in Bakhtin’s writing is that the ‘folk’ not only evidence remarkable originality, but they turn everything upside down (the ‘carnivalesque’). One wonders with what folk Bakhtin had come into contact; it is hard to imagine that he was writing from experience, more likely from ideological persuasion. It is significant that Bakhtin himself was born into an old family of nobility, dating from at least the fourteenth century. His father was a bank official. Cf. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, especially the editor’s introduction.

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soulish substance and Poesie. Soulish substance is differentiated understandably into ‘differences’.28 Nationalism ‘carves out’, delineates characteristics within the ‘mass’ of material. Again, the discussions preserved in writings of the medieval period were used by Herder and many more recent writers as an available conceptual material to be worked with and recomposed, and from which to delineate characteristics.29 A summary such as this belies in some respects the force and continuing presence of these concepts. One, today, has by no means discarded the idea of the recoverability of medieval ‘authenticity’ that a medieval ‘folk’ constitutes a human pre-existent substance for nationalism today. A discipline of folklore, as well as a century of research and writing, particularly over Hungarian ‘Folk Music’ has resulted from this conceptualization of priorities, potential, and logical results. From the concept of a medieval stockpile of authentic folk substance, the activity of collection (of folk music) follows logically in order to discover, categorize, and identify characteristics belonging to this authentic, recoverable folk substance. The argument, though circular, seems to make sense; in any case, it has provided a foundation — a spiritual force — for the activities of collecting, describing, and cataloguing what had been and could be identified as folk song throughout the twentieth century. It was, however, a fundamental misunderstanding of the conceptual material of the Middle Ages and the enormous theological-philosophical literature these many centuries of the medieval period(s) offered. The usefulness of the medieval period — one can make a case, as here, that conceptual, based upon educational, continuities remained at least to the late eighteenth century — lay in its instrumentarium, that is, its arsenal, of intellectual tools useful for understanding, describing, articulating, and communicating what actually occurs within the compositional process. What is available from medieval intellectual civilization is a finely honed collection of subjects, terms, analogies, and constructed arguments for dealing with what human beings do when they build — with visible as well as invisible materials. As the result, primarily, of inferences that resulted when philosophical terms were translated from Greek into Latin, medieval intellectuals noted analogies between, and the coequality of, visible 28 

Differentiae are a preoccupation of Peter Abelard, but also throughout the Middle Ages. Differentiae within substance were illustrated by means of the discipline of music that provided direct analogies, testable by experience and within performance, to important concepts. See Marenbon, The Philosophy of Peter Abelard, especially his chapter ‘Substance, differentiae and Accidents’, pp. 137–77. 29  See Chapter 10 below.

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substance and emotional-intellectual-spiritual material and realized that both could be dealt with in similar or even identical ways. As we have seen, an analogy was also made, within nineteenth-century reshaping of medieval subject matter, between visible, concrete material and spiritual-intellectual-emotional material, in the sense that both contained properties as well as potential, could be used for specific purposes, and could be shaped in similar ways. These aspects, following from what has been discussed so far, will be further expanded in the chapters that follow, that is, the question of material, what it contains, and how identity emerges from a generality of material substance, the question of nationalism as characteristic figurae within modi, and the relationship between differentiating characteristic nuance within commonality. These concepts, discussed in much detail during the Middle Ages, become recognizable as one travels through wide stretches of Hungarian countryside, but also paradoxically as one observes the high-rise apartment buildings in Budapest. Both situations present constant change, subtly nuanced detail — the medieval concept of differentia — within the broad generality of material. Further, medieval descriptions of material in terms of pre-existent material will be illustrated by means of figurae within the composite/composition of both ‘folk’ and ‘composed’ music from this part of Europe. ‘Soulish substance’, as Aristotle, Augustine, and Herder reiterated, is difficult to describe or contain and, as substance, has no boundaries. A unification can be seen in the example of central European music life, whether of ‘composed’ or ‘folk music’. In returning frequently to Budapest, it becomes obvious that the musical life of the city has, with rare exception, to do exclusively with central European music. Concert programmes in Budapest featuring, overwhelmingly, nineteenth-century music, present music from this particular part of the world, that is, Hungarian composers and performers, or music by composers who at least spent their professional lives in central Europe: Mahler, Brahms, Schubert, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, an aspect to be observed in the concert programmes collected for this study (Appendix III). What conclusions can be reached now at this stage in our study? Musical material, that is, material consisting of time, sound, and motion, is by its very nature particularly attractive and, accordingly, possesses a particular magnetism as material for human beings, who are then motivated to impose order — their own order — on the material at hand. This is true of everyone, both those who work with the tool of music notation and those who do not. Categories such as ‘composed’ or ‘art music’ as an opposition to ‘folk music’ do away with a fundamental unity that any visitor to Budapest, for example, can quickly observe. This distinction also misrepresents a musical culture that is essentially unified.

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Hence, these categories are not appropriate or even significant as categories. Any differentiation or delineation is geographical and historical — as a result of a geographical situation — not material or categorical. Significant differences have to do with place — as medieval writers point out — rather than due to differences within the material itself. It would be a commonplace to state that Marxist ideology has stressed material difference, presenting material dichotomies as the only ones worth considering in contrast to medieval writers, such as the thirteenth-century Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon, who make much of place as primary arbitrator of difference.30 On the other hand, the supposed untouched, undisturbed regionalism of central Europe which, according to both Bartók and Kodály, was responsible for the authenticity and purity of folk music from these regions, is contradicted by the unavoidable geographical situation of this part of Europe, swept over for at least the past two millennia by hordes, tribes, groups, nations, and ideologies. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth than to maintain that the ‘folk music’ of central Europe was ‘untouched’ by external geographical, mental, musical influences. The music collected in the folk music archive demonstrates this. Rather than consisting of pure musical substance, the songs collected consist of pieces of material appropriated widely, from which a totality was fashioned. Again, place is the crucial causal, as well as differentiating, feature, neither the pre-existent material itself nor methods of working with music and texts. The twentieth century reaped a harvest of ideology. Music, as well as the discussion it has generated, has, since Late Antiquity, provided immediate disclosure of these ideological currents. For example, a mental category of ‘folk music’, however ill-defined, is utterly important to Russian, Rumanian, and Hungarian students — and many other nationalities in central and eastern Europe — who have grown up and attended educational institutions during the Marxist era. The concept of ‘folk music’ encapsulates such primary ideological directions as evolutionary process, dialectical positivism, and a Marxist, as well as anti-Semitic, view of the bourgeoisie. All of these currents, and their applications to as well as their exemplification within, an ongoing discussion of folk music throughout the twentieth century will be addressed in the chapters that follows. 30  This topic is addressed by Robert Grosseteste in the introduction to his commentary on the book of Genesis, the Hexaemeron, in which he begins his commentary with a discussion of place as essential for understanding the diverse peoples of the world. Cf. Grosseteste, Hexaemeron, ed. by Dales and Gieben, especially in the Prooemium, pp. 19–37, and pp. 322–24 in which the four Gospels are related to four regions of the Middle East.

Chapter 3

Historiography of Ideology: Conceptual Bases for the Collection of Folk Song

‘J

ust as in a small village’, said my neighbour as she described her life in the Swiss city of Basel. She should have known, since she had grown up in a farm village in Basel-Land, outside the boundaries of the city proper, moving to the city only when she married. Basel-Stadt and Basel-Land are separate cantons, and their distinction as historical and cultural realities is both important and taken for granted in that part of Switzerland. That day, in conversation with myself, she was reflecting upon the way we all lived together on our street, the Sennheimerstrasse, how we knew one another well, how folks of all ages saw each other on a daily basis and knew how each was getting along, chatting frequently — the children with young parents and those who eventually were taken, in old age, to hospitals and nursing homes — how our lives were also bounded by the limits of our street. That the main squares, the opera, the university, elegant department stores, cathedral, and concert halls were within walking distance, we knew perfectly well, taking advantage of the fact that we could appropriate the city when we needed to do that — for me, every day, since I taught at the university. That a city was nearby was largely, for our private, daily life and a feeling of ‘our’ place, almost totally irrelevant. Basel, as other cities, is composed of Quartiere, actually small ‘villages’ such as ours. One lived, as a matter of daily reality, in a small village.1 1 

One question, of course, arises: What difference does it make that this ‘village’ is part of,

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So it is that the dichotomies — city/town and village, rural and urban, folk and ‘cultivated’ people, natural and artificial, authentic and formal — often in real life, with examination, and in comparison with the realities of life, break down. Constructs perceived as useful in analysis, reiterated in the telling, repeated perhaps throughout decades of scholarly literature, may reflect neither the circumstances described nor the perceptions, actually, of those who have described them. The usefulness of these constructs, of course, is a question that must be evaluated case by case, and I will attempt to do so. This chapter will examine the principal conceptual assumptions that have given impetus and motivation both to the collection of folk music throughout the twentieth century and to its interpretation — a core of conceptual assumptions that is unified and has remained essentially intact throughout the century, to the present day in fact. The resulting structural bases, and underlying assumptions, unify disciplines that are separated methodologically and professionally, particularly those of historical musicology, ethnomusicology, anthropology, and folkloreethnography. As an example of the unification to which I have referred, the disciplines of both historical musicology and ethnomusicology have, throughout the twentieth century, made reference, in fact had frequent recourse, to the concepts of ‘layer’, ‘type’, ‘style’, and ‘form’. Layers of composition, composers’ styles, and formal arrangements have been and continue to be the unquestioned explanatory constructs of conservatory-trained musicologists, whether they are dealing with Hungarian folk music, the medieval sequence, or so-called ‘NotreDame Polyphony’.2 These conceptual bases are few in number, as well as tenacious, both as reference points and as courts of last appeal. In this sense, expressions such as ‘layer’, ‘style’, ‘form’, and ‘type’ function as topoi, or commonplaces, starting and also concluding arguments. One should also note that these concepts have been appropriated from disciplines other than music, formulated to describe materials other than sound, and also that these concepts are anachronistic to the music with which they are put into contact. The concept of ‘form’ as a focus is of particular interest, since this concept as a consideration has overtaken musicological writing, as well as music theory/music pedagogy, throughout the twentieth century. Form, as, perhaps, an imaginative construct and certainly and appended to, a considerable and important, as well as ancient, city, namely, in this case, Basel, Switzerland? 2  The coincidence of subjects and methods within both historical musicology and ethnomusicology will be noted repeatedly within this study; see below, especially Chapter 8, on analogies between doing research with the medieval sequence and with Hungarian folk song.

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as a pedagogical construct using a series of alphabetical letters, has overridden nearly every consideration in music analysis, from the medieval sequence, the so-called formes fixes as they are applied to troubadour and trouvère compositions of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and the polyphony of the thirteenth century, to, especially, the symphonies of Haydn and Mozart. Ironically, the concept of ‘form’ in the sense in which it has been used in the twentieth century is not applied to music during the Middle Ages, so far as we are able to tell,3 nor was it an articulated priority for either Haydn or Mozart.4 Form, however, like few other terms has been repeatedly and vividly impressed upon the twentieth century’s artistic consciousness. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the term was bandied in the manifestos of Futurism, Cubism, Suprematism, Constructivism, Neoplasticism, and Functionalism — to mention but a few of the more prominent ‘isms’. Expressions such as ‘significant form’, ‘symbolic form’ virtually defined the aesthetic philosophies of Clive Bell, Ernst Cassirer, and Sigfried Giedion. Strongly influenced in the twentieth century by the art criticism of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Robert Vischer, Heinrich Wülfflin) and applied to architecture in the late nineteenth, the concept of form was adjusted amid some protest in the early twentieth century to allow for the dynamic motion inherent within music, a motion that 3 

One observation that reinforces this point of view is that while the sequence, in twentiethcentury textbooks, such as Grout’s influential History of Western Music and others, is explained solely in terms of its ‘double versicle form’, that is, each line of music is repeated with a differing text, this particular attribute is not emphasized within the manuscript transmission of the sequence from c. 875 to 1600, all over the continent of Europe, nor within more than three thousand manuscripts. Rather than noting the repetition of the musical line by placing two lines of text under the single line of music, a practice that would have also saved considerable space on costly manuscript vellum, the musical line is invariably written out twice, since it occurs with a different text. The sequence, as will be discussed below, was included for very specific reasons within the Mass liturgy, and on the basis of this raison d’être, not due to its so-called ‘form’, received its recognition and consistency. See van Deusen, ‘The Use and Significance of the Sequence’ and van Deusen, ‘Sequence Repertories’. 4  A thorough investigation of this factor is outside the immediate purpose of this chapter. It would, however, be of interest to observe that pairs of contrasting melodic dispositions, that is, ‘presentational’ in total aspect contrasted with, for example, ‘limpid/tranquil’, or ‘agitated’ contrasted with ‘peaceful, contemplative’, essentially paired contrary motions or modes (modi) of movement, are more evident both as compositional intent and to the listener than an anachronism such as ‘form’, an early twentieth-century concept, rather than in use during Haydn’s and Mozart’s lifetimes. The term, however, is, from the 1930s on, ubiquitous, not only in historical musicology, music theory, and pedagogy, but in ethnomusicology as well, since music students as undergraduates are presented with the same curriculum, namely functional harmonic analysis together with ‘form and analysis’, based on harmonic function.

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must not always be considered in painting but is obviously essential to the discussion of music that uses the unseen substances of sound, time, and motion. Other metaphors from the visual arts were also appropriated by the emerging discipline of historical musicology in the first decades of the twentieth century. ‘Form’ has been advanced, largely unquestioned, for decades, as one of most important reference points or subjects in academic music analysis, taught in conservatories and the performance degree programmes especially at North American universities. (This is the case not only within university studies. It is interesting to note how often ‘form’ occurs either as noun or verb in ordinary speech. It would seem that the word connotes nearly everything and can be used in all circumstances, yet with very little precise meaning.) A short summary of how this term/concept was used and how it became more and more widespread provides a basis for what follows. Hugo Leichtentritt, influenced as he mentions by Hugo Riemann, wrote his book Musical Form for Xaver Scharwenka’s series of textbooks, Handbücher der Musiklehre. The work was published in 1920, and its contents, with some additions, remained relatively unmodified in its 1951 edition,5 which included the following: • • • • • • • • • • • • •

5 

the regular construction of musical phrases, irregularities in the construction of musical phrases, the song forms and their application to the dance and march, contrapuntal forms, the suite, theme and variations, the rondo, the sonata, the vocal forms, aesthetic ideas as the basis of musical styles and forms, logic and coherence in music, the accompaniment in its formal and stylistic significance, the forms of unison music, and examples from ‘contrapuntal forms’, ‘variation form’, ‘sonata form’, ‘free forms’, ‘concerto form’, ‘fantasy’, Bruckner’s eighth symphony, and Arnold Schoenberg’s Opus 11 and 19.

Leichtentritt, Musical Form (Bussler and Leichtentritt, Musikalische Formenlehre).

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In short, nearly every parameter of music is accessed under the concept of ‘form’, which is, as Leichtentritt states, ‘a composition that is constructed consistent with musical sensibility, containing neither a measure too much nor too little, exhibiting in all its parts the right balance and the right symmetry’, as well as a ‘particular traditional type, such as a simple song, a march, waltz, polonaise, rondo, sonata or fugue’.6 Leichtentritt continues in summary: ‘Even a superficial acquaintance with the history of music reveals the fact that musical forms have a close and inseparable relation to musical styles. Evolution of forms coincides with the evolution of styles. Every new style carries with it a new form or set of forms adapted to the aesthetic ideas underlying each change of style.’7 Leichtentritt also suggests that ‘form’ is akin to ‘Platonic Idea’ but that this is extremely difficult to analyse, whereas repetitive schemes are amenable to analysis and pedagogy.8 If, as Charles Rosen states, sonata form is the most prestigious of forms,9 that is, ‘form’ as exposition, development, and recapitulation, then a fascinating conceptual transmutation has occurred during the course of the twentieth century. What has happened is that the process for devising and memorizing speeches, formulated by Quintilian and as theoria by Aristotle, in common use for centuries, reiterated, in a sense rediscovered, during the first half of the twentieth century as a process for composition and memorization, when 6 

Leichtentritt, Musical Form, p. 3. Leichtentritt, Musical Form, p. 219. 8  Leichtentritt was wrong: idea and forma are two distinct Greek terms, also translated into two different Latin words in the medieval Latin translations of Plato, that is, the Timaeus in what is now known as Late Antiquity, c. end of the fifth century ce, or the Phaedo (trans. 1157), as well as the subsequent fifteenth-century translations into Latin subsidized by the Florentine Medici family and made by Marsilio Ficino, considered to be the founder and advocate of the Florentine Academy. The terms are not, in the Plato latinus — both medieval and fifteenth century — interchangeable, an aspect that takes its importance from the fact that the Latin translations of Plato were of much influence until the early 1920s. Further, the English translations that are in common use today are largely reprinted editions first produced in the 1920s at a time when ‘form’ was emerging as a particularly attractive catch-all term. Cf. Plato’s Timaeus, ed. and trans. by Bury. In assessing whether the notion of ‘Platonic Forms’ is, after all, a twentiethcentury construct, not necessarily to be taken from the Greek texts or their subsequent translations into Latin, it is instructive to compare the Latin translations of Chalcidius and Ficino, influential for so many centuries, with the English translation of R. G. Bury. See below, in the discussion which follows of the importance of a single Latin expression contained within the Timaeus for the conceptualization of music as discipline. 9  Rosen, Sonata Forms, p. v. 7 

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influenced strongly by art criticism was appropriated by the emerging field of musicology as the concept of ‘form’ within music. A well-known plan of a process, described by both Quintilian and Aristotle, brought together with a current preoccupation in the visual arts, that is, ‘form’, was repeated throughout the twentieth century as the most important means of analysing music. This is particularly incongruous since form is a static concept whereas Quintilian’s exposition-development-recapitulation plan constitutes a model for the discursive movement of a speech within time. Carl Dahlhaus rightly observed, however, that an odd shift had taken place. He writes in his chapter on music theory (in Einführung in die systematische Musikwissenschaft) that the study of ‘Form and Analysis’ belonged under the category of music pedagogy designed to enhance performance skills associated with memorization rather than, strictly speaking, belonging to a category of ‘music theory’ that dealt with basic principles. Plan as process, noticed in music compositions, was, at the turn of the twentieth century, filtered through arts that remain essentially in place, that is, architecture and painting. Accommodation to this irony was perceived to be necessary; a considerable number of authors sought to justify the unlikely combination of a static, stationary concept, that is, ‘form’, with the transient fluidity and constant mutation of music. Form, in order to be transposed onto musical material, conceptually needed to be made dynamic. This was achieved through repetition rather than logic until it became commonplace. Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht in his Musik im Abendland: Prozesse und Stati­ onen vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart (Music in the West: Processes and Stations from the Middle Ages to the Present) skirts the issue by writing : ‘Doch diese Gedankenrichtung, die uns zu den Formungstypen und konkreten Formen der Musik führen wurde, verfolgen wir nicht weiter, weil sie schon jetzt die Geschichtlichkeit des Schönseins von Musik ins Spiel brachte’ (Indeed, we will go no further in this conceptual direction that leads us to form types and concrete forms in music, since this brings into the discussion the historicity of beauty with music). Echoing late eighteenth-century reception of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Eggebrecht maintains that beauty itself is inextricably tied to a conceptualization of form in Western music. He then includes connections (Gliederung und Zusammenhang), return (Wiederkehr), change (Veränderung), development (Entwicklung), beginnings (Anfänge), process and close (Durchführen und Schliessen), principle and subsidiary considerations (Hauptsache und Nebensache), entanglement/lack of resolution (Verschlingung), resolution (Lösung), symmetry and asymmetry (Symmetrie und Asymmetrie), countertheme and its communication (Gegensatz und Vermittlung), tension and relaxation (Steigerung und Zurücknahme) — all as the maxims of ‘form’

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(Form-Haben). Again, nearly every conceivable parameter of musical extension has been included in Eggebrecht’s concept of form, without an explanation of exactly what is meant by this concept.10 A transformation has taken place: 10  Literature accessed here includes Mallgrave and Ikonomou in their introduction to Empathy, Form, and Space, p. 1 (of special interest for this discussion are Vischer, ‘The Spatial Understanding of Forms’, pp. 93–95, and Hildbrand, ‘Form and Effect’, pp. 232–36); Riemann, Geschichte der Musiktheorie im ix.–xix. Jahrhundert; Leichtentritt, Musical Form, which is without bibliography and almost completely devoid of footnotes; Rosen, Sonata Forms; Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, ed. and trans. by Butler; Aristotle, Metaphysica, exemplified in the Physica, to be discussed below; Dahlhaus, ‘Musiktheorie’, esp. p. 94: ‘Die Disziplinen, die seit dem 18. Jahrhundert unter dem Namen Musiktheorie zusammengefaßt werden — Harmonielehre und Kontrapunkt, seltener Rhythmus-und Melodielehre —, stellen nichts anderes als eine musikalische Handwerkslehre oder Propädeutik dar, die den Mangel, daß sie — als Kodifizierung einer jeweils vergangenen Entwicklungsstufe der Komposition — immer schon veraltet ist, durch den Anspruch, musikalische Bildung zu vermitteln, auszugleichen sucht’. (The disciplines under the heading of ‘music theory’ are by and large nothing other than the rules of a craft as it is no longer practised — a codification of a developmentary phase of composition of the past transmitted as general musical education.) By 1974, a fascinating turnabout had taken place, that is, in the opinion of the writer Rudolf Arnheim, ‘architecture’ needed to have recourse to ‘musical form’ to legitimize its ‘dynamism’; cf. The Dynamics of Architectural Form, in which Arnheim writes: ‘A book on the visual form of architecture requires justification’ (p. 1), in which analysis of architectural ‘form’ is carried out by means of alphabetical letters, A, B, etc.; cf. Eggebrecht, Musik im Abendland. Form as a device for discussing music had become so entrenched by the end of the 1970s that a book on architecture called upon ‘musical form’ as a topos to obtain coherence. Compare Eggebrecht’s granting of the quality of ‘concreteness’ to ‘form’ and bringing this together with ‘type’ with Adorno, ‘On the Problem of Music Analysis’, trans. by Max Paddison, in Adorno, Essays on Music, pp. 177–78. See also Hauck, Einführung in die Ideologiekritik, under ‘Grundformen der bürgerlichen Ideologie’, namely the ‘Basic Forms of Bourgeois Ideology’: ‘Die Warenform erscheint als die natürliche Form der Arbeitsprodukte, die Kapitalform als die natürliche Form der Produktionsmittel, die Lohnform als die natürliche Form des Arbeitsentgelts. An diesen “ewigen Naturformen der gesellschaftlichen Produktion” sei nicht zu rütteln. Es zu versuchen, wäre wider die Vernunft. Solange dies die allgemeine Überzeugung ist, wird auch nicht daran gerüttelt werden. Die Verfestigung jener Formen zu “objektiven Gedankenformen” und der von diesen ausgehende gegenständliche Schein sorgen ebenso wie ihre schließliche Auslegung durch die politische Ökonomie dafür, daß es — entgegen den besseren Argumenten — allgemeine Überzeugung bleibt’ (p. 138). These ‘eternal natural forms’ of bourgeois production, namely ‘Ware form’, ‘Capital form’, and ‘salary form’, through a process of concretization are understood as ‘objective thought forms’, and further as forms are impossible to displace, even when criticized by rational argumentation. To do so appears to be going absolutely against common sense. Once these ‘eternal forms of nature’ have become general persuasions, they stick; no ideology criticism can possibly dislodge them. So it is with the notion of ‘form’ in music analysis. For the sheer tenacity of ‘forms’ as an analytical construct, see Marian-Balasa, ‘The Real Being of the Folk Song’.

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Leichtentritt wrote that ‘form’ could be somehow akin to the ‘Platonic Idea’; Eggebrecht’s concept of ‘form’, as he states, is ‘concrete’ (‘Formungtypen und konkrete Formen der Musik’). ‘Type’ then coalesces here with ‘form’. The same equivalence of ‘concreteness’ with ‘form’ and ‘type’/‘category’ had already been made by Theodor Adorno, in a lecture (1969) in which he discusses ‘universality’ in music analysis. The passage quoted below also confuses the two separate concepts of ‘idea’ and ‘form’: I might attempt to summarize or codify this universality in terms of what I once defined as the ‘material theory of form in music’ [materiale Formenlehre der Musik]: that is, the concrete definition of categories like statement [Setzung], continuation [Fortsetzung], contrast [Kontrast], dissolution [Auflösung], succession [Reihung], development [Entwicklung], recurrence [Wiederkehr], modified recurrence [modifizierter Wiederkehr], and however such categories may otherwise be labelled. And so far not even the beginnings of an approach have been made regarding such a ‘material theory of form’ (as opposed to the architectonic-schematic type of theory). These [i.e. dialectical] categories are more important than knowledge of the traditional forms as such, even though they have naturally developed out of the traditional forms and can always be found in them. Were this concept of analysis such as I have in mind, and which is in accordance with structural listening — were this conception to be consistently realized, then something else, a further level, something like such a ‘material theory of musical form’, would necessarily emerge out of it. It would not, to be sure, be fixed and invariable — it would not be a theory of form for once and always, but would define itself within itself historically, according to the state of the compositional material, and equally according to the state of the compositional forces of production.

Adorno has moved in this passage from establishing, as he states, a ‘concrete definition of categories, i.e. material forms’ to what was established within Marxist ideology as ‘ewige Naturformen des gesellschaftlichen Produktion’ (‘eternal natural forms of economic production’).11 The concept of ‘form’ is not the only example of the steady and pervasive influence of visual concepts current within art criticism that have been appropriated, regardless of their analogical vigour or relevance to the medium considered, for the analysis of music during the course of the twentieth century. ‘Style’ is another example of a commonplace to which frequent reference is made within art criticism that, although it has been repeatedly questioned within that field,12 has found almost universal acceptance within academic 11  12 

Adorno, ‘On the Problem’, pp. 177–78. Ernst Gombrich has expressed on many occasions his mistrust of style as an explanatory

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music analysis. Despite voiced apprehension, as we see, on the parts of major art historians, both ‘form’ and ‘style’ continue to be the primary analytical factors in describing music. They would seem to be indispensable. The reason for this is partly that the concepts of ‘form and analysis’ as well as ‘style’ appear on the surface to be amenable to teaching purposes, as Dahlhaus nearly forty years ago observed; that is, ‘form’ in most cases actually makes reference to repetition, and repetition is easy to note, as well as simple to bring to the attention of students. On the other hand, both form and style have by now acquired, through repetition during the decades of the twentieth century, concept, as, for example, in the autobiographical portion included in The Essential Gombrich: ‘This is the first book [a reference to his publication of his Mellon Lectures on the subject of art and illusion] in which I staked my claim to be interested not only in the history of art as it is taught, but in something different. That difference is an interest in explanations. Explanations are scientific matters: how do you explain an event? I thought that certain aspects of the development of representation in the history of art, which I had discussed in The Story of Art in the traditional terms of “seeing and knowing”, deserved to be investigated in terms of contemporary psychology. I spent a good deal of time in psychology libraries. I studied the subject for the sake of explanation — that is, explanation of the phenomenon of style — because the phenomenon of style as it had been seen traditionally did not satisfy me. Style became one of my worries, one of my problems, because the idea that style is simply the expression of an age seemed to me not only to say very little, but to be rather vacuous in every respect. I wanted to know what is actually going on’ (p. 34). See also ‘Psychology and the Riddle of Style’, in the same volume, pp. 83–88, and ‘Leonardo’s Method for Working Out Compositions’ (first published in Gombrich, Norm and Form), pp. 211–22. It is interesting to note that Gombrich repeatedly makes a subtle, apparently unconscious, substitution of the term ‘form’ for what Leonardo would surely have regarded as figura — of part, of gesture, of movement. The subject of figura, a concept essential to this present study, will be examined in detail below. Further, however, ‘style’ as a basis for chronology has long been a research preoccupation in the visual arts; see also Ginzburg, Erkundungen über Piero, in which both editor, Martin Warnke, and author write of the ‘Ordnungsbedürfnis im 20. Jahrhundert’, as well as ‘objektbezogener Bedingtheitsforschung’, also crediting Giovanni Morelli as well as Sigmund Freud as founders of the art-historical method of style criticism. Warnke writes (p. 11): ‘Auch die historische Leistungsfähigkeit der Stilkritik ist beträchtlich. Da es für die wenigsten überlieferten Kunstwerke Dokumente gibt, die eine historische Zuordnung erlauben, war die Stilkritik das einzige Mittel, die Objekte zu lokalisieren, zu datieren oder einem Künstler zuzuschrieben. Das haben die Kenner mit akribischen, vielfältigen, oft wie kriminalistische Kombinatorik wirkenden Verfahren besorgt. Ihren verschlungenen Argumentationswegen geht Ginzburg eindringlich und, wie ich vermute, mit Lust nach. Das Gefühl ist heute weit verbreitet, die Stilkritik habe ausgedient.’ Style it would seem, according to this author, has been the only verbal tool by which to place, localize, date, or describe a work of art. With respect to the pervasive influence of ‘style’ on musicology, Elscheková, ‘Stilbegriff und Stilschichten in der slowakischen Volksmusik’, p. 263, was of the opinion that a ‘many-sided and layered concept of style for comparison with the musical work was the basis of musicology itself.’

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a consistent pedagogical apparatus and conventionality that allows them to be taught with a sense of authority. For example, the so-called ‘forms’ of medieval music can easily be taught by faculty who have done no research in the music of the Middle Ages and have no experience with primary sources or with the concepts and topics of discussion that were actually raised during the many centuries of the medieval period, quite apart from a lack of interest in, or knowledge of, the surrounding intellectual, cultural, and historical context of the musical witness with which they are dealing. Frequently within music departments of North American universities and at conservatories, this is exactly the case. Shored up by out-of-date textbooks, the ‘forms’ and ‘styles’ of ‘medieval music’ have acquired a life of their own within the teaching of ‘music history’. These concepts of layer, form, style, and type throughout the twentieth century, especially from the 1930s to the present, have shown remarkable resilience and longevity. They have also been of enormous influence, often providing the sole basis, not only of medieval music, but, likewise, for a discussion of folk music. The observation offered almost simultaneously by Walter Danckert and Bence Szabolcsi in the early 1930s, that small-ambitus and pentatonic orientation distinguished an older ‘layer’ of folk music, was repeated throughout the century.13 Pentatonicism indicated for Szabolcsi Finno-Ugric origins, within the context of migrations from East to West.14 In a series of articles, ‘Elemente 13 

Danckert, for example, in Das europäische Volkslied, who states initially that ambitus in Europe is between five and six tones, and that ambitus as pentatonic distinguished Finnish, Karelish, Ukrainian, Rumanian, Hungarian, and Serbian laments. The nationalities in question differed, but the premise was the same, namely, that fifth-relation, as either pentatonic or as recurring central tone, indicated relative antiquity. Cf. a series of articles published first in Hungarian by Szabolcsi: ‘Osztják hösdalok-magyar siratók melódiái’, ‘Népvándorláskori elemek a Magyar népzenében’, and ‘Egyetemes müvelödéstörténet és ötfokú hangsorok’; as well as a reopening of the connection between ambitus, antiquity, and the lament in Rajeczky, ‘Zur Ambitusfrage der Klagelieder’. 14  This is also the case for Germanic ‘authenticity’. Eastern tribes, migrating to the west were more ‘authentic’ than, for example, the Romans, who became the Franks, eventually remaining in Gaul, and, at least to the nineteenth-century mind, contrasted with the indigenous, barbarian population. Needless to say, ‘ethnicity’, in terms of the Franks and the Gauls, is no less problematic (cf. Weber, ‘Nos ancêtres les gaulois’, as well as his bibliography concerning nineteenth-century ‘race wars’ contained in this article). See also Goffart, ‘Jordanes’s Getica and the Disputed Authenticity of Gothic Origins from Scandinavia’, pp. 379–98, with his thorough treatment of the extensive literature concerning questions of ‘origins’, migrations, and ‘authenticity’ within his notes. Goffart writes (p. 379), ‘All the above and much more; you cannot have too much history. But, in some contexts […] history is deeply serious. To touch certain parts of it with the scalpel of criticism seems comparable to tearing out the heart of a nation. In the 1690s Gabriel

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aus der Völkerwanderungszeit in der ungarischen Volksmusik’ (Elements from the Migrational Period in Hungarian Folk Music, 1934), ‘Universale Kultur­ geschichte und fünfstufige Tonreihen’ (Universal Cultural History and the Five-Tone Series, 1936), in which he suggested that ‘fünfstufige Melodietypen mit Quintwechsel in der ungarischen Volksmusik die extremen Vertreter der innerasiatischen, mongolisch-türkischen Melodiewelt seien’ (five-tone melody-types and the fifth-relationship in Hungarian folk music were the extreme representatives of an inner Asian, Mongolian-Turkic melodic world), and ‘Zur Geschichte des neuen ungarischen Volksliedstils’ (On the History of the New Hungarian Folk-Song Style, 1954), a basis for the ‘origins of genuine Hungarian folk music’ was thus laid, and a clear differentiation between ‘old’ and ‘new’ ‘style’ was postulated. These two propositions, namely, that the fifth relationship, wherever and however it occurred, was older and more authentic and hence constituted a ‘type’, thus serving as a basis for extended type-classification, and that there was an old style to be differentiated from the new, was also regarded as fact by Kodály in his influential Folk Music of Hungary, which appeared first in its Hungarian edition in 1937. Kodály also accepted the idea of an ‘ancient layer of folk music’.15 Form, layer, and style as concepts influence how one describes music of all kinds, what one takes into consideration, and what one ignores completely. Statements, simple enough, easily remembered, and, because of their very simplicity, increasingly perceived as self-evident, were advanced, essentially unchanged and unquestioned, throughout the twentieth century, growing in Daniel was forced to retract the opening volume of his Histoire de France because he dismissed the historicity of the Merovingian ancestor Pharamond. So patriotism, faith in the good old story, triumphed over the temerity of the critic. Cherished tales of origins die hard.’ See also Goffart, Historical Atlases, pp. 240, 271. 15  Kodály’s Magyar népzene (Folk Music of Hungary) appeared in 1937, with the English translation in 1971, demonstrating just how continuous this hypothetical structure was, as it was put forward nearly simultaneously by both Finnish and Hungarian authors. Kodály mentions language without mentioning the specifics of that language in statements such as: ‘The language of the Zyrians, who, in all probability, moved towards the North because of the coming of the Bulgars’ (pp. 10–11). Statements such as this that are extended into accepted theses reflect a positivistic conviction that all uncertainties, if one can only collect enough material, will eventually be abolished; that one, in the end, will surely know everything, hence, ‘in all probability’ for unfounded statements, advanced optimistically, with the assumption that they would surely, someday, be proven right. There well may be limitations to what we will ever know concerning the migrations of strands of groups or tribes, a question that is not easily answered even with respect to the migrations to the New World in the nineteenth century, or during the thirties and the post-war period of the forties and fifties of the twentieth century.

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authority with repetition. L. Bárdos, for example, presents this older layer as what he terms a ‘natürliches Tonsystem’ (1957); C. B. Nagy, who, in a comprehensive article of 1962, wrote of ‘rein innerasiatischen Stil’, and that the ‘jahrtausendente Stamm der ungarischen Volksmusik ist weit verzweigt’ (centuries-old trunk of Hungarian Folk Music has wide-reaching branches) as he quoted Szabolcsi, was reinforced by L. Vikár in his article, ‘Melodietypen der Bugtscheremessen’ (1967).16 Layer, style, and type, in that order, were virtually seized upon and accepted by nearly every writer on the subject of ‘folk song’ through the twentieth century. A group of studies appeared in close succession, emphasizing the pentatonic as most ancient, hence a powerful differentiation factor, as well as a stylistic marker,17 of the concept of the Urform or melodisches Recitativ,18 as well as establishing difference based upon Gestalt-Variation, 16 

Cf. Bárdos, ‘Natürliches Tonsysteme’, translated as ‘Natural Tonal Systems’, in which he states at the onset, ‘In the course of investigating the primitive forms of folk music it has long been realized that, on the most diverse parts of the globe, the same or very closely related melodic elements can be found which seem to be completely independent of either race, age or place’. Here, form as term/concept has been substituted in what follows for what would have been the Latin punctum, namely, a self-contained module that can be sung on one breath and evidences characteristic features (figurae). The consequences of this substitution will be discussed below. Bárdos then discusses the fact that major/minor thirds can be found in melodies around the world, as perhaps ‘remnants of a common melodic property’ (pp. 207–08), and states that ‘the theory of fifths as applied in our investigations does not claim to be suitable for explaining every possible musical phenomenon but can be used to account for the most general and most natural one’ (Bárdos’s italics, p. 213). One of Bárdos’s conclusions is that the selection of the intervals used in melodies seems to be governed by two factors: ‘the quintal affinity rooted in nature and the semitonic proximity derived from the intonation in speech’ (p. 231). Cf. Lachmann, Die Musik der aussereuropäischen Natur- und Kulturvölker. A similar line of structuralist investigation is pursued in Werner, The Sacred Bridge, ultimately to a certain extent, Frazer, The Golden Bough; cf. Szabolcsi, ‘Beiträge zur Geschichte des neuen ungarischen Volksliedstils’; as well as Vikár, ‘Melodietypen der Bugscheremissen’. 17  Baud-Bovy, ‘La Systématisation des chansons populaires’, brings up the following points of comparison and discussion: (1) pentatonicism of Greek music compared with Hungarian, (2) genres based upon text-types, such as ‘enfantines, berceuses, les chansons de quête, les récits épiques, vies à une occupation, à un travail’, (3) rhythms accentuated by instruments or the addition of instruments/percussion as a completely different and decisive factor, (4) consideration of mode/tropos, (5) that the alternation between solo/chorus has no stylistic implication nor does this factor denote complexity, (6) a discussion of ‘segments mélodiques’ and ‘structure metrique’. These points of reference and considerations, as well as a terminology developed by the author, are just those developed within the field of historical musicology to deal with music that was considered to be ‘art music’, that is, the songs of the troubadours and trouvères. 18  Nagy, ‘Typenprobleme in der ungarischen Volksmusik’, who summarizes previous lit-

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Typenordnung, and, by way of contrast, bürgerliche Volksmusik.19 Further, in the ongoing attempt to delineate the ‘Volkstümliche’, to define just what this element might include,20 the lament as a category appeared to serve as a magnet for nearly everything one had to say about what was essential to a concept erature and states that the ‘Terz ist nicht aussachlaggebend, Hauptöne sind 1, 5, 2, 4’ (third is not pivotal, rather, principal tones include 1, 5, 2, 4 [which correspond to the principal harmonic functions in functional tonality]), and, furthermore, that the oldest style is evidenced by ‘dominierende Halbtonlösigkeit’ (dominating half-tone absence [i.e. minor seconds]). ‘New style’, since c. 1800, is characterized by formal quality; i.e. ’s Maehrische Sammlung (1859) gives eight melodies that, according to Nagy demonstrate the form AABA. On the other hand, ‘Französische, deutsche, ukrainische maehrische, slowakische, ungarische, moatische, rumänische Beispiele und solche aus der Bukowina sprechen für die überaus grosse Verbreitung dieser Melodie. […] Der ganze Stil (das System ABBA) ist bei uns heute noch durch die strenge Ordnung der Formen und Zaesuren zusammengefasst […] streng geschlossene Einheit dieses Stils (i.e. Urform)’ with the conclusions: ‘Es fällt freilich oft schwer, die einstige Hauptmelodie unter den gewölbten Formen der europäischen Volksmusik zu erkennen’ (p. 242, all italics are mine). The Hauptmelodie, or architektonische Melodien, then, provide a basis for variation. The interchangeable use of Stil, system, Urform, form, Hauptmelodie, as well as Melodieprinzipien, Prinzipien der Mustermelodien, Variantenfamilie, Urmelodie, and Singart, all present a dense, mixed terminology that obscures internal contradictions, as well as the contradiction of the very principles the writer claims are true. Nagy mentions difficulties in identifying categories, that is, types, within music from the standpoint of many hundreds of years after the fact, and that the lament ‘ist vielleicht die einzige Singart, die sich heute noch in ihrer Urform offenbart. Seine ausserordentliche Intimität sichert ihm die Reinheit des Stils’ (pp. 225–26). (Laments are, perhaps, the only ‘Singart’ or manner of singing that still retain their original form, due to their extraordinary intimacy.) All in all, Nagy emphasizes the concept of ‘form’ however variously and inconsistently defined — or not defined at all — with the conclusion that formal considerations were decisive in bringing a sense of order into the question of folk music. Again, here as in the cases mentioned above, it would appear that an indefinite but assumed as self-evident ‘form’ is the primary element to emerge as an analytical construct during the second half of the twentieth century. Vargyas, ‘Protohistoire de la musique hongroise’, p. 27, writes of ‘la forme cristalisée de la transposition à la quinte’ (p. 27). More recent literature continues to emphasize the use of the term ‘form’ as an analytical vehicle; cf. Przerembski, Style i formy merodyczne polskich piesni ludowych, and Dahlig, ‘An Integrated System of Encoding, Analysing, and Processing of One-part Melodies’. Finally, ‘form’ may be interchanged with ‘style’, as in this statement of Paksa, Népdaltípusok, p. 37: ‘The lamenting style is an even older musical heritage of irregular structure brought along from Ugrian times and developed into strophic form by the Hungarians’; in the same context: ‘The descending pentatonic style was adopted by the Hungarians in the strophic form from Old Turkic peoples’ (emphasis mine). 19  Cf. Kuckertz, Gestaltvariation in den von Bartók gesammelten rumänischen Colinden and Járdányi, ‘Die Ordnung der ungarischen Volkslieder’; ‘Das Bürgerliche’ is not at all easy to define, although references to it abound. 20  Kerényi, Népies dalok.

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of folk music.21 Nagy concluded eventually that, rather than the pentatonic emphasis as the most important aspect in delineating old layers/styles/types, formal scheme was the crucial factor.22 What has attracted researchers to the terms, if not specific concepts, of form, type, and style, and why have so many writers — certainly not only in the area of Hungarian folk music — found these concepts to have such an appeal, contain such truthfulness, persuade so completely, and evidence an efficaciousness for explaining so satisfactorily the fact that they had noticed and confronted differences within a large mass of collected folk songs? It seems that the written discussions of the 1970s reinforce and reiterate a search for categories and identities, as well as indicating a constant struggle to find conceptual hooks upon which to hang the vast material that had been increasingly brought together. There was, obviously, much more sheer material to deal with, in terms of what had accrued during repeated collection expeditions in the 1970s, than had been the case a half century previously. This is not so much a search for ‘origins’ or even a desire to establish the authenticity of national ethnicity, but, rather, quite simply, a dearth of principles, of hypothetical underpinnings with which to handle the accumulation of collected folk song, to order them in a rational way, and to have the 21  Cf. Mahler, Die russische Totenklage, p. 130, and Nagy, ‘Typenprobleme in der ungarischen Volksmusik’. Nagy writes that both Bartók and Kodály distinguish the lament as type based on form (not the pentatonic emphasis), that is, AABA (p. 241). On the next page, however, another consideration, that of unification of melodic style, is advanced. Nagy’s article of 1962 summarized the extant literature on the subject of folk song categorization and analysis. Further literature published more than twenty years after this article does not deviate significantly from the underlying concepts upon which he bases his premises, nor do subsequent writings depart substantially from his conclusions. 22  Nagy, ‘Typenprobleme in der ungarischen Volksmusik’ describes a development comparable to a ‘second epoch’ of folk song composition, which is analogous to, and concurrent with, the description of a ‘second epoch’ of ‘sequence composition’ that was commonly reported and widely discussed in historical musicology — a ‘second epoch’ that perhaps occurred in the twelfth century. (For a discussion, however, of this notion of a second epoch for the sequence, see van Deusen’s review of Fassler, Gothic Song. Old and new style is also the conceptual basis for Pesovár’s article, ‘Les Types de la danse folklorique hongroise’, with the thesis (p. 104): ‘Les types principaux de la danse folklorique hongroise se divisent en deux grands groupes dans à l’évolution historique, les danses de style ancien et les danses de style nouveau. Pour délimiter les deux styles, on peut partir des analogues de forme (motifs, structures specifiques), des rapports musicaux de les résultats des recherches historiques et comparatives.’ In other words, old and new style differentiation is based on ‘form’. Cf. Elscheková, ‘General Considerations on the Classification of Folk Tunes’, who relies upon genetics terminology to gain analytical authority. These ideological constructs are further discussed in the chapter which follows concerning parallels between research concerning the medieval sequence and folk song.

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satisfaction that one could gain control over this huge mass of melodic material.23 That one should collect as many folk songs as possible was absolutely self-evident throughout the twentieth century, questioned, seriously, by no one. Once again, as the discussion of types in the chapters that follow will show, the ‘pentatonic’ came to the rescue. The pentatonic emphasis was found primarily in eastern and central Europe, according to Nagy, most predominantly in the lands of the then USSR, less in Finnish music (except for ‘pentatonische Inseln’),24 thus making a distinction between the ‘Völker of the USSR, Ungarn, Sekler, Tschango’ and nearly everyone else.25 It is a well-worn, widely used vocabulary that encourages conceptualization by remote control, that is, that musical and textual compositions are ‘Erscheinungsformen’, that they demonstrate — if both they and we are fortunate enough — ‘Urmelodien’, that they can be disposed with, and classified, as ‘styles’, ‘types’, and ‘systems’, as ‘Ausdrucksformen des grossen osteuropäischen Bereiches der pentatonischen Melodien’ as ‘zentrale Konstruktionen’ as well as a ‘Variantenwelt’,26 and also that the most interesting of these styles and types 23  Cf. Nagy, ‘Typenprobleme in der ungarischen Volksmusik’; cf. especially Dobszay and Szendrei, Catalogue of Hungarian Folksong Types, with index of types, pp. 909–22. 24  Nagy, ‘Typenprobleme in der ungarischen Volksmusik’, p. 257: ‘in welchen Gebieten Europas sich der halbtonlose Pentatonic konzentriert und welcher Natur diese Dialekte bezüglich der Form, des Schlußtons sind? Der größte Teil der europäischen Pentatonic konzentriert sich in Osteuropa, in erster Linie in der Musik der im europäischen Teil der Sowjetunion ansässigen Völker, dann häufiger in der Volksmusik der Ungarn, Sekler und Tschango, seltener in der finnischen, estnischen, polnischen, rumänischen, albanischen Volksmusik…Im diatonischen nur der mitteleuropäischen (schwedischen, norwegischen, dänischen, tschechoslowakischen, deutschen, österreichischen, französischen, italienischen) Volksmusik tauchen pentatonische Inseln nur hie und da auf.’ 25  This differentiation between ‘Sekler’ or Hungarian Rumania, Transylvania, and ‘Tschango’ is an example of reporting ideology rather than concentrating on the music itself. Cf. below: the sequence, for example, found all over the continent of Europe for hundreds of years, is based predominantly on the reiteration of fifth relationships. Nagy. ‘Typenproblene in der ungarischen Volksmusik’, writes of ‘diatonische Variationen’ versus the pentatonic of ‘Erscheinungsformen’, using the language of dichotomy and mechanical appearances of ‘Ausdrucksformen’, a ‘Melodiewelt’, ‘Melodietypen’ (p. 258), ‘Zentrale Konstruction’, and ‘Variantenwelt’ (p. 263). Cf. also Rajeczky, ‘Zur Ambitusfrage der Klagelieder’, a discussion of Nagy’s article cited above. 26  ‘Forms of expression of the great East-European Region of pentatonic melodies’: Szabolcsi, ‘Egyetemes müvelödéstörténet és ötfokú hangsorok’; Nagy. ‘Typenprobleme in der ungarischen Volksmusik’, ‘central constructs’ (p. 258) are ABAB; Nagy, ‘Typenprobleme in der ungarischen Volksmusik’, pp. 263–64, ‘variation-world’, in the context of his observation, mentioned above, that ‘Alldies läßt darauf schliessen, dass diese unentwickelten Formen […] aus deren Typen die deutsch-französischen Kinderlieder entstanden — ureuropäischen keltischen

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were formed, or evolved, much before the thirteenth century ce, that is, somewhere in an undefined past that nevertheless still makes available noticeable, if not directly describable, barbarian vestiges. It is a mythic past, and these compositions share the dignity of ancient sites and the doings of ancient peoples, such as the Celts, howbeit, definitely not the Greeks and the Romans. Although the motivation here for investigating and dealing with what is broadly termed ‘folk music’ — and, as we will see, the medieval sequence as well — is surely an understandable and legitimate scholarly impulse to work with a material that is both present and demonstrating, by this presence, a need to be worked with, not only are these research goals and conclusions subject to interrogation on logical grounds, they obscure what one could have observed in the music and texts themselves. This is also the case for the medieval sequence. The language used both requires, and results in, ambiguity. This, of course, is the challenge and responsibility of ongoing scholarship with material that is there — to question the logic, definition, and classification of what has been written, in an ongoing dialogue with the musical and textual material itself. Writing from the seventies, virtually to the end of the twentieth century, using the conceptual bases outlined above,27 has in the main discussed classification or organization into types of the mass of folk music collected during that century. Major conferences of, for example, the International Council of Folk Music were largely devoted to the question of classification, as proceedings indicate.28 Type continues to be topic of major importance, as will be discussed in more detail in the chapters to follow.29 Ursprungs sind.’ Cf. also Elschek, ‘Problem of Variation in 18th Century Slovak Folk Music Manuscripts’, p. 47, which begins with ‘No comparative historical-genetic investigation of folk music can be undertaken without a thorough study of historical sources.’ The underlying supposition is that one is dealing with a problem of ‘East–West’, rather than ‘North–South’ and that this (historical) problem is genetic in nature, to be explained in terms of organic growth processes. 27  The conceptual bases remain, as in Vargyas, ‘Protohistoire de la musique hongroise’, who writes that except for a very small minority, all of the folk songs are pentatonic but that ‘pentatonality’ is an extremely complex term. ‘Form’ and ‘style’ remain as the principal analytical anchors, as in Przerembski, Style i formy melodyczne polskich piesni ludowych. 28  See Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, 7 (1965) which is devoted to the problem of methods of classification and lexicographical arrangements of tunes in folk music collections; and the collected papers of the International Folk Music Council Meeting in Budapest, 1964. Questions of type classification have been the priority, as well, of Dobszay and Szendrei, Catalogue of Hungarian Folksong Types, a large-scale project preceded by such articles as Dobszay, ‘Népdalrendezés és-kutatás’; Dobszay, ‘A típus-fogalom a Magyar népzenekutatásban’; Dobszay, ‘Der Begriff “Typus” in der ungarischen Volksmusikforschung’. 29  Most recent work has, in fact, centred around just this topic. Cf. Stockmann and Stuzewski,

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A quintessential model of the points of view reiterated by two generations of writers on the subject of folk music is Kodály’s opening address for a conference honouring Bartók and Liszt:30 Bartók was the offspring of the Hungarian countryside, had a longing for the West, and eventually emigrated, trying to find recognition and affection which was not his lot in Hungary. His oversensitive organism was not harnassed with ‘ars triplex circa pectus’ without which he could not have endured the last years of his life at home. His was a shorter life than Liszt’s but their fate is similar inasmuch as they earned full recognition only after their death.

One could divide this piece into the following modular entities: • • • •

Bartók was the offspring of the Hungarian countryside, had a longing for the West, eventually emigrated, trying to find recognition and affection not his lot in Hungary.

This remarkable piece of prose not only exemplifies the most characteristic feature of folk music itself, that is, the bringing together of ‘chunks’ of verbal substance, each with a recognizable characteristic, for the sake of the whole — or a completed composition, for an intended purpose. In this case — and one can find countless parallels in medieval and Byzantine composition, for example of the ninth–tenth centuries — these ‘chunks’ must not necessarily be provably ‘true’; they can be placed, essentially, in any order without becoming disorderly, and they must not even be entirely significant.31 In fact none of Kodály’s Analyse und Klassifikation von Volksmelodien; Elscheková, ‘Stilbegriff und Stilschichten in der slowakischen Volksmusik’, who writes in detail of ‘stilanalytischer Methode’ (p. 265); Domokos, ‘Bartók népzenei rendszerei’; and finally, Paksa, Népdaltípusok. Paksa writes, ‘It was among the first insights of the Hungarian ethnomusicology that for a grasp of folk music phenomena, one was required to have melody types’ (p. 35). 30  See the opening address to Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, 5 (1963), 9; the entire volume is of interest here, as well as Kodály’s Collected Writings, Speeches and Statements. 31  See, for example, Whittow, The Making of Byzantium, pp.  4–9, and van Deusen, ‘Byzantium and the West’. Whittow states, with respect to the composition of the ninth-century Byzantine texts: ‘Apart from the uneven coverage, the main problem with all these texts — even the better ones such as Leo the Deacon — is their obvious unreliability. This is a problem that is as applicable to Nikephoros and Theophanes as it is to the later writers, and it is one that some modern Byzantinists still ignore’ (p. 9). Whittow is applying much later criteria of the modern historical discipline to the text he has examined — a text that has similarities as biographical

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‘chunks’ have specifically to do with the details of Bartók’s life and work: he was, for example, not a person of the ‘Hungarian countryside’, but, like most Hungarians, and in fact, central Europeans, a typical — in this sense at least — urban European who eventually left Budapest for New York City; he had no desire whatever to emigrate (few would under those circumstances); and the process of emigration was, in fact, very difficult for him. Finally, a desire for recognition and affection do not seem to stand out as Bartók’s personal characteristics, since he turned down advantageous positions at prestigious institutions, in fact, to his own personal detriment. In this case, Kodály’s composition is composed of the bringing together of chunks of syntax in order to fashion a composition for an intended purpose. This method can also be seen in Kodály’s other writings, his book, as well as his musical composition, as for example, the opera-Singspiel-operetta Székely Fono and the opera Háry János. Both of these extended works consist essentially of chunks of musical textual substance brought together, often with very little obvious attempt at fashioning transitions, an aspect that is discussed in much more detail below. Recognizable modules of conceptual substance can be found, placed together, through the remaining decades of the twentieth century — analogous to the chunks of textual-musical substance found, as we will see, in the music collected. In the placing-together of these modules, many apparent logical contradictions went unnoticed. The composition, that is, a given essay, composed in the same manner as a ‘piece’ of ‘folk song’ constituted a completed whole from many placed-together parts. Reading and noting common features of the many articles that together presented a literature over the decades in this field of folk music research, it was astonishing to notice how closely an unconscious compositional construct that employed words exclusively paralleled that of words/music — the subject matter over which the essay was written. In other words, the construct of the article itself, that of modules of verbal substance, from an available material was exactly the construct employed in the folk music concerning which the article was written. But none of the writers noticed this. Each thought that he or she was presenting a new and innovative way of dealing with the question at hand. What had happened was that chunks of availwriting with the one considered above. This is a consideration that also comes to the fore in medieval biographers of Pope Gregory the Great or Bishop Chrodegang of Metz, discussed, for example in Claussen, The Reform of the Frankish Church, especially pp. 19–57. In much the same way, Kodály should not be accused of misrepresentation; rather, one must consider the occasion for which he has placed together the composition, as well as his own compositional characteristics. He is not, in this instance, testifying under oath at a court of law, nor was his occasional speech, although published later, a scholarly article.

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able material had been placed in a different order, with a different emphasis. In other words, the connections — the connecting link — were the contribution of each individual writer, as we will see to be the case in folk song composition. Let us examine in this chapter some of these modules that resulted in essaylength compositions to the end of the twentieth century. L. Vargyas, for example, after arguing for the authenticity and nature of folk song writes, ‘Let us regard the Folk Song as a work of art. It is significant for our national heritage, and it was originally for this reason that folk-song was discovered’.32 Together all of the modular statements, reiterated in varied formulation through several decades, constitute a material — a substance — to be then appropriated by later writers. The materia-substantia-natura in its entirety, whether textual or textual-melodic-rhythmic, could be accessed and used by one who was capable of doing so. Not only can one reasonably doubt that a separation exists between the constructive principles used in the writing of essays about folk music and the folk music itself, but one can also argue for the methodological unity with which otherwise separated ‘folk’ and ‘art’ music are discussed within scholarly research. The literature that has accumulated at rapid pace around the question of folk song and folk music also, however, has been methodologically unified with analysis generally of music as it has been discussed verbally and within written discourse, as well as taught at conservatories around the world where ‘western art music’ is taught. In other words, methodologically, there is no difference between an article, for example, on the subject of ‘polyphony of the School of Notre Dame’ in which types, evolution of style, and layers are discussed with respect to dating, or ‘old and new’, or first and second epoch, etc. and an article concerning folk music. In both cases, type, the delineation of type, style, and style layers are conceptual engines that motivate the discussion, giving a recognized, conventional structure to argumentation. The conceptual motivation, in terms of style and type, were paramount, regardless of whether the author considered him or herself to be an ‘ethnomusicologist’, a folklorist, or a historical musicologist, or whether he or she was writing about Hungarian or Polish folk song or the medieval sequence. Type, form, and style have been ubiquitous both in titles and throughout articles from the 1960s to the early years of the new millennium. In many respects, articles either reiterated or reformulated the conceptual features and substance contained in Nagy’s ‘Typenprobleme’, with phrases such as ‘streng geschlossene Einheit dieses Stils (Urform)’: ‘Es fällt freilich oft schwer, die ein32 

Vargyas, ‘The Folk-Song as a Work of Art’, p. 195.

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stige Hauptmelodie unter den gewölbten Formen der europäischen Volksmusik zu erkennen’33 — an argumentation that would be hopeless and hapless without an assumed shared and accepted background of acquaintance with the terms ‘form’ and ‘style’. Attendant to the concept of style is that of structure, of Hauptmelodie and Varianten, in which Quintstrukturen were pressed into service as harbingers of either old or new style: ‘die gewölbte Quintkonstruktion des “neuen Typs”, die gleichzeitig mit dem erscheinen des Dux-Comes Prinzips zustande kam’ (this fifth-structure-arch [indicative of ] the ‘new type’ appeared simultaneously with the principle of the antecedent/consequent).34 Is it possible for research to constitute more than an example for ideological construct of one’s time and place? Yes, all of the research outlined above is more than a documentation of examples, in varying mixtures, of positivism using evolutionary, genetic growth models, based on nineteenth-century GermanRomantic, Marxist views of peoples, nations, and history, with incipient structuralist tendencies upon which a discussion of structure and ornamentation, as well as universality, was based. Each writer, despite overt common features, placed together, from material available to him or to her, a particular composite, with figures of speech and figures of thought not only relevant to the situation at hand but utterly characteristic. Just so with the music they were all seeking to describe. Let us go into this in more detail.

33 

Nagy, ‘Typenprobleme in der ungarischen Volksmusik’, p. 247. Nagy, ‘Typenprobleme in der ungarischen Volksmusik’, p. 256; also, under ‘Die Frage des Pentatonic’: ‘die allumfassende Kenntnis sämtlicher Erscheinungsformen der europäiscen Pentatonic ist mangels notwendiger Publikationen fast unmöglich’. 34 

Chapter 4

Understanding Herder: Plato’s Timaeus and the Medieval Conceptualization of Sound as Material*

T

he Hungarian language, in particular the word szilfa, preserves a significant conceptual continuity with the medieval past — a past only recently lost. This word, amongst other connotations, retains attributes of the Latin silva, from which it would appear to be derived. Silva holds the key to understanding a paramount feature of Latin-based mentality dealing with material substance and its importance for composition. Silva, as an important concept-term, ardently and thoroughly defended by its translator from Greek into Latin, provides as well a key to understanding ways of working with external, visible material as well as the more elusive ‘substance of the soul’, including also the substance of sound, time, and movement upon which music composition is based. The following chapter provides an introduction to a concept necessary to the discussion which follows of materia-substantia-natura — certainly one of the most basic issues of dealing with life itself. Further, the influence of the Latin translation of Plato’s Timaeus in the Middle Ages provided one of the most important bases for the study of music in the Middle Ages — a basis that one could with profit revive and seek to understand today. We will take these issues *  Portions of this chapter have been published in van Deusen, ‘In and Out of a “Latin

Forest”’.

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step by step, beginning with the place of music, using as it does, invisible materials of sound, motion, and time, and proceeding on to a discussion of substance itself. The readers of Plato’s Timaeus, both in the Greek as well in as its Latin translation, are presented with what, on reflection, might be considered to be selfevident, namely, that seeing is believing. According to the Timaeus, the sense of sight is the first sense, reinforcing repetition, thus reassuring the viewer with the pleasure of recognition and an accompanying sense of comfort. Obvious as this might seem, it would also indicate that the sense of hearing, and in conjunction with that sense, music, would take a second place, serve a secondary function during the period of time during the Middle Ages when the Timaeus in its partial Latin translation, with lengthy commentary by Chalcidius, continued to be read and receive comment. There is much evidence that the Timaeus, in its Latin translation, was important and influential throughout the Middle Ages, presenting an arsenal of conceptual tools with which to access and deal with basic principles of life, those accessing material, generation, and growth, and providing a vocabulary of Latin terms for approaching these basic concepts. The Timaeus latinus also served as a platform from which to begin further discussion concerning these issues and words, so ubiquitous was its influence.1 The beat goes on, so to speak; the influence of the Timaeus in its Latin translation is unnoticed, for example, in the writings of Herder. But the premise mentioned above, namely, that hearing is, so to speak, a second-class sense, and sound, as well as music, are of lesser consequence than 1 

Klibansky, The Continuity of the Platonic Tradition, p. 28, in discussing the translations of Plato’s Meno and Phaedo in the mid-twelfth century writes: ‘The importance of these works, however, cannot be compared with that of the Timaeus: This dialogue, or rather its first part, was studied and quoted throughout the Middle Ages, and there was hardly a mediaeval library of any standing which had not a copy of Chalcidius’ version and sometimes also a copy of the fragment translated by Cicero. Although these facts are well known, their significance for the history of ideas has perhaps not been sufficiently grasped by historians.’ Klibansky’s statement is even more true for an assessment of music writing within the discipline of music throughout the Middle Ages. It should be mentioned in this context that the copy that was believed to be the oldest extant manuscript of the Timaeus latinus was that of Hucbald of St Amand, who also wrote at least one treatise on music and even in the twelfth century continued to enjoy a reputation for having served as a consultant for the establishment of scholae cantorum — singing schools that were always attached to schools that also enjoyed reputations as centres of medieval learning, as, apparently, the cathedral school at Nevers in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries (see van Deusen, Music at Nevers Cathedral, especially the introduction to vol. i). The link between the Timaeus and utterly basic music conceptualizations with attendant vocabulary has not, in view of its importance, come under investigation, although Peter Dronke has emphasized the importance of Chalcidius, his translation and commentary, as well as that of the Timaeus latinus in the Middle Ages in Dronke, The Spell of Calcidius.

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sight, was, however, not completely accepted as a premise in subsequent interaction with, and extension of, the Latin Timaeus and its commentary within medieval mental culture, as well as beyond. An indication of the dignity, importance, and ultimate functionality of hearing and music as the first sense within medieval disciplines is that, still, many centuries later, Leonardo da Vinci in his writings on art criticism complained with some bitterness that since the visual arts served the same function as music, that is, making profound, basic philosophical concepts available to the senses, drawing, in particular, should hold the same place and acquire the same dignity as an indispensable discipline as music. Drawn figurae, with their carefully delineated characteristics, so much the more, since they carefully depicted life itself, should also be considered as a material and measurement discipline, just as music — or even in place of music.2 This case in point has been mentioned since the entire discussion by Leonardo, to which he obviously gives a good deal of attention, shows how important the material of sound, its shaped, conscious, contained organization into music, as well as the sense of hearing — all incorporated into a carefully structured discipline — were for many centuries from the time of the translation of the Timaeus into Latin, that is, probably around the beginning of the fifth century, to at least the end of the nineteenth or early decades of the twentieth century when the Latin translations of Plato were commonly read. Music, in the Middle Ages, as well as later than what is customarily considered to be the medieval period, was a material discipline, making plain what material indeed was, its properties, functionality, as well as precisely what measurements could be applied in order to access these properties. Paradoxically, music as a discipline — that is, thinking and writing about music in the Middle Ages — had the Latin Timaeus and its fourth-/fifth-century translator Chalcidius to thank for a concrete perception of sound substance. The Timaeus delineated not only how one should think about material, both seen and unseen, but how to recognize it. This is also an example of the power of translation itself, the influence of the choice of concept on the part of the translator, as the translator infuses terms with what he himself knows, believes he knows, and believes to be true. The translation itself, in addition to providing, case by case, metaphors for terms (translatio most commonly signified metaphor), constitutes a composite — a composition — on the part of the translator. We will look at the influential and opinionated commentary of Chalcidius and how his translation, by means of just one particular substitution, shaped the discipline of music throughout the Middle Ages. In fact, this particular meta2 

See, for example, Schroer and Irle, ‘…Ich aber quadriere den Kreis…’.

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phor reached to the present, as well, in ways in which music is taught today. Elementary properties of music, even today, are commonly taught as the ‘materials’ of music, as an indication of the perception that sound, in fact, is material in nature and can be handled as such. This insight is the view of sound found, ultimately, in the Latin translation, with commentary, of Plato’s Timaeus. It seems that nearly every major medieval library held at least one copy of the Latin translation of the Timaeus by Chalcidius, frequently also with the commentary by this translator. This is an important indication of what might be termed a ‘mentality’, since, as has also been often noted, they all read the same books.3 One of these books was surely the Latin Timaeus, so we will take it seriously. Questions that might come to mind are the following: How did the Timaeus latinus differ conceptually from the Greek text; what did its readerships make of the Latin translation; and what priorities left their traces in discernible ways upon Latin-reading culture, which included everyone who could read for over one and a half millennia? How did the Latin Timaeus depart, as well, from an earlier, pre-Socratic, as well as a Platonic, tradition, and what difference did this make specifically for these cultures throughout the continent of Europe? These are comprehensive questions that, like most important and basic questions, are not so easily answered, but by selecting one important issue to be found here — which apparently made a great impact — we may be able to make some progress, and at least provide a platform for further discussion in the chapters that follow concerning working with sound materia. I will, first of all, draw attention to the importance of the Latin translation with commentary by Chalcidius, secondly, point to one specific priority within this translation and commentary, and thirdly, observe the application of this priority within the emerging material discipline of music, with broad underlying principles still in place today.

3 

The importance of the Timaeus latinus not only was not sufficiently recognized in 1939, when Klibansky noted that fact, but continues to be almost completely ignored, as is the case in Thomas J. Mathiesen’s recent book on Greek writers on music in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Apollo’s Lyre. The writer is apparently unaware that an edition of the Timaeus, with a valuable introduction to the translation and commentary, as well as important indices, has appeared since Johannes Wrobel’s nineteenth-century edition. If Professor Mathiesen had seen the indices pointing to both sources accessed by Chalcidius as well as the influence upon a Latin readership during the entire medieval period, he, no doubt, would not have been so dismissive of the work as ‘largely derivative’ (p. 616), nor treated it so cursorially, as scarcely worth considering, even by mention. A recent edition with translation has been published: On Plato’s ‘Timaeus’ – Chalcidius, ed. and trans. by Magee.

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The primary consideration of the Timaeus is material, and it is just this subject matter upon which both its Greek and its Latin readers were divided. Perhaps no other topic separates physical and temporal cultures more than that of material and its attendant perceived properties: of what stuff consists, how one can effectively approach and describe it, what one can do with it, on what basis one regards material, what types of material are indeed valued, for what reasons and for itself, of ‘goods’; of what material’s properties consist, as well as these properties’ inherent functionality. It is essentially this topic of material — ways of moving within material, or modes, and properties that are contained and expressed — that is explored in the question of ‘type’. It is the topic of material reality, a priority of both Plato and Aristotle, especially in the Physics, and even more so in the subsequent transformation of Plato’s text by Chalcidius, who apparently regarded sound, hence music, as a valuable exemplification of invisible, yet material, reality. This attitude, towards both material reality as well as its musical exemplification, fashioned, throughout the Middle Ages, the discipline of music and its specific exemplary challenge and opportunity, all of which provided the underlying, if unexpressed, reason for the fields of both musicology and ethnomusicology. One is obviously dealing in both musicology and ethnomusicology with the unseen substance of sound. To return to the topic at hand: the Greek word hyle is a point of departure in the text of Plato, as Chalcidius states, this expression being a key term within the argumentation of the Timaeus, as the Greek for what there is that exists, being, or, perhaps also, interpreted as ‘stuff ’. The term has, without a doubt, generated much discussion and controversy, then as now. Chalcidius, as translator, selects certain connotations from this important and multivalent concept, pointing it in his own direction, giving it clear priority, and making his own contribution to the Greek text. Hyle, for Chalcidius, is chaos,4 but does not refer solely to ‘stuff ’ that can be seen, heard, noticed, described, and moulded in some way, but rather is, most importantly, invisible, yet substantial, material. In his remarks, particularly concerning this elusive Greek term, Chalcidius seems to have pragmatically avoided certain overwhelming, probably irreconcilable issues and, quite simply, notes that he took the term and translated it, necessarily, as he states, into a perfectly useable and ordinary Latin expression, ‘silva: necessitatem porro nunc appellat hylen, quam nos Latine silvam possumus nominare’ (silva, necessarily now called hyle, which we Latins are able to 4 

See Plato, Timaeus a Calcidio translatus commentarioque instructus, ed. by Waszink, pp. 61, 145, 259, 286, 325.

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name silva);5 and again, ‘chaos, quam Graeci hylen, nos silvam vocamus’ (chaos, the Greek hyle, we call silva).6 This seems like an innocuous undertaking, supported, as Chalcidius states, by Pythagoras. Yet the implications of what, in some sense, is a translational sleight of hand are amazing. These are at the same time contradictory of one of the basic theses of the Greek Timaeus, that is, that what is seen takes precedence over what is invisible, yet present, as sound. In some ways a typical Greek expression that had been used to imply almost everything, and at the same time delivering almost nothing to hold securely in one’s grasp, is consciously channelled by Chalcidius into an ordinary Latin word meaning, as well as bringing to the Latin mind, a ‘forest full of trees’, demystifying the word and making it much more concrete. What has happened is a transformation of one expression into the connotations of another. One might also at this point observe that this translation-metaphor of an already transliterated hyle was, after all, unnecessary, since the Latin language was already, by the time of Chalcidius’s writing, full of Greek terms — words that had landed, been appropriated, or constituted linguistic cop-outs for Latin writers. The treasure of Greek vocabulary had long since been plundered by writers in Latin searching for words. Chalcidius could have followed suit. He does not and proceeds to devote the major portion of his commentary that follows to explain himself, thus indicating that the transformation he had effected was not as matter of fact as it might on the surface seem and that, at the very least, he felt compelled to defend himself. Silva — literally, for the Latin imagination — was a forest full of trees. Silva implied a rich source of material that could be grown up from seeds, cut down and appropriated, carved into chunks usable for many purposes, made into shapes or figures, such as furniture, shaped, piled up, or burnt up into heat and light. And at the end of the century of its lifetime, depending upon its innate properties, at least part of the trees would die and fall to the ground, enriching the soil, and providing yet another kind of material. Chalcidius’s translational metaphor transformed the concept into one that could be directed to very specific uses, channelling a term into everyday, matter-of-fact perception. Silva, unbounded, without limitation, a dark, even opaque, disorderly thicket, a maze, an intense, compact texture, full of potentially useful material, invited those who knew of its existence and who could work with its mate5 

Plato, Timaeus a Calcidio translatus commentarioque instructus, ed. by Waszink, p. 273. Plato, Timaeus a Calcidio translatus commentarioque instructus, ed. by Waszink, p. 167, to be expanded upon in the more extended section of Chalcidius’s commentary, chs 268–354. 6 

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rial properties to enter and help themselves — and, of course, forests existed all over medieval and even so-called early modern Europe to serve as literal and concrete examples of exactly what Chalcidius projected. 7 The possibilities for differentiation into characteristic figurae or differentiae were endless. The concept of silva, therefore, could contain the possibility of differentiation, made clear by indicators — all of which were observable. This silva was a reality that extended as well to that within and accessed by the imagination.8 In other words, silva itself, or ‘the forest’, is disorderly, uncontained, and indeterminate but can be carefully, selectively differentiated into modi, or classifiable, differing motions (modi) with their differences (differentiae) indicated by characteristic figures, gestures, or shapes (figurae). One question that comes to mind 7 

Fernand Braudel states that the forests of medieval France well into the seventeenth century were just such forests, full of material and possibilities for lodging, some of which were simply available for those who otherwise had neither income nor place to live — the homeless — or fugitives. See Braudel, The Identity of France, i, 55, 146–53 with subheadings: ‘The Forest: Jewel among Properties’, ‘The Forest: A World Upside Down’, and ‘The Forest as Refuge’. Braudel makes the point that these ‘silent, dark, forests with their piled up logs’ were limitless in that they often reached over county boundaries, and there were few paths and roads. Collections of folk tales such as those of the Grimm brothers began often with a line such as ‘Near a large forest lived a poor woodcutter with his wife and two children’; cf. Weber, ‘What Is Real in Folk Tales’. The concrete exemplification of this concept of silva as a disorderly limitless mass of material that could be accessed would have been available to a Latin readership even much later than the Middle Ages, a point to be reinforced below. In a sense, collections of folk tales themselves comprised a silva to be appropriated. One can make the point here that the hunt, hunting as a culture, and forestry, as well as the cultivation of forests, have always constituted a priority in central Europe, and works such as Carl Maria von Weber, Der Freischütz, Wagner’s Parzifal, and Kodály’s Székely Fono either open within a forest and/or take place for the most part within a forest — a repository of available materia-substantia. Priority of this concept is also shown by the several related terms in the Hungarian language: szilfa (wood, material, including intellectual material); szilánk (splinter); szil (elm tree, single tree); szilajság (wildness/wilderness); szilankmentes (splinterproof ); szilárd (firm, solid, massive, steadfast); szilencium (silence — also a material); szilva (plum). 8  See Carruthers, The Craft of Thought, who writes of imaginative ‘tools’ and regards them primarily as rhetorical (as they also are), but is unaware, apparently, of the fundamental material nature of what she describes, nor of the medieval background of concern to explain the materiality of the concepts, for example, of cento (a chunk of material) and figura (a consciously crafted delineation within a chunk of material; figura is one of the translations of the Greek schema). As a historian and expositor of literature, she has not taken into consideration the totality of medieval education which included the material and measurement disciplines, giving substance that was then exemplified by rhetorical figurae. It is significant that her index does not refer to Plato, the Timaeus latinus, Chalcidius, or the concept of silva.

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is how, in fact, did Chalcidius come to, and settle upon, this particular word in the Latin language. That Chalcidius, indeed, selected silva, with its obvious material connotations, illustrates what occurs in the translational process here, namely, that Chalcidius appropriated from many sources, certainly also the discussion of material and its properties from Aristotle’s Physics,9 all of the aspects of material property he could think of and loaded them into silva. In a sense, then, silva as a word itself is an example of what the word signifies, namely, an entire thicket of aspects, concepts, permutations, and threads, a pre-existent conceptual stuff from which one could take out and select what was useful to one’s own purposes. Chalcidius’s silva, as a term, itself is a collection and composition, a composite from many different sources that were available to him at that time. If this were not the case, Chalcidius would not have taken such pains to explain himself. The passages on the subject of silva are Chalcidius’s priority, as van Winden has pointed out, and although Chalcidius’s quotations from the Timaeus and his commentary are channelled to some extent by the progression of topics Plato brings up one by one, yet not only is the section on silva clearly Chalcidius’s own priority, but the implications of silva profoundly influenced not only medieval mentality, but a conceptualization of seen-unseen substance that has remained. Silva turns up again and again.10 It would seem that it is impossible to escape from this medieval ‘forest’, even in collections of so-called Märchen (fairy tales) of the nineteenth century. One moves from one topic to another in this order. Chalcidius, dealing with the Greek text, has been discussing anima (soul/mind) and the conjunction of anima with corpus (body), arriving then, as Waszink has observed, at a section entitled ‘In Praise of Seeing’, Laus videndi. One has therefore gone from what is unseen to that which is seen and the capacity for sight, a subject that, in spite of his words of praise, Chalcidius abandons forthwith, with the terse comment, ‘and now we will examine another sense’. There are two senses, he states, sight and hearing, by which we can comprehend things, and which also instruct us 9  See also Aristotle, Metaphysica, I.3,983b. An earlier study of this concept can be found in van Deusen, ‘The Problem of Mode, the Example of Melody in Medieval Music Writing’. 10  Cf.  Plato, Timaeus a Calcidio translatus commentarioque instructus, ed. by Waszink, ‘Introduction, p. xxvii, with regard to the passage quoted above (c. 268), ‘necessitatem porro nunc appellat hylen, quam nos Latine silvam possumus nominare’; the reader is drawn to the comment of van Winden, Calcidius on Matter, p. 23: ‘therefore, Calcidius’ lengthy chapter on material/silva is actually more than a treatment of one of the two principal subjects […]. It is, in point of fact the fundamental part of his entire commentary.’

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when those things are no longer directly present.11 A translation of Plato’s text then follows: How much by means of the utility of the voice is grasped through music; and all of what the human race consists can be attributed to harmonia. (This, by the way, is an obvious example of an important Greek term appropriated into the Latin language and used, although, as Chalcidius also states, harmonia has indeed a Latin translation, modulatio.)12 The Latin text follows: ‘Quantumque per vocem utilitatis capitur ex musica, totum hoc constat hominum generi propter harmoniam tributum’, to which Chalcidius responds in his comment, that a harmonic ratio has been built between mind on top (in superioribus) and nature, which can be said to consist of the motion of the rhythmic modes or manners of moving. This is, again, a translational dilemma for a modern reader, since the language used here is at the same time too familiar to music historians acquainted with what has become by now, on the one hand, a conventional ‘music theoretical’ terminology and, on the other hand, quite incomprehensible. We are lulled by what we perceive as conventionality into believing that we understand the point that Chalcidius is making. This point, to become so influential throughout the Middle Ages, is that the various delineations of predictable movement found in recognizable rhythmic patterns negotiate a bridge between what is sensed and what is known, between natura, or that of which the world consists, and its sensory perceptions and differentiations. The bridge formed by musical sound is that between the perceived, visible realities of the physical world and all that is unseen. Chalcidius goes on to say that this, in fact, is the measure of music’s great importance, not so much on account of its magical properties which cause people in general (the vulgus) to lust after it — have an appetite for it (‘non in ea qua vulgus delectatur quaeque ad voluptatem facta excitat’) — but that music partook somehow of the divine, in that through music reason and intellectuality are no longer separated from 11 

This subject of ‘things that are no longer present’ is taken up in detail in the Phaedo, which became known to the Latin-reading public in the mid-twelfth century and could be found in major emerging libraries, such as what would become the Vatican and the Sorbonne, by the beginning of the fourteenth century. See van Deusen, ‘The Harp and the Soul’, especially pp. 388–90. 12  I have deliberately avoided the implications of this entire terminological nexus, also for the reason that Stephen Gersh has treated it so thoroughly and effectively, with important implications for analysis, not only for the terms under consideration, but generally. See Gersh’s pivotal Concord in Discourse, especially his consideration of Chalcidius and the Timaeus latinus, pp. 128–39, 148–49. The implication here is that if you truly understood armonia in music, using the material of sound which is unseen, you understood, as well, what holds the world as well as the human body together.

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sensorily perceived, strongly insistent reality. A consensual symphonia ensues as mind-spirit (anima) is brought back to its proper path, literally, a via recta.13 Chalcidius then proceeds to state that: this, indeed, is an optimal symphonia within our system of law and principle, from whence both reward and works proceed. For reason is leader; there is an inner vigour, similar to rage in its strength and intimacy, but much more productive than rage, providing a helping hand to the will. Without this modulating, harmonizing, force, from whence music follows — and by which music consists — there is no symphonia, and without symphonia, there is no music. For without a doubt, music clothes the mind-spirit with rationality, recalling the spirit to itself and its internal properties also from that time when God fashioned the world.

Chalcidius closes with ‘All music is posited in voice, in hearing, and in sound. By sense, then, concept becomes known within intelligible things.’14 Silva, as the editor of the Timaeus latinus notes in his chapter heading, follows as Chalcidius gives the reader a tour de force of what silva contains, what could be done with this stuff, at the same time providing a vocabulary for the discipline of music for the next one and a half millennia. We are led from the unseen, vivifying force of the world, essentially unlimited and without boundaries, namely anima, to the bond of anima with a containing, delimiting body; then, from sight to vox and sound, that is, again, from differentiated, contained voice to 13  Plato, Timaeus a Calcidio translatus commentarioque instructus, ed. by Waszink, c. 267, p. 272: ‘Quantumque per vocem utilitatis capitur ex musica, totum hoc constat hominum generi propter harmoniam tributum, quia iuxta rationem harmonicam animam in superioribus aedificaverat naturalemque eius actum rhythmis modisque constare dixerat, sed haec exolescere animae ob consortium corporis necessario obtinente oblivione proptereaque immodulatas fore animas plurimorum. Medelam huius vitii dicit esse in musica positam, non in ea qua vulgus delectatur quaeque ad voluptatem facta excitat vitia non numquam, sed in illa divina quae numquam a ratione atque intellegentia separetur; hanc enim censet exorbitantes animas a via recta revocare demum ad symphoniam veterem.’ Augustine in his treatise on music indicates the same; cf. van Deusen, ‘De musica’ and ‘Rhythm’. 14  Plato, Timaeus a Calcidio translatus commentarioque instructus, ed. by Waszink, c. 267, pp. 272–73: ‘Optima porro symphonia est in moribus nostris iustitia, virtutum omnium principalis, per quam ceterae quoque virtutes suum munus atque opus exequuntur, ut ratio quidem dux sit, vigor vero intimus, qui est iracundiae similis, auxiliatorem se rationi volens praebeat; porro haec provenire sine modulatione non possunt, modulatio demum sine symphonia nulla sit, ipsa symphonia sequitur musicam. Procul dubio musica exornat animam rationabiliter ad antiquam naturam revocans et efficiens talem demum, qualem initio deus opifex eam fecerat. Tota porro musica in voce et auditu et sonis posita est. Utilis ergo etiam iste sensus est philosophiae totius assecutioni ad notationem intellegibilis rei.’

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auditory stuff, unlimited and uncontained. In and out of the inchoate, disorganized, yet rich silva we go. Chalcidius then takes up silva, superimposing two Latin words, anima (soul/mind/spirit) and silva (forest) to explain the Greek hyle. In the course, then, of his translation and commentary, what is clear is that silva refers simultaneously to both: that which is seen (the visible stuff of the world) as well as, and in full equivalence with, all of the unseen stuff of the world, or anima. Silva, therefore, includes and is best exemplified by sound, since sound is both material, substantial, and unseen. All stuff, seen and unseen, sounded and unsounded, is included in this disorderly thicket of sounded and unsounded material in an equivalent relationship. Chalcidius has zest for this topic. Over seventy-three pages in the recent edition are required for Chalcidius to explain why he has chosen silva to explain hyle. This, summarized, is his thought process: Silva, as he states, is the Greek hyle, encompasses everything, and is made from ‘germane material’ or material ‘germane to itself ’.15 Silva also includes pre-existent material and, without distinction of substance, mind-soul or anima. Hence, silva can be viewed as piled up, disorderly, conceptual, as well as physical, material, without delimitation and without boundaries, neither corporeal nor incorporeal.16 Silva is fundamental, but generated. The time of generation or the concept of ‘beginning’ is not of such great consequence. Indeed, ‘beginning’ itself may not be a predominately temporal concept.17 Silva as a term is a composite itself, containing a 15 

Cf.  Plato, Timaeus a Calcidio translatus commentarioque instructus, ed. by Waszink, c. 268, pp. 273–74. Chalcidius not only invests his commentary with his own interpretations — the obvious bases, in any case, for a commentary — but the translation of Plato’s text is informed by this conceptualization as well, as for example, his emphasis on the concept/word fabricator, fabricatus est, which brings up concrete, material connotations. See, for example, 36 D (p. 28): ‘Unam quippe, ut erat, eam et indivisam reliquit, interiorem vero scidit sexies septemque impares orbes fabricatus est iuxta dupli et tripli spatia orbesque ipsos contraria ferri iussit agitatione, ex quibus septem tres quidem pari velocitate, quattuor vero et sibimet ipsis et ad comparationem ceterorum impari dissimilique sed cum ratione motu.’ (Latin texts have been included so that even if one has only basic Latin reading knowledge, one can nevertheless pick out the terms under discussion.) 16  Plato, Timaeus a Calcidio translatus commentarioque instructus, ed. by Waszink, c. 272, p. 276: ‘Quippe primum elementum universae rei silva est informis ac sine qualitate quam, ut sit mundus, format intelligibilis species; ex quibus, silva videlicet et specie’, with editor’s note to Augustine’s De genesi ad litteram, I c. 4, n. 9: ‘silva informis ac sine qualitate’. 17  Plato, Timaeus a Calcidio translatus commentarioque instructus, ed. by Waszink, c. 276, p. 280: ‘Hebraei silvam generatam esse censent. […] vel ut Symmachus: Ab exordio condidit deus caelum et terram, terra porro fuit otiosum quid confusumque et inordinatum. […] [ex Origenis in Genesin commentario, I.9] Omnia tamen haec in unum aiunt concurrere, ut et generata sit

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diversity of capacities.18 Silva can be applied to, and include, the entire physical and conceptual world — an amazing thought, and one that taxes the imagination. When divided or individuated, one can imagine a particular selected individual as a branch, the Latin stirps or virga, a protruding, defining stem from the disorderly mass of the entire forest of silva; as Chalcidius states stirps figurae, the ‘branch’ as a figura. The rough, heaped up wood of a forest as an imaginary construct is placed before one’s mind in terms of the careful separation of a single, living twig. Likewise, rough, undifferentiated conceptual substance containing inner energy is bonded to a single written-out figure, a written twig, or virga. The branch or twig is animated, both in the world we observe around us and conceptually, as a tone delineated and given intention within the generality of sound, as will be exemplified below.19 Silva, in Chalcidius’s translation, is an example of linguistic protuberance, in that the Latin language necessitates a degree of concretization that the Greek language neither requires nor admits. On the other hand, the Latin silva also displays a deficiency since no accommodation is made for the insubstantial feature of the Greek hyle. The invisible aspect of, for example, a concept or an ‘agenda’, that is, a motivating force, is suppressed. The result, however, of what Chalcidius apparently was compelled to explain was that silva, for subsequent centuries, presented as material reality to the imagination what was invisible as well as conceptual. The translation of hyle into silva, rather than giving evidence for the conceptual, even intellectual, poverty of the Latin language,20 produced ea quae subiecta est universo corpori silva sermonesque ipsos sic interpretantur: initium minime temporarium dici — neque enim tempus ullum fuisse ante mundi exornationem dicique et nocturnas vices quibus temporis spatia dimensa sunt — tum initii multas esse significationes.’ 18  Cf.  Plato, Timaeus a Calcidio translatus commentarioque instructus, ed. by Waszink, c. 274, p. 276: ‘Porro corpora, si per se ipsa spectentur, perfectam videbuntur habere substantiam, sed si ad originem eorum convertis mentis intentionem, invenies cuncta et eorum scatebras silvae gremio contineri. Tunc ergo compendio principalibus materiis quattuor sumptis exaedificaverat sermone mundum, sed quia erat philosophi proprium cuncta quae ad causam pertinent summa cura mentis et diligentiore examine peragrare, ratio porro asserit subiacere corporum diversitati silvae capacitatem, recte rationabiliterque censuit hanc ipsam rationem trahendam usque ad intellegentiae lucem, difficile opus omnino vel assequi, longe tamen difficilius declarare ac docere.’ The bringing out of a ‘work into the light of day’ is both difficult to accomplish and difficult to teach. 19  In other words, silva as fundamentum figuratis (also Aristotle, Metaphysica, A4, 985b14, ed. by Vuillemin-Diem); hyle schema (also Aristotle, Physica A 2, 184b2, ed. by Mansion). Silva, therefore, is more than a ‘congestion’. 20  See Humbert, ‘A propos de Ciceron traducteur de grec’, who, within the context of

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a very specific outcome, namely, that unseen realities have, in fact, material properties and can be imagined or conceived exactly as one conceives of the material, physical world at hand. In other words, one can work with, fashion, and disclose internal properties with conceptual material, placing pieces of concepts together, exactly as if one were building with blocks of wood. This gives a new seriousness to working with invisible, even inaudible, substance and brings to mind the question of whether human beings ever take anything seriously that they cannot conceive as ‘material’ in nature. Is this conceptual background not the foundation of all ‘works’ that human beings ‘make’ with ‘pre-existent material’, including songs?21 Furthermore, the term silva itself for Chalcidius constitutes a collection or a repository of self-contained, identifiable significances for Chalcidius himself as translator, as well as for his readerships during many centuries. The term silva itself could be used as a resource. Indeed, incalculable use was made of this conceptual repository as writers through centuries helped themselves, one after another, chopping up manageable chunks of this forest, digging up blocks of conceptual substance, or separating out twigs or strands of concepts for their own use,22 as for example, King Alfred the Great’s preface to his translation of Augustine’s Soliloquies from Latin into Anglo-Saxon (Appendix II), in which, in describing the work of translation that he had undertaken, he states: Cicero’s translations and interpretations from Greek into Latin, argues that the philosophic resources at the command of the Latin language were not ‘servile’ when compared to the Greek. Peter Green makes the point that since educated Romans were thoroughly bilingual in Greek and Latin, that the translation, rather than offering the only access to a Greek text, was regarded as an interpretation of that text — a Greek original that was fully accessible as well to the reader. See Green, Classical Bearings, pp. 264–65. Peter Green again argues that free, not ‘literal’ translation has been in and out of fashion at all times (p. 266), while missing the point. It is impossible to avoid translating what it is that one wishes to communicate into one’s translation, a translation being a metaphor (translatio) for the view one holds, whether one articulates these views to oneself or not. 21  For the linguistic properties discussed in this section, see Becker, Beyond Translation. The assertion made more than once that Chalcidius received his concept of silva from ‘the Pythagoreans’ either contradicts nearly everything Pythagoras is credited for originating or has little to do directly with what Pythagoras supposedly advocated, i.e. immortality and transmigration of souls and that the soul is made of air. (Cf. the concise account of McKirahan, Philosophy before Socrates, pp. 79–115.) Furthermore, the problem of silva is not only conceptual but translational, having to do with specific languages and linguistic propensities, potentialities, and properties. See also Stephen Gersh’s valuable discussion of the concept of ‘structure’, especially in ch. l of Concord in Discourse. 22  Cf. van Deusen, ‘De musica’.

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I then gathered for myself staves and studshafts, and cross-beams, and helves for each of the tools that I could work with; and bow-timbers and bolt-timbers for every work that I could perform — as many as I could carry of the comeliest trees. Nor came I home with a burden, for it pleased me not to bring all the wood home, even if I could bear it. In each tree I saw something that I needed at home; therefore I exhort every one who is able and has many wains to direct his steps to the selfsame wood where I cut the stud-shafts. Let him there obtain more for himself, and load his wains with fair twigs, so that I may wind many a neat wall, and erect many a rare house, and build a fair enclosure, and there dwell in joy and comfort both winter and summer, in such manner as I have not yet done. But He who taught me, and to whom the wood was pleasing, hath power to make me dwell more comfortably both in this transitory cottage by the road while I am on this world-pilgrimage, and also in the everlasting home that He hath promised us […]. He will both make this way more convenient than it hitherto was […]. It is no wonder that one should labor in timber-work, both in the gathering and also in the building; but every man desireth that, after he hath built a cottage on his lord’s lease and by his help, he may sometimes rest himself therein and go hunting, fowling, and fishing; and use it in every manner according to his needs.23

It is a preface that makes little sense unless one brings the background that we have been discussing to bear upon it. Alfred’s preface clearly brings to the fore all of the mental pictures with which we have been dealing and which are inherent within Chalcidius’s translational choice, namely, silva (wood), useful, 23 

See Alfred the Great, King Alfred’s Old English Version of St Augustine’s Soliloquies, trans. by Hargrove, pp. 47–48. Cf., as well, the translation of Keynes and Lapidge in Alfred the Great, pp. 138–39, based on Alfred the Great, King Alfred’s Version of Augustine’s ‘Soliloquies’, trans. by Carnicelli, pp. 47–48, and Bately, ‘The Nature of Old English Prose’, p. 77: ‘Alfred’s reworking of his Latin sources in the Boethius and the Soliloquies is indeed considerable. At times it seems as though he is using his Latin texts as no more than a spring-board for his own considered responses to their contents and his personal interests. (His own fine extended metaphor, in the preface to the Soliloquies, is of the would-be builder who goes to the forest — that is, the writings of the church fathers — for materials.) The freedom that he takes with his authorities is too considerable to be dealt with in detail here’. See also Christine Fell’s article ‘Perceptions of Transience’, in the same volume, in which a portion of the passage quoted above is given as an example of Alfred’s understanding of the paired concepts of transience and eternity. Fell then compares Carnicelli’s edition of the Anglo-Saxon text with Alfred’s version of St Augustine’s Soliloquies (p. 173). Translators, editors, as well as commentators have all brought out their own priorities with the emphasis, based directly on the Anglo-Saxon version, in the KeynesLapidge translation, on forest (ontimber). Alfred’s translation of Augustine’s Soliloquies survives in a single manuscript, now London, British Library, MS Cotton Vitellius A.xv, fols 4–59, midtwelfth-century, unknown origin; cf. Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred the Great, p. 299. Cf. as well, Lapidge, ‘Surviving Booklists from Anglo-Saxon England’, p. 34 n.

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selected branches or twigs (stirps virgae), and mode, manner, way of proceeding (modus in viam), as well as Alfred’s own conceptualization of his mental work as imaginable in terms of gathering, cutting, appropriating useful wood from the thicket of available material within the forest. It is not impossible that Alfred actually had read Chalcidius’s translation of Plato’s Timaeus, with its extensive commentary. But whether or not this is true, by the time of Alfred’s writing, the concept of both visible and invisible materia/substantia as a forest (silva) to be worked with as one worked with wood had infiltrated the mental-conceptual world in which Alfred lived, and the concept of silva was reinforced as well by what he could see around him — hence the power of Chalcidius’s choice of term. In this regard, Michael Lapidge has stated that there is little evidence for libraries owned by Anglo-Saxon kings, but that based on his translating projects, King Alfred ‘most presumably had assembled a royal library’ of some distinction.24 The cluster of pointed references Alfred makes to the forest full of material substantiates Chalcidius’s priority and provides clues as well both to Alfred’s educational background as well as to the landscape of his own learning. Another example is to be found in the commentary on Martianus Capella’s Marriage of Philology and Mercury, by tenth-century Remigius of Auxerre, who describes the entire repository of musical tones as a forest full of trees, the high ones giving off high tones, the lowest branches giving forth low tones. In an extraordinary, highly influential, by-now famous passage, Martianus Capella presents a forest full of trees, but with potentiality through their motions to produce differentiated high and low tones: Amidst these extraordinary scenes and these vicissitudes of Fortune, a sweet music arose from the trees, a melody arising from their contact as the breeze whispered through them; for the crests of the great trees were very tall, and because of this tension, reverberated with a sharp, high, sound; but whatever was close to and near the ground, with dropping boughs, shook with a deep heaviness of sound; while the trees of middle size in their contacts with each other sang together in fixed harmonies of the duple, and sesquialtera, the sesquitertia also, and even the semitones came between. So it happened that the forest poured forth, with melodious harmony, the whole music and song of the gods.25 24 

Lapidge, ‘Surviving Booklists from Anglo-Saxon England’, p. 34. Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts, trans. by Stahl and Johnson, ii, 9–10, in which every allusion finds exemplification within the medieval discipline of music, as, for example, a quotation, for the most part, from Remigius of Auxerre’s commentary on the above passage in Regino of Prüm’s treatise: ‘Quicquid vero terrae confine et propinquum fuerat, rami videlicet inclinatiores et humiliores ac terrae viciniores quatiebat, id est, impellebat, repercutiebat rauca gravitas. At media, id est mediae partes ipsius silvae, coniuncta sibi spatia concinebant 25 

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Just as Chalcidius apparently chose an emphasis in his Latin term, silva, so also Latin medieval writers later on in the twelfth century choose silva, or, apparently, do not. Bernardus Silvestris does. William of Conches in his commentary on the Timaeus avoids the term, using materia instead of silva.26 Still another example, well known though misunderstood, indicates that silva as a unlimited thicket of available yet disorderly substance was known as well to Dante, as he writes in the famous introduction to the Inferno of the Divine Comedy (Figure 4): Nel mezzo del cammin de nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura che la diritta via era smarrita. [When in the midst of my course of life, I found myself in a dark, opaque forest, and found that I had lost my way.]27 duplis succentibus’ (cf. Scriptores ecclesiastici de musica, ed. by Gerbert, i, 234, with Remigius of Auxerre’s commentary on The Marriage of Philology and Mercury, in Commentum in Martianum Capellam, ed. by Lutz, i, 86–87). See also van Deusen, ‘The Problem of Mode, the Example of Melody in Medieval Music Writing’, especially pp. 6–7. Unlike Martianus, Macrobius, in his Commentary on Cicero’s Dream of Scipio (English trans. by Stahl) does not emphasize silva. See, for example, Book i, chapter V, proceeding with Cicero’s Dream of Scipio: ‘What is this great and pleasing sound that fills my ears’, answered by, ‘that is a concord of tones separated by unequal but nevertheless carefully propositioned intervals […]. The high and low tones blended together produce different harmonies.’ Macrobius writes of metallic bodies that are not subject to a state of flux, not perfect but solid (nasta) (p. 95), and the demarcation between water and air as harmony, that is, a compatible and harmonious union, as an interval uniting lower with upper, reconciling incongruent factors (p. 107). It is of further interest that in the west Frankish territory, now France, at the time of the writing of both Remigius’s commentary as well as Regino’s treatise, figurae of music notation evidence relationship between relative spatial highness and lowness on a manuscript page and highness or lowness of actual pitch, a relationship taken for granted today, but which was not common in eastern Frankish manuscripts until, in some cases, several centuries later. 26  Cf. Guillaume de Conches, Glosae super Platonem, ed. by Jeauneau, especially Tractatus de primoriali materia, pp. 258–60, cf. notes, p. 261 with reference to Gilbertus Porretanus, Comment. in Boetium, De Trinitate II (PL, lxiv, col. 1250B]: ‘Hic dicendum quod materia multiplex nomen est et forma similiter. Origo namque sive initium rerum, quod Plato vocat necessitatem et fraudem et receptaculum et nutriculam et gremium et matrem et sinum et Iocum totius generationis, auditores eius vero appellant hylem id est silvam, ipse Plato nominat primam materiam eo quod in ea formantur quae cumque recipiuntur ab ea, cum tamen ipsa nullam ex eis contrahat formam.’ William of Conches also states that materia is that which exists before and without figurae. 27  Dante, The Divine Comedy: Inferno, ed. and trans. by Mandelbaum; cf. commentary on p. 344, in which the author concentrates his remarks on ‘darkness’ rather than forest (selva).

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Figure 4. The concept of a ‘thicket’ of material, undergrowth, or forest recurring in an illustration for the opening lines of Mandelbaum’s recent edition/translation of Dante’s Inferno, frontispiece (used by permission).

Dante’s dark opaque forest is the silva of unlimited material, available for his use yet daunting and disorderly, reinforced, as well, by a topic that was well known throughout the Middle Ages of the biblical scriptures as an opaque ‘thicket’ of material to be appropriated, organized, and used.

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But one final question to be taken on here is how music as a material and measurement discipline also clearly exemplified concepts and terms contained within the Timaeus latinus, as well as Chalcidius’s commentary. Chalcidius had stated that music provided a bridge between abstraction and physical exemplification, as is the case with these examples (Figures 5–10): music notation throughout the Middle Ages itself is literally a twig, stirps, a virga, forming an enlivened stem within the general, inchoate mass of sonic material, or silva. The virga as basis for delineating sound. An extension of this concept of Figure 5. Virga as basic music notational twig , moving branch, or stem is, as figura for delineating particular sound, Chalcidius’s commentary points out in as well as accent. many contexts, a figura, whether of letter, number, or music notational figura. All use the same Latin word, figura, to bring up specific properties such as movement, colour, individuality delineated from the congested mass of material. The figurae contained within the eleventh-century manuscript Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds latin 1118, bring all of these attributes of delineated, animated figurae together within the modi of musical motion (the topos of figura in modis). Properties such as motion or gesture, colour, position, demeanour, and instruments separate out definition from the mass of aggregated material. Chalcidius has a great deal to say, not only, as we have noted, about silva, but also concerning figurae as differentiating agents or instruments of delineation. Figurae are made, hence, they delineate by connected lines format within material. They are artefacted in order to give forth the properties of that material, hence, a figura itself is an instrument within material for the purpose of delineating individuality within conglomerated reality, making clear both the intention of the illustrator as well as the internal properties of the illustrated.28 28 

Chalcidius’s figurae are plain (Plato, Timaeus a Calcidio translatus commentarioque instructus, ed. by Waszink, p. 6l); they demonstrate (p. 62); they are composed of lines (pp. 69, 88); they have properties (p. 305); and they are composed, or fictive. Upon this basis, that is, of the delineatory potentiality of the concept of figura, Chalcidius summarizes the system of

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Figures 6–10. Figurae from Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fonds latin 1118, set of figurae, fols 104r–114r. Images reproduced with permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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How did music accomplish this task? One is amazed, since the answer is at once too simple and difficult. By the invisible materials it used — sound and time — music itself demonstrated Chalcidius’s priority that both the seen and the unseen were substance to be appropriated in order to make useful works. Sonorous substance is massive and undifferentiated, but it can become delineated by means of internal, germane properties of music, that is, through motion and time. Sound is unseen, yet reality; movement is inherent within sound as a material. Thus, the main point of silva, the equivalence of material substance as both seen and unseen, as well as the reality of both — in equivalence — of anima, mind, and spirit, as a substantial reality that could be fashioned and worked with, are all demonstrated most clearly within music. Music is unseen, yet palpable, material reality and displays all of the properties of material, in that one can become satiated with musical substance and it is, as well, addictive. Such, also, was the power of Chalcidius’s translational metaphor that even in the nineteenth century silva, or a ‘forest full of trees’, constitutes a repository of sonorous material to be accessed by the composer of the musical work. The overture to Carl Maria von Weber’s early nineteenth-century opera Der Freischuetz begins with diffused, sonorous material — to be then selected and developed in the course of the opera — in the forest (Figure 11), a conceptual continuity with the Timaeus latinus.

disciplines that delineate particularity, connection, and motion, namely, grammar-arithmetic, logic-geometry, and rhetoric-physics. See also ‘Change in a Concept of “Mode”’, in van Deusen, Theology and Music at the Early University, pp. 54–75.

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Figure 11. Recently discovered sketch of stage set for performances of nineteenth-century operas in the Ludwigsburger Schlosstheater (used by permission).

Chapter 5

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M

onday morning, and I was preparing to go to work in the archive of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest. The downstairs doorbell rang. Expecting no one and busy with my attempts to get off, I ignored its insistence. There was, for the moment, silence; then the doorbell to my apartment began to ring. Again, I repeated to myself that I was expecting no one, wished at that moment to see no one, and further, had the right to ignore that morning any pressure, no matter how urgent, to open the door. No sooner had I said this to myself when the door opened and the owner of the flat appeared, explaining that he needed some papers he had left when he had himself moved out in some haste one month previously and that, really, it would only be a matter of a few moments and he would be gone. Still in my bathrobe, I had only one short sentence for him: ‘But this is my home’, I said. A clash of cultures and an issue of private space, a conceptualization of intrusion, and, also, the perception of one person’s imposition of his will upon another, simply because he had a key. I reflected on what seemed to me to be a radical sense of private space and the right, now and then, to be incomunicando — unansprechbar. Most of the terms for this occurred to me in other languages, but it is certainly a basic and necessary concept within the English language as well. I had lived for many years in Switzerland, as well as in the United States, when I myself had once been a landlady who, in California, had been prevented from entering the apartment I owned even though the tenant had not paid rent for four months previously and, in the meantime, had been convicted of arson and committed to a mental hospital.

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But this was not so much a question of legality, even of a perception of intrusion, but rather one of shared space, of place, of density and aggregation, of a description of mental and physical contiguity, of people who had lived together for a long time, and — again — a deeply ingrained cultural characteristic that paid no attention to customary boundaries of urban/village, wealth/ poverty, higher/lower classes, or education and profession, but did involve an identifiable internal property, a manner of moving, a definable characteristic ‘substance’. This could be characterized by the Latin proprietas, property, and these aspects could also be described as belonging to, ultimately, material — cultural material — even if, or perhaps especially if, that material was invisible. Further, this unseen property reached over other customary separations. There was, according to my observations, no difference with respect to a perception of private space and community between my ‘village’ near the Kosztolányi Deszö Ter, a crowded meeting point in Budapest for bus and tram transportation, and the villages everywhere outside of Budapest, where I had quite often spent weekends. My university office in Budapest was another case in point. Upon arrival, I had been assigned an office, with computer, and an agreement had been reached that I would have its use two mornings and three afternoons per week, for purposes of conferences with students, use of the computer, meetings with colleagues — all of the activities for which one customarily uses designated space that has been placed at one’s disposal. It all sounded clear and sensible to me, and familiar, since the situation seemed comparable to that at my North American university. I left, pleased that everything had been settled, and a card was placed on my door, identifying me as a visiting professor and indicating my office hours. This was, however, by no means the end of it. I returned the next day at the appointed time to find a couple of colleagues using the desk and computer, and also camping out, so to speak; their backpacks, papers, bottles of mineral water, and half-filled coffee cups had, along with themselves, taken over the entire available space in the room. The following day, as I was discussing plans for a conference with the departmental chair, another colleague appeared, stating brightly that if ‘the two of you are only talking, maybe I can use the computer.’ At the beginning of the next week, as I was speaking with a dissertation student, the colleague appeared again and began to use the telephone on the other desk in the room. One could have been outraged — the amazing fact was that there were several virtually unused offices, actually a good deal of unused space — but there was another explanation. It would appear that my presence there generated an

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aggregate, a clumping phenomenon, a coagulation. Conceptually for them to assign an office to me for my sole and individual use, during predictable and predetermined hours of the week, was not only incomprehensible, it was impossible. It simply could not, in that particular culture, be done. I noticed as well that my American office-mate, who had grown up in the United States but was by birth Hungarian, slid comfortably quite without realizing it into the same way of thinking, appearing whenever she wished and at any time of day, appropriating the office space as her own, quite irrespective of agreed-upon office times, simply because the office was there and so was I. In fact, although I had no way of proving it, it seemed to me that she incorporated herself into the office space especially when I was there and that the case was even more so when there were two of us to begin with. I noticed as well that the Hungarian colleagues at the university worked mostly in groups, in teams; in fact none of them appeared to work in the typical North American manner of academic research life which is, by and large, solitary especially within the humanistic disciplines. Indeed it seemed to them incomprehensible that one worked mostly all by oneself, and I realized that I aroused not only curiosity, but pity and suspicion, as my Hungarian colleagues wondered what I was really up to with respect to my own personal research, as I plugged away according to internally generated goals. I have brought up these vignettes from life in Budapest because, amazingly, they, as well as many other experiences there, made me more aware of how relevant and cogent medieval perceptions of material are, as well as properties of this material — such as the capacity and disposition to aggregate. This is especially true of the thirteenth-century writer Philip the Chancellor, so-called because he, in his activities and authority as chancellor, served as a liaison between the recently configured theology faculty of the newly constituted university and the episcopal see of Notre Dame.1 Further, of even more interest, Philip’s principles, difficult as they were to understand, found their most apt expression and exemplification in musical composition during the period of his activity and, in turn, also motivated musical innovation at that time in terms of 1 

‘In Paris, the chancellor of the cathedral chapter of Notre Dame was chancellor of the university. His most important and prestigious assignment was to grant the license to teach. The basis of the chancellor’s authority was very complex. As a dignitary of the cathedral chapter who had traditionally been responsible for the cathedral school, he acted under the authority of the bishop of Paris’ (Thijssen, Censure and Heresy at the University of Paris, p. 8). See also Verger, Les Universities au Moyen Âge, p. 68. Of importance for the entire question of offices and duties within the academic structure of the early University of Paris, see Courtenay, ‘The Preservation and Dissemination of Academic Condemnations’.

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music that used as a foundation ‘pre-existent substance’ and which well exemplify this pivotal concept. Some of these music-textual compositions have come down to us as from Philip himself, and there appears to be good reason for this attribution.2 More to the immediate point, I realized as I was working with the types, transcriptions, and recordings, as well as the extensive literature on the subject of Hungarian folk music in the Archives of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, that the questions, answers, terms, and concepts that I had found in thirteenth-century discussions of music in the wake of newly available translations of the Physics of Aristotle were of great value in understanding the compositional process and internal characteristics within the folk music I had encountered. This chapter develops the particular and very effective capacity of music to make comprehensible principles within invisible realities. Ultimately the goal of music as a ‘ministry discipline’ was to provide analogies to basic aspects of the invisible nature of God discussed within the emerging discipline of theology, during what has become known as the Aristotelian reception of the thirteenth century. But discussions of both seen and unseen material during this period so long ago can also be applied to the construction and understanding of the folk music of the present. That music, as a material and measurement science, takes on a more systematized relationship to, and with, the ‘study of unseen substance’ or theology/philosophy in the early thirteenth century is not only due to a concern generally to organize and understand each one of the material and measurement disciplines — still a concern today — but also, especially, the increasing delineation of the profession of the theologian and of theology as a science.3 In the chapter that follows, an important figure, Philip 2  Philip the Chancellor has been regarded by musicologists solely with respect to the composition of his conductus texts and, influenced by the historigraphical model of a ‘school’ prevalent in the first half of the twentieth century, in the construction of a ‘School of Notre Dame’. But his relationship, as chancellor, with the university faculty in theology was perhaps most important, since the faculty had the right, if it chose to exercise it, of removing the chancellor from office. See Thijssen, Censure and Heresy at the University of Paris, p. 11. For the conductus genre, see van Deusen, Theology and Music at the Early University. The office of chancellor and its relationship to the faculty of theology is further emphasized by the fact that, as Thijssen states, ‘The emergence of the faculty of theology as an academic institution and of theology as a scientific discipline went hand in hand’ (cf. Censure and Heresy at the University of Paris, p. 113). 3  This early history of the university discipline of theology and its place within both the context of the other disciplines, especially those having to do with material and measurement, was not peaceful, as the large literature on the condemnations of 1277 indicates. J. M. M. H. Thijssen’s above-mentioned study is useful not only for cogently presenting the issues, but also

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the Chancellor, is brought together with an emerging concept of material, connecting his writing on that subject to the preceding chapter with its discussion of the concept of silva. In Chapter 6, Philip will be brought into the discussion of collection. Philip the Chancellor was writing in Paris around 1220, incorporating Aristotelian principles and vocabulary taken from the newly translated Physics into his own Summa de bono.4 Aristotle, in the Physics, concerns himself with material itself: its properties, inherent movement, potential, and expression. That the Physics was translated from the Greek into Latin at least five times between the mid-twelfth and the mid-thirteenth centuries attests to its enormous intellectual importance within the Latin readership during the formative period of the early universities, notably in Paris and soon thereafter at Oxford and Cambridge.5 The ensuing stream of commentary on the Physics, throughout at least the next three centuries, also attests to its importance,6 but it points, as well, to the difficulties faced by this intellectual community in attempting to comprehend its basic principles, particularly the nature of motion within material, which, as Aristotle himself stated more than once within the work, was extremely difficult to comprehend.7 It is, in fact. Each commentary on the Physics is different, beginning with the primary difficulty, as well as the principal focus within the Physics, as the commentator himself perceived them. for his summary of the bibliography, both primary manuscript and early published sources, as well as the secondary literature discussing the tensions that existed from its nascence as a discipline. 4  Philip the Chancellor, Summa de bono, ed. by Wicki. 5  The Physics was translated by James of Venice, c. 1125–50, of which there are at least 139 extant copies, by an anonymous translator (the so-called ‘Physica vaticana’) in the mid-twelfth century, by Gerard of Cremona before 1187, by Michael Scot c. 1220–35 (65 copies), and by William of Moerbeke, c. 1260–70 (230 extant copies). The great commentary of Averröes on the Physics was translated by Michael Scot c. 1220–35. These translations, clustered together from the mid-twelfth to the mid-thirteenth centuries, as well as the number of copies that remain even today, attest to the intense interest generated by the Physics, a work that also subsequently was commented upon more than any other Aristotelian work. See Dod, ‘Aristoteles latinus’, especially p. 75; and Murdoch, ‘Infinity and Continuity’, especially p. 565. 6  Latin commentary literature has only partially been identified, much less edited. For an impression of the scope of these commentaries, see Zimmermann, Verzeichnis ungedruckter Kommentare zur Metaphysik und Physik des Aristoteles. 7  According to Simplicius (De caelo, 226,19), the first four books of the Physics were referred to as ‘Concerning the Principles’, whereas Books v–viii were called ‘On Movement’. The distinction between ‘change’ (metapbole) and movement (kinesis) is consistently emphasized by Aristotle.

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Further, the format, the agenda, and the order of inclusion of the principal subjects all differ according to the discipline in which the commentator is writing, and which he is addressing, as well as the purpose he has placed before himself. During the course of the thirteenth century, the comments of Philip the Chancellor, Robert Grosseteste, and Roger Bacon are of particular interest, since their writings evidence an excitement, as well as an underlying tension, that is indicative of the intellectual foment that the Physics produced at this time. Aristotle’s Physics infused an ancient discipline concerned with moving heavenly bodies, or astronomy, with a new agenda, placing it on the forefront of all of the sciences. Since music exemplified the basic principles of this newly negotiated discipline of physics, music, too, during the thirteenth century was a proving ground of the exciting new concepts contained within the Physics, such as ‘contrary motion’ and harmonia as the result of a reconciliation of oppositions within motion and time.8 Consonancia then took on a new dimension. Most of all, music exemplified unseen, yet actual, material itself with its presence, properties, and propensities for generation, actualization, and aggregation. What is Aristotle’s Physics about, and why was it so important at the onset of the thirteenth century, an importance that continued for centuries? Why, and how, can one approach the Physics in order to describe and understand folk music? For a start, the Physics treats of some of the most basic and far-reaching questions of material realities. Let us look at some of the issues taken up as they occur, one by one. Rather than competing with or refuting a philosophical tradition, or presenting a doctrine, the Physics brings together an entire body of writing concerning fundamental questions of undifferentiated or chaotic nature, which, as we have seen, was the topic taken on by Plato in the Timaeus, of substance itself, movement, the nature of movement, time — again as material — and place, as well as aggregation or density within place and the propensity of intrinsic properties to aggregate. Many of the most important themes are presented in the first three books of the Physics. Arguments are prepared in the first two books, then brought to conclusions in the third. Here, below, for easy reference are some of the most relevant passages dealing with nature, mass, part, contiguity, and aggregation, treating these far-reaching topics in the order of their appearance in the Physics (italics added for emphasis):9

8 

See van Deusen, ‘On the Usefulness of Music’ and van Deusen, ‘Roger Bacon on Music’. For the Greek text, see Aristotle, Physics, ed. by Ross; the English is from Aristotle, Physics, trans. by Hardie and Gaye. 9 

Aggregation: Cultural Properties Exemplified Nature is a principle of motion and change, and it is the subject of our inquiry. We must therefore see that we understand what motion is; for if it were unknown nature too would be unknown. When we have determined the nature of motion, our task will be to attack in the same way the terms which come next in order. Now motion is supposed to belong to the class of things which are continuous; and the infinite presents itself first in the continuous — that is how it comes about that the account of the infinite is often used in definitions of the continuous; for what is infinitely divisible is continuous. Besides these, place, void, and time are thought to be necessary conditions of motion. Clearly then, for these reasons and also because the attributes mentioned are common to everything and universal, we must first take each of them in hand and discuss it. For the investigation of special attributes comes after that of the common attributes. (200b8–24) The appropriateness to the science of this problem is clearly indicated; for all who have touched on this kind of science in a way worth considering have formulated views about the infinite, and indeed, to a man, make it a principle of things. (203a1) Nevertheless for him [Democritus] the common body is a principle of all things, differing from part to part in size and shape. It is clear then from these considerations that the inquiry concerns the student of nature. Nor is it without reason that they all make it a principle. We cannot say that the infinite exists in vain, and the only power which we can ascribe to it is that of a principle. (203b1–3) But the problem of the infinite is difficult: many contradictions result whether we suppose it to exist or not to exist. If it exists, we have still to ask how it exists — as a substance or as the essential attribute of some entity? Or in neither way, yet none the less is there something which is infinite or some things which are infinitely many? (203b31–35) Our account does not rob the mathematicians of their science, by disproving the actual existence of the infinite in the direction of increase, in the sense of the untraversable. In point of fact they do not need the infinite and do not use it. They postulate only that a finite straight line may be produced as far as they wish. It is possible to have divided into the same ratio as the largest quantity another magnitude of any size you like. Hence, for the purposes of proof, it will make no difference to them whether the infinite is found among existent magnitudes. (207b28–34) Now like existence of motion is asserted by all who have anything to say about nature, because they all concern themselves with the construction of the world and study the question of becoming and perishing, which processes could not come about without the existence of motion. But those who say that there is an infinite number of worlds, some of which are in process of becoming while others are in the process of perishing, assert that there is always motion (for these processes of becoming and perishing of the worlds necessarily involve motion), whereas those who

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hold that there is only one world, whether everlasting or not, make corresponding assumptions in regard to motion […]. Mind introduced motion and separated them. (250b15–26)

So then, material contains qualities, especially of motion, of the ability to aggregate, the capacity for breaking out and fragmentation, and of opacity, which is of particular interest as a property. Aggregation and opacity constitute not only a property of material that is easily and visibly identified, but also of more difficult to access innate cultural properties that separate one group of people from another — a property presented in the opening examples of this chapter. Philip the Chancellor, one of the first official liaisons between the newly formed theology faculty of the University of Paris and the pastoral staff of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, writing during the first generation of the thirteenth century, was also one of the first to put the tools of Aristotle’s Physics to use in describing both overtly physical material realities as well as material properties that were, in fact, invisible. Dealing as he must with people themselves, by virtue of his position — and with their souls — the topic of invisible ‘soulish material’ with its properties, propensities, and possibilities for actualization or movement were on his mind and resulted in what one could identify as applications of the Physics to daily life. The subject of material, aggregation, mass, and opacity as a potential and capacity that could be expressed without difference of substance in both outward and inward property is a topic that obviously fascinated him since he brings it up in many contexts during the course of his large-scale Summa de bono.10 One might easily miss the importance of the Physics within this work, since it is not what would become a typical commentary on the Physics, with quotations from that work followed by comments. Rather, Philip brings up a topic important for its theological implication and exemplification and proceeds then to formulate his comments using vocabulary as well as argumentation that he had culled from his reading of the Physics. Here, summarized, is what he has to say on the subject of aggregation and conglomeration as well as opacity.11 10 

Philip the Chancellor, Summa de bono, ed. by Wicki. The index to the two-volume editon of Philip’s Summa de bono, ed. by Wicki, gives insufficient indication of the importance of the topic of materia-substantia within the entire work. In fact, the subject comes up consistently and constantly; Philip has recourse to materia repeatedly, for a start, within the first volume, as substantia mobilis (p. 106); moveretur vel contraria in eodem (contrary motion, p. 107); in loco and with respect to the motion of time within place and according to part (secundum partem, p. 108); with respect to chaos/anima/corruptibility (p. 117, cf. informem materiam, p. 130), substantie spirituales (p. 118), imperfecta/proprio/ perfectiones/opus (p. 118); materia sive in potentia (p. 119); in contrarium (p. 120); modes of 11 

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Philip the Chancellor’s discussion of material brings together a nexus of principles and terms taken directly from his reading of the Latin Physics but also occurs within the context of creation, which places his consideration within the ongoing, long-standing Genesis commentary tradition — a tradition of which he is very much aware and which he takes care to identify. What we have here is a coordination of a whole stream of medieval writers, beginning with Basil, Ambrose, and Augustine on this very subject of the origin, propensities, and properties of material, united with Plato’s discussion of inchoate, unlimited mass in the Timaeus. Philip picks up tools from Aristotle’s Physics in order to energetically articulate what it is that material actually is, particularly with respect to the material property of motion. Philip the Chancellor has been discussing the question of material used by God in the creation of the world and what one might mean by the concept of ‘In principiis’ — in the beginning. From this logical entrance he goes on to bring up the topic of God’s work, accessing the important concept of equivalence, as well as the properties of materials such as light and time: nam materialis esset lux. One is immediately tempted to ask, in what way is light material? The answer follows that light contains properties of material and manifests, as well as exemplifies, these properties, making available the characteristics and distinctions of other materials with their properties. One is visually immediately aware of these characteristics in the separation of light from darkness. Philip then proceeds to speak of measurement and the varieties of measurement appropriate to individual things.12 materia and opposition (p. 120); substantia arbitrated according to quantity of time (p. 120); separatio inter substantiam (p. 120); materia secundum via compositionis (p. 122, cf. p. 157); de materiali luce et spirituali (p. 125); prius et posterius in natura (p. 125); nam materialis esset lux (pp. 137–38); ‘substantia incorporea illuminationum que sunt a primo prima relatione perceptive’ (p. 158); ‘omnium que substantialiter etiam nature assunt contentiva voluntas’ (p. 160); and so on through the entire two volumes of Wicki’s edition. Materia-substantia-natura constitutes a background for nearly every topic of discussion, that is, Philip’s discussion of pre-existent substance, ‘will’ resident within materia, contrary motion as well as the other motion inherent as a property within materia, and contained within a limited part, with invisible materia as an important discussion point within his argumentation. 12  Quoting from both Augustine’s City of God (De civitate Dei, xi.13, PL, xli, cols 329–31; ed. by Hoffmann, i, 532.27–533.2) and Pseudo-Dionysius’s De divinis nominibus in its translation by John the Scot (c. 4:30 (PG, iii, col. 732; trans. by John the Scot, PL, cxxii, col. 1145C)) and accessing Aristotles’s Physica I c. 9: ‘Nec est simile de luce et tenebra corporali et luce et tenebra spirituali. Nam in corporali est accipere duas naturas, quarum una habet in se opacitatem et altera lucem, licet hec sit magis potens illa; lux vero spiritualis omne esse comprehendit, et propter hoc tenebra non proveniet nisi ex defectu alicuius esse. Ad aliud autem quod dicuntur poni duo principia privatio et species, hoc non est in esse sed in fieri; in esse enim privatio

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In the calm, ordered discussion that follows, the attentive reader is particularly impressed with the recurrence of two or three topics that provide a structure for Philip’s agenda — just those priorities found in the Physics. They are the expression of material potency, potentiality, and property in terms of motion, variety, and within aggregation. Time is of particular interest as a material because it displays motion, varieties of the measurement of motion, and the possibility of aggregation in terms of simultaneous times, yet is invisible. Further there is always an implied contrast between motion and mutation, that is, what ‘stands firm’ as for example earth, the ground upon which we walk — the firmament — in contrast to flying things, or even ourselves upon the earth, moving about. We learn about motion as an absolutely essential property of material by its contrasting quality, stability. At this junction Philip brings up several pairs of contrasts, all dealing with properties of material and their identification: transparency, such as water, contrasted with opacity; and corporeality which is enclosed, delimited, and shaped, contrasted with inchoate substance (natura). It is clear that while these properties must be identified, their differences must also be brought into consonance, not only as one thinks about them, but in actually dealing with them in very concrete ways. And this is just it. How does one deal with motion, mutation, and aggregation in concrete ways? How might these abstractions become accessible, in this case, not only to those who would become, eventually, doctors of philosophytheology at the newly founded University of Paris, but those who would be engaged in teaching principles of creation and material substance, who were intellectually rather ordinary, even quite unreflective, people? They would, no doubt, eventually become priests and/or teachers of students on the primary school level, and so needed to understand and explain on a basic level the physical universe and God’s place within it. This, after all, was Philip’s task, to bring together biblical principles with the ‘new learning’, as it became known, resulting in reorganized disciplines such as physics. This cathedral and university chancellor was attempting to make both visible and invisible material comprehensible to those students who would ultimately be engaged in basic people-to-people contact within their respective life situations and professions. Philip seems to be a good teacher, with a need to make himself plain based on his office, but also with a heart for making himself understood. One notices this in the patient manner with which he takes up one consideration after another, defining each one and presenting what would have been unfamiliar, non distinguitur a materia’ (Philip the Chancellor, Summa de bono, ed. by Wicki, i, 25), which brings up the concept of ‘opacity’.

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such as the concept of coagulation, more than once. Taking up the concept of opacity, he states that natura is opaque, subject to being shaped and moulded, but susceptible to our understanding; in other words, one can think about it in terms of division and distinction, by addition and accretion. The firmament is opaque and dense but can be divided from what is above and below, all of which are parts (partes).13 Philip quotes Augustine on this one, also bringing up the related concepts of ornament and decoration. Music is a paradigm for all of these qualities. This is the reason for the importance of music as the discipline of exemplification, based on Augustine’s writings on the order that exists among disciplines, through the Latin translation of Plato’s Timaeus that places music in a position to make known invisible but actual substance,14 right on to the thirteenth century and the early uni13 

‘Distinctio autem lucis tenebris intelligitur separatio in natura partis orbis […]. Nam quinta essentia habet naturam lucis, ultima vero, scilicet terra, habet naturam opacititatis’ (Philip the Chancellor, Summa de bono, ed. by Wicki, i, 138). The earth by its very nature contains opacity. One is reminded here of an oft-recurring medieval topos of the ‘opacity’ of sacred scriptures or the scriptures compared to a dense thicket. 14  Cf. Plato, Timaeus a Calcidio translatus commentarioque instructus, ed. by Waszink, pp. 167, 273, 278, 282, 303, 309. Philip makes the point of unseen substance such as time, existing before the formation of the world, then proceeds to his musical analogy of sonus, cantus: ‘Item, Augustinus super Genesim: “Qui vivit in eternum creavit omnia simul, ut habetur Eccli. XVII, spiritualem scilicet et corporalem naturam.” Unde per celum intelligit spiritualem, per terram corporalem vult intelligi creaturam. Unde Gregorius, Iob penultimo: “Ecce Vehemoth quem feci tecum. Non unitate temporis”, supple tantum. Propter hoc dicendum est quod prius dicitur multipliciter. Est enim prius tempore, ut flos precedit fructum; et est prius eternitate secundum theologum, quia duratio continet eternum et tempus, ut Deus est ante omnia; electione, ut fructus flore vel ut magis virtuosus vel ut sciens secundum metaphysicam; origine, ut sonus cantu, ut materia materiato; est enim sonus formatus cantus’ (Philip the Chancellor, Summa de bono, ed. by Wicki, i, 58, cf. Augustine, De genesi ad litteram, I c. 1, n. 2, PL, xxxiv, col. 247; ed. by Zycha, 4, as well as the Glossa ordinaria in Genesim I,22 D (PL, cxii) and Peter Lombard, Sententiae in IV Libris II d. 2 c. 5 (ed. by Brady, i, 341)). It is of importance here that time, duration, and the measurement of time are related closely to creation. On the topic of time measured and time ultra mensuram, the above cluster of quotations demonstrates in nuce Philip the Chancellor’s pivotal role of bringing together the most influential texts of Late Antiquity and the earlier Middle Ages, that is, Augustine’s commentary on Genesis as well as the Glossa ordinaria, with the Sentences of Peter Lombard, which was required reading for theology students of his own day, and, as we have noted, the most recent Latin translations of Aristotle. This occurs over and over within his Summa, as study of the excellent footnotes and indices published with the Summa demonstrates. On the crucial and formative role Peter Lombard played in the education of theology students during this period — and much later as well — see the comprehensive study of Colish, Peter Lombard, especially the preface, i, 1–13, and ch. 2, ‘The Theological Enterprise’, i, 33–90.

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versity that was attempting to understand some of the most important principles Aristotle had brought to the fore. Additionally, as a matter of interest, there is good reason to believe that Philip himself possessed a special sensitivity to music’s position as an exemplary discipline, plainly displaying abstractions, such as motion and aggregation, and making them attractive to the senses. His name and person are connected with several music-textual compositions. Let us match up the considerations we have been discussing with a contemporaneous musical-textual example, Florence, Biblioteca Laurentiana, MS Pluteo 29.1 (Figures 12–13), no doubt copied c. 1238.15 (Note the visual impression of the notational figurae on the page: density and aggregation of the pre-existent substance also later known as a cantus firmus at the bottom — or ground — of the composition. Note as well, germane figurae in their respective levels, as illustrative of the world itself with the ‘earth’ on the bottom, more swiftly moving figurae on the upper levels: partes of superius, tenor/median, inferius.)16 Why is this important? First, Philip the Chancellor’s writing brings together disciplines that are separated today. Here, disciplines are logically fused. Music, rather than serving mostly as entertainment for passive, even quite inattentive, listeners, by means of the substance it uses, namely unseen materials of sound and time, both displaying the properties of motion and measurement, exemplifies principles of movement itself, the presence or absence of invisible material as a reality, and of the principles of disassociation, autonomy, and their opposite, aggregation. These are all basic principles of the world in which we live, but because of this are difficult to imagine without some specific example of what is meant thereby. Music has for many centuries been named the ‘ministry 15  Florence, Biblioteca Laurentiana, MS Pluteo 29.1, facsimile edn by Dittmer. The manuscript provides music-textual exempla for the most important theological concepts of this period, and the largest repository of conductus texts for which the case has been made for the authorship of Philip the Chancellor. Cf. Tischler, The Earliest Motets (to circa 1270), i, 109–11; iii, 4, 59–60. The edition here makes comparison of the versions possible, as well as facilitating performance by singers today, yet a modern transcription, as a translation, incorporates the mentality of the transcriber into the piece of music/text but, as in this case, not the priorities of the period in which it was produced. We have, in a sense, a translation, in which the text is made comprehensible on an immediate level, but the intention and mentality of the text are lost. See below for a discussion of transcription as translation. 16  See Philip the Chancellor, Summa de bono, ed. by Wicki, i, 63–65. One important feature for this discussion, to be illustrated below, is that whatever moves is divisible into parts. For related concepts of firmamentum, medium, superius, and consonance between these three levels, cf. Philip the Chancellor, Summa de bono, ed. by Wicki, i, 141.

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Figure 12. Florence, Biblioteca Laurentiana, MS Pluteo 29.1, fol. 383v (c. 1238), facsimile edn by Luther A. Dittmer, 2 vols, Publications of Medieval Musical Manuscripts (Brooklyn: Institute of Mediaeval Music, 1966–67) (reproduced by permission).

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Figure 13. Florence, Biblioteca Laurentiana, MS Pluteo 29.l, c. 1238, from Hans Tischler, The Earliest Motets (to circa 1270): A Complete Comparative Edition, 3 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), i, 109–11; iii, 59 (detail) (reproduced by permission).

discipline’, making abstractions perceptible to the sense of hearing and, through the figurae of music notation, to the sense of sight as well. Using both of these powerful senses, music makes general principles plain, disclosing unseen realities of mind, soul, and culture that are otherwise unavailable, a fact that has been understood more clearly and intuitively in the past, and also by those cultures that have less contact with globalized commercial society.17 17 

Nothing could be truly understood without music, wrote Augustine. See van Deusen,

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What are some of these qualities? First, material, seen and unseen, itself attracts aggregation; it contains movement, even to the extent of a capacity for ‘breaking out’, for the interruption of the predictable, an explosion of the orderly and expected. All of these qualities were discussed particularly during the early thirteenth century, together with musical exemplifications of all of the concepts under discussion, that is, of density and pre-existent substance (or cantus), of parts, of contrary motion between parts, eventually of cantus firmus, of punctum (or module) contra punctum, and of ways or manner of movement or modi arranged in contrasting pairs. But these concepts find musical exemplification elsewhere as we will see, and on the other hand, give us implements — succinct and reasonable tools — to analyse music composed recently, including folk music.

‘De musica’, pp. 574–76. Obviously, Augustine is dealing with a very important topic, namely, how one ‘understands’ anything at all. See, for example, Shapere, ‘The Concept of Observation in Science’.

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Old Stones, Useful Chunks: Working with Material

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ne evening Harry and I went out to dinner. We enjoyed each other’s company, usually laughed a good deal, and had more than enough to talk about — topics ranging from world politics, operas, and concerts current in Budapest to, sometimes most importantly, food. That evening we were eating palacsinta as a first course when Harry abruptly stopped her conversation with me. Motioning over the Roma violinist, she inquired, in Hungarian, whether he knew a song she especially wanted to hear. He nodded in agreement, and the two began, to my amazement, to sing the songs of Harry’s youth in Croatia, in Transylvania, in Central Hungary, and tears came to the Roma violinist’s eyes, as well as to my friend’s. Together they sang, Harry crooning, the Roma violinist playing with his instrument against his chest and singing at the same time, and one after the other, they sang and played the songs her father’s Roma had played for her birthdays, confirmation celebration, and wedding on one or the other of her family estates during her childhood and young maturity. Harry, as she preferred to be called by her friends, had an aunt who was a composer. Related to at least five of the most highly placed aristocratic families of central Europe, including the Habsburg and Eszterhazy families, she had relatives nearly everywhere, virtually uniting, in her own person, the empire. Harry grew up progressing with her family from their home in the castle district of Buda, to their summer house on Lake Balaton in Central Hungary, to their castle in what is now Croatia, and to numerous other homes of friends

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and relatives throughout central Europe, speaking Hungarian, Croatian, Czech, German, French, Italian, and English as a matter of course. We spoke German with one another; but Harry was completely fluent in English as well as in French and Italian. Harry knew Roma songs. In her youth, Roma had played at her social gatherings and were around most of the time somewhere on her family’s estates. Her family, she said, enjoyed their contacts with the Roma, because they played and danced so well, and her parents invited them often to provide music at both large and small parties. She, so far as I could tell from the many conversations that I had with her and also from her own way of life whilst in Budapest, was deeply and outspokenly egalitarian, as had been her family for many generations. (She had emigrated under truly difficult circumstances to Switzerland at the time of the Soviet takeover of Hungary.) She simply accepted, sometimes with a wry comment, those who came into her life one way or the other, and it seemed to me that this had always been the case. Some years after her childhood, she learned in school in Budapest that the Roma songs she knew were not at all ‘authentically’ Hungarian. What was of interest to her was that she had spent her youth actually mostly in the countryside of Croatia and Transylvanian Rumania, and she herself had never heard the songs that were taught to her in Budapest — songs purported to be ‘genuinely Hungarian’, without any influence of the middle class, towns, or city life. This chapter will summarize the preceding chapters on the topic of ‘stuff ’, especially applied to sound, material substance as discussed by Philip the Chancellor, and will go on to use the vocabulary presented and explained there to analyse the compositional process, as described in medieval writing concerning music, and as applied to folk music. Harry has been brought into the discussion not only because she is in her own right an extremely interesting person, but also because she exemplifies the difficulties one has with preconceived, ideologically based categories, and because she and her experience appear to require a new, or at least different, explanatory system to deal with both culture and music in central Europe. Her person constitutes a composite of almost chunk-like, identifiable attributes that can be designated by individual characters or figurae. Rather than placing her into a social layer or stratum (a notion that was totally absurd, once one became acquainted with Harry), medieval discussions of material, material properties, chunks of material, and how these properties manifested themselves in motion and characteristic gestures — figurae or schemata, as well as rhythmi, as another translation of schema — came to mind. The entire topic of material, a topic carried over from what is now referred to as Late Antiquity, surely, in this situation, had relevance and could

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provide an explanatory model to deal, not only with Harry as a phenomenon, but with the music she knew and loved. We have seen that the concept of material and of what the material universe consists is the subject of the Timaeus of Plato. This is a significant fact, since, of all of Plato’s dialogues, the Timaeus was the one that was accessible as Latin gradually became the only common language of transregional communication during Late Antiquity, through the earlier medieval centuries. Rather than raised as bilingual children in both Latin and Greek,1 those who were literate, increasingly, so far as we know, from around the time of Augustine’s lifetime on into the period now known as the Latin Middle Ages, spoke, read, and wrote Latin with fluency but could not, to save their lives, have read Plato in Greek. (This is true in the majority of cases today for those who study this period; one knows either Latin or Greek well, rarely both with equal competence.) The Timaeus, or at least a major portion of this dialogue, was translated and heavily commented upon by Chalcidius in the first half of the fourth century ce, and continued throughout the centuries of the medieval period to be regarded as basic training — a place to begin a discussion, since everyone to whom one was addressing one’s remarks had read and studied Plato’s dialogue in its Latin translation and commentary by Chalcidius. The Timaeus was commented upon, rediscovered, continuously quoted, and, as has been mentioned, contained passages that served as commonplaces or places from which to launch an argument either for or against what Plato had said or was perceived to have said. One can regard this treatise as a unifying agent for medieval mental culture. And, as one might expect, given that the subject matter of this dialogue is basic material substance, the Timaeus greatly influenced how people, when they were thinking thoughts in Latin at least, regarded material. Basic substance in the Timaeus, as well as elsewhere, is designated in the Greek as hyle.2 Chalcidius shows, in many contexts, the importance with which 1 

Quintilian sets forth what he considers to be a useful education which involved Greekspeaking child-care from the earliest years. (See Institutio Oratoria, Book i, 112–14, in which Quintilian addresses the topic of early education and good teachers.) Roman children were therefore bilingual in Greek and Latin by the time they went to primary school — an education that Augustine, raised in Roman North Africa, however, did not possess. He laments what he considers to be a lack of spontaneous fluency in Greek. This situation was also true of Budapest, which was a bilingual city, in German and Hungarian, until the mid-twentieth century. Hungarian families, as well, hired German-speaking child-care so that their children would be introduced to the German language almost as soon as they could speak. 2  See the discussion of hyle, terminology, and quotations in Chapter 4 concerning the Timaeus and its influence, above. Authors found other translational solutions such as Cicero

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he regards this particular term and the care with which he translated it. As a good translator Chalcidius took pains to preserve what he regarded as the intention of the author as well as the content, the authority, and the consistency of the previous use of this Greek noun. It is therefore significant that the word he chooses is an ordinary Latin noun, silva, signifying for anyone who could read, write, and think in Latin a forest full of wood.3 If one considers a forest, the material, concrete connotations are obvious, and in fact, very difficult to drive out of one’s mind every time this word, silva, occurs to it. A forest was full of material, in varying stages of growing, flourishing, dying away, and decaying — of generation, propensity, participation in properties, actualization, corruption, and transformation. The forest moved with the wind; higher branches could flutter with a greater velocity and give forth a particular sound; lower branches moved at quite a different rate, and also made quite another sound as the wind stirred those heavy branches close, in some cases, to the ground.4 The forest could also be cut down and the material, just as it existed, used as ‘raw material’ to make furniture, houses, boats, and even to burn up for fuel, heat, and light. In other words, one could do almost anything with this forest, including leave it alone or, as one would say today, ‘develop it’ according to its potential and properties. Some thought that this might be to bring the forest and its properties to a certain perfection, or actualization, that is, if one cut it down and made from it a town. But the possibilities for growth, movement, actualization, and perfection were not limitless, since all that went on with, and within, the forest was according to the properties of the entire forest, as well as the internal propensities of the wood itself. Wood made good fires, but it could not, itself, under most circumstances, be eaten. It was a clear translational exchange, but it is difficult to overemphasize the linguistic metaphor that resulted, or the influence this metaphor had for so many centuries. The result was that as one read of the invisible substance of the who uses substantia and materia in his fragmentary translation of the Timaeus. On the other hand, Bernardus Silvestris expressly uses the term silva; in fact, a thorough survey of Bernardus’s use of the term would constitute a study for itself. Cf. Stock, Myth and Science in the Twelfth Century, pp. 35, 67, 69, 70, 77n, 84, 87, 97–118, 119, 121, 122, 134, 138, 143n, 199n, 203n, 222, 226, 233; p. 100. See also Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century, especially pp. 158–86, and Bernardus Silvestris, De mundi universitate, ed. by Barach and Wrobel, pp. 8–13, and the more recent critical edition of Vernet. 3  The English language also preserves this noun as an adjective, ‘sylvan’, or forested. 4  Macrobius’s commentary on Cicero’s Dream of Scipio, with the passage occurring in Regino of Prüm’s treatise on music, commented in turn by Remigius of Auxerre, is the source, well known in the Middle Ages, for this analogy. See Chapter 4 above, n. 25.

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world, that is, utterly basic spiritual, cosmological material within which the inner motivations operating within all seen phenomena were resident (hyle), as a Latin reader one had a visible, substantial, thoroughly concrete metaphor before one’s eyes, as well as before one’s mind. One thought of what is regarded today as ‘the world of the intellect’, ‘theory and speculation’, ‘emotions’, ‘a conceptual world’, or ‘spirit’, as wood that could be manipulated, moulded, carved out, and used as one saw fit, and in accordance with both available properties and the mastery and craft of the one at work.5 This conceptual material could also be cut up into blocks and placed alongside one another, connected to one another by whatever means one had at one’s disposal. One could help oneself to this material, just walk right in and appropriate what was there — the wood on the ground, the young saplings, the sticks, and the logs — according to the purpose one placed before oneself. So it went, in one’s mind, when one read and thought of the eternal substance of Plato’s world as presented by Chalcidius in the Latin language. There were also analogies round and about, since perhaps Chalcidius himself, as well as others such as Augustine, lived in cities of stones placed together that had been used for centuries. All of the buildings on both sides of the walkway, as one went off each day to work and back home again to one’s stone house, were made of chunks of building material placed together. The town or city was also in various stages of building, repair, demolition, and rebuilding. There were large chunks of material from buildings that had been demolished and were just waiting for someone to come along and take them off to build again another house; and there were also public buildings that had been used for hundreds of years, which, increasingly, were no longer needed. So these essentially abandoned buildings constituted huge, looming stockpiles of material, in various and diverse chunk sizes, that were simply there, waiting for an appropriate use by someone who could work well with the material at hand. One could even speak of cannibalizing buildings, incorporating these chunks into one’s own compositions, that is, further buildings.6 As with the buildings 5  This metaphor is still in place and thoroughly comprehensible with the composer Josquin des Pres and the concept in the sixteenth century of a soggetto cavato, a contained, material chunk of musical substance carved out from the entire generality of musical substance and used as a subject or basis for a musical composition. Again, the mass of pre-existent substance, or materia-substantia-natura, is appropriated and used for purposes that one has in mind. 6  Needless to say, one is also very much influenced by one’s surroundings. In the Roman world — all of the territory once under Roman jurisdiction — there are stones everywhere, certainly not only in Rome itself. One might, in fact, in Pula, on the Istrian Coast, for example, become tired of seeing chunks of building material. There are stones of various sizes everywhere,

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made of blocks or chunks of stone that one could actually see, so exactly was the compositional process with chunks that were invisible to the eye. In other words, difference is made between what was contained, that is, delimitation, not a difference in material between that which is seen and what is not. In considering the unification of a potential work process at stake here, one was influenced both by the connotations in Latin of the word used, silva, as well as one’s daily surroundings — what one was used to — in what was regarded as material substance. This particular conceptualization is a profound indicator of cultural difference between this Latin-reading community over many centuries and one today within the English language. Evidence that we are, within the Latin language, dealing with a culture that regards emotional, spiritual substance in concrete terms is easy to come by. Augustine, for example, in his youthful treatise on music, De musica, begins with the substance of sound, as common to both spoken language and to music, then proceeds to point out that a pulse is a contained, delimited piece or body of enlivened substance, responsible, ultimately, for the life-giving force or dynamism within the sound substance of music.7 Augustine then moves on to what he names as versus, again, as a delimited, contained body, filled with sound substance, and evidencing all of the properties of material itself, that is, propensity, substance that can be worked with, movement, and the potential and this is essentially true for the entire Mediterranean rim, whether the Provence, North Africa, Spain, Sicily, the Dalmatian coast, or Greece. One therefore not only needs the linguistic vehicle, granting concrete connotations to this important term, hyle, but also the surrounding geographical experience to fully understand the significance of Chalcidius’s translation. 7  Augustine, De musica, written c. 387 ce, Latin edition in PL, xxxii, along with three other treatises written at this time, shortly following Augustine’s conversion to Christianity, that is, his writing on the Order that Exists Amongst the Disciplines (De ordine), and his two treatises on the substance of the soul — all preoccupations that would remain on his mind throughout his long writing and preaching career. See also Brown, Augustine of Hippo for a discussion of these early works, as well as the extended discussion of Augustine’s concept of pulsus as ‘ensouled body’, in van Deusen, ‘Describing Ecstasy on the North African Rim in Late Antiquity’. Augustine’s work on music has received very little notice, in comparison with other of his writings, such as The Confessions or The City of God, for the reason, no doubt, that Augustine concentrates on just this concept, pulse and pulses within repetition. The pulse, however, for him, illustrates most clearly the concept of ‘soulish substance’, as well as containment within ‘body’ that encloses and delimits unseen substance, in this case, sound, time, and movement from general mass. The materiality of time specifically is also of importance here, as in his statement, ‘Modus, qui pes est […] Quot temporum est’ (Augustine, De musica, PL, xxxii, col. 1081), an interval or increment of time material within a way of moving (modus). See also van Deusen, ‘De musica’, ‘De ordine’, and van Deusen, ‘Music/Rhythm’.

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for actualization. Pulse, as a ‘piece of substance’, contains life, and again, what one might regard as ‘spiritual’ realities, such as accent, pulse, what Augustine names as ictus, and versus, are all explained in concrete terms. Augustine, apparently, is working with chunks of sound substance that, brought together, constitute a composite, a composition. For centuries it was impossible, in the Latin West, to ignore Augustine’s writings. One might find his many treatises tedious, although that was rarely the case; one might take strong issue with what he had written, which happened much more frequently. But one simply could not afford to ignore his work, which, in turn, to a certain extent, became a stockpile of topics, quotations, positions on issues or ‘topics’, in effect a huge heap of conceptual, verbal material. Augustine did the same, quoting Virgil thousands of times, incorporating what Virgil had to say on a given topic without citing him by name, and quite often misquoting him slightly, showing that he had committed Virgil to memory.8 Augustine’s emphasis on substance to be appropriated, moulded and shaped, placed in comprehensible chunks, then together into compositions, and his assurance that one could do this with sound, as well as his programme for using music as a direct access — in terms of its properties, potential, dynamism, and internal, invisible reality — to what was even more difficult to access and understand, can be seen to have permeated talk, thought, and writing until as recently as the end of the nineteenth century, so far as the conceptualization of music at least is concerned.9 8  See MacCormack, The Shadows of Poetry: ‘In some instances, Augustine quoted from Vergil as part of a thought or a line of reasoning, referring to the famous poet in order to help convince his readers. At other times, however, he cited lines or half-lines of Vergil informally as part of his own mental furniture […]. In almost all of these different contexts, lines of Vergil came to his mind and he wrote them down in the process of formulating a thought or expression’ (pp. xvii–xviii), with an example (p. 90), among many, of Confessions i.13.20–21, quoting Aeneid vi.457. Everyone quoted Virgil, precisely or with variation, in chunks that contained in most cases a complete thought and were of approximately the same length. For Quintilian including a cento or punctum of Virgil in whatever context at hand was habitual, as in his discussion, mentioned above, of childhood education he writes: ‘Keep in mind always Virgil, “So strong is custom kept from early years” (Adeo in teneris consuescere multum est)’ (Book i, iii.13– 14). ‘Adeo in teneris consuescere multum est’ is a cento, that is, what one could keep in mind at one time, and say aloud on a single breath. This method of composition, widely applicable to many and sundry types of texts, was noted by virtually every important writer during the Middle Ages. 9  Augustine’s comment that sound substance was distinct from the figura that indicated it is an important background for writers such as Jean-Paul Richter, Novalis, Schelling, and Friedrich Schleiermacher, a topic to be expanded upon below.

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There are other witnesses to the effect of the translational metaphor of silva and its influence, as well as the conscious division into workable pieces of this amorphous mass. We have observed that Isidore of Seville, in the seventh century, writes in his Etymologies on the meanings of words, that Homer as well as Virgil wrote in centones, translated into the Latin puncta, and that the bringing together or convening of these modular, self-contained chunks into an effective composition was truly a miraculous achievement. Further, Virgil’s compositional method shown in the Aeneid was applied by a certain Roman by the name of Proba, who has come to us from Isidore’s account as the Christian wife of a Roman senator, showing that the method could be observed, analysed, and applied in many other circumstances — that, familiar as it was by this time from the writing of Virgil, the method of carefully bringing together chunks of self-contained mental substance was an immensely effective way of dealing with material. This concept of cento/punctum can be seen to have been one of the most decisive of the Middle Ages, as it was brought up by Pope Gelasius in the late fifth century, by Isidore of Seville, and in Prosper’s Epigrammata, and is mentioned by Adelard of Bath, Hildebert Turonensis, and in manuscripts from the Augustinian Abbey of St Victor, outside of Paris, as well as by Robert Grosseteste, writing a commentary on the Book of Genesis (Hexaemeron) in the first decades of the thirteenth century, and the first rector of the newly organized Oxford University. In other words, this compositional concept of manageable, selected, fabricated pieces of material, carefully and considerately put together to achieve appropriateness, order, combined with as much mastery as possible is an overriding principle of medieval composition. The choice of the chunks is important, but true mastery bordering on the miraculous is in the connecting of these chunks together — convened according to the properties of the material itself (secundum materiam concinnatis). It is astonishing to notice how often this particular concept is expressed throughout the medieval period; but it is even more stunning to observe its influence in actual composition.10 10 

Grosseteste, Hexaemeron, ed. by Dales and Gieben, p.  34; cf.  Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum sive originum, ed. by Lindsay, i, 39 (38), and van Deusen, ‘A Theory of Composition and its Influence’, in Theology and Music at the Early University, pp. 132–33. Cento (kento) is often mistranslated, hence misunderstood, as ‘formula’, which, however, is an entirely different Greek noun, hence, concept. Further, negative connotations of derivation in a thought-milieu that ostensibly prizes originality have, at least for the last century, been attached to this term with a resultant dismissiveness that belies the term’s outstanding importance, not only historically, but, as we will see, as an explanatory mechanism for the compositions human beings produce during any period of time.

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There is more on this subject. Philip the Chancellor, writing a Summa de bono (a lengthy summation concerning what should be sought after, or regarded as valuable, at the newly begun cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, interacting with the also recently organized theological faculty of the University of Paris), has a good deal to say about the subject of material — seen and unseen — in his treatment of the nature of ‘goods’. What can be identified as worth going after was obviously then — as now — a topic that would certainly attract a reading audience, both amongst university students in Paris and elsewhere. Drawing extensively upon quotations and analogies from the newly translated, therefore extremely intellectually exciting, Physics of Aristotle,11 the subject of materia-substantia-natura is approached again and again, with the following results. First, Philip begins his encyclopaedic study of ‘goods’ with an important principle having to do with the inner properties of material: it should, by its very nature, be collected. As we have seen, the author begins his work with the agricultural story of Ruth, from the Old Testament, who went out into the fields to gather or collect together the ears of corn left behind by the harvesters. Right at the beginning of his discussion of this topic of the most basic importance, a primary quality of material comes to the fore, namely that it generates itself a gut yearning for more and more. One is attracted to material, sometimes passionately drawn to it; one, in fact, can become addicted to it in terms of what is now known as substance abuse.12 We read further and find that for Philip the Chancellor nature (natura) is synonymous with material (materia) and substance (substantia). He uses all three terms often and interchangeably. Material contains within itself motion and even has the capacity to contain simultaneous contrary motions — motions that would seem to exclude one another or cancel one another out (modus contrarietatis). Natura, substantia, materia contain the capacity for movement in opposing directions.13 11  This is so much the case that Philip’s Summa, if one does not take the format into consideration, could be considered to be a commentary on the Physics. 12  This is the reason, of course, for overfilled closets, pantries, and freezers today. The Chancellor commences his long, important work with the subject of ground, with allusion to agriculture and a concept of collection, in a quotation from Ruth 2. 2: ‘Let me now go to the field and gather ears of corn after him in whose sight I will find grace’ (‘Vadam in agrum et colligam spicas que fugerunt manus merentium, ubicumque clementis in me patris familias reperero gratiam’: Philip the Chancellor, Summa de bona, ed. Wicki, i, 3), a biblical passage to which at least two medieval commentators added their remarks, namely, Jerome (fourth–fifth centuries) and Rhabanus Maurus (tenth century), to which Philip also gives a cento from one of Seneca’s letters. 13  Philip the Chancellor, Summa de bona, ed. by Wicki, i, 68, 77, in which pars, partes, ex

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We have previously noticed how Philip writes further of the opacity of material, as, for example, the material of the earth. As is appropriate to a Summa, an extensive treatment of all possible angles to a given question, Philip gives contradictory points of view, one after the other, concerning every attribute of material to which he refers, thus advancing a whole vocabulary — a compendium — of terms, hypotheses, rebuttals, and new points of view. At times it is difficult to find out exactly what Philip himself might consider to be the case, as he illustrates this particular concept of contrary motion within all of the opposing directions of arguments from the group of authors and writings he presents. Aristotle had stated, in a principle that would become very well known indeed, that two directly opposing arguments or lines of thought could not simultaneously be true. But as he shows in the Physics, these two oppositions could be resolved within motion and time. This resolution could also be shown in music partes, and it was. What is particularly useful for our discussion at hand is the importance Philip places in materia-substantia-natura — seen and especially unseen — acknowledged, collected, consciously divided into partes or chunks, and indicative of movement, property, and participation. Philip writes that it is impossible to conceive of quantity without relating quantity to material, and as we consider quantity, we have already accessed a determining factor in material, as well as what is appropriate to material’s nature — a nature that also contains within itself and participates in contrary motions. Now, material can be said to be substance, he reiterates, and under that particular concept, we find a whole diversity of compositions, arising from potential inherent within the material itself, in other words, made out of material which can be considered to pertain to that material’s nature.14 Some treatments of material are possible, others parte, and ex parte materie (referring to Aristotle’s Physics, iii, 4) are often mentioned, especially with respect to partes moving in contrary motion, against themselves, to be resolved by craft and mastery within motion and time — a concept which was well exemplified within the discipline of music only shortly after the time of his writing. (See the example from a contemporaneous anthology of examples, now in the Biblioteca Laurentiana of Florence, MS Pluteo 29.l, facsimile edn by Dittmer, mentioned above, Chapter 5, n. 15.) It is, of course, today a tenet of counterpoint (punctum contra punctum) and of ‘part writing’ still taught in conservatories today, and still an essential aspect of any trained musician’s education. Cf. van Deusen, ‘On the Usefulness of Music’. 14  Philip the Chancellor, Summa de bono, ed. by Wicki, i, 69: ‘Sed quantitas non invenitur nisi in materia; unde cum eximus quantitatem, iam eximus determinativum materie, et ideo non procedit ratio. Est igitur duplex proprie materia: materia ex qua fit aliquid, ut in generabilibus, materia ex qua aliquid etsi non fiat […] ideo ibi quantitas absque contrarietate motus. Unde cum materia dicat potentiam, ubi minus de potentia et minus proprie materia.’

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are not; as for example, it is possible to make playable oboes from wood but not from unfired clay. Nature accepts differences, that is, within itself, which is another way of stating that movements in contradistinction to and with one another are possible within material.15 Natura is inchoate, unformed, unlimited, not enclosed, but is full of potentiality, usefulness, properties for actualization, and, best of all, is available to be used.16 Natura as ‘pre-existent substance’ can be taken up and appropriated, and, according to one’s understanding of the material with which one has to do and one’s talent and training, as well as one’s willingness to work intensely and persistently, a new composition made from pieces or chunks of this material will ‘come to light’, as these medieval authors describe it. These terms and concepts emphasize the substantial, concrete, material nature of thoughts. The compositional process is essentially collecting and placing together what is already there. The craft is first in collection, then mastery of connection. Both Hungarians and the Hungarian language have a propensity and capacity to regard spiritual materials in concrete ways. The word, among others, in Hungarian for intellectual substance, indeed substance of any sort, is silva (szilfa), with the related words/concepts of szilard (firm, solid, massive, strong), szilardsag (stability, constancy). The English language conventionally gives lip service to this in the use of the common expression ‘musical materials’, but this is simply a habit within this language. Apparently the Hungarian language continues to take seriously a very important point made in Late Antiquity and preserved in both the Latin and Greek words for material, that is hyle = silva, or a stockpile of intellectual-spiritual-emotional substance to which Chalcidius, the late fourth-century commentator on Plato’s Timaeus very clearly refers and thoroughly discusses. In reading recent English translations of Hungarian fiction and poetry, one observes that the Hungarian language generally, and writers using this language in particular, have a habit of using extremely earthy, startlingly substantial and explicit metaphors in describing emotive situations and qualities. One is 15  Philip the Chancellor, Summa de bona, ed. by Wicki, i, 79: ‘Naturale autem multipliciter accipitur’. The Chancellor writes further of plural ‘natural virtues’ referring to the Old Testament book of Job and simultaneous attributes. Philip uses this concept of the diversity of properties and forces within the materia of Job’s personal situation (which was miserable indeed: Mecum nata est miseratio), thus bringing a consideration of natura together with key passages (or centones) from Augustine, Pope Gregory the Great (sixth century), Peter Lombard (twelfth century), and William of Auxerre (twelfth/thirteenth centuries). Philip’s writing, then, constitutes a composition, a direct example of what he was attempting to explain. 16  Philip the Chancellor, Summa de bona, ed. by Wicki, i, 146.

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tempted to ascribe this to a lack of ‘taste’ or at least a different sort of taste. In Hungary, one is always close to the land, to fields, forest, agriculture, the earth, and these all provide the lens through which one views life. This is true as well for people who live in Budapest, since one is always close to the land there as well, and everyone also has relatives who have worked with and on the land — a feature Hungary has in common with Switzerland. It is possible perhaps to be less substantial in the English language, and this is why one is amused at the very idea of ‘cannibalizing’ building material. But a medieval person would and could have understood this perfectly well, and the use of mastication in a whole variety of contexts shows this to be the case.17 Workers with words and workers with stones during the nineteenth century both used the great conceptual culture of the Middle Ages, and particularly the well-thought-out argumentation of the early university, as well as the architecture of the thirteenth century, as a stockpile. Thus, the cathedrals of Notre Dame and Cologne are essentially nineteenth-century buildings, as are many of the refashioned castles along the Rhine River. Again, a concrete parallel in stones cut to size can be found to concepts that have, again, been removed from their previous connections, as well as the century of their generation, to be placed within a new context, obtaining a new significance. Heinrich Heine wrote, in Die romantische Schule, that there was nothing of significance that had been written by the group of Romantics that was not appropriated from the Middle Ages.18 One might even go so far as to argue that a continuity that had remained in place for hundreds of years from Late Antiquity to the 1830s, from Augustine to Jean Paul Richter, Heine, and eventually Karl Marx, had been interrupted by the overt plundering of medieval ideas, terms, concepts, and buildings, rather than simply using them, as had previously been the case. If 17  Medieval writers on music commonly write of how ways of moving, modi, feel in the mouth, how they relate to individual taste. Robert Grosseteste, during the first half of the thirteenth century, as well as others, describe the learning process as that of mastication; Augustine as well as Hugo of St Victor, writing in the twelfth century on the topic of education, note that the material to be learned must be sweet to the taste, or delectable, in order to be assimilated. The topic is obviously an important one for many centuries, and a topic to which one could apply one’s own experience. 18  Heine, Die romantische Schule, ed. by Altenhofer, pp. 15–16: ‘Was war aber die romantische Schule in Deutschland? Sie war nichts anders als die Wiedererweckung der Poesie des Mittelalters, wie sie sich in dessen Liedern, Bild-und Bauwerken, in Kunst und Leben manifestiert hatte.’ Poesie used here should not be understood as ‘poetry’, but rather as artefact — what has been made or fashioned from pre-existent substance. Heine is writing with the background given above.

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one quite simply lives in a house, just as one’s grandparents and great-grandparents had, one thinks far less about what one is doing than if one totally rebuilds that dwelling, retaining only what seems useful and discarding all of the rest of it. It was much the same with the cathedral of Notre Dame, for which the chapter house, with its priceless library, arguably the most important area of the cathedral since it directly had to do with its legacy and administration, was, during the 1830s, demolished. As with buildings of stone, so with concepts. Medieval writers considered that all material constituted a composite that contained both seen and unseen, both visible body and invisible soul. Another way of looking at this question is that they thought that spirit was substance, and that there was no essential difference between body and soul, but rather a difference of containment. What, in the meantime, has happened to this conceptualization? What is important regarding ‘matter’ as possibly containing spirit (Geist), or ‘soulish substance’, as material, to be considered in exactly the same ways, with the same properties, potentiality, activity, and possible actualization as material that could be seen, touched, smelled, weighed, and measured? In the first instance, music is excluded, in that music is almost entirely unseen. Secondly, again if one separates ‘matter’ from ‘spirit’ a lack of seriousness regarding the unseen, as therefore not ‘substantial’, is unavoidable. Regardless of what one professes concerning unseen, invisible substance, if the unseen is not regarded as patently substantial, it will not be considered as a serious reality. Thirdly, it would seem that the major emphasis of medieval thought culture, centring around the significance — and material nature — of the unseen, has become, by now, incomprehensible. Concurrently, therefore, music’s place as the illuminator of unseen reality has in the meantime become unnecessary. Nature, rather than comprising the inner material of which one ultimately is made, from whence one’s motivation arises — the inner, invisible space filled with material that harbours one’s propensities, potentialities, characteristics, a region closer to each one of us than the closest companion — is disassociated into a foreign outside reality, one knows not exactly what. As Becker states in Beyond Translation, with respect to a poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson, written in 1836, ‘The central question of Emerson’s chapter on language is also the central question of the whole work, Nature. It is an epistemological question: how is a Soul, an individual observing person, related to Nature? Two very distant, archaic words, soul and nature. As for nature, Emerson defines it as “all that is separate from us, all which philosophically distinguishes as the not me, that is both nature and art, all other men, and my own body”. How does an individual observer, a live being, “relate to its environment” (to use Dewey’s terms)? We

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might now call Nature context. Soul for Emerson was a metonymy for an individual being, a term shared at the time by science and religion. We don’t have a word nowadays quite like soul in that same range. Since Emerson’s day whole continents of prior text have drifted away.’19 Becker goes on to quote Emerson as having written that ‘the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind’. With Emerson the change that would eventually excise meaning from the term ‘nature’ was taking place, resulting, as he sees it, in the entire word floating away out of the most pungent territory of the English language as it is spoken and with historical priorities intact. To exemplify and illustrate the principles under consideration, we take up now pre-existent substance, carefully appropriated and carved up, so to speak, into manageable chunks, then placed in a specific order, first as this process occurs within the Psalms and Virgil’s Aeneid, arranged then into cantus. The Psalms divide themselves into centones, that is, chunks of conceptual, textual substance, each of which can be spoken comfortably in one breath and contains one predominant identifier, or figura, as, for example, Psalm 1, the Blessed Man (Beatus vir): Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, Nor standeth in the way of sinners Nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful. But his delight is in the law of the Lord; And in his law doth he meditate day and night. And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water That bringeth forth his fruit in his season His leaf also shall not wither And whatsoever he doeth shall prosper. The ungodly are not so But as the chaff which the wind driveth away Therefore the ungodly shall not stand in the judgment Nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous. For the Lord knoweth the way of the righteous But the way of the ungodly shall perish.20

These centones or chunks are present as well in Latin translations of the Psalter, as in the Vulgate: 19 

Cf. Becker, Beyond Translation, pp. 16–18. English translation taken from the King James Version of the Psalter. The ‘vulgate’ or ‘vernacular’ translation of the Psalter, one of many in use during the medieval period, was translated by Jerome in the late fourth/early fifth centuries and has become the standard Latin translation of the Bible, still most in use today. 20 

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Beatus vir qui non abiit in consilio impiorum Et in via peccatorum non stetit, Et in cathedra pestilentiae non sedit; Sed in lege Domini voluntas eius, Et in lege eius meditabitur die ac nocte. Et erit tanquam lignum quod plantatum est secus decursus aquarum Quod fructum suum dabit in tempore suo: Et folium eius non defluet; Et omnia quaecumque faciet prosperabuntur Non sic impii, non sic; Sed tanquam pulvis quem proiicit ventus a facie terrae, Ideo non resurgent impii in iudicio, Neque peccatores in concilio iustorum, Quoniam novit Dominus viam iustorum; Et iter impiorum peribit.

So it is with the entire Psalter, dividing itself into chunks, often juxtaposed in opposition, that is, one notices what could be observed as a ‘contrary motion’ between pairs of chunks. These chunks have an order, but they could also be wrested from the order within the Psalter and rearranged within a different order or composition, which is exactly what was accomplished within medieval cantus, as we will see. This is the same method as was used by Virgil in the Aeneid, namely, placing chunks of conceptual and textual substance together as in the famous opening lines: Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris Italiam fato profugus Laviniaque venit litora, multum ille et terris iactatus et alto vi superum, saevae memorem Iunonis ob iram, multa quoque et bello passus, dum conderet urbem inferretque deos Latio; genus unde Latinum Albanique patres atque altae moenia Romae. Musa, mihi causas memora, quo numine laeso quidve dolens regina deum tot voluere casus Insignem pietate virum, tot adire labores Impulerit. Tantaene animis caelestibus irae? [I sing of warfare and a man at war. From the sea-coast of Troy in early days He came to Italy by destiny, To our Lavinian western shore, A fugitive, this captain, buffeted

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Cruelly on land as on the sea By blows from powers of the air — behind them Baleful Juno in her sleepless rage. And cruel losses were his lot in war Till he could found a city and bring home His gods to Latium, land of the Latin race The Alban lords, and the high walls of Rome. Tell me the causes now, O Muse, how galled In her divine pride, and how sore at heart From her old wound, the queen of gods compelled him A man apart, devoted to his mission — To undergo so many perilous days And enter on so many trials.]21

The section closes with: Left by the Greeks and pitiless Achilles Keeping them far from Latium, For years They wandered as their destiny drove them on From one sea to the next, So hard and huge a task it was to found the Roman people.

It is entirely possible that every literate person for nearly two millennia knew the above passage by memory. Each cento or chunk of both Psalm 1, Beatus vir, as well as the Aeneid, contains and sets forth one prominent, characteristic, mental shape or figura that identifies that cento and separates it from the next, as in the passage quoted above from the Aeneid, cento l: arms/war, cento 2: Troy, cento 3: Italy, cento 4: shore, cento 5: fugitive, cento 6: cruelty, cento 7: blows, cento 8: Juno, cento 9: loss, cento 10: city/home, cento 11: Latium, cento 12: Rome, cento 13: O Muse, cento 14: pride, cento 15: queen of gods, cento 16: mission, cento 17: peril, cento 18: trials. Many of these pairs of centones are also contrast pairs, or figurae in opposition. This method of composition is that found as well in cantus, sung in this case for the celebration of epiphany, or the beginning of Christ’s ministry on earth as in the following example, made even more explicit in the chunks indicated by figurae or personae that precede the Mass liturgy of the day. In an example of verses from the cathedral of Nevers, central France, c. 1120, each chunk is delineated by a single figura such as ‘narrator’ (nuntius) or ‘king’ (rex or plural, magi) (Figure 14). 21 

Virgil, The Aeneid, ed. by Mynors, opening to first book, p. 103; trans. by Fitzgerald, p. 4.

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Figure 14. Transcription of Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fonds nouv. acq. latin 1235 (c. 1120), fol. 199r. Figure: author.

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Figures 15–17. ‘Chunks’ in transcriptions by Kodály, published 1916 (by permission of the Bartók Archive of the Musicology Institute, Hungarian Academy of Sciences)

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But this is also the constructive process for Hungarian folk song, namely, pre-existent sound substance, divided into chunks, and placed together into a composition (Figures 15–17). Each chunk has a defining figura, as well as a way of moving that is distinctive and that separates that particular chunk from the generality of sound material. How can we define this distinction, these differences (or the medieval differentiae) between ways of moving (modi)? This is a question that has occupied folk music research for many decades and is the topic of the chapter which follows, namely, on the question of types.

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Methodology and the Question of ‘Types’

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e had taken all of the graduate students on a trip from Budapest to Zagreb and around the Istrian Peninsula in order to observe just how a symbiosis — a real composite — of Roman, Byzantine, Early Christian, Venetian, Slavic, and Glagolithic elements, or chunks, identified by distinctive figures or characteristics (figurae) could be noted and recognized. The trip had been rigorous, fascinating, and exhausting, requiring some resourcefulness on the parts of all, especially as we had recently occupied a camp left vacant by Bosnian refugees who had returned to their homes. All of us were happy to be sitting outside, enjoying a meal, in the warm evening air close to the Mediterranean. We ate the fried fish and schnitzel prepared for us, spoke of our experiences, and laughed at Cuncho, a Bulgarian who would, surely, in my estimation, succeed at whatever he took upon himself to do, so infectious was his humour, spontaneous his warmth, his humanity spilling out from an expansive personality. Then one group began to sing: the Bulgarians first, followed by the Ukrainians, then the Muscovites, the Rumanians, the Poles, the Croats, the Georgians, and so on through the seventeen nationalities that were travelling together in our double-decker bus, all part of that summer seminar, each group singing folk songs in Slavic languages, as well as Rumanian, Hungarian, one after the other, often with the accompaniment of spoons, clapping, and movement. Everyone was having a good time and releasing the tension of the previous ten days of riding in the bus, walking through excavations in the hot sun, arriving late each night at the hotels, youth hostels, and camps, to get up

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early the next day. Finally, of course, the Hungarians, students and faculty, sang too. They were in the majority, since the university was located in Budapest, and they sang with full voice and much enthusiasm. It was a pleasure to watch them and to recognize, from my own research, many of the tunes they sang, including, as well, ‘John Brown’s Body’ with Hungarian text. It seemed to me at that moment that what we all had done that evening was analogous to the composite of civilizations we had been studying and that some of the same intellectual constructs could either be used or discarded. We had noticed distinctive features of the ubiquitous Roman presence in that region, Roman columns and Latin texts on stones and buildings, but there were Greek and Glagolithic textual figurae, as well, here and there. Another day was spent walking through Roman ruins to an early Christian chapel still, miraculously, intact, but without a roof and surrounded by weeds, olive trees, and rocks, with an occasional viper to be seen slithering from sight as a throng of sixtyfive students and seven professors came suddenly down the deserted path; and the highpoint of another, still, was the Roman Forum and Amphitheatre at Pula, on the coast of the Adriatic. One day we had tramped through brush and stones for a mile in order to note a Glagolithic inscription on the lintel of a chapel doorway. There were numerous Venetian windows to be seen, Apuleian frescoes, and even Lombardian doorways and walls. What we viewed and experienced here on the Istrian Peninsula was a totality, composed of individual distinctive elements, or delineatory and characteristic figures, all related to what could be conceived as modules of influence, as residues of civilizations that had all left their traces. Exactly the same situation was apparent, and available for our observation, for the many distinctive figures contained within the folk song from the present-day nations these civilizations had become. Of what are these folk songs composed? The answer was quite simple: everything, a body of melody and text that is composite in nature, with the most prominent, easily recognized melodies from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, gathered from diverse and unlikely sources.1 1 

Augustine’s analogy was the mosaic, in which each piece had its own place within order. Augustine, of course, both in Rome and in North Africa, was surrounded by stones, buildings, some ruined or under reconstruction, and mosaics, and a mental conceptualization of fitting together pieces into a proper and appropriate order is a topic that comes up over and over again in his writing, to be discussed in more detail below. Cf. De ordine, i.2: ‘If a person were to look at an intricate pavement so narrowly as to see only the single tesserae, he would say the artist, lacking a sense of composition, had set the little pieces at haphazard, since he could not take in at once the whole pattern, inlaid to form a single image of beauty’; and De civitate Dei, xix.13:

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Another vignette may serve to make a point. A colleague in the folk music archive in Budapest was put out and, in exasperation, related her story to me. She had been asked by her supervisor to review all of the ‘types’ with twelve syllables, then ten syllables, and, following that, nine, all of which she had done, putting her own research by the side. Then finally, since she had reviewed so many types with such alacrity, she was asked to continue into ever more numbers of syllables. What had especially frustrated her at the moment was that one large type had been divided into many subtypes, and further into even more subtypes — with no apparent reason for the division. No one among the seven or eight researchers in the institute knew why this work had been done, for what reason, and according to what criteria. I was interested in her story for two reasons. First, it confirmed my impression about these ‘types’, namely, that the classifications reflected ephemeral, often personal, interests, and reinforced my hypothesis that the ‘types’, rather than structural abstractions, were themselves constructed artefacts. Secondly, her description of the situation in the archive corresponded exactly, to my own mind, to the great medieval projects, in which at the end of the day, so to speak, one did not know who had done what. The historian Beryl Smalley remarked about this fact with respect to the early medieval Glossa ordinaria, a medieval commentary on the Bible and a gigantic project of the Middle Ages that remained as the standard commentary on the Bible for many centuries, for which, she thought, no one would ever figure out who had written what and exactly when. The fact that a project is communal and that each contributes accordingly to his or her capacity, however, does not imply that an individual has not made a certain, self-contained contribution.2 For the ‘types’ as well as for the Glossa ordinaria, again, as Beryl Smalley observed, there were distinct differences between contributions. Still another scene from lives filled with research and archival activity in the city of Budapest will make a further point that is directly related to this consideration of types. When I arrived in Budapest, at the archive one recent summer, an unusual atmosphere of pleasant unrest was in the air. Great things, it would seem, were being considered. Meetings were held, in Hungarian, of course, in the archive where I worked on a daily basis, and I, one day, asked one of my colleagues what was up. She replied, ‘We have decided to revise our view of the types.’ ‘Oh, how interesting’, I said. ‘I am constantly thinking about them ‘Order disposes all things, regular and irregular, in the places they fit’. I have included Gary Wills’s translations from his Saint Augustine, p. 3. 2  Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, especially pp. 56–62.

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myself, as I am doing this work each day with the types and transcriptions. Why don’t we get together and talk about it?’ This having been initiated, we met one afternoon. Since I had, in a sense, called for the meeting, I began the conversation with the statement, ‘It seems to me that the question of type is the most important one with which we are dealing, and one that constantly needs to be assessed. Perhaps we could begin, as each one of us relates his or her own view of the question, “What is a type?”’ This opening remark was greeted with complete silence. Finally, one of the researchers spoke, ‘But don’t you realize that this question has been asked before, by Bartók, Kodály, by Járdányi, and many others?’ I replied, ‘Yes, and I have read what they have written on this topic, but is it not our challenge and function as scholars to ask the question anew, for ourselves, and also to come up with some new and fresh answers, for our own time and place?’ Again, my question was met by silence. Finally, one of the colleagues walked to the shelves of the library surrounding us and began to take books from their places. Handing them to me, she said, ‘When you have time, then, read what Kodály, Bartók and Járdányi have to say on types. The question has already been asked — and answered — for us. Why do we need to ask this question again?’ Once again, two cultures came into direct, sharp juxtaposition. I myself, as an American, had been raised in a culture of change and innovation, often, indeed, for their own sakes, perhaps unreflectively, without foresight as to possible consequences and to excess. My Hungarian colleagues had grown up into maturity in a culture that valued, both consciously as well as unspoken, tradition and authority. Both authority and innovation, needless to say, are necessary. But, at that moment, confronted with a clear example of totally contradictory points of view, taken so intuitively and spontaneously, it was extremely interesting for me to reflect on the concept and capacity of innovation itself, how a climate of innovation is prepared and, ironically, cultivated, and what a deep-seated cultural reality the propensity for innovation was. All of us were ‘right’. None of us was ‘wrong’. All of us had, during that short discussion that had lasted perhaps, at the most, ten minutes provided an example of deeply held, sharply divergent, cultural points of view, ones that are often discussed as commonplaces but rarely experienced with such intensity and immediacy. But, as we have seen, the question of types is not only one of ideological or cultural point of view, but, rather, one of material concern. What, indeed, should one do with this plethora of material, this sheer mass of musical and textual substance? The answer, since at least the end of the nineteenth century, has been to collect it assiduously, of course, use it, and order it. No one had any

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doubt but that something should indeed be done with this material. Folk song material has been recomposed and ordered through the course of this century. In the past, the answer to the question of what to do with an overwhelming material has been to delineate types.3 For this reason, we will deal with this question of type as construct, what ‘type’ as a concept includes and excludes, how types have been seen to have been extracted from the folk song material itself, and the nature of representational constructs for delineating importance as a broader, more general, preoccupation of music analysis. The comparison of ‘types’ with the transcriptions from which they have been extracted is itself very revealing, bringing to the fore the question of what the essence of the connection between the two, type and material, actually is. The concept of type 3 

Járdányi and others (as indicated above), as the collection grew, observed that it had become even more necessary to arrange the folk songs and growing collections of transcriptions into ‘types’. See, for example, Járdányi, Hungarian Folk Song Types and Járdányi, ‘Die neue Ordnung der ungarischen Volkslieder’. Imre Olsvai worked with Járdányi, as well as Dobszay and Szendrei, who substitute ‘type’ sometimes for ‘style’ (Catalogue of Hungarian Folksong Types, p. 35) and write of theoretical clarification of the ‘type’ concept infused from practice of folk music systematization: While there is perfect consensus in Hungarian ethnomusicology about the significance of typology, several proposals have been abroad for the musical arrangement (ordering) of the types; not merely to arrange the material in a logical system for easy orientation based on the hierarchy of musical characteristics, but also to capture the essence, the life of folk music, to create a theoretical model to reconstruct what is impossible to reconstruct: where a tune comes from, why it is as it is, what it derives from, what further alterations may arise from it. The systems try to define formal features that express coherence by content. It would appear that type and style are first of all formal principles, and that form as a concept is perceived to describe what one is approaching and seeking to explicate by means of music analysis. This priority coincides with the influence of the visual art hypothetical constructs of the 1920s and 1930s that were seized upon by the emerging discipline of historical musicology, one of the historical disciplines to attain increasing importance in the final generation of the nineteenth and first generation of the twentieth centuries. It must be observed that these historical disciplines, including the university study of history itself, were not medieval disciplines, but rather have appeared much later. The transformation of an essentially static visual concept such as form into a dynamic concept that could be then applied to musical time lapse was a topic of much interest with the result that the concept of ‘form’ has all but usurped the field as analytical priority, especially in undergraduate textbooks in the English language during the second half of the twentieth century (see discussion of this important question above). The meaningfulness and relevance of the concept of form as analytical tool has been largely unquestioned, since the concept is so amenable to teaching, and even so ubiquitous within ordinary, everyday, conversational use of the English language. As the preceding discussion brings out, it is not at all easy to get at exactly what ‘form’ is nor what it, as a concept, should accomplish as conceptual distinction. Many have expressed this point of view, maintaining that ‘form’ quite simply is what it is and that it is quite necessary to have a concept of form.

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is also a reinforcement of a basic premise that human beings shape material at hand and that this is true of both ‘folk song’ and ‘composed’ music. Method, in other words, does not differentiate the two, ‘folk song’ and ‘composed’ music, one from the other. To begin: as we have seen, it is not easy to clarify exactly what is meant by type, since musicology has appropriated the concept, along with ‘style’ and ‘form’, from other disciplines, namely, art history and criticism. Furthermore, in a search for ‘the clearest type’ — which is what the folk music researchers are after — the details of the artist’s life are of little significance; in other words, the goal is to extract ‘type’ and, essentially, ‘style’ from the circumstances of an artist’s life. One, as a scholar, is attempting to remove the work from the artist as one deals with, and brings into the question, exemplification, type, and the musical, or artistic, work. In other words, ‘type’ accomplishes reification of the work itself.4 The researchers in the folk music archive write, and speak, of types and old layers, but they are not specific about exactly what they have in mind: pentatonic? psalmodic? repetitive? formal arrangement of recurrence? Pál Járdányi, who influenced at least two generations of research in Hungarian folk music, wrote that one quite simply needed to come to terms with this concept and use it. In the final decades of the twentieth century, again, László Dobszay remarked that while there was a ‘perfect consensus’ in Hungarian ethnomusicology about the importance of typology, there was a variety of proposals as to how this could be achieved. The best way of proceeding, however, was through the actual practice (of ordering into types). In other words, the material itself spoke to one as one worked with it; properties of the material became available for observation as one actually dealt with the folk songs. Katalin Paksa has 4 

For insightful comments on the concept of type more or less at the nascence of its widespread use, see Longhi, ‘Piero dei Franceschi e lo Sviluppo della Pittura Veneziana’; Hänseroth, ‘Erwin Panofsky’; Kris and Kurz, Die Legende vom Künstler; as well as Ginzburg, ‘Spurensicherung’ and Kubler, The Shape of Time. See also Ginzburg, Erkundungen über Piero who in a trenchant discussion of style (p. 11, and ch. 3 on ‘Historiography as Ideology’) discusses how and why ‘Stilkritik’ has been used predominately to place works within an artist’s oeuvre, and artists within a narrative history of art, relying most often upon a chain of ‘influences’. In particular, Piero’s paintings make the point that this methodology is of no use whatsoever, since Piero’s works give little or no evidence for ‘development’, and very little can, at any rate, be ascertained from the works if they are considered for their own sakes and on their own. Ginzburg further brings out the obvious fact that an artist has the perfect ‘right’ to change his/ her ‘style’ at any time (or not to), quite apart from any discernable ‘development’, thus calling summarily into question the entire enterprise of typing and stylization, and the usefulness, at any rate, of either of these concepts.

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recently remarked that the concept of the melodic line is not the outcome of an abstract musical thought, but, following this observation, she goes on to write that ‘In Hungarian folk music, the major stylistic layers are characterized and differentiated first of all by the melodic contour of the strophe’ and of old and new styles (emphasis added).5 It would appear that type, style, layer, and form all have been, one time or the other, used interchangeably and without precise clarification as to what, exactly, is signified by each of these terms. The question also arises that if one becomes increasingly suspicious of such generalizing concepts, one must find other possibilities in order to accomplish the problematic task of indicating particular differentiation within a shared material, or delineating what one perceives as structure from what appears to be either ornamentation or addition that is, for some reason and according to some criteria, nonstructural. This is, of course, the challenge and opportunity of music analysis, and the problem of finding metaphors to describe what can be perceived as musical reality.6 Why is type so important? A closely related question, how can difference be established? In other words, how can one approach what is distinctive and describe the character of this distinction?7 An old question, the problem of 5 

Paksa, Népdaltípusok, p. 35. Paksa writes of stylistic layers, that descending melodies are typical of old styles, that domed melodic contours characterize the new. But, according to her point of view, the delineating characteristic of the individual melodies is not exclusively melodic but, rather, is determined by an evolutionary process. The use of growth models render automatic the actual compositional process. In other words, the process, once set in motion, leads inexorably to what is fuller, ‘more mature’, possibly more complex. 6  Cf. Gersh on structure, in Concord in Discourse, especially ch. 1. 7  This is an old question asked, searchingly, anew by László Dobszay in his introduction to Dobszay and Szendrei, Catalogue of Hungarian Folksong Types, pp. 7–38, followed by a most useful bibliography. Dobszay states that ‘“song” denotes that we are treating the song-like manifestations within the broader realm of folk music, in other words the vocal manifestations that possess a certain closedness, an independent musical and primarily melodic message, and in most cases are strophic in character […]. However, there is no sharp borderline between songs and other strata of music’ (p. 7). With regard to type, and the relationship of type to style, Dobszay (Catalogue of Hungarian Folksong Types, p. 13) quotes Pál Járdányi: ‘“All the types of melodies sung by the Hungarian people that are free of signs of chordal functions, harmonic shifts.” But he [ Járdányi] distinguishes from the folksongs the 19th century popular art songs in which “there are many folksong-like elements … but some phrases, mainly at the end of the melodic lines, show evidence of lurking harmonies”, in other words the layer of melody that “in the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th thickly covered the humus of Hungarian folk music”, because if “we do not peel the humus off ” this melodic layer “we cannot survey the layer underneath”.’ What follows then is a description of the ordering process, in arranging types of folk song according to style.

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type is asked anew by the researchers in the folk music archive in Budapest even today, after many decades of discussion concerning type and style. Type, it would seem, is based on style, most often, in this case, old and new style, and style is based upon layers of style. The concept of style, as partially considered above under historigraphical points of view, has served as an organizing principle, point of departure, and debatable issue within a discussion of the visual arts, as well as within the emerging field of musicology, throughout the twentieth century. We find style as a concept, with meaning often simply assumed, in such standard texts, for example, as Bruno Nettl’s Theory and Method in Ethnomusicology, with the chapter, ‘The Nature and Description of Style: Some Theories and Methods’, which, published in 1964, became a leading textbook in the English language for the developing field of ethnomusicology, together with Mantle Hood’s The Ethnomusicologist, published in 1971, which also contained a chapter on ‘style’. Bartók already in 1913 had discussed, in German, ‘style’ to the extent that a comparison of single Musikstilarten led to a possibility that the origins of these ‘kinds of style’ could be discerned.8 Bartók’s work was influential well into the second half of the twentieth century, as the work of Constantin Brăiloiu indicated, who wrote that style in music was ascertained through an analytical, systematic, melody-typology that relied upon comparative investigation of the object of study. Here, Musikstil is recognized through ‘melodietypologische und vergleichende Verfahren’. One found out about style through type rather, it seemed, than the other way around, that is, that typology should lead to style.9 Building, apparently, upon inital, highly influential, works of the early twentieth century, the concept of style could be found nearly everywhere one looked, such as, for example, K. Reinhard’s Einführung in die Musikethnologie, with a chapter ‘Die Musikstile’, published in 1968, F. Hoerburger, Musica vulgaris: Lebensgesetze der instrumentalen Volksmusik, and D. Holy, Probleme der Entwicklung und des Stils der Volksmusik, as well as A. Elschekova, who, in an article that summarized several papers on the same topic, ‘Stilbegriff und Stilschichten’, wrote that ‘Stilkritik strives to bring together what was characteristic of a given musical culture. Style comprehends ethnic, national, historical, 8 

Bartók, Cantece populare romanesti din comitatut Bihar; German trans. Volksmusik der Rumänen von Maramures: ‘In dem so gewonnenen Material durch sorgfältige Vergleichung die einzelnen Musikstilarten festzustellen und nach Möglichkeit ihren Ursprung zu beleuchten’ (p.  5); cf.  Brăiloiu, ‘Le Folklore musical’. See also Hoerburger, Musica vulgaris and Holy, Probleme der Entwicklung und des Stils der Volksmusik. 9  The art historian Gombrich has remarked more than once that he had always been suspicious of the concept (or non-concept) of ‘style’; see Chapter 3 above.

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regional, local, and individual, areas and layers, style comprised of generational differences, as well as performance style within instrumental music. These are all stylistic differentiations that are totally bound up with one another. Under the concept of style, one can therefore bring together the entire generality of single, individual, melodies, both of the same and related musical structures, that, seen from an ethnic, historical, or regional standpoint, together form a homogeneous unity within a given music culture. Hence, unity of style, that is, a “stylistic layer” is based upon musical characteristics (Merkmale), but also upon functional, generic, textual, cultural, and many other factors.’10 Elschekova then delineates musical structures according to the point of view of tonality, series of tones, tone-systems, containing ambitus, melody (melodik), rhythm, meter, upbeat, structure (Architechtonik), polyphony, Tonbildung, tone-colour, tempo, dynamics, sound/sounded phenomenon (Klang), performance aspects that contribute to structure, with the further classification of • melody-classification and systematization, • single structural melodic groups as well as musical categories, with the conclusion that all of these aggregate together bring about a homogeneous unity, and that unity is one that can be designated as ‘style’. On the other hand, style did not actually constitute a unity, since a selection process should also take place amongst all of these ‘characteristic elements’. 10 

Cf. Reinhard, Einführung in die Musikethnologie, especially pp.  296–98 which discusses musical style; Hoerburger, Musica vulgaris, Holy, Probleme der Entwicklung und des Stils der Volksmusik, and a series of articles by Elscheková: ‘General Considerations on the Classification of Folk Tunes’; ‘Methods of Classifying Folk Tunes’; ‘Technologie der Datenverarbeitung bei der Klassifizierung von Volksliedern’; ‘Systematisierung, Klassifikation und Katalogisierung von Volksliedweisen’; and ‘Stilbegriff und Stilschichten in der slowakischen Volksmusik’, pp.  266–67: ‘Die Stilkritk strebt die zusammenfassende Charakteristik einer Musikkultur an. Die Volksmusik ist vom stilistischen Standpunkt gesehen ein ungemein mannigfältiges Objekt. Der Gesamtstil gliedert sich in ethnische, nationale, historische, regionale, lokale, und individuelle Stilbereiche und Stilschichten. Es bestehen auch Generationsstile, Stile von Liedgattungen, Interpretationsstile, Vokal- und Instrumentalstile, wie auch Vortragsstile von Instrumentenarten […] Diese Stilarten sind nicht isoliert aufzufassen, sondern wechselseitig verbunden, untereinander verflochten und stellen ein ungewöhnlich dynamisches Ganzes dar. Under dem Begriff des Musikstils fassen wir die Gesamtheit jener individuellen Einzelmelodien gleicher und verwandter Musikstruktur zusammen, die vom ethnischen, historischen oder regionalen Aspekten im Rahmen einer Musikkultur eine homogene Einheit bildet. Eine Einheitlichkeit eines Musikstils, bzw. einer Stilschicht berüht ausser musikalischen Merkmalen auch auf funtionellen, genremässigen, textlichen, kulturellen und anderen Faktoren’. Merkmal is Herder’s expression as well; see below.

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One selected those elements that occurred most frequently, and these, then, constituted melody types that truly indicated a musical culture.11 For Elschekova, however, as well as for Charles Rosen, writing on ‘Classical Style’, this concept of style, rather than, as Rosen wrote in 1972, corresponding to ‘an historical fact, answers a need: it [style] creates a mode of under­ standing’.12 Elschekova recognized that a certain dependency upon a hypothesis (Hypothesenabhängigkeit) gradually took over, becoming, with time and repetition, an axiom.13 In other words, style took on a life of its own in its own right, quite apart from historical or even musical considerations, and style as a meaningful label had also by that time, certainly, become accepted without question as a metaphorical tool for describing music. Furthermore, Elschekova wrote, in an investigation that was primarily motivated by genetic, or evolutionary, considerations, that is, the discussion of stylistic ‘layers’ based upon a postulated development from simple to complex, any implied relationship to a specific historical situation was, for the most part, to be avoided. Instances of development, particularly of previous stages, and especially of origins, were — and are — most often allowed to remain in an unspecified mythic past. Elschekova wrote as well that recourse to the basic tones and functions of functional har11  Elscheková, ‘Stillbegriff und Stilschichten in der slowakischen Volksmusik’, p. 267: ‘Nach dieser differenzierenden Phase, die bis zu den Melodietypen vorgedrungen ist, werden die kennzeichnenden Elemente der Musikkulture untersucht, teils nach quantitative überwiegenden Merkmalen, teils nach spezifischen, originalen stilistischen Elementen’. This methodology is also followed concurrently within historical musicology, i.e. extracting particular features to ascertain ‘composers’ style’ and on this basis to postulate the style of a given period, i.e. Classic, Baroque, Romanticism. Cf. Rosen, The Classical Style, who in his introductory chapters writes of ‘The Musical Language of the Late Eighteenth Century’, ‘Theories of Form’, including nineteenth-century conceptions of sonata form, twentieth-century revisions, Schenker, Motivic Analysis, ‘The Origins of the Style’, going on to section II: ‘The Classical Style: The Coherence of the Musical Language and Structure and Ornament’, followed by a consideration of the specific works of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. 12  Charles Rosen, in The Classical Style, mentioned above, goes on to write that the concept of style belonged ‘not to the history of music, but to the history of musical taste and appreciation. The concept of a style can only have a purely pragmatic definition, and it can at times be so fluid and imprecise to be useless. Confusion of levels is the greatest danger’ (pp. 19–20). 13  Elscheková, ‘Stilbegriff und Stilschichten in der slowakischen Volksmusik’, p. 264: ‘Sie zeichnen sich durch eine beträchtliche Hypothesenabhängigkeit ab, die allmählich einen axiomatischen charakter erhalten, so daß eine nachträgliche Verifikation und Beweisführung in unzureichenden Umfang angestrebt und durchgeführt wird.’ Elscheková’s lengthy and insightful article shows, in my opinion, much methodological sophistication and well summarized the conceptual foundations of a concept of style at the time of the article’s publication.

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monic analysis, one way or the other, were unavoidable whenever stylistic layers were a consideration.14 Style, then, and type were useful as giving an impression of information, for the very sound of the words themselves, not particularly for any precise definition they conveyed. This is borne out by the fact that they are used interchangeably. In other words, the very analytical foundations of these two expressions were in need of investigation, and many noticed this more or less concurrently. One example of internal properties of musical material that have been intuited, explained in terms of all four of these principles under discussion here — type, style, form, and layer — is the lament.15 What, indeed, constitutes a lament? Is it the emotional substance of the text, that is, the one instance of emotional content of text closely related to music, and thus producing recognizably distinct characteristics of both? Is the lament an ‘ancient layer’, as has been said to be the case? The lament has been described as having a characteristic ‘small ambitus’, a range of fewer and more closely spaced tones. But this characteristic does not particularly distinguish the lament from other ‘types’. Again, the lament has been described as displaying repeated tones, as well as recitation patterns that would place it closer to what is recognized as ‘psalmodic’ in medieval cantus, but this is true, as well, for many types classified in the Budapest archive. Is the 14 

Elscheková, ‘Stilbegriff und Stilschichten in der slowakischen Volksmusik’, pp. 268–70: ‘Grundfunktion also Hilfsmittel der Forschung zu einem Forschungschema. Diese Faktoren machen sich mehr bei den stilgeschichtlichen Theorien bemerkbar, weniger bei musik-dialektologischen Untersuchungen, die in den rezenten Quellen vorkommen.’ 15  Nagy wrote in ‘Typenprobleme in der ungarischen Volksmusik’ that both Bartók as well as Kodály made the distinction of the ‘lament’ based on form (Kodály: AABA), but the lament, again, according to Nagy was actually international, not by any means exclusive to music combined with a Hungarian text. He wrote that there was, in the lament, a unification of melodic ‘style’: ‘Französische, deutsche, ukrainische, mährische, slowakische, ungarische, kroatische, rumänische, Beispiele und solche aus der Bukowina sprechen für die überaus grosse Verbreitung dieser [lament] Melodie’ (p. 242). Nagy continues with a consideration of ‘system’, namely, that the lament system is ABBA, as ‘strenge Ordnung der Formen und Zäsuren’, and writes of the ‘streng geschlossene Einheit dieses Stils’ as well as general ‘Formen der europäischen Volksmusik, Melodieprinzipien, Prinzipien der Mustermelodien’. We have here, applied to the lament, terms such as Urform, Einheit des Stils, geschlossene Einheit, and strenge Ordnung der Formen — all words that project a desired emotional flavour of ‘rigour’ but very little else, are descriptive but not analytical, and, again, leave aside any cogent differentiation between conventional, utterly familiar but, in fact, meaningless terms. What is Nagy striving for exactly; what distinction is he attempting to isolate? What would be lost if one simply postulated that sonorous substance, as all material, contained within itself properties that are material in nature and distinguishable as properties? Roma musicians speak, as well, of ‘tastes’ associated with melodies, as do Australian Aboriginals and medieval writers concerning music as an exemplary discipline.

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chief characteristic of the lament its pentatonicism?16 Does the lament evidence a regular accentual pattern that is found not only in the Hungarian language as it was fashioned during the course of the nineteenth century, but in Latin and German as well? Since Hungarian is composed of so many German words and translated Latin expressions, the language has a feature of regular accentual pattern in common with both German and Latin. Finally, perhaps the best explanation for the lament is that like the Latin medieval planctus, a ‘mode of being and moving’ (modus), it contains a particular emotional substance, in this case, longing, Sehnsucht, for what one has had and lost.17 The lament, described concurrently and interchangeably as style, type, form, and layer, is an indication in itself of the problem of description one faces, as well as the acknowledged need for more adequate explanatory tools. But there is an even more deeply seated problem, namely, the change of material substance, as one leaves actual sound substance (the music combined with text of the lament itself ), translating this substance into conceptual, verbal explanation.18 What then delineates types? Working with the material reveals the nature or properties of that material. The types themselves, worked over, sorted out, reevaluated throughout an entire century, all together constitute a substance unto themselves, to be worked with, taken over, recombined, reevaluated. In other words, one must come in contact with the music itself as material. In this confrontation, a single factor does not answer the opening question. All features of differing and varying importance, that is, height and range, sections, directionality, continuity, remarkable intervals — usually leaps — focus attention on that particular moment in musical time, compass, and motion. Within the classification system of the archive, one distinct feature was usually isolated, thus becoming the ‘typical’ element. Further, a kinship was apparent between all of the melodies of a given type; that is, an essential quality could be perceived.19 The vast material collected within the archive in Budapest is constantly being reappraised. Nevertheless, the following categories of types have been singled out and, at least at this writing, constitute the following categories, with prevalent characteristics. Each type selects a different determining feature as its basis. In this selection process, all other parameters and possibilities have been 16  Cf. again Nagy, ‘Typenprobleme in der ungarischen Volksmusik’, concerning ‘die Frage der Pentatonie’ (pp. 256–64). 17  See van Deusen, ‘The Lament and Augustine’. 18  This is a problem as well in music transcription. See below, Chapter 9. 19  Kuckertz, Gestaltvariation in den von Bartók gesammelten rumänischen Colinden, describes this essential quality as ‘Gestalt’.

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essentially eliminated or go unnoticed. (This is true, of course, of all analysis, as in functional harmonic analysis, in which only concurrent or simultaneous vertical sonorities are singled out for emphasis.) Actual numbers of folders have been included for comparison, and they are taken in the order of appearance in the archive. (See Appendix IV for representative notated types.) • Kvintváltó (160010/0–160340/0) (Interval of the fifth); Kvintváltó (es ereszkedo kornyezete) (Descending interval of the fifth) • Pássztor: mol/müdal, lásd (160350/1–160370/0) (Herdsman, shepherd, minor modality, composition) • Dür ereszkedö (160380/0–160450/0) (Major descending (interval)) • Pszalmodizáló (160460/0–160550/0) (Psalmody) • Sirató (160560/0–160620/0) (Lament) • Sirató (160630/0–160710/0) (Lament) • Átmenet ‘Sirató’ ‘Rákóczi’ (160720/0–160730/3–4) (Transition from ‘Lament’ to ‘Rocket’) • Rákóczi és frig környezete (160740/1–160950/0) (Rocket ‘context’) • Duda és kis-kvintváltó (160960/0–161081/0) (Bagpipe and small interval of the fifth) • AA-8 5 (1) (161090/0–161140/1–4) • Emelkedö, 1 sor, kadenciája szekund jólatt (161150/0–161360/1) (Ascending, 1 line, cadence at the second) • Emelkedö, 1 sor, kadenciája tere álatt (161370/0–161520/1–2) (Ascending, 1 line, cadence below) • Dür pentachord (gyermekdalos is) (161530/0–161710/0) (Major pentachord, also children’s songs) • Révész-család (rubato/giusto) (161720/0–161890/0) (Disappointed Ferryman, rubato/guisto) • Egyéh kisambitus (161900/0–162070/0) (Other small ambitus) • ‘Szerkesztet’ egyházi (162080/0–162230/0) (Compiled ecclesiastical, church) • Új kisambitus 2) noport (szekvencia) (162430/0–162600.1/1) (New small ambitus) a. ereszkedö b. dür emelkedö c. moll emelkedö.

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Types return; some categories with their features come up again and again: • Kvintváltó és ereszkedö környezete (170010/0–170280/5) • Moll müdal (170290/0–170310/0) (Not only is the ‘minor mode’ characteristic of this small group of types, but the rhythmic figure (shortlong) as well as a leap of the octave at the beginning of the phrase.) • Dür ereszkedö (170320/0–170460/0) (Major descending, but again, the most significant characteristic figure here is that of rhythm that is also clearly connected to speech-rhythm, ending in cadence: i.e. eighth notes at the end of phrases.) • Pszalmodizáló (170470/0–170510/0) (Psalmody, i.e. recitative) • Sirató (170520/1–170540/0) (Lament) • Duda (170550/1–2–170670/3–4) (Bagpipe) • Kis kvintváltó (170680/0–170730/0) (Small interval of the fifth) • AA-8 5 (1) (170740/0–170820/0) • Emelkedö, 1 sor, rége, szekund fölött (170830/0–170890/1) (Ascending, 1 step, archaic, upper second) • Emelkedö, 1 sor, rége, tere álatt-moll (170900/0–171040/0) (Ascending, l step, archaic, spreading out under or within the minor) • Régies kisambitus (171150/0–171480/0) (Archaic, small ambitus): a. pentachord 120ig b. révész (ferryman) c. lépcsösetes moll (stepwise minor) d. AA e. kanász (swineherd) f. Igaz Messias (True Messiah) g. 2 soros dür periodus (double series, major periods) h. s-m i. szerkontétt (structural content) • Új kisambitus (171490/0–171601/0) (New small ambitus) • Új kisambitus (171610/0–171960/0) • Új kisambitus (171970/0–172130/0) • Új kisambitus (172140/0–172410/0) • Kvintváltó-‘Páva’ (180010/0–180090/1–2) ([Interval of the] fifth-‘Peacock’) • Kvintváltó (180100/0–180300/0)

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• Kvintváltó: b soros és származék (180310/0–180340/6) (Fifth-exchange: b-[flat]- derived series) • Kvintváltó (180350/0–180470/0) • Kvintváltó ‘környezet’ (180480/0–180560/0) (‘Environment’ of the fifth) • Pásztor (180570/1–3–180700/1) (Shepherd, herdsman) • Pásztor (180710/1–180860/0) • Moll müdal (180870/0–181040/0) (Minor composition) • Dür ereszkedö (181050/0–181380/0) • Pszalmodizáló ereszkedö (181390/0–181550/2: a very large file) (Psalmodization, descending) • Pszalmodizáló-stagnálo (181560/1–3–181770/0) (Psalmization, ‘stagnant’: in place) • Pszalmodizáló, 2’3 soros, siratá-rokon, tetraton (181780/1–2–181830/0) (Psal­ mi­­za­tion, 2–3 lines, lament-family, tetraton: 4-line, syllabic construction) • Sirató (181840/1–2–182000/0) (Lament) • Rákóczi frig környezet (182010/0–182110/0) (‘Rocket’/context) • Duda (182120/1–10–182400/0) (Bagpipe) • Kis kvintváltó (182410/0–182630/0) (Small interval of the fifth) • AA (182640/0–182660/0) • Emelkedö, ‘Bujdosik’ + ‘Zúg az erdö’ (182970/0–183230/0) (Ascending, ‘concealed, in hiding’, and ‘sounds in the forest’, i.e. a collection of sound within the forest (see above, Chapter 4, silva)) • Emelkedö, 1 sor, kadenciája szekund fölött (+ nehany X 8) (183240/1– 183440/0) (Ascending, 1 line, cadence at upper second, with addition of number of 8 [syllables]) • Emelkedö, 1 sor, kadenciája tere álatt (183450/0–183860/0) (Ascending, l line, below the cadence) • Régies kisambitus (183870/0–184080/0) (Archaic small ambitus) a. drm-mag 39big b. pentachord 405ig c. ad ‘Révesz’ kor (‘ferryman’-age) • Régies kisambitus (184090/0–184230/0) a. AA 414ig b. ‘Igaz Messias’ kor 416ig

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• •

• •

• •

• • • • • • • • • • •

c. Sorpar + refr. 428ig d. gydal-szerv (hurdy-gurdy) Régies kisambitus, ‘szerkesztett’ egyházi (184240/0–184350/0) (Archaic small ambitus, ecclesiastical ‘structure’) Új Kisambitus (184360/0–184680/1–2: an especially large file) 1) noport kétrészes, ereszk. közép-kad. (New small ambitus, 2) two-part, descending-centre or middle cadence) Új Kisambitus (184690/0–184790/0) 1) noport folyt (New small ambitus, continuing [motion]) Új Kisambitus (184800/0–185380/1) 2) noport (szekvencia) a. és 499-ig b. dür emelkedö 525–9g c. moll (New small ambitus, in sequence) a. falling, b. major upward, c. minor Új Kisambitus (185390/1–3–185990/0: also a large file) 3) noport AA Új Kisambitus (186000/0–186540/1–7) 1) noport (plagalis) a. dür 636-ig b. x V x c. x V x moll d. V X x-623-ig Kvintváltó, ‘Rákóczi’ Duda és környezete (190010/1–4–190091/0) (Interval of the fifth, ‘Rocket’, Bagpipe context) Emelkedö (190000/0–190160/0) to Régies Kisambitus (190170/0–190199/1–2) (Ascending to Archaic small ambitus) Új Kisambitus (190200/0–190330/0) AA 5 5 sequ. AA Plag. Kvintváltó és könyezete (100010/0–100092/0) (Interval of the fifth and environment) Pásztor (Pásd 8-as szótagszám) (100100/1, only two types included) (Shepherd/series of 8-syllables) Dür ereszkedö (100110/0–100131/0) (Major descending) ‘Sirató’ és ‘Rákóczi’ (100140/0–100180/0) (‘Lament’ and ‘Rocket’)

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• Duda Kis Kvintváltó AA (100189/0–100300/1–2) (Bagpipe, small fifth interval, AA) • Emelkedö (100310/1–11–100409/0) (Descending) • Régies Kisambitus (100410/1–3–100478/0) (Archaic small ambitus) a. ‘imbolyog’-50ig (‘staggering’) b. AA • Új Kisambitus (100480/0–100540/0) (New small ambitus) 1. noport 2. noport (sequ) • Új Kisambitus (100540/0–100660/0) (New small ambitus) a. ereszkedö (descending) b. emelkedö dür (ascending major) c. emelkedö moll (ascending minor) • Új Kisambitus (100670/0–100775) (New small ambitus) 3. noport AA a. 3 3 b. 2 2 c. 1 1 • Új Kisambitus (100780/0–100831/0) (185550/2) (New small ambitus) 4. noport (plag.) • Kvintváltó (110010/1–2–110140/0) (Fifth interval) • Kvintváltó-‘Környezete’ (110150/1–2–110240/0) (Fifth ‘environments’) • Ad ‘Pásztor’ és moll müdal (lasd 8-as szótagszám) (110250/1–9–110300/0) (Present ‘shepherd’ and minor composition) • Dür ereszkedö (110310/1–6–110360/0) (Major descending) • Ad ‘Pszalmodizáló’ (110370/0–110420/1–3) (Present ‘Psalmization’) • ‘Sirató’ + ‘Rákóczi’ (110430/1–2–110511/0) (‘Lament’ and ‘Rocket’) • Duda-Kanász, kis kvintváltó AA (110520/1–4–1106820/0) (Bagpipe-Swineherd, small fifth interval) • Emelkedö 1. sorkadenciája szekund fölött (+magas Közep-kadenciások) (110690/1–3–110860/0) (Ascending 1-step cadence at the second, and high-centre cadence) • Emelkedö 1. sor kadenciája tere álatt (110870/0–111049/0) (Ascending 1-step cadence [spreading] under) • Régies kisambitus (111050/0–111090/0) (Archaic small ambitus) • Új kisambitus, ‘imbolyog’ (111100/0–11114310) (New small ambitus, ‘tottering’)

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• Új kisambitus sequ. (111180/0–111293/0) AA 5 5 (New small ambitus continued) • Új kisambitus sequ. fol 137-ig (111300/0–111372/0) • Új kisambitus 3) nopart (AA) (111380/0–111610/1–2) • Új kisambitus 4) nopart (plagalis) (111620/0–111830/0 a. V x X 171ig b. X V x • Kvintváltó és környezete (120010/0–120020/0: this is a very small folder) (Fifth and environment) • Pszalmodizálo és tetraton (120030/0–120090/1–4) (Psalmody and tetraton) • Sirató (120100/1–2–120170/0) (Lament) • Sirató (120180/0–120230/0) (Lament) • ‘Rákóczi’ (120240/1–5–120290/0) (‘Rocket’) • Kanász kis Kvintváltó AA (120300/0–120431/0) (Swineherd small fifth interval AA) • Emelkedö (120440/0–120550/0) (Ascending) • Régies kisambitus (120560/0–120660/0) (Archaic small ambitus) • Új kisambitus 1–2/nopart (120670/0–120790/0) a. AA b. + ldb ‘imbolyog’ (‘tottering’) c. sequ. • Új kisambitus 3) nopart (AA) (120800/0–121150/0) a. 3 3 b. 2 2, c. 1 1 • Új kisambitus 4) nopart (plagalis) (121160/0–121280/0) • Kvintváltó (130010/0–130019/1–2) • ‘Sirató’ és atmenet ‘Rákóczi’ fele (130020/1–2–130120/0) (‘Lament’ and transition towards [sort-of ] ‘rocket’) • ‘Rákóczi’ (130130/0–130190/5) (‘Rocket’) • Kanász-és környezete (130200/1–4–130470/0) (Swineherd and environment) • Emelkedö (130471/0–1304792/0) (Ascending)

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• Régies kisambitus (Archaic small ambitus) a. kánasz-jellegu (swineherd-character) b. ‘Igaz Messias’ kor (‘True Messiah’ age) c. dür pentachord kanász (major pentachord /swineherd) d. egházi ‘szerkesztett’ (130500/0–130767/0) (church ‘edition’) • Új Kisambitus (New small ambitus) a. sequ. b. AA c. 2 2 d. plagalis (130768/0–131220/0: this is a very large group) All of the types together constitute the ‘material’, that is, all of the sonorous material available and possible. The types themselves constitute modi, literally, ways of moving, differentiated on the basis of figurae. Types taken together presented a collection of varied and diverse figures, delineated by their outstanding characteristics, some of them remarked upon by the designations given to them, such as ‘lament’ or ‘rocket’. (Defining characteristics or figurae are also given with notated types in Appendix IV.) Although there were a large number of folders containing ‘types’, there were actually few in number. The delineatory features noticed by one researcher often differed from the observations of another, and the feature identified by a title differed as well from that brought out by the individual singer in recorded performance. For example, the distinction of the ‘fifth’ as differentiating feature of a type pointed to the least noteworthy feature of that type — the aspect many melodies/types had in common, not the most differentiating aspect. This is actually the case with prevalent analytical models used today for training conservatory musicians, and which have been part of a conservatory training since the beginning of the nineteenth century. In functional harmonic analysis, the least distinguishing feature is appropriated for analysis, not the single most differentiating feature, or figura. Further, often the most outstanding characteristic, both in notational figurae as well as in actual recorded performance, was rhythmic, for which comparatively few analytical models have been constructed. Rhythmic figurae, hence, tend to go unnoticed. Examples included:

or

• short short long, short short long, short short long, short short long • ssl ssl ssl ssl • short long, short long (repeated) (170670/3–4) • sl sl

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Some were melodic, a figura of several formative tones, often also identified by a name, such as the ‘Duda’ (170550/102) as g g / d e / f e / d: a figura that returned often, slightly modified as (170620/1) g g / d g / f e d and (170640/1) g g d e / f e d, but with rhythmic figura: s s s s / s s l. Still other figures were found within, and characterized by, their place within the cadence, including the following: • (170680/0) c c b a / g g g • (170890/1) f f f / a gg with rhythmic figura at the cadence, ss/ • (1710900/0) a c / d b-flat f / gg • (171040/0) d h aaac h / g g g with rhythmic figura • (171150/0) gg cc gg f / b a g f gg / d with rhythmic figura • (171320/0) g g g; cf. (171330/0) gg • (171350/0) d d d / a g g with rhythmic figura • (171460/0) rhythmic figura • (171611/0) f-sharp d e c / d d d with rhythmic figura • (172410/0) e d c a b g g g with rhythmic figura • (180010/0) d f b c / f f b b / d f b c / f f g g with rhythmic figura • (180090/1–2) d d f e-flat d c / g g with rhythmic figura The stepwise cadence was clearly important, but characteristic rhythmic figurae were particularly emphasized by the musicians themselves. Characteristic rhythmic figurae often coincided with a characteristic leap (of a fourth, for example). Further, the repeated tone at the cadence is characteristic as well of the medieval sequence. Sequences were collected into large collections and were sung longer in central Europe than elsewhere in Europe.20 The interval of the fourth, not the fifth, occurs frequently as a characteristic figura as in 171480/0, 180560/0 with the characteristic f g d, and cadence, d c gg. 180700/0 contains a characteristic leap followed by a leap: g ag f d / g c c g with a distinctive rhythmic figura. Turns of phrases that are both characteristic and seized upon by the musicians documented by the recordings abound, such as the following: 20 

See my forthcoming publication, The Medieval Latin Sequence.

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• (180710/1) short/long • (180850/0) f a c b a g g g; and the so-called ‘pszalmodizáló’ cadence • (181560/1–3) b c b a-flat g g g g or d d c b g g g g with rhythmic figura • (181830/0) f g c b f f g g with rhythmic figura • (182010/0) cadence c b d c b a g g with rhythmic figura • (182120) c d b d / g g g with rhythmic figura • (182410/0) f f f f b b b / c c g g g g g with rhythmic figura • (182460/0) characteristic chromatic tones, as well as an ambiguity between f and f-sharp that one often finds (along with the ambiguity between b and b-flat) in medieval notation found in sources throughout the period considered to be the Middle Ages. Even shorter figurae included the following: • (171270/1) b g g with rhythmic figura • (171290) g gf g g g with rhythmic figura, and, as substantiated above, patterns of long-short or short-long are crucial, as in (171280/0) s s s l / s s s s / s s s s l / s s s s / l; cf. (170800/3) and (171450/0) s s s s s l, as well as (171460/0) s l l l. (Although the types, according to the researchers, had been transposed in order to provide a common basis for comparison, the use of the musical space in and around the fifth between d above middle C ascending to a was spontaneously, apparently, selected out, as well, by a good number of the singers that had been recorded.) There was not one single characteristic feature that could be singled out but, rather, a whole collection of distinguishing features, one after the other, that provided definition to each perceived type. Differing, characteristic properties seemed to emerge (as, for example, in the ‘Régies kisambitus’ (171150/0) which began, as I noted, with ‘common musical property’ (i.e. triadic), ending with a defining rhythmic figura). These distinguishing features are varied and diverse: in some cases a figure (figura, figurae: herdsman, shepherd, ferryman, child, swineherd), in others a processionality, that is, psalmodic recitation, in others an emotional content, such as lament or rocket, and in others a musical interval combined with major or minor manners of moving within musical material or a range of notes as in ‘Kisambitus’ — small ambitus, or a category simply labelled ‘church/ecclesiastical’. Distinguishing characteristics, then, could be

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named ‘varied and diverse figures’ that give individuality and recognizability to classification. But all of these distinguishing features were the outcome, as well, of individual musical interpretation on the part of each researcher as to what was the most characteristic feature to be selected from many possibilities. In working with the types I observed that often the priorities of the researchers were not my own; rather, especially after listening to the recordings, I extracted one musical relationship that seemed to me to give a delineating characteristic format to the ‘chunk’ of musical-textual material. The researchers had, through the years, chosen another, such as ‘Fifth Interval’, ‘Bagpipe’, ‘Old or new ambitus’, and so on. (Often, as is clear above, a rhythmic figura was the delineatory factor for me, and I was not alone, since this appeared to me to be reinforced by the singers in the recordings.) Further, they changed their minds, or others came in to add their interpretation of what was the crucial figura in that specific case. I had begun working with the types in 1992, then began rechecking my work first in 1996, and also in 1998 and 2000, to find that many of the types had, in the meantime, undergone considerable change. The types, then, constituted a living, dynamic material resource that, like the living organism, the corporate body, that was constantly working with it — the minds, souls, musicalities, totalities of the personalities of the individuals themselves — changed perhaps a bit every day. Remarkably, the types themselves constituted a musical and mental-verbal culture for itself, this being that much more of an irony since types as a way of dealing with the material at hand were the result of a desire to be ‘objective’ in doing research with musical material. Not only did the types, with their defining characteristics, constitute a collection of varied and diverse characteristics, or figurae, but the expressions used to define these characteristics were so individual and picturesque that many of them were not to be found in the large, comprehensive standard Hungarian–English dictionary issued by the Academic Publishing Company, Budapest (1990). Apparently, the researchers themselves were placing together composite expressions to set forth characteristic figurae contained within the types they were describing. Even ‘Rákóczi’ was not to be found in this standard academic dictionary, but there were many, many words and permutations, basically, of these two words, meaning forest, woods, a deep, dark collection, also of sound (as above in category ‘Emelkedö Bujdosik’ + ‘Zúg az erdö’, namely, ‘concealed in hiding’, and ‘a collection of sounds such as leaves rustling in the forest’). It is also interesting to note, in comparing the numbers within brackets, that some of the types contain many examples, others very few. This difference is especially impressive when one takes the actual folders, filled with transcrip-

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tions of the type under consideration, in hand. The physicality of the material, in some cases very substantial, makes a point that the mere citation of a series of numbers obviously does not make. This leads to an observation about material. One needs to have contact with it in order to appreciate its properties, such as amount, and material cannot be ‘translated’ into anything else, even, or perhaps especially, numbers.21 This, of course, is true as well for sound material; the translation from the sound, for example, of vowels, into letters, conventional and useful as this process is, involves at the least, transformation, at worst, loss. As we will see when we bring the music itself into relationship with the types, all of the ‘types’ are divided into chunks, that is, two measures for each line, as will become clear. There are many small groups, as if each new ‘batch’ of material required a fresh classificatory approach. All of the types can be seen to be ways of indicating relationship, and they also constitute variations upon one another. The types listed above, for the purpose of drawing attention to the features described above should be related to the music they indicate. All of the material for the same type has an ‘aroma’ in common. Further, types are distinguished by differences, identified most often by one principal figure (see Appendix IV). In working in the archive in Budapest, in this former Communist country, one notices day by day the tones that are emitted periodically from a loudspeaker in the immediate vicinity. A centre of traffic as well as of tourist activity is close to the Institute for Musicology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. My co-workers at the Institute had long since learned to ignore it or, since the same tones had reverberated through the nearby cathedral square for so many years, had never really noticed them at all. But this was by no means true of myself. The tones, taken together one after the other, were staunchly triadic, g-b-a-c-b-d-g, and I had heard them over and over again — also the same succession of tones near my hotel, close to the Kremlin in Moscow when I was there in 1989. No one seemed to know why they were sounded at regular intervals, and no one seemed to care. The typing tendency, however, that we have been discussing is comparable to, and parallel with, reductionistic systems such as functional harmonic analysis, as well as, again, reductionistic formal analysis, and the Schenkerian analysis as it has proliferated, particularly and for a longer period of time, in North American universities, especially in the United States where ‘explanations’ that are clear, simple, overtly ‘useful’ are accepted 21 

The concept of figura is based on the fact that material, containing movement, can be — even must be — translated into a figura, that is, a letter of the alphabet, number, music notation, which, as Aristotle has pointed out, has all movement pressed out of it.

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— in this case, systems that teach superficial features quickly and simplistically. (Reduction may or may not be superficial, but it usually is.) Ambiguities, for both pragmatic as well as ideologically inclined and trained people, are seen as unnecessarily complicated, needlessly time-consuming. Triads, tuning everyone to the same simple melodic code, types, reductionistic ‘forms’, and music study based on the perception of a few simple chords, whether in East or West, it would seem, are the mental cultural indicators of the twentieth century. But the question remains: What are some of the alternatives to a concept of ‘style’, ‘form’, ‘type’ or the reification of the musical work? Part of my dissatisfaction with all of the metaphors for structure and ornamentation, part and whole — all of the underlying classification schemes that have been so ubiquitous and accepted universally in the twentieth century, in music pedagogy taught throughout the North American continent as ‘music theory’ as well as in the formalized discipline of folklore — and paralleled within historical musicology — was that they were static, therefore, inappropriate to the moving material of sound in time used by music. Especially in the case of ‘types’, the term/concept was also loaded with a preconceived ideal of ‘authenticity’ or ‘naturalness’ that in no way corresponded to what one could actually observe; that is, peasants seemed to me to be no more ‘authentic’ than princes, and at any rate, these distinctions were no longer relevant. Until it can be conclusively proven otherwise, all people, everywhere, were capable of both forthright action and deviousness, of honesty and mendaciousness. Illiteracy was no guarantee of either; rather, both were choices that were patently available to every human being — and every human being was also responsible for choices made. People living in smalltown communities were no more ‘authentic’ than those in cities, and in any case, as we have seen, most town/city distinctions were — and are — blurred. If anything, those living in small villages in Hungary seemed to me to be attracted, not to natural foods and objects, but rather to processed goods and objects made of plastic. Again, those analytical metaphors that seemed to be available were largely static, conveying impressions that remained in place, also in the imagination as it was motivated by the metaphor. Style, type, layer of style could be useful if the object were more objective and did not move, although there has been a good deal of criticism of these metaphors from visual art criticism, as well. It seemed to me that thirteenth-century discussions, on the other hand, point to parts within a dynamic whole,22 corresponding to the project under22 

Robert Grosseteste, in his commentary on the Physics of Aristotle, for example, makes a project of understanding component parts, part by part, of a trajectory of motion; see van Deusen, Theology and Music at the Early University, especially pp. 1–18.

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taken here, that is, an analysis of component parts, often of varying lengths, that proceed to a conclusion, part by part. Secondly, a concept of style, as contributing to type, invariably was based on a question of origins. Some styles were more authentic, hence older, than others, and the converse was also the case; some ‘stylistic layers’ were older, hence more authentic. In thirteenthcentury discussions, although place is an important consideration,23 origin is not, or at least it is admitted that there could be other means for approaching a given problem — other questions for accessing an answer. One looks, instead, to the artistic conglomeration as it is, now, as a particular complex of associative pieces in which the bonding agent itself is also important — and mysterious, always, to a certain extent. The thirteenth-century questioning of the work accords with how non-European musical cultures also see music, in that while the past has significance for the present, it is, however, not all there is. Further, the past may be divorced from the present through a rupture that can be accounted for by one of many different factors.24 The order of each component part, placed by the conscious will of the component placer (composer), and the dynamism set up between each part as it is linked to the other is the point.25 Each and every link is essential and has an identity of its own, resulting in the completed composition that may be either valuable because of the mastery it displays or less than satisfactory, that also responds to, and is dependent upon, the manner in which it is brought out, part by part. That all of these attributes must be considered within each individual situation is the nexus of considerations that is placed before us. In observing the mental tools, the metaphorical aids available to us from the past, we can also show a respect for and ability to learn from a historical situation, not so much in the context of a historical narrative, but as individual writers with their own points of view, their own personal understanding of some of the same issues that we are still attempting to understand. One learns from their investigations, since the answers they give are valid. A medieval answer can be given to the question of ‘type’ and ‘order’.

23 

Cf. introduction to Grosseteste’s Hexaemeron, ed. by Dales and Gieben, pp. 17–48. Cf. Ellis, Aboriginal Music, Education for Living, as well as in personal conversation over Australian Aboriginal musicians, 1985–95. 25  This would appear to be a process possibly best described by alchemy. 24 

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A Passion for Collection: Folk Music and the Sequence

T

oday, in the library of the Musicology Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the ‘librarian’ (or caretaker of the reading room) is speaking loudly on the telephone, after it has also insistently rung many times, workmen are working outside of the windows, an assistant is typing cards on a manual typewriter, and the research colleague is, as he has told me, under desperate pressure to finish a paper he is going to give soon and is flapping through the large-format pages of the collected edition of the composer’s works with which he has to do. Colleagues come in and out, greeting and chatting with one another, as has been the case in the same way for decades. Recently, over a period of a few years, the library was moved into a newly renovated, well-lit, commodious facility with expansive tables, comfortable chairs at exactly the right height for writing or lap-top computer typing, easy and convenient accessibility to the periodicals and the published folk music collections, as well as many other useful features. In all, the environment for working with these collections has been vastly improved from the dark, crowded, upper-story library of former times. But the research culture, of gathering, of community, of the never-ceasing web of human contact, of constant exchange and conversation, has not changed in the least; rather, it has intensified, since the larger library can accommodate more people, and the space also appears to encourage them all to speak even more loudly. Further, the library, now well lit and expansive, is much more inviting. For a ‘Westerner’, it is an impossible situation, and in this context, it is of interest that, by contrast, the New York–

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based, North American–influenced Central European University Library across the Danube informs those entering the reading room that ‘Silence must be maintained at all times’. What kinds of mental work can be accomplished under these circumstances? For what is this environment conducive? The answer is: collecting.1 A passion for collection, not only as a deeply ingrained cultural trait of this region, but also collection as both force and external result, can be observed to unite two great research projects of the nineteenth to twentieth centuries, namely, the study of folk song and of the medieval sequence, thus bringing again together in a reciprocity conducive to mutual understanding folk music composition and medieval compositional mentality. In this nexus of topics of tradition, preservation, folk music, and the revival of national musical identity, two factors become prominent: first, that one is increasingly aware of, and has recourse to, the past,2 and secondly, that the result of this passion for collecting — this assiduous collecting activity pursued with enthusiasm during the nineteenth and throughout the twentieth centuries — has resulted in the accumulation and subsequent availability of a great deal of ‘pre-existent material’, mate1  The many volumes of Magyar Népzene Tára — Corpus musicae popularis hungaricae have resulted. See also Russell and Atkinson, Folk Song (cf. as well as Tari, review of Folk Song, ed. by Russell and Atkinson): in writing of folk music ‘revival’ of the twentieth century, as a ‘concept of revival and its manifestation in various regional and national contexts’ one is instructed to ‘look at some of the men and women who wittingly or unwittingly helped to feed the twentieth-century revival primarily by collecting songs’ (p. 2, my italics). The volume is organized as a narrative of scholarship from the nineteenth century to the present with chapters dealing with ‘Folk Song in Lithuania’, the institution of scholarship from ‘beginnings’ to the present, i.e. since 1970 (pp. 53–66); O’Reilly’s contribution, ‘Transformations of Tradition in the Folkways Anthology’; and Thomas A. Dubois’s work examining the relationship between oral tradition and printed folk song collections (‘The Little Song-Smith’, pp. 41–52). 2  Gammon, ‘One Hundred Years of the Folksong Societies’, in discussing the status of folk music studies writes: ‘Folk music is, in the last analysis, a historical formation, and as such, a historical discipline; the examination of each and every present-day folk music phenomenon requires therefore a comparison with the past. It is another matter how much we know of the past, and that the “national heritage” is a highly selective, by no means constant concept from era to era’ (p. 23); and ‘Folk music seems to have a way of coming back, the work of the “Victorians and Edwardians” have given us something unique, irreplaceable, valuable, something we can build on, develop, and carry forward’ (p. 24). There is, however, an assumption that ‘few of the people who have contributed to our growing understanding of traditional music have studied in music departments’ (p. 22), with which I disagree. Analysis has depended upon the fact that the majority of both historical musicologists and ethnomusicologists have basically the same conservatory training and therefore use the same models such as ‘layers’, ‘form’, and ‘style’; and that this has been true throughout the twentieth century.

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rial present to work with, and a resource and foundation upon which to build, whether this be a national identity or new textual-music compositions. This, of course, is the nature of scholarship, that is, to interrogate and build on the past, but it is also the nature of material itself as ‘pre-existent’, having potential for development. It is by no means a coincidence that the pre-existent resources of the Middle Ages were also laid out for development by the Victorians in terms of the large-scale collections of texts that came to fruition in the late nineteenth century such as the text collections of the Analecta hymnica and the Patrologiae latina and Patrologiae graeca.3 This collecting activity, however, is not a ‘revival’ but rather a perception of ‘goods’ that were both valuable, available, and close at hand, but also combined with the perception of a noteworthy anxiety that a resource considered to be valuable could be lost. One certainly needed to do something about this.4 For whom are all of these volumes intended, a reading audience for the Corpus popularis, the Analecta hymnica, and the Patrologiae series? For whom are these collections ‘goods’? A partial answer could very well be that collection, the desire to collect, to bring together likes with likes, and to catalogue differences and variants, to order and identify, in short, to have as much as possible, is in the nature of the material to be collected itself. By its very nature, material can and should be collected, it would seem. This is expressed by Italo Calvino who wrote in his introduction to the ‘Italian Folk Tales’ that he had collected together and reworked, that is to say, recomposed: For me, as I knew only too well, it was a leap in the dark, a plunge into an unknown sea into which others before me, over the course of 150 years, had flung themselves, not out of any desire for the unusual, but because of a deep-rooted conviction that some essential, mysterious element lying in the ocean depths must be salvaged to ensure the survival of the race; there was of course, the risk of disappearing into the deep, as did Colla Fish in the Sicilian and Neapolitan legend. For the Brothers Grimm, the salvaging meant bringing to light the fragments of an ancient religion that had been preserved by the common people and had lain dormant until the glorious day of Napoleon’s defeat had finally awakened the German national con3  Analecta hymnica, ed. by Dreves and others; PG, ed. by Migne; PL, ed. by Migne. For whom are all these collections intended? There is, of course, an imagined reading audience, but the primary impetus, I believe, for these massive collections has been the urge to collect. 4  Reference to heritages ‘lost’ to Mongolian or Turkish invasions are continued into the present with Tari, review of Folk Song, ed. by Russell and Atkinson, p. 471: ‘The Soviet invasion had a still worse consequence: the radical and not spontaneous, disruption, moreover shattering of the earlier traditions’ contrasted with, and contradicted by, her statement: ‘Earlier musical traditions survived more or less intact until the political change of 1990’ (p. 474).

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sciousness. In the eyes of the ‘Indianists’, the essential element consisted of the allegories of the first Aryans who, in trying to explain the mystery of the sun and the moon, laid the foundations for religious and civil evolution. To the anthropologists it signified the somber and bloody initiation rites of tribal youths, rites that have been identical from time immemorial, from Paleolithic hunts to today’s primitive peoples. The followers of the Finnish school, in setting up a method for tracing migrations among Buddhist countries, Ireland and the Sahara, applied a system similar to that used for the classification of coleoptera, which, in their cataloging process, reduced findings to algebraic sigla of the Type-Index and Motif-Index. What the Freudians salvaged was a repertory of ambiguous dreams common to all men, plucked from the oblivion of awakenings and set down in canonical form to represent the most basic anxieties. And for students of local traditions everywhere, it was a humble faith in an unknown god, rustic and familiar, who found a mouthpiece in the peasantry […]. Meanwhile, as I started to work, to take stock of the material available, to classify the stories into a catalog which kept expanding, I was gradually possessed by a kind of mania, an insatiable hunger for more and more versions and variants. Collating, categorizing, comparing became a fever. I could feel myself succumbing to a passion akin to that of entomologists, which I thought characteristic of the scholars of the Folklore Fellows Communications of Helsinki, a passion which rapidly degenerated into a mania, as a result of which I would have given all of Proust in exchange for a new variant of the ‘gold-dung donkey’ […]. I was unexpectedly caught in the spiderlike web of my study, not so much by its formal, outward aspect as by its innermost particularities: infinite variety and infinite repetition […]. Thus, the longer I remained steeped in the material, the fewer became my reservations; I was truly exalted by the expedition, and meanwhile the cataloging passion — maniacal and solitary — was replaced by a desire to describe for others the unsuspected sights I had come upon.5

5 

Calvino, Fiabe italiane; English trans. Italian Folktales, trans. by Martin, pp. xvi–xviii (italics added). This passage has been also been cited to point to a parallel in collecting, cataloguing, and describing the medieval sequence. Cf. van Deusen, ‘Verbum Dei Deo natum and its Manuscript Context’: ‘The literature concerning the medieval Latin sequence is considerable, yet some of the genre’s most basic aspects have eluded investigation. These include the extent of its transmission as well as its precise role within the medieval liturgy of the mass. To begin, there are in fact at least 3,200 manuscripts from the late tenth to the end of the sixteenth centuries that contain major collections of sequences, with approximately 3,000 texts in combination with 1,500 melodies. The interplay of texts and melodies is a feature of the repertory that has not been accessed by the editions, which list manuscript concordances, contained in the Analecta hymnica, the most exhaustive textual sources for the medieval hymn, cantiones, and the sequence’ (p. 55). Ordering, enclosing, delimiting, and describing individual cases, then, is important work of one who works with both folk song and sequences. Cf. Járdányi, ‘Die Ordnung der

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Material substance, whether seen or unseen, produces, as Italo Calvino observed, its own attraction, magnet-like, for other material. We observe this in daily life, as we collect more food than is absolutely necessary, and our closets also contain evidence for a passion for collection. Collection is also an innate preventative measure against diffusion and fragmentation, voiced by the folk song researchers in terms of counteracting what could be feared as loss. With respect to this impetus to collect, parallels between literature on folk music and medieval music have existed for much of the twentieth century, as we have seen in the great collections of texts, as well as melodies, amassed during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.6 Further parallels include genre classification based on text types that have dominated research findings in both folk music and the study of troubadour-trouvère music;7 the construct of tree/ trunk/branches, the stemma, Stamm, Urform8 contrasted with, in the case of medieval music, ‘a Second Epoch’ or ‘earlier’ versus ‘later’ manifestation, that is, old and new ‘style’ of both folk songs and sequences.9

ungarischen Volkslieder’, and his concept of Ordnung. A similar view is expressed by Fletcher in The Conversion of Europe, as he includes a quotation of Richard Wentworth at the beginning of his monograph: ‘History, I think, is probably a bit like a pebbly beach, a complicated mass, secretively three-dimensional. It’s very hard to chart what lies up against what, and why, and how deep. What does tend to get charted is what looks manageable, more recognizable (and usually linear) like the wriggly row of flotsam and jetsam, and stubborn tar deposits.’ Fletcher goes on to include a quotation by Anthony Powell, ‘Enormous simplifications were possibly necessary to carry a deeper truth than lay on the surface of a mass of unsorted detail. That was, after all what happened when history was written: many, if not most, of the true facts discarded.’ 6  Benjamin Rajeczky in particular focused upon these comparisons in articles such as ‘Sur le “Kyrie Ungaricum” de manuscript no. 1267 de la Biblioteka Jagiellonska (xv s.)’; more recently, Kiss, ‘Kyrie ungaricum-Data on Research History and the History of Melody’, in which (p. 19) the effort to find and identify characteristic features of Hungarian music, also historically, and to ‘interpret facts of music history in their cultural context’ are mentioned as goals of research. See also Bartkowski, ‘Gregorian Chant and its Relation to Folk Music and Religious Song in Poland’, pp. 115–30. 7  Cf. Baud-Bovy, ‘La Systematization des chansons populaires’: ‘structure metrique’. 8  Cf. Nagy, ‘Typenprobleme in der ungarischen Volksmusik’, p. 225: ‘der jahrtausendalte Stamm an ungarischer Volksmusik ist weit verzweigt’; ‘melodisches Rezitativ’. Would it lessen the value of folk song if, instead of postulating an ‘Urform’ reaching back to ‘pre-Mongolian origins’, one were dealing with music today, here and now? 9  This assumption is perpetuated by the editors of the Analecta hymnica and taken without criticism as fact throughout the twentieth century; see van Deusen’s review of Fassler, Gothic Song, concerning a category of liturgical music, the sequence, that is neither ‘Gothic’ nor ‘Song’.

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In addition, ideology is also held in common, such as the concept of the ‘popular’ or the ‘populace’ that achieves results by ‘improvisation’ based on changes that are effected by means of the group — essentially evolutionary models.10 This preoccupation also impinges upon a question of value. What is, after all, worth working towards and, on the other hand, worth preserving. For both sequence research and folk song, ideology has obscured observation, quite often in dramatic ways. Why does one ‘need’ a concept of ‘origin’? There are so many other interesting observations that one can make, all marred by insistence on an ‘origin hypothesis’, often shored up by no evidence and explaining little. Further, there is also a gulf separating ‘origins’ (such as FinnoUgric, Celtic, pre-Mongolian) from the present, that is, mostly, the collections, in the case of folk music, of the 1970s and 1980s.11 Ideology gives birth to metaphor. Metaphors remain long after the ideological underpinning has become either self-evident or forgotten. What is conjured up, for example, by Kodály’s ‘ancient layer of folk music’ or ‘layers’ of chant?12 ‘Layer’ is, no doubt, in its stationary, immoveable, massive connotation the least appropriate metaphor that one could use to analyse and understand music, as music changes and becomes transformed from one tone, one moment to the next. The only appropriate use of a concept of ‘layer’ would be that of the material nature of sound.13 Metaphoric properties of terms with repeated 10  Lujza Tari in responding to a discussion of ‘tradition’ outlined in Folk Song writes (review of Folk Song, ed. by Russell and Atkinson, n. 175): ‘Events such as the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 spread political disillusion and at the same time probably created some unease with Marxist approaches to folk song as an instrument of political change.’ Definitely the Soviet conquest of Hungary was politically and in many cases personally catastrophic, but the ideology with which folk music research has been conducted has remained more or less in tact and unquestioned from the late nineteenth century to the present, and, furthermore, not only made way for but could be integrated into Marxism. Kodály, for example, emphasized that he thought that towns were suspect, that is, did not carry significant cultural impetus or cultural ‘goods’. Cf. Dalberg-Acton, Selected Writings of Lord Acton, iii, 529, in referring to towns in the Middle Ages — and present, ‘Towns were the nursery of freedom’ (MS Add. 4980, p. 1). The notion of a ‘popular origin’ of nearly every ‘attainment’ in Western music history is ubiquitous; cf. Sanders, review of Baltzer, Le Magnus Liber de Notre Dame de Paris, p. 75: ‘The process of organization of rhythm in cantus firmus polyphony composed at Notre Dame during the last quarter of the twelfth century is a momentous phenomenon. By the end of that period, due to the ingenious notion of assigning mensural connotations to certain ligatures […] the concepts of long and short could be conveyed unequivocally in notation.’ 11  The question of ‘origin’ is obviously not the same as that of ‘prior’/‘posterior’. 12  Kodály, Folk Music of Hungary, p. 29. 13  Cantus, cantus planus: the concept of tones ‘on a plane’ corresponds to a new inter-

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unquestioned use become conventional, therefore, familiar, and, accordingly, are unquestioned even or especially in scholarship.14 It is of interest to critically take into consideration in terms of historiographical directions the line of scholarly agendas applied to both the medieval sequence and folk music research during the course of the twentieth century. Due, as has been suggested, to the fact that both scholarly agendas are determined to a certain extent methodologically by the sheer mass of material to be considered and dealt with, one can observe features held in common.15 For pretation of planus within the early thirteenth-century reception of Aristotle’s Physics and the subsequent expression of the contrast-pair cantus planus/mensurabilis. See, van Deusen, ‘Cantus planus’. 14  Aristotle, Metaphysica: the jargon of a discipline is more easily assimilated than an understanding of the terms acquired. Further, listeners demand the language to which they are accustomed. Cf. Metaphysica, 995a1–15: ‘The effect which lectures produce on a hearer depends on his habits; for we demand the language we are accustomed to, and that which is different from this seems not in keeping but somewhat unintelligible and foreign because it is not customary. For the customary is more intelligible. The force of custom is shown by the laws, and in whose case, with regard to the legendary and childish elements in them, habit has more influence than our knowledge about them. Some people do not listen to a speaker unless he speaks mathematically, others unless he gives instances, while others expect him to cite a poet as witness. And some want to have everything done accurately, while others are annoyed by accuracy, either because they cannot follow the connexions of thought or because they regard it as pettifoggery’ (Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. by Ross). 15  Cf. Bentley, Companion to Historiography, for several useful contributions dealing with major historiographical directions during the course of the twentieth century, including Bentley’s introduction, ‘The Project of Historiography’; Comber, ‘Re-reading the Roman Historians’, which is useful in dealing with medieval biographical writing; Smith, ‘Regarding Medievalists’; Reynolds, ‘The Historiography of the Medieval State’; Reuter, ‘The Medieval Nobility in Twentieth-Century Historiography’; Bachrach, ‘Medieval Military History’; Woolf, ‘The Writing of Early Modern European Intellectual History, 1945–1995’; Hutton, ‘Revisionism in Britain’; Bentley, ‘Approaches to Modernity’; Dray, ‘Philosophy and Historiography’; Goodman, ‘History and Anthropology’; Munz, ‘The Historical Narrative’; Happert, ‘The Annales Experiment’; and Rigby, ‘Marxist Historiography’. Michael Bentley in his introduction writes that the ‘project of historiography’ is that of undermining certainties, as well as dealing with the notion that historiography could not be ‘taught’, that is, did not constitute a field unto itself. He observes that students might learn more and ‘develop tastes’ if they were given serious thoughts about what they assumed the study of the past involved — assumptions painfully innocent of criticism and lacking context for the historical writing regularly encountered. (This is especially true of the study of music history, since, in addition to this ‘innocence’, one tends to reify the musical work to be studied.) ‘Historiography’ as description proceeds to answer the questions of why historians write what they do, why they choose the explanatory models that they choose, and why historians of the past did it differently. Historical writing has fashions in its methods and approaches, as is borne out by the Germanic commitment to ‘systematic’

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example, sequence collection/research and folk song collection/research have a ‘search for origins’ at approximately the same time, that is, in the early medieval period, such as the ninth-century history of the monastery of St Gallen in the case of the first supposed composer of sequences, Nokter Balbulus, and the ‘pre-Mongolian period’, that is, before the thirteenth-century conquest of Hungary. Secondly, research in both areas has been concerned with the problem of dealing with the material itself, resulting in the use of types. Thirdly, form is a major consideration: in the case of sequences the so-called ‘double versicle form’ of repeating melody with two differing texts; in the case of folk music, form, as we have seen, has comprised a major conceptual force, also in terms of ‘closure’, ‘closed nature’ (‘Schlußton importance’), and ‘formal clarity’. It would appear that quite often researchers would have had very little else to write about if both ‘type’ and ‘form’ as expressions would be taken from them. We have also seen how type, form, and style have been interchangeably used. Fourthly, pentatonicism has provided a differentiating agent in the discussion of ‘old’ and ‘new’ style for both sequence and folk song analysis; and the question of ‘old’ versus ‘new’ style has continued to constitute a basis for discussion. A characteristic syllable/tone relationship of approximately one syllable per tone is common to both sequences and folk song, as well as intervals that are commonly used.16 Stepwise motion prevails, with meaningful, appropriate treatment of history (cf. Fueter, Geschichte der neuen Historiographie). In this regard, the papers of Lord Acton, especially letters to Gladstone, 1888, are of interest: ‘There is a great difference between ancient and modern history: the ancient writers have a value of their own apart from what they teach. The literary treatment of an author is interesting independently of the conclusion deductible from him. He possesses a certain consequence even when he yields nothing’ (London, British Library, MS Add. 4997, p. 216, in Dalberg-Acton, Selected Writings of Lord Acton, iii, 526). Considering the time at which Lord Acton was writing, that is, the end of the nineteenth century, his view regarding the continuity of the Middle Ages with his present as well as the value of medieval thought culture are of interest. He writes: ‘Two principles divide the world and content for mastery, antiquity and the Middle Ages. [… In recent times] Europe “forgot”, proudly and ignorantly overlooked a thousand years of Christian history […]. To the greatest classical and ecclesiastical scholars, Protestants and Catholics, all that period was nearly a blank, to Gropius as to Bossuet […]. Thus it came to pass that an interest for the Middle Ages was awakened neither among Catholics nor among Protestants, for the one feared, the other hated them, but among Nationalists and infidels. This renaissance of the Christian Ages, this discovery of a palimpsest, this renewal of an uninterrupted continuity is the great work of the nineteenth century’ (Dalberg-Acton, Selected Writings of Lord Acton, iii, 526). Regarding ways in which historiographical directions have influenced the study of Western music history during the course of the twentieth century, see van Deusen, ‘Introduction to Medieval Musicology’. 16  See Nagy, ‘Typenprobleme in der ungarischen Volksmusik’, p. 260, for a comparison of intervallic structure between the antiphon and folk song.

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within a melodic context, and sparingly used wider intervals as both the exception and useful in providing characteristic format. Wider intervals, especially indicated by medieval notational figurae (for example, the two-tone upward pes often delineating an upward fifth signaling the first mode), show how a characteristic figura defines a way of moving or modus — a graphic statement that is often lost in modern notation. For both sequences and folk song, there is little relationship between the meaning of the text and the mode of melodic movement, in what has much later become known as ‘text painting’. Finally, sequences and folk songs often have the same endings. Both sequence and folk song research rely upon organic, evolutionary ‘growth models’:17 the evocation of biological terms to describe change, development, autonomous growth, with a corresponding use of manuscript sources as evidence for change and development.18 In investigating the entire comprehensive question of origin, growth, development, transformation, and use of both the medieval sequence and folk song — a question one must ultimately seriously engage — one is confronted with the question of what, exactly, is the ‘music of the folk’? What precisely is ‘the folk’? This is a question that both engages writers in the Middle Ages, such as Roger Bacon, a professor at the 17  A terminology reflecting evolutionary, biological growth models was in evidence at the nascence of the early twentieth-century reformulation of ‘Musikwissenschaft’ as a historical, rather than a substantial, discipline, as for example, Adler, Der Stil in der Musik, who writes of ‘Stilkritik als mittel zur Aufdeckung musikalischer Entwicklungsreihen’, and ‘als Kernstück einer neuen Musikgeschichtstheorie’. Cf. also Riemann, Handbuch der Musikgeschichte, who in his Vorwort mentions ‘die Entwicklungsgeschichte der musikalischen Formen und Stilarten’, all of which is closely paralleled by Elscheková in ‘Stilbegriff und Stilschichten in der slowakischen Volksmusik’ (who quotes both authors at pp. 263–64), a comprehensive paper that attempts to provide a ‘scientific’ basis for comparative style analysis, and strongly suggesting that one use the same methodology, that is, comparative style analysis, based on evolutionary development — always ill defined, but usually proceeding from ‘simple’ to ‘complex’ — for both European and non-European music. She writes: ‘Der Musikstil wurde durch analytische und systematisierende, melodietypologische und vergleichende Verfahren zum vorrangigen Untersuchungsobjekt der Volksmusikforschung, und ist es bis Heute geblieben’ (pp.  265–66). The writer gives Krohn, Versuch einer Systematisierung der ungarischen Bauernmelodien, credit for giving the concept of ‘style’ as central place. Others followed, such as Bose, Musikalische Völkerkunde, p. 51: Klangstil; Nettl ‘The Nature and Description of Style’; Reinhard, Einführung in die Musikethnologie, p. 54: ‘Die Musikstile’; and Hood, The Ethnomusicologist. See also Hajdu, ‘Linguistic Background of Genetic Relationships’, pp. 11–36. The terminology has remained at least a century after the natural sciences, especially biology, no longer used classification as its chief theoretical construction. 18  See, for example, Elschek, ‘Problem of Variation in 18th Century Slovak Folk Music Manuscripts’, in which he investigates ‘genetic’ growth.

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newly organized, thirteenth-century University of Paris, as well as remaining pertinent to both nineteenth- and twentieth-century research in folk song.19 It could very well be that psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs (cantiones) constitute the continuous ‘music of the folk’. Not only are the psalms, sequences, and hymns, as well as a rich compendium of cantiones (songs that were not sung within church services), a great reservoir of the music of ‘the folk’ in its widest sense through the centuries available to be ever accessed, but this compendium also constitutes a unified musical culture for which there is no distinction between ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’, or between ‘oral’ and ‘written’, ‘newly composed’ or ‘traditional’. Just as the concerts typically given in the city of Budapest, or elsewhere in Hungary, present a unified music life centred upon central European music, so the distinctions between ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’, upon analysis, break down. They do not correspond to reality, either in the past or observable in the present. We are dealing with a unified music culture.20 A basic epistemological problem that is, nevertheless, worth mentioning because it has played such an important part in the research of the past century — and, again, is common to both sequence and folk music research — is that constructs delineated to expose essential features of the subject studied can actually crucially obscure the subject. In a sense, the outcome, often because of the directionality of the question asked, is programmed in advance,21 in which comparisons selected appear to ‘prove’ a preconception, namely, that an ‘ureuropäisches Reinstratum’ that is ‘Celtic’ in origin existed and has been transferred in folk melodies particularly of central/eastern Europe. On the one hand, this example supports one of the theses of this study, namely, that the medieval concept of ‘stuff ’ and ‘pre-existent material/substance’ remains, is available for use, was and is, in fact, used. Nevertheless, we have here an epistemologicalmethodological problem that is extremely difficult to identify and delineate because it requires one to so fully stand ‘outside’ oneself. One must not only consciously and deliberately set up questions, but one must then appropriately address one’s own research material, cognizant, as well, of the way in which the chosen direction of investigation influences the results one obtains. In addition

19 

The ‘vulgus’: Roger Bacon at end of the thirteenth century also interacts with the vulgus (for him, his colleagues at the University of Paris). For a comparison of medieval with nineteenth-century discussions of this topic, see also van Deusen, ‘Plundering the Past’. 20  For a lack of differentiation between ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’ see Baumann, Music in the Dialogue of Cultures, in ‘dialogue’ with Kartomi and Blum, Music-Cultures in Contact. 21  See Nagy, ‘Typenprobleme in der ungarischen Volksmusik’.

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to this, one must then represent one’s findings in a manner that does insightful justice to the material at hand. It is a tall order.22 Stylistically, musically, and textually, folk music and sequences have much in common. Sequences were sung, in large collections, well into the sixteenth century in Hungary, and in regions outside of contemporary Hungary which nevertheless historically reflect Hungarian culture. These collections, from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, predate, of course, Hungarian folk songs as collected by Bartók and Kodály, as well as their immediate predecessors, which have been analysed by successive generations of folk song collectors/researchers. In this comparison, the interest and benefit, I believe, lies not so much in verifying a causal relationship of folk song influenced by sequences, but, rather, an innate interconnectedness in which it is impossible — nor is it particularly productive — to postulate what originated from or influenced what. I am arguing for a reciprocity between the study of notated music with a liturgical function and essentially unnotated traditional music, a reciprocity which has been advocated for at least two scholarly generations by the Hungarian scholars, such a Benjamin Rajeczky, László Dobszay, and Janka Szendrei, themselves. Of most interest, however, is the fact that not only are there large, important collections of both sequences and folk music, but that both are in fact so similar. One can use a comparable terminology of concepts and terms from the Middle Ages to describe and understand each and both. Sequences can usefully interrogate folk song. Folk song can aptly dialogue with sequences.

22  Representation in, and of, research is dealt with in an exemplary manner by Agawu, Representing African Music, in which he first defines ‘African Music’ as ‘potentiality’, and asks, ‘Why is a critique of discourse about African music necessary? First because […] there is a disjunction between the practice of African music and its scholarly representation […]. A second, related reason stems from that part of the legacy of modernity that concentrates increased awareness on the contingency of our modes of knowledge production’ (p. xv). Valentin Y. Mudimbe’s hughly influential book, The Invention of Africa, made possible the kind of slate-clearing exercise that the study of African music has long needed. ‘If you suspect that there is no self-evident knowledge, that methodologies produce and reproduce ideology, that it matters who we are and why we do what we do, that conventional frameworks for reporting knowledge evince no invariant or a priori superiority to other frameworks, then it becomes difficult, perhaps unconscionable, to proceed in the task of knowledge production with little or no self-consciousness’ (Agawu, Representing African Music, pp. xv–xvi). Agawu describes postcolonial theory as seeking to ‘unmask, unveil, demystify, “lay bare” enabling constructs of various knowledge systems’ (p. xvii).

Chapter 9

Transcription, Translation, Transmutation

O

ne of the students at the Central European University, Budapest, saw no need at all to discuss the topic of nationalism. For him the concept made little sense, since everything beyond the boundaries of Hungary was, quite simply, ‘the West’. The generality and totality of the West as a landmass with many recurring features obliterated the need to discuss individual ‘nations’. It is possible to discuss certain ideas in some languages but not in others. Language itself illustrates the co-equivalence of conceptual with sensorially received substance, since both the thought-content and the actual sound of language are ‘substances’ unto themselves. They are unique and differ from their graphic indicators, such as alphabetical letters (figurae). Learning a new language brings an awareness of the ‘stuff ’ of the unfamiliar language. This ‘stuff ’ overcomes, supercedes, and overrides its grammar or lexicographical aspects.1 This is an important affinity between cantus (customarily mistranslated as ‘chant’) as a reservoir of sound substance, differentiated into recognizable differentiae, and for the textual substance of folk song. Substance, the ‘stuff ’ of which a language in fact is comprised, is more important than rules of grammar and translation. Substantial change is more important than grammatical, lexicographical equivalence.2 The linguist of Southeast Asian languages A. L. 1  2 

This is a general issue in Becker, Beyond Translation. In conversation with the musicologist Claire Chevrolet, it became clear to me that a fash-

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Becker has drawn attention to the substantial nature of linguistic sound substance itself, for its own sake, and having a material nature. Becker extends his discussion to point to the implications of this reality for the translational process. This is, as well, a medieval preoccupation. This profound incommensurability of one sound substance with another, exemplified in languages, is the underlying reason why it is so difficult to transcribe musical sound substance, either into the ‘stuff ’ of words in description and discussion that is also actually sounded or, still further, in which actual sound substance is delineated by the figurae of writing.3 Transcription is translation — sound substance translated into figural, linear indicators. This is a transformation, not without the danger of misrepresentation. It is also true that one translates into the word selected what one knows, as well as a taste for conceptual matter.4 Further, the non-negotiable, material nature of sound substance as ioning of the Hungarian language itself occurred as words were translated from Italian libretti and made available in late eighteenth-century opera productions in Hungary. Not only did these opera libretti ‘popularize’ and propagandize the newly formulated Hungarian language, a composed and relatively modern language, but the underlying concepts expressed in the Italian language infused Hungarian sound composites with new conceptual significance. This, in reverse, obtained for the Latin silva, as is discussed above. 3  Augustine in De musica stated that the figurae of writing were different, and separate, from the actual sound. This topic, of course, is one that has resurfaced many times, also recently, in the writings of Jean-Paul Richter and those who were influenced by him, as well as his commentators. See Schmitz-Emans, Schnupftuchsknoten oder Sternbild, especially the chapter ‘Die Sprache als Zeichensystem’, pp. 12–23, bringing out hitherto unpublished papers of Richter especially dealing with the separation between indication/sign/figura/name and ‘thing’ (das Ding), or significance. There is an equivalence here between thing and meaning in contrast to figura. 4  Central European philosophers working especially during the second half of the twentieth century, had virtually no secondary literature, so they read the original treatises of Plato and Aristotle, thus completely circumventing the translational fashions repeated in the literature concerning these writers during the 1960s and 1970s. Further, they did not read these works in isolation, but rather, the entire corpus of the works of both Plato and Aristotle were discussed amongst themselves, and their papers circulated within the group. Consequently, in reading their writing, one becomes aware of just how much one’s understanding of, for example, the Timaeus of Plato is influenced by the English words chosen for key Greek expressions, such as the constant use of ‘form’ resulting in a dogma of ‘Platonic Forms’ in the twentieth century. This is, of course, one reason for medieval interest in going to the Greek text, rather than through the intermediation of Arabic, as in the translations of Averröes, as much as possible during the later years of the twelfth, and especially during the thirteenth century, which resulted in, for example, at least four Latin translations of Aristotle’s Physics becoming available to the Latin West c. 1180–1220. But the importance of considering specifically the Latin translations of Plato and Aristotle, rather than subsequent translations into English, of pivotal works by these authors

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it is exemplified in language served as the conceptual foundation for the belief that ethnicity, hence, ideally, nationality, is founded upon and expressed best in and within this sound substance — that language is the substantial basis for regarding ethnic groups, explaining ethnic origins, as well as ‘families’ of origins. Ethnicity and language, accordingly, have proved to be a pair impossible to dislodge or to separate, exerting together an influence throughout the twentieth century.5 Language, it would appear, makes a people. Living, however, in Budapest today, one finds that language, surely, isolates people, even when they live in close proximity to one another, if one knows only one’s mother tongue, whether English or Hungarian. The isolation of the monoglot especially — and ironically, if one considers the international or supranational emphasis of Marxist ideology — has the effect of isolating class, not so much based on wealth, but based on education and talent.6 Sound substance, like all material, contains and is differentiated by its properties, its capacity for movement, for change and mutation, as well as transformation, its propensity for development, and the fact that it is, by nature, disorderly and undifferentiated, awaiting organization. 7 This includes the cannot be overstated. It was the Latin Plato and Aristotle that both engaged and influenced medieval and early modern intellectual culture, nearly to the present day, rather than either the Greek or, more recently, the English translations of seminal works. A further consideration is that of ‘national intellectuality’ that dictates a sense of what is important, of ‘taste’ with respect to what should be mentioned and emphasized, which also influences translation. A preparation for this topic of translation was included in Chapter 4 above, concerning the translation of the Greek hyle into the Latin silva, with all of the attendant implications and consequences. 5  Even a sampling of the literature that either uses this concept-pair as a basis or seeks to strengthen this connection further reinforces the validity of the above statement; see, for example, Krohn, Versuch einer Systematisierung der ungarischen Bauermelodien, as well as Nagy, ‘Typenprobleme in der ungarischen Volksmusik’, Vargyas, ‘Protohistoire de la musique hongroise’, Elscheková, ‘Stilbegriff und Stilschichten in der slowakischen Volksmusik’, all discussed above. Kodály, in his pivotal work on Folk Music of Hungary, thought that classification and ordering should be placed according to closeness or distance from ‘middle class’/town, urban circumstances, and ‘authenticity’ was related to retaining monoglot status, that is, those who knew languages in addition to Hungarian were suspect. 6  In contrast, the secretary of the Musicology Institute of the University of Basel, where I taught for many years, had had opportunity for little formal education but, nevertheless, spoke five languages fluently, with élan, irony, and humour, and as a consequence was able to hold her own, with confidence, in any setting. 7  Properties of material are extensively discussed in the Physics of Aristotle, a discussion that encouraged centuries of commentary on this particular work. The Physics was the most commented upon work of the Philosopher (see Murdoch, ‘Infinity and Continuity’, especially p. 565).

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sound substance of language. Further, relationship and affinity can be described along other lines than familial or generation growth and progeny models. One of these singles out a property of the sound substance itself, for example, in German, Tonfall, or the rise and fall of syllables, perceived and observed apart from significatory content. If one listens carefully to Hungarian, a language for which the sounds themselves had grown familiar to me, during the early years of my returns to Budapest, without my comprehending what was actually signified — that is, a release of sounds from their intellectual significance — one notices that Hungarian has the same Tonfall as German and proceeds in measured, almost equidistant, syllables of approximately the same size and on approximately the same level. One notices again, in this regard, a relationship to spoken Latin. Although structural and cognitive affinities also exist, this is a relationship of sound and portions of sound themselves, autonomously, for their own sakes. A particular example of this, in German, can be observed clearly in the German psalter, as: Wie der Hirsch lechzt an versiegten Bächen, Also lechzt meine Seele O Gott nach dir! Meine Seele dürstet nach Gott, dem lebendigen Gott.8

Many other illustrations of a regular progression of equal-sized syllables in regular intonation (Tonfall) could be found, since the German psalter is filled with such examples. (The example above also illustrates the concept of ‘chunks’ discussed above.) Other analogies and reinforcing examples come to one’s attention: the ‘type’ that appeared most often in the folk music archive was one of equal syllables, falling like equidistant drops — that is, long, long, long, long — and both German as well as Hungarian names often showed the same characteristic, for example, Jürgen Wagner, László Dobszay. One could easily imagine that both languages were related by common influences, and one of these, 8 

Psalm 42, quoted from the Zürcher Bibel. The syllabic construction of the sequence may be one reason why it was sung, apparently, much later in central Europe than, for example, in France (van Deusen, ‘The Use and Significance of the Sequence’, and van Deusen, The Medieval Latin Sequence). But it is not to be wondered that Hungarian should be related to German in this as well as in other ways. István Széchényi, important to the movement to fashion a Hungarian language, spoke, as his first languge, German. The language, ironically, was shaped by ‘aristocrats’ and ‘townspeople’; Franz Liszt, for example, had a limited knowledge of Hungarian.

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quite conceivably, was the psalter and its extension in the sequence.9 What is at stake here, however, is not so much ‘influence’, but rather intrinsic relationship: a property held on a deep level in common, or linguistic connection that goes beyond vocabulary, cognates, grammatical similarities. This constitutes degrees of affinity going deeper, beyond, or in juxtaposition with the construct of language ‘families’, related, as we have mentioned, to sound itself and its intrinsic properties.10 Additionally just this property of both languages, that is, equidistant, periodic level syllables, can be seen as a physical characteristic if one travels by plane over both Hungary and Germany today. Towns — most of them, no doubt, present on just those spots since the Middle Ages — of approximately the same size are spaced equidistantly from one another all over both countries. This is true, as well, of the towns of the seven Saxon counties, or Siebenbürgenland, in Transylvania. Music also serves as an outer exemplification of these statements. This exemplification will be the subject of the chapter that follows, as well as a contingent extension in translation-transcription — one of the most rewarding features of working with the collection of material within the Budapest Academy of Sciences Archive. Four aspects, closely related to translational hypotheses and linguistics, will be explored in the chapter that follows. Our first consideration will be sound as substance that is plainly ‘as it is’ and for itself. Sound cannot be metamorphosed into ‘something else’, that is, sound within speech or within music as a material that evidences particular properties cannot be substituted for something it is not, that is, on the most basic level, sound and the figurae that indicate sound. This is one of the reasons why it is so difficult to speak of music, since music is its own sound/material, while spoken sound is its own kind of sound.11 All of this, of course, is patently obvious, but nevertheless constitutes an almost impassable barrier. The distinction brought up here is also the reason why translation is so difficult, since one language with its own sound material cannot be transferred, or become another sound mate9 

It is not by chance that the sequence was apparently sung and collected into manuscripts longer in central Europe than anywhere else in Europe. This will be shown clearly by my forthcoming publication, The Medieval Latin Sequence. 10  Structuralism has introduced the concept of a deep-lying substratum held in common by related languages, but does not invoke the concept of sound substance — that sound is material in nature — which was Augustine’s point. 11  A point that is not so obvious as it may seem. Augustine addresses this difference between the sound of speech and the sounds of music, noting that although both speech and music use sound as a material, the chief difference between the two is just this aspect, namely, that speech tends to have sound, whereas music contains many sounds, a reason, as well, for its attraction.

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rial.12 But still another parameter of the same consideration is that of the great, even all-consuming, difference between vocal and instrumental music, as one considers the entire resource of folk music available in the archive. These differences defy comparison at all, or at least make it exceedingly difficult. This will be explored in detail below. A second consideration follows: there are, however, other connections between the sounds or ‘sound material’ of one language and another, or between music as sound material and spoken words. In speaking of languages, one is, by now, accustomed to refer to ‘families’ of languages as a construct to explain affinity and relationship. Structuralism, recently, has proffered another answer to the question of relationship. But there are additional ways of explaining possible affinities between languages. A third consideration: both language and music as sound material are divisible by their very nature into building blocks. How are these perceived and explained, and with what component parts are we dealing? Again, these ‘components’ can be analogized by the typical towns, all of which are autonomous, independent, and have remained in place, in many cases, for hundreds of years, neither growing nor becoming diminished — or disappearing altogether. Fourthly and finally, it is not easy to compare sound substance (as recorded) to multiple transcriptions. Differences between individual performances as well as those between individual transcribers are so comprehensive, as well as distinctive, as to make comparison nearly impossible. This also explodes a common point of view that this folk music was the ‘product’ of ‘popular imagination’. The mighty reservoir of recordings as well as the sheer volume of transcriptions — there are, according to the researchers, approximately sixty thousand pieces of folk music, all transcribed with each and every example filled with personal idiosyncracies — consist of the melodies, the performers, and his/her will and capacity to perform, as well as the priorities of the transcribers, all variables that make comparison next to impossible. All of these features, however, can be indicated by the term figurae delineating dif12 

Transcription and translation may not only put a screen between the sound material and potential readership, but may create an absolute aversion, or at least disinterest for a translated work. This accounts for the fact that some works of Plato or Aristotle may disappear from active reading for a period of time — the best case would be the present, in that Plato, having been translated in the 1920s and 1930s, contains translated vocabulary that would seem to interest no one, and the main feature for which Plato is known, throughout the twentieth century, namely ideal ‘forms’ is, again, both incomprehensible and uninteresting. ‘Platonic Forms’ is not a priority for the Latin translations of Plato, the Plato latinus that so greatly influenced Western thinking and writing for so many centuries.

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ferences (differentiae).13 In other words, medieval concepts/terms describe the situation at hand. We begin with the first, that is, sound substance in and for itself, illustrated by another vignette taken from daily life in Budapest. Today, the folk music researchers came into the archive to hold a meeting. As I was in the midst of my work, I was invited to remain, since no one would be disturbed by my presence. The leader presented a topic of discussion, in voice without excitement and without significant rise and fall. She paused, and all began to speak together, all in the same unexcited, unperturbed voice, without rise and fall, but also energized, but as if on a plane. The intonation of all of them together was not at all flat. One heard a syllabic construction comprised of one even syllable after the other, with the occasional accented syllable, as: s s s s s s s s s long s s s s s s s s s s s s s long   (s = short)

which is what one finds in the songs, as well as the sequence, but also in the German language as it is sounded. The Hungarian language sounds as if each syllable were on a plane, but not flat; even, as one drop after the other, but not monotonous. Juxtaposition of even syllables appeared to be very important. Sound substance is also a material for which one has an appetite — and all of the researchers have expressed this to me, namely, that they themselves have an appetite for the sound-substance of the folk song. Analysis is possible on this level only if one does not understand the sounds but, rather, relates to them solely on the material level of sound itself. Learning Hungarian shifts the sound material into another field, bringing together with the sound content in terms of significance. Middle-class Hungarians living in Budapest until recently were bilingual, and the situation was as in the Roman Empire, particularly in the city of Rome, where, according to Quintilian,14 Roman families, speaking Latin amongst themselves, with Latin also as the language of instruction, sought after Greekspeaking housekeepers for their children. In Budapest, nannies spoke German, and from one’s earliest experiences with language as a child, one would have been conscious of difference in sound as one moved one’s thoughts from one sound material to another. This consciousness of the unique sounds of a given language, namely, Hungarian, is evident in the juxtaposition of sound within 13  As ‘twigs’ or ‘stems’ differentiating branches within a forest full of trees. See Chapter 4, above, on silva as a concept, more thoroughly discussed above. 14  See above, Chapter 6, n. 1.

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the folk song. One comes quickly to the conclusion that these songs are carefully artefacted with a full appreciation of the sound material of the Hungarian language and that this seemed to be a most interesting avenue to explore. In dealing with the transcriptions that follow, our goal will be to concentrate on the nature, uses, and differentiation that is possible on several levels with respect to sound. These differences include: • between performances of what has been interpreted to be one folk song type, • between multiple transcriptions of the same recording, • between the sound itself and the figurae (notation) that delineate and indicate those sounds. In many, if not all cases, these differences will appear to be self-explanatory, although commentary has been included, as will become clear.

The Transcriptions Not all information was given consistently for each recording, that is, region, date, recorder, transcriber, recording number. I have included, where possible, place of origin, date in cases, especially, of early recording, and when this information was available the recorder as well. Due, obviously, to the immense volume of material collected and available in the archives, I was compelled to be selective, maintaining priorities as delineated in this study and attempting to direct the reader through the examples included, carefully indicating the goals at hand. Many other directions have been taken in the past and can be taken in the future, with the enormous resource of pre-existent material now available in the archive, and the reader has been given the necessary information in this study to either proceed according to individual interest or to verify the conclusions presented here. I have endeavoured not to clutter this study with too many details, but at the same time, to give enough information that the reader is able to make his or her own way in the vast thicket of available material. Secondly, although text will be discussed generally, it is not the priority of this study for two reasons. First, the notion of ‘type’ and corresponding subtype, as well as the melodies included within a type, are not classified according to text, although syllable count does enter into classification. Further, the segments of text sung with segments (or chunks) of musical material are interchangeable; the concept — and expectation — of a certain phrase or group of tones paired intrinsically and consciously with a certain text is not appropriate

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to these examples. The folk song melody did not reinforce aspects of the text; there was no intrinsic connection between a given tone or group of tones and a syllable of text.15 In addition, there were many texts, usually, that occurred together with the melodies presented here; for that reason, texts were often not included by the researchers/recorders themselves. Much work on the texts involved has been done by the Hungarian folk music researchers, and the reader has been referred to this literature in the bibliography. ‘Properties’ are expressed by the very nature of the material. This appeared to have been intuitively perceived by those who classified these melodies as they placed them together, not so much on account of textual similarity, but, rather, often on account of a single differentiating, but strongly perceived, delineatory feature. Even so, this identification could be quite personal on the parts of the researcher-classifiers. A perception of which feature was ‘formative’ and, therefore, of classificatory value in placing a given example within a ‘type’ differed, sometimes drastically, from one researcher to another, as we will see. As mentioned above, there are important, considerable discrepancies between the amount of information offered for each transcription. Some transcriptions have date recorded, by whom, performers, with age, provenance, name, transcriber, date when transcribed, subsequent transcriptions, date when published, recording archives number, and text(s). It appeared that this was not only a matter of a single researcher’s diligence, attention to detail, training in the profession, or experience, nor was it due to the amount of time that had passed, but that another factor played an important role. Certain melodies seemed to attract attention. Observational details clustered around these melodies. At any rate, it seemed important to indicate what was there, indicating as well the diversity of the recorders, as well as the circumstances of the recordings. The transcriptions transmit, above all, the inner musical lives and personalities, as well as experiences, of the transcribers. The transcriptions, with names of transcribers, also constituted a generational chain. Still another factor involved the constant daily activity of the transcriberresearchers themselves, as they rearranged the transcriptions from year to year, day by day, ordering them and placing them anew in different folders. After copying a transcription, I returned a year later to recheck my work and found 15 

This observation was reinforced in conversation with the researchers, especially László Dobszay. This was fully recognizable to me, since exactly the same situation obtains in medieval text-music relationships — another important affinity between medieval composition and that of Hungarian folk song, namely an absence of what has become later known as ‘word-painting’: close connection between tone and significance of text, as well as a set order from beginning to the end of parts.

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the transcription missing, having found its way into another folder and, presumably, into another type. The transcriptions themselves were not labelled with a ‘type’, hence their position within a type depended entirely on the folder in which they were retained (such as type 160460/0). Whence, then, comes this penchant for variation, so evident not only within the melodies and texts but within the transcriptions as well as in the reordering of the transcriptions that could be constantly observed? Variation as a principle could be observed amongst all of the transcriptions of a single recording, amongst all of the recordings of a single type, and amongst all of the types that used the same essential tonal material. One found correspondence in a series of variations, not so much on a ‘theme’, but on and amongst themselves. Further, individual melodies seemed to contain a propensity, by their very nature, for variation within themselves. Their internal properties dictated that variations could ensue.16 Variation as a technique permeated use of language (not only Hungarian, but other languages, such as English and German, that the researchers spoke with me). Conversation can be related to the constant, myriad variations of the melodies, in which the same thought or subject is handled in as many ways as time allows, back and forth, in extended dialogue. One notices this as soon as one has an elementary vocabulary in Hungarian, but Hungarian acquaintances, friends, and colleagues do this in other languages they know as well. This process clearly differs from a developmentary discussion of a given subject, in which a consensus or harmonization of varying points of view eventually, through extended progress, is reached. An example follows: Colleague I: ‘Katalin and I are going for some lunch, and then an American visitor will come to the archive at 2 o’clock.’ Colleague II: ‘You will come to the archive at 2 o’clock.’ I: ‘We have brought along some food to eat here at lunch time.’ II: ‘An American visitor will come at 2 o’clock.’ I: ‘We are slightly under time constraint today because we have an American visitor after lunch.’ II: ‘So we are planning to eat our food in the Institute.’ And so it continues, back and forth, with other small nuances of meaning, as well as slight additions of details, as the exchange takes place. The conversation appears to be pedantic, repetitive, and time-consuming, but this is not at all the case; rather one, by means of the dialogue, is having friendly, enjoyable 16 

This I have observed to be the case for the medieval Latin sequence as well, that is, that some sequence melodies ‘attract’ variants, others do not.

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contact with another for just a few minutes during a busy day. Sound, here, too, is essential — the sound for and of itself, of the other’s voice. The conversation furthermore brings out the potentiality of this sound, explores the potential inherent within the properties not only of the sound substance of the syllables themselves and, together, the words, but also of the significatory substance and the relationship between the two persons generating the sound. This is, accordingly, potential to be expressed that is not only susceptible to the senses in terms of aural perception, but unseen conceptual and emotional substance that is being drawn out by the short conversation. The conversation, as well, is exemplary of deeply rooted cultural properties and constitutes an analogy to the unending variations found in the folk music of this culture.17 And many, many such conversations occur, both personally and on the telephone, during a typical day in Budapest. Further, one is impressed with the highly personal nature of this work not only, as noted above, in bringing out one’s own perception of musical substance in transcription, but also as witnessed by the fact that the same persons had gone to the same places. During a period of a few years, they recorded the same people singing the same songs. In spite of all of this, each time a song was recorded, it became a highly personal statement, for the performer in connecting musical building blocks, and for the researcher in the connections of return, recording, and transcription. Each one of the researchers worked during a span of very few years and in a confined region, so that the entire archive also is a composite of self-contained building blocks of material, with each separate, essentially self-contained, piece constituting a variation on the other. Some of the researchers apparently took one or two field trips and dropped out of sight, so far as their work contained in the archive is concerned. Others are interesting to track in order to observe, in some cases, a development of perception, orientation, and emphasis. In still other cases, although the archive contains hundreds of transcriptions by a given researcher, perceptions and goals remained essentially the same through several decades and repeated field trips. Names of researchers that occur repeatedly include, for the first generation, twentieth century, Vikár, Bartók, and Kodály, for the second generation, J. Jagamas, Lajos Kiss (who went back to the same region in 1956, 1966, and 1970, recording the same songs with the same persons),18 and Peter Paul Domokos, and for the 17  Again, no dichotomy must be admitted between so-called folk music and concert, composed music, since the variation has also been cultivated in a particular way in central Europe, i.e. from the piano variations of Mozart, to Brahms. 18  Type 160720/0 was recorded with Illeane Gyoke and Mária Kantas when the respec-

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final generation, Dobszay, Mária Domokos, Lazar, Paksa, Sárosi, Szendrei, and Tari, among others. Although very influential, particularly for their published writings, both Szabolczi and Rajeczky did not, apparently, do much actual field work. In the case of Rajeczky, there exists a highly interesting collection of his transcriptions of other researchers’ recordings. The personal element, inseparable from the recordings and transcriptions themselves, underlies the community of Hungarian society. Again, music constitutes the analogy to hidden realities of thought, culture, and society. As a factor is identified within the musical context, a corresponding trait ‘underground’, so to speak, can also be accessed and assessed. The network of social fabric that one observes on a daily basis within life in Budapest — even for an outsider from every point of view, such as myself — a nexus of interpersonal relationships of utmost complexity, is exemplified within the totality of all of the recordings and transcriptions of the archive in Budapest. Let us proceed to examples: • 160740/1: The ‘type’ was reissued many times by Kodály, and an example was also recorded by the same person after a lapse of ten years and published. This particular example shows how groups of researchers, namely, Kodály, Vikár, Manga, and Rajeczky, all appropriated and used a material for their own purposes, as did the singers themselves. Each module exhibits a containment, namely, that of identical place, the use of the same singers, a circumscribed time, as well as the same recorder. In other words, from the generality of sound possibly available, several parameters of containment have been, one way or the other, exercised. Further containment is added by the attribute that this particular type has been related to ‘pagan’ practices, and there exists a concentration of writing concerning what one supposed to be a ‘residue of paganism’.19 At any rate, much attention has obviously been paid, many transcriptions made, and this particular type has been set up as noteworthy. It is interesting to ask why and what the result of this attention has included. In this case it appears that perceived genre, based essentially on the season and special day with which this type tive performers were fifty-eight, seventy, and eighty years old. Kiss also recorded Toth József Tucak (b. 1879) in 1957 and 1960. It is only feasible that, as a researcher, one would go back to places and people one knew; nevertheless, the re-recording of songs sung by the same performers brings another dimension, or variable, into a possible interpretation of what can be gained from these recordings — what, in fact, can be concluded from them. 19  See Chambers, I.145, Szabolczi, 53, the Szentes Déak Sirata (1774): Chari chari, Jesu. ‘Szent Ivani’.

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was associated as overriding consideration, has taken over other considerations such as either text or melody, or a combination of both. In fact many of the transcriptions contain little text at all. • 170030/0: There are four huge folders of transcribed examples of this type, connected to many texts.20 In going through the folders containing this type, it is interesting that in some cases, ‘Nógrad’ has been scratched out, ‘Heves’ put in; many of the recordings/transcriptions were made by Bartók and Kodály. Furthermore, all of the many examples constitute variations upon one another. One becomes slowly aware of the remarkable slight, nuanced, differences in the melodies, as one attempts to relocate examples in order to check examples already collected. One also becomes aware of the constant reordering process that is going on day by day within the collection itself. As mentioned above, some transcriptions that had been copied by myself previously were no longer in their type folders, but had been shifted to other types. Searching for transcriptions I had copied three years previously, I could not find any of them in the four massive folders containing this type. The type also seemed, as we have seen, to be the most unstable with respect to actual location from which the recordings were taken. This, in itself, was an interesting comment on the nature of the types themselves, but it also accessed the material nature of the melodic and textual substance. As is the case with all material, a constant process of bringing out, placing emphasis upon, and differentiating internal properties is evoked by the material itself. Observed by Aristotle especially in the Physics, this propensity of material to disclose properties, especially within the ongoing movement of time, becomes comprehensible as one notices how single traits become manifest through all of the single examples here at hand. Some types attracted, or contained within themselves, a propensity for instability, for uncertainty, and for variation. This had more to do with the type than with individual researchers, and more to do with internal properties than with a certain time, place, and recording situation. That is, stability did not decrease or increase as decades passed, nor did this factor vary according to the individual recorder-transcriber. 20 

See van Deusen, ‘Crossing Boundaries between Nature and Artifact’, an article that brings forward this type as example. The distinction between ‘type’ and ‘genre’ is quite often ambiguous.

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People in central Europe have always lived in towns — in Transylvania as well. Many of these date to the earliest written records of the thirteenth century. In fact, people in Europe have probably lived in towns for the last two millennia.21 Hence, the suspicion of contamination attributed to town culture, if not clearly expressed by Kodály, nevertheless is clearly implied. The transcriptions themselves are taken from singers who for the most part live or have lived in towns, and as has been pointed out above, Budapest itself constitutes a collection of towns contained within a larger area. This is the case for European cities in general, most of which, although greatly expanded during the course of the nineteenth century, bring together an aggregate of self-contained towns. Each of these ‘towns’ is distinctive, to some extent autonomous, and within which town life goes on. Living in such a situation, one also has a pronounced loyalty to the self-contained quarter in which one has grown up.22 This, as a matter of fact, is true, even for Los Angeles developing as a post–World War II city, but in the same manner. The implication, then, that retreat from towns and cities in central Europe for ‘authenticity’ as a desirable point of view or state of affairs, is not only impossible but ignores the realities of European history and culture. We have also seen that conversation amongst Hungarians can be related to the constant, myriad variations of the melodies, in which the outline is handled in as many ways as time allowed, back and forth in extended conversation. The limitations of time appear to contain this movement, not the subject itself. One does not ‘arrive’ at a conclusion, but, rather, individual aspects are brought into the conversation, one by one. One notices this as soon as one has an elementary vocabulary in Hungarian, but Hungarian acquaintances, friends, and colleagues do this in other languages they know as well. This constitutes an accretion, not a process. To return to the example of our conversation held in the folk music archives, as an outward manifestation of cultural property, it also constitutes a direct link to medieval constructional method. First, the chunks or statements, 21 

Cf. Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion who dates the habit of living in towns to Roman custom (p. 2). 22  Mention above has been made of the Sennheimerstrasse as a ‘town’, but there are many examples of this sense of place. A friend, Elsbeth, regards herself, not a ‘Basler’ that is, she has lived in Basel, Switzerland, all of her life, but rather from Klein-Basel, and more specifically the area of the Claragraben. Further, as an apartment was found for me to live in, year by year, almost always in a different quarter of Budapest, the friends and colleagues that I invited to my apartment for dinner were often introduced to a part of the city that was almost totally unknown to them, although they had been born in Budapest and lived there their entire lives. One played out one’s life ‘as in a small town’.

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as given above, are all approximately of the same size. Secondly, they could be placed in almost any order, since each is self-contained, and they are all autonomous. As has been stated, there is no developmentary reconciliation of opposing points of view, but there is also no narrative continuity that must, for logical reasons, such as considerations of ‘prior’ and ‘posterior’ be preserved, and there is also no sense, particularly, of climax. A medieval example of versus before the celebration of the Epiphany from a twelfth-century manuscript from Nevers employs the same organizational methodology. The transcription of a portion of this manuscript has been included above (see Figure 14).23 Medieval writers incorporated priorities in their transcriptions, as do scholars of medieval music. Figures 15–17 of Kodály, above, show that the folk music researchers also incorporate their own agendas — what seems most important to them in their transcriptions, still another feature held in common for research in medieval music as well as folk music. Finally, transcription has been both a problem and a necessity for both folk music and medieval music. Music as sound material is irreplaceable; as Bartók stated, transcriptions can never be a substitution for music itself. Further, one’s own transcriptions often differed from one to the other within a period of a few days. This statement is borne out by the archive itself, in which frequently multiple transcriptions exist for the same melodies from the same transcribers, all varying from one another in slight but significant ways. All of this might appear to place transcription in a negative or at least secondary position. I said to my colleagues, ‘Why do it then?’ First, the urge to transcribe rises from and expresses a basic outcome, of the substance itself. One is urged by the material itself to work with it, to deal with sound substance in personal ways. One has, as well, an urge to manipulate, arrange, organize, and even transform material such as sound. Further, in working with material, one discloses, most of all to oneself, the internal properties of that material. In an age of easy and convenient copy machines, as well as digitalization, one notices this all the more, since it becomes essential to actually use one’s hands — to copy the transcriptions for oneself. The motion of the hand in writing achieves an inner confrontation, like digestion, of the sound substance itself.

23 

The entire version can be found in van Deusen, Music at Nevers Cathedral.

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his chapter will contrast imagined identities with the identity of place. Ahdaf Soueif, in the manifesto of ‘Sharif Basha al-Baroudi’, Cairo, 26 October 1911, writes that, put simply, the East holds two attractions for Europe: 1. An economic attraction: Europe needs materials for its industries, markets for its products and jobs for its men. In the Arab lands it has found all three. 2. A religious, historical, romantic attraction to the land of the Scriptures, of the ancients, and of fable. This Attraction is born in the European while he is still in his home country. When he comes here, he finds that the land is inhabited by people he does not understand and possibly does not like. What options are open to him? He may stay and try to ignore them. He may try to change them. He may leave. Or he may try to understand them. The last two options are harmless, but they are never chosen — unless it be by individuals. The first two, when linked to large movements of people, to Colonial Enterprise, are of untold harm. As to the first option, it may be safe to suggest that the more the Colonialist wishes to ignore the inhabitants, to deny their existence, the stronger the historical or religious ties he claims to the land […]. And for the second, the Romantic European can lend himself without too many pangs of conscience to a Colonial Enterprise such as the one we have been living with in Egypt for thirty years — the one that is beginning in Morocco and Libya. He speaks of the White Man’s Burden, of his duty to help ‘primitive’ nations fulfill their potential, his duty to civilise them. He is intrigued by the image of himself as a Reformer — a Saviour. He feels

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righteous as he ‘protects the peace’, supports the ‘legitimate sovereign’, ‘ensures the safety of the religious minority’, or the Europeans. There is also a kind of attachment that comes from a satisfaction with the European’s own image of himself in the East, an image different from the one he has of himself in his own country and among his own people. Certain aspects of the European’s personality which find no outlet in his own land, he allows to flourish while he is in the East. Thus the new economic ambitions of Europe in the East find a good use for the old feelings of Europe towards the East. Seen in this light, every question is answered and all of the pieces fit into place: the Treaties between the Powers according them ‘free hands’ in the countries of the East. The aggression of France against Morocco and Italy against Libya. The cooperation between finance and politics in the project of displacing the Palestinians and creating — in the heart of the Arab lands — a state not merely friendly to Europe, but European in substance and Colonial in ideology. Europe simply does not see the people of the countries it wishes to annex — when it does, it sees them in accordance with its own old and accepted definitions: backward people, lacking rational abilities and subject to religious fanaticism. People whose countries — the holy and picturesque lands of the East — are too good for them. And what of us Orientals? What of our responsibility in all of this? We in Egypt have been proud of our history; proud to belong to the land that was the first mother of civilization. In time she passed the banner of leadership to Greece and then Rome, and from there it reverted to the lands of Islam until in the seventeenth century it was taken hold of by Europe. For the last hundred years, we have tried to find a place for ourselves in the modern world. But our attempts have collided with what Europe perceives as her interests. There have been those among us who have been so dazzled by the might and technological wizardry of Europe that they have been rather as a man who stands lost in admiration at the gun that is raised to shoot him. And our hands have been tied by the presence in our countries of an earlier Imperial Master: the Ottoman Turk. And it was in the weakness of the Turks and the turbulence that attended each country’s attempt to rid herself of the rule of Constantinople that the European Powers saw their chance to take control of our lands. The Colonialists’ response […] will be to say that [this opinion] does not express a general point of view. That its author is an Anglophile or Francophile or a phile of some sort that renders him not representative of the mass of his people. To this I say that there are many others who think and speak as I do. And that this body of men and women bears the same relationship to the fellaheen of Egypt and the Arab lands as your Honourable Members to the farmers of Somerset or the factory-hands of Sheffield whom they represent in your Parliament. If there are elements of Western Culture in us, they have been absorbed through visiting your countries, learning in your institutions and opening ourselves to your culture. There we have been free to choose those elements that most suited our

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own history, our traditions and aspirations — that is the legitimate commerce of humanity. Our only hope now — and it is a small one — lies in a unity of conscience between the people of the world for whom this phrase itself would carry any meaning. It is difficult to see the means by which such a unity can be effected. But it is in its support that these words are written.1

The manifesto quoted in full above cost the life of Soueif ’s fictional Sharif Basha who, in the novel, is ambushed and shot from both the front and behind within a short period following its publication in English as well as in Arabic. It has been included here since, although Soueif dates it to the early twentieth century, and as such the fictive document is fully believable within that time framework, it has obvious seriousness of purpose and relevance today. Further, as an ‘open letter’, it expresses with cogent urgency factors shaping the collection of ‘folk culture’, reflecting and providing evidence for the national ideologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These factors, and indeed the entire preoccupation of nationalism, the ascendancy of ‘pure’ and ‘authentic’ cultures over contaminated ones, a concept of civilized nations over primitive ones,2 and again, a medieval contrast-pair of nature versus development, have not only shaped the mental world in which one lives today, but are still questions of life-and-death relevance throughout the world. They have been played out, and have returned again and again, in discussions of folk music — from 1  Soueif, The Map of Love, pp. 481–83; cf. also p. 515: ‘It is so difficult to translate from one language into another, from one culture into another; almost impossible really.’ 2  The famous British statesman and political essayist Lord Acton in his correspondence, especially with Gladstone, in the late nineteenth century, wrote: ‘We are mistaken generally in attributing to the European nations at the time of their conquest by the Romans and absorption into the empire a very low degree of civilization, as of barbarous nations at an early age of their progress. On the contrary, they were for the most part 1) very highly cultivated [and] 2) arrived at the close and decline of their civilisation, like the nations of Asia. We know […] how highly the Gauls were civilized. The same is probably of the Spaniards. Their resistance was longer, and we can trace backwards to a very early period the signs of their civilization. The civilization of most of the nations conquered by the Romans was older than theirs. They had a rich history and civilization, though unlike the countries of the Hellenic world, little literature’ (London, British Library, MS Add. 5528, in Dalberg-Acton, Selected Writings of Lord Acton, iii, 524); and ‘Nations are not primitive products. They are the slow produce of History. Nations which are the authors of modern history are the products of medieval history’ (BL, MS Add. 4960, p. 31, in Dalberg-Acton, Selected Writings of Lord Acton, iii, 529). See also Himmelfarb, Lord Acton and Murphy, ‘Lord Acton and the Question of Moral Judgement in History’. The entire issue of Acta Ethnographica Hungarica, 42 (1997) entitled ‘Ethnicity-Religion-Nationhood’ is of interest here, especially Kürti, ‘Hungary and her Neighbours’.

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whence it has come, of what it consists, and what can be done with it. Rather than presenting a scholarly field to be discussed at academic gatherings in a gracious but non-committal manner, the arena of folk culture has presented, both overtly and subtly, issues of nationalism, tribalism, and internal ethnic substance that finds expression in language and music, as well as charting the vicissitudes of a variety of conceptualizations of materialism as it has emerged during the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — ‘materialism’ that is both amorphous, yet in its very vagueness possessing remarkable truculence. Further, the above manifesto also describes what can be regarded as a ‘colonization of the past’, of appropriating the raw materials of the past and transforming them into what one regards as acceptable without regard to their cultural — geographical, chronological, mental, and emotional — background that made these textual and musical material possible in the first place, and for many centuries, in which they were both taken seriously and regarded as self-evident. This colonization of the past, and the using of the past as a ‘preexistent substance’ — there, available, to be appropriated and used — has also generated textbooks on the topic of medieval music as well as what has been named ‘music theory’ throughout the twentieth century.3 Finally, the fictive manifesto brings up the important problem of representation, with respect to both the representation of scientific/scholarly interpretation of the data that has been collected or the even more relevant question of representation as fantasy, either personal or as ‘group imagination’.4 3  Reference could be made to Grout, A History of Western Music, and Reese, Music in the Middle Ages. Grout has been republished and continues to serve as a commonly used text for the North American undergraduate textbook market. Both appropriated German-language constructs of the medieval period current approximately thirty years previous to the time of their initial writing. Although clearly a substantial and lucrative commercial enterprise, such textbooks have been at least partially responsible for an extreme conservatism in the teaching of Western music history, particularly to American undergraduates. 4  Kofi Agawu deals with the ‘invention’ of ‘Africans’ and their music, as well as fantasies regarding why African music is as it is and why it holds an attraction to non-Africans in his trenchant study, Representing African Music. He writes: ‘What is the secret of African music? Some say that it is communal and inviting, drawing in a range of consumers, young and old, skilled and unskilled […] obviously, then, little effort is required on the part of Africans to produce reasons for wanting to celebrate the extraordinary range and depth of their musical-artistic resources. The spirit of African music, is, however, not always manifest in the scholarship about it. There are several reasons for this […]. The field is dominated by foreigners whose ultimate allegiances are to the metropolis, not to Africa [… and] African music, as a performing art in a predominately oral tradition, poses uncommon challenges to those who seek to establish its texts and define its analyzable objects’ (pp. xi–xii). Again, as in the above manifesto, the West is attracted to African culture and music on its own terms.

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The necessity for preserving, not an imagination, a fantasy, or a mythology of folk culture, as described above in Sharif Basha’s manifesto, as well as promulgated by central Europeans themselves who tend to particularize themselves as unique, but the unity and expression of an identity has been, and is, addressed on many levels in central Europe. It is in evidence, as we have seen, in an ongoing impetus to collection — indeed, a passion for collection — that has been sustained at least throughout the past two centuries. Material attracts itself, but collection is also a hedge against fragmentation and diffusion — against scattering. On a very practical level, the tendency to fragmentation in this part of the world is exemplified by the fact that my colleagues at universities in Budapest needed several different jobs to make a modest living. This was a problem that was recognizable at once to me as a visitor, since it is also endemic to Southern California, in which part-time faculty commute long distances to teach several courses at widely divergent universities. But there was another, more interesting aspect to the travel situation I noticed each day at the university in Budapest, as it scattered my colleagues’ attention, deprived them of their focus, caused them to forget meetings, and displayed itself in many other ways as well. In addition to this practical necessity, namely, of having several part-time jobs, there was an intrinsic, distracting, fragmenting force at work in this part of Europe, felt, I believe, by nearly everyone living in that region. Collection that has been pursued so assiduously by Hungarian folk music researchers for so many decades mitigates against this impulse to scatter, but this potentiality to suddenly ‘fragment’ can be used in a conscious manner within a composition, as well, and appeared to be responsible for what can be observed as a ‘transcendental moment’ in, for example, Kodály’s opera Székely Fono. It happens frequently as a Roma group is playing. One experiences a moment that is suddenly, unaccountably, ‘out of control’. This is a trance-like phenomenon, with an almost ecstatic unity of time and place that is both the result and culmination of repetitive progression.5 Another reaction to the potential for diffusion 5 

See especially Becker, Deep Listeners: ‘Trance can be empowering for all concerned, attesting to the divine presence in one’s midst’ (p. l); ‘Trancing is challenging to an objectivist epistemology, it resists representation’, but rather necessitates a ‘theory of consciousness’ (p. 2); ‘Trance consciousness remains opaque, unstudied, and suspect’ (p. 3); ‘Trance is a profound mystery. […] You lose your strong sense of self, of ego, as you feel one with the music, you lose the sense of time passing, and may feel transported out of quotidian space’ (p. 25); ‘Languages may not easily be translated, but the art of languaging is universal. However, one aspect of everyday languaging stops in trance. What has been called “the inner language”, the ongoing inner conversation one has with oneself ’ (p. 28) (cf. Becker, Beyond Translation, pp. 3, 13).

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is the continuous reordering that was going on in the Institute, in which the types were disengaged, assessed, reordered, and classified according to criteria that had been modified, often in seemingly nearly indiscernible ways. This is a region of assimilation, appropriation, collection, aggregation, and even coagulation. Hungary, with borders on all sides, is a composition. How better to present its national identity than through its music, which, either organized and written down or recorded from a more or less spontaneously enfolding performance, is a composite of chunks of textual and musical substance, placed together for a specific purpose. Even the concert life of Budapest gives evidence of this characteristic, since it is composed of music almost exclusively by central European composers — a unified concert culture composed of distinct, characteristic, and identifiable parts. One notices this characteristic of composite of parts in the music of Liszt and Mahler, but also in the buildings of Budapest, within the towns, as well as in the topography of the land and its historic divisions — a composite composed of parts, centones, or chunks. The young woman of Hungarian background who, in Budapest one evening, was singing a concert of folk songs from her native Transylvania remarked to the audience before she began that she had ‘composed’ the song she was about to sing upon the death of her mother. She then proceeded to sing pieces of folk songs, from many sources that had come to her notice, placed together by herself for a specific occasion, that is, her mother’s funeral. This is a view of nationalism and the place of music within it that departs in essential ways from many of the recognizable discussions of a question that is arguably one of the most important considerations of the twentieth century, with massive, unavoidable, perhaps irredeemable, implications. Further, it draws upon mental and verbal tools of the past, using them, not as a museum of curious objects, for which a purpose can scarcely be imagined, but as an approach to reality, even as it exists today. These medieval analytical and descriptive tools for dealing with region and past either avoid or offer other alternatives to the following: • a nationalism based on isolation, with an argument for the uniqueness, and potentially superlative qualities, of a given national situation; • a focus on a mythic past, with the implication of tribalism, that has in some way, for some reason, been interrupted or externally compromised, most often by illegitimate invaders or unfair treaties imposed by inimical other nations; • a focus upon origins and evolutionary progressive development;

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• a focus upon acquisition and possession, as well as legitimacy and retention, with the possibility that rightfully held territories had been compromised; • the representation of the Middle Ages as a fantasy world, a pre-existent material that could be reconstituted according to one’s own agenda, imagination, and will, as a self-fashioned ‘Orient’ i.e. Egypt and ‘The Holy Land’, or ‘Pre-Mongolian’, a period to which ‘authentic’ national folk substance could be traced, as well as providing a ‘heritage’ that should, rightfully, be regained; • a ‘nationalism’ that is considered to be innate, even genetic. A medieval answer to all of these considerations, first of all, places region, not language, as bringing forth distinction. Each region is different, with differing characteristics, or ‘varied and diverse figures’ (caractere variarae: charivari). This is a usable concept because it accounts, as medieval commentaries on the book of Genesis show, for everyone, in all regions. With respect to place, and the importance and distinction of geographical region, it is relevant to note that Hungary agriculturally has been in the past, and could be once again, largely self-sufficient. This gives the impression, even to the visitor, an outsider, that there is absolutely no need to go anywhere. One is well positioned, centred, so to speak, where one is. Only with great difficulty — and I could feel somehow the tug of magnetism that bonded me to the place — could I leave to travel, to go elsewhere to work, to Berlin, for example, even the train trip of slightly over two hours to Vienna. Strangely, it was not so much the pull of affection, of shared affinities, even, important as they were to me, of human contacts that, in this case, rivets one to a place. I sensed this as well for my colleagues, both Hungarians and others who had come there to do projects, for example, from all over the continent of Europe to the research centre of the Collegium Budapest. Further, the dichotomies between East and West, specifically, have been recognized since Antiquity, as are the profound differences between North and South. But the difference and separation between large and small regional situations are both significant and relatively unnoticed. What are the implications of place for the exemplification of music? How can the current insistent and obvious need to deal with ‘nationalism’ in central Europe be dealt with without prioritizing identity, setting up conflicting agendas, without the invocation of a mythology that has gained authority by repetition, while at the same time admitting and accurately describing regional character? What exactly constitutes the identity or identities of the musi-

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cal expressions of central Europe, especially if one takes into consideration a unified musical culture that includes concert life as well? We have discussed past representations of national identity, within historiographical priorities of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but is it possible to deal with folk music as it exists today? It would appear, first of all, that so far as differentiation is concerned, a crucial separation exists, not between vocal melodies, but between songs with texts and instrumental music. Both the sound material itself as well as ways of moving or delivery related to either singing or playing an instrument bring about a distinction that is dispositive. Some figurae (delineating characteristics) were possible on instruments but not with the voice, and vice versa. Further, this distinction was available visually as well in transcription (see Figures 18–21). Another crucial separation had to do with performance. These aspects, also not available in transcription, included very lightly touched adjacent tones, giving an impression of both structure and less important ornamental tones; a flat/natural ambiguity and the use of both within a given piece, sometimes as microtones; the timbre of the voice, the absence or presence of vibrato, expressive gestures, as well as a willingness and power to communicate musically on the part of the performer; tempo differences within a piece, portamento; the addition of microtones; the age of the performer, unintended characteristics related to age, such the difficulty of a woman to produce clear pitch after a certain age, or to societal position; and variation of the actual pitch, personal and idiosyncratic vocal mannerisms, combined with the fact that each singer reinforced a different structural feature.6 In each case, as much or more difference existed between two performers singing the same song within the same region than between quite separate regions; in other words, differences were personal and idiosyncratic, musical and performative rather than based on region. Essential differences between transcribed melodies had more to do with performative differences than with strictly musical-textual parameters and, therefore, were difficult to assess. Thirdly, there were outstanding characteristics, such as an emphasis upon the first and fifth tone of a scale as well as triadic emphasis, that were everywhere to be found on the European continent. In fact, most of the frequently occurring features of Hungarian folk song were not only common property of folk song, but included on concert programmes. What have become known in functional harmonic analysis as ‘primary functions’ were ubiquitous, not only in what the researchers had designated as ‘new style’, but in the ‘old layer/ambitus’ as well. 6 

See van Deusen, ‘Crossing Boundaries between Nature and Artifact’.

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Figures 18–21. Transcribers’ priorities; transcriptions of instrumental music (by permission of the Bartók Archive of the Musicology Institute, Hungarian Academy of Sciences).

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Further, repeated tones were a stabilizing element all over the European continent. Again, instrumental music that is recognizable as heavily influenced by Roma instrumental culture is to be found all over the European continent, as are the Roma. What differentiates Hungarian folk song, then, is the obvious fact of place. Hungarian folk song can be placed in Hungary; it is sung and played by Hunga­ rians, by and large, and it is also valued and prized as a Hungarian artefact of what could be viewed as a pre-existent substance, a common property of the many various groups of people living on the European continent. It is to be located in Hungary, and that is the single most important factor in its differentiation. This is not a statement that places Hungarian folk music in a privileged position; it is statement of fact.7 Included in this fact are what could be termed ‘meaningful regional experiences’, and the value that is placed upon them within that region. These meaningful regional experiences would appear to be significant to the region itself, and the concept of meaningful regionality important to a concept of being Hungarian, but not subject to research documentation. Some observations regarding folk song collection and research would include such aspects as the following: • Recording activity since that of Bartók and Kodály has proceeded in waves, that is, a first period of recording before World War I followed by one shortly after, a second in the mid-forties, and a third in the late fifties to early seventies. Each group was relatively self-contained, and there is little evidence that ‘returning groups’ coordinated their recording activities with that of Bartók and Kodály; rather they added their findings to ‘what was already there’ in the archive. In other words, it would seem that work has been conducted for the most part as a collecting activity, without control over the location and centralization of a given melody, or melodic/textual combination. Because of this factor, it is impossible to authoritatively assign specific melodies to regions. 7 

For the relationship of geography to identity, also the priority of medieval writers, see Braudel, The Identity of France, and Anderson, ‘Fernand Braudel and National Identity’, p. 270: ‘Spatial determinations are the most ancient and important of all.’ Braudel contrasted the ‘material civilization of world capitalism’ with place, per se, but according to Anderson, did not use comparative methodology, to Braudel’s detriment, as Anderson states: ‘The different European contexts which ought logically to have given relief to the specifically French experience are all virtually missing’ (p. 270). Anderson emphasizes commonality rather than French peculiarity/ particularity.

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• In reviewing all of the melodies for one type (which was supposedly taken into consideration for the creation of the types upon which Dobszay and Szendrei’s Catalogue of Hungarian Folksong Types is based), there are in many cases more variations within a single type than there are between types. It is possible that significant variation from either, as has been expressed, ‘a great deal of ornamentation’ to essential structure has been accommodated within a single type. It is also possible (as is the case with sequence variation) that some melodies attract variation; other melodies remain extremely stable through wide regional distances and time. • There is much variation and divergence in transcription itself. Each of many transcribers through the years has presented his or her own priority, from sketchy, structural transcriptions to extremely detailed ones. If one must, in the final analysis, go then to the recordings, what is the purpose or necessity of the transcriptions at all? The answer to this, of course, is that one receives, first and foremost, an impression of the transcriber from the transcription, secondarily, the melody. This is a further variable in the project of linking specific melody to region, or even citing specific reasons why a given melody is distinctively and authentically Hungarian, a project made even more difficult by the fact that melodies are interwoven structurally and interface with each other. • Functional harmonic analysis, developed by Hugo Riemann during the early years of the twentieth century, appears to be most effective as an analytical model for the folk melodies. This is an interesting concurrence of analytical system and folk music collection. What have later become known as ‘primary functions’ in the twentieth century are endemic to European folk song. Based on this observation, with the exception of melodies evidencing strong association with medieval hymns and sequences, as well as cantus, most of the recorded melodies date from the late eighteenth to the turn of the nineteenth/twentieth centuries. • Further, there is actually a limited number of stylistic characteristics that are repeatedly found in the entire collection, namely, figurae such as melodic sequence on the third above or the seventh degrees of the scale, dividedoctave structure such as g d g or the reverse, and the four-line chunk (see Appendix IV). In other words, it is by no means a limitless collection, and there are not strong regional differences, as has been assumed and, accordingly, advanced. Often in the extensive literature cited above, in ascribing one song to a certain region, an

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indication that it is ‘found’ in a given place gives the impression that the melody is individual to, as well as indicative and characteristic of, that region. This is almost never the case; rather, in comparison, common characteristics with even widely divergent locations can be found. Needless to say, it is possible to write that a transcription of a given song was recorded in a certain location, but no general conclusions can be drawn from this remark unless one is certain that the example occurs nowhere else. Further, every recording is completely different in nearly every aural respect; yet there is a common collection, a way of using material, that contributes to the flavour or the taste of the composition. This is also true of the texts. Nearly all of the texts differ from each other, that is, texts have been recombined or recomposed. This is a problem common as well to sequence research; general conclusions have been drawn from single instances, with regard to both region and melody. Composers, both of music that has been notated and of what is considered to be folk music, have recognizable figurae, or features that are particular to their compositions. The majority of the material, however, is common to the majority of other compositions. Finally, what differentiates folk song is not regional identity or melodic structure, but rather the highly significant factor of vocal versus instrumental music, the instrumental techniques employed, coupled with performance idiosyncracies. This is true, as well, for notated music, another factor that fuses the musical milieu of central Europe into one unified musical culture. What can be named ‘performative differences’ include the following: • lightly touched adjacent tones; • tone/chromatic tone ambiguity; • timbre of the voice, absence or presence of vibrato, expressive gesture, inherent willingness and power to communicate musically, mastery of material to be performed; • tempo differences within a given composition, portamento; • addition of microtones; • age of performer, intended and unintended characteristics; • variation of actual pitch, vocal mannerism, noise factor; • each singer/instrumentalist reinforcing a different structural feature. All of these performative features can be applied, as well, to the written musical culture and the interpretative aspects required for performance.

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The representation of a musical culture often differs from the culture itself. In a recent book concerning the final years of the Habsburg Empire, and the role of Archduke Wilhelm von Habsburg within its declining hegemony, historian Timothy Snyder has brought out the importance of both self-identification and the place of the will in assuming, as well as prioritizing, national identity. Snyder emphasizes how flexible national identities at this time indeed were. Wilhelm himself was born an Austrian, raised to be a Pole, chose to become Ukrainian, served by choice in the Wehrmacht as a German, became Ukrainian again when disillusioned by the Nazis, and forfeited his life as the result of that decision; his brother Albrecht chose to be a Pole. Such choices may be difficult, even impossible, to imagine today, in which national identity has become not only a classification, but a place within a globalized commercial enterprise or an innate, genetically linked ‘ethnicity’.8 Snyder writes: The ability to make and remake identity is close to the heart of any idea of freedom, whether it be freedom from oppression by others or freedom to become oneself. In their best days, the Habsburgs had a kind of freedom that we do not, that of imaginative and purposeful self-creation.9

Nothing could illustrate this ‘imaginative and purposeful self-creation’ more immediately than the will and ability to choose how a piece of music will, at a particular time and place, be performed. Hungarian folk music of the twentieth century is just that, the music of the twentieth century. It is not a residue of medieval folk culture, a pre-Mongolian, perhaps pagan past. There are, in fact, no intervening stages, although certainly the pre-existent substance of cantus, to be found all over the European continent, is appropriated and used, as well, in Hungary. What is Hungarian, specifically, is indicated by characteristic figurae. Secondly, instrumental music has been a vital force within the unity of musical expression throughout central Europe, but again, this is not peculiar to Hungary. What is particular to Hungarian folk music is the passion for collection, from one generation to the next, throughout the twentieth century.

8 

‘Ethnicity’ is not medieval habitus which is much more comprehensive, involving primarily will and way of life. 9  Snyder, The Red Prince, quoted, with commentary also included here, in Applebaum, review of Snyder, The Red Prince, pp. 50–51; cf. Roth, The Radetzky March; Musil, The Man without Qualities.

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ne of the team of folk music researchers who had been working for the past three decades on folk music in the Institute for Musicology, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and had been extremely productive in her scholarly output opened her remarks at the meeting of the International Council for Traditional Music, 2004, by stating, ‘I am speaking about Hungarian Music because I know it best and above all, because there is still a lot new to say about it.’1 What is ‘new’? Why study Hungarian folk music? What remains to be said after over a century of assiduous collecting, classifying, and discussing Hungarian folk music? First, rethinking well-known questions such as how to manage this vast resource.2 In fact, a consideration of folk music as a resource is also a question that has been brought up as a discussion of what material consists, whether an equivalence exists between unseen and visible material, and how, important as it is, this question has changed through many centuries of commentary and ideology. Many of these considerations, arising from a question of material itself, such as nationalism — ethnic ‘substance’ and its representation — are some of the most important issues in the world today. 1 

Cf. Reuer and Tari, Perspektiven der Musikethnologie, especially, ‘Aufgaben und Ziele der Ethnomusikologie aus ungarischer Sicht’, pp. 15–16. 2  Gammon, ‘One Hundred Years of the Folksong Societies’, in discussing the status of folk music studies, asks a well-known question, ‘What is folk music?’ (p. 25). The answer to another question of what to be done with folk music has also remained the same for more than a century, namely, collect it.

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This chapter will summarize a view of music in its disciplinary activity as illustrative, exemplary medium for understanding cultural values as well as bringing into relief basic principles. Over and over again, the topic of cultural values as a basis for understanding national specificity as a reality and context for the music it had produced introduced itself in cogent, clear ways that also greatly influenced my daily life in Budapest. Often the topic confronted me with urgency, as in the following vignette that reinforces what has been previously described, namely, the deeply sustained cultural feature of aggregation as basis, not only for a passion for collection, but for a national identity at large. The conceptualization of ‘private space’ and of an attitude towards silence are some of the most basic, yet difficult to trace and define, cultural realities that can separate out a national consciousness. Let me illustrate. Full of energy and plans to work, I set myself up in the archive in order to compare my work of last year with the transcriptions in the files. In came one colleague, bustling about, taking drawers of types out, sliding them in and out, reaching for boxes from the top of a ladder. Another colleague typed furiously on the computer. Still another sat down with earphones and began comparing tempi with a loud mechanical metronome, starting and stopping, starting and stopping. Two other colleagues came in and began to discuss their projects with one another. The small place was a beehive of activity, intermittent motion, and irregular noise factors. ‘Enough of this’, I said to myself; ‘I’ll return another time’, and off I went to the institute library to read recent periodical literature not so easily found in the United States. As I was commending myself on having done, under the circumstances, exactly the right thing with some of the few hours that remained for me and my work in Budapest, the librarian came in and began to type on a manual typewriter. It was a typical day, loaded for me, as a Westerner — accustomed to and needing private space and silence — with obstacles that seemed to stand in the way of my not only finishing my work, but having some new and interesting ideas about it. It was not a matter of space: there were ample single listening rooms, and the building that houses the Institute was both commodious and not at all filled to its capacity. This was simply an entirely different way of proceeding, a modus operandi, but an entirely different culturally based attitude towards the dynamics of people together, and the requirement as well on the parts of Westerners for space, privacy, and silence, as well as solitude, in order to, as one might put it, ‘do serious work’. Inconceivable, it seemed, to my Hungarian colleagues, who, apparently, gravitated to, were pulled by, an invisible magnet to one another, together, in the same room, where all of the files I needed to work with were located. I have commented on this attribute, as a

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taste, an attraction, for aggregation, and a passion for collection, elsewhere in this volume, for the reason that it constituted for me such a clear example of an utterly basic, dispositive difference between this portion of central Europe and the milieu in which I personally had been raised and educated. Library culture speaks to inner, perhaps hidden, cultural attitudes and values that are mostly taken for granted, rarely verbally articulated. But there was another factor to be considered here. This particular cultural feature, a factor, perhaps, of what one could describe as ‘national identity’, or at least ‘identity’, could not be explained solely by geographic region, national history, or language. It had primarily to do with attraction, with taste. It was, however, astonishing how deeply these cultural attributes penetrated into daily life. There was, however, another dimension. Following the First World War, Hungary joined the league of small nations, to which group Switzerland, at least since the thirteenth century — and to the present day — belongs. People who live in small countries have less time to themselves. All of their aunts, uncles, cousins, siblings, to say nothing of their parents, as well as their school friends — primary school right on to university who become then, in some cases, professional colleagues — were close at hand, with births, marriages, birthdays, name days, deaths, and anniversaries to celebrate on a regular basis. Nearly all of my friends and acquaintances in Basel and in Budapest are too busy for me most of the time — absolutely at their maximum of social contact because too many relatives live nearby. This, of course, makes times we do have to spend together special, planned well in advance; but it also means that people from small countries do not, as a rule, expand a sphere of association beyond school days. They live out their lives with, on the one hand, a sphere of cross-generational relatives placing obligations upon them throughout their lives and, on the other, people of their own generation with whom they went to school. All of this, it seems to me, was typified by a remark made one evening by a new Swiss acquaintance. She and I had, during the course of a dinner party to which we had both been invited, engaged in an interesting and warm conversation. At the close of the evening, I remarked upon this fact, adding that I would be pleased if we could meet again someday in the town for coffee, or that I would enjoy inviting her and her husband some evening to our apartment for dinner. With a pleasant smile on her fact, she said, ‘I’m sorry, but we have enough friends.’ People in Budapest, too, have enough friends, and as my returns to Hungary became a regular yearly occurrence, I noticed more and more how much these two small countries had in common and that, although divided somewhat by

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relative affluence and standard of living, degrees of purchasing power, making possible more opportunities for travel, the two small nations also were both situated in the very centre of Europe. Further, many people in small countries have the same name. I looked for my landlord in the Budapest telephone book and found three pages of him, both first and last names, in the same combination. It is also true of both Switzerland and Hungary that one often refers to a person by the last name first, since there are so many with the same family name. What can be said about this? Cultural difference is not what one might expect, not necessarily what has been postulated, either historically or recently, by ‘nationalism’, as geographically/nationally, racially, and linguistically defined. I noticed that although most people in Switzerland and in Hungary spoke completely different languages, as the result of the fact that they were both living in small, land-locked nations, more and more common features presented themselves as I became better acquainted with each. Some of these common features were quite obvious, such as overt attempts to reasonably differentiate themselves from neighbouring countries, many of which are considerably larger; here the number of surrounding nations with which Hungary shares a border should be emphasized. We have mentioned what amounts to a ‘Geheimsprache’, a secret language, that is known, really, in all of its nuances only to themselves, since it is almost impossible to speak either Hungarian or Swiss German without a trace of an accent unless one has been born there. These are languages for the initiated that immediately separate the native-born from others, since only an extremely gifted and intensely motivated linguist can learn to speak either with fluency, together with an attitude that, although not inhospitable, expressly keeps foreigners out. Much has been made of the Swiss ability to learn languages and their energy to do so, but the permeation of this trait into the broader spectrum of Swiss society, I would imagine, is just about the same as in other countries, that is to say, language mastery is indicative of educational level and social standing. In the case of Swiss Germans, the ability to express themselves easily, fluently, and with a certain amount of zest in ‘High German’ (so-called ‘Schriftdeutsch’) is most often linked to a university education. Otherwise, a pride in speaking a language that the rest of the world neither understands, cares to learn, nor would find of any value whatsoever in learning is, in both cases, conspicuous. It is not so much that Swiss German in all of its nuances (as Basel-Deutsch compared to Basel-Land Deutsch or, even further afield, BernDeutsch) is ‘related to German’ or that Magyar is ‘Finno-Ugric’ (a relationship even more tenuous); rather, that both are languages only for the initiated, and one must evidence a long-term commitment to the linguistic culture before

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one begins to deal with either. The more frequent use of diacritical markings than in languages to which both are at least superficially related requires still more attention from the outsider. This secret language extends to work in the archive, since most of the notes giving essential information for the recordings and transcriptions are in handwriting that is, unless one has actually worked with the researchers involved, cursory and illegible. Not only is one dealing with a secret language, but a secret culture. There are other analogies between these small, land-locked countries. They eat well; they sleep well. They speak often, with exactitude and relish, about food. Simple, necessary pleasures are important. One notices a sense of the essential, as well as enjoyment, appreciation, and a good deal of success, with the elemental needs of daily life. Both Swiss and Hungarian beds are extraordinarily comfortable; the food that is actually grown in both of these countries is especially tasty, and it is the same food — potatoes, carrots, tomatoes, and grains, and in the summer, pears, apples, cherries, and apricots. These observations, in both cases specific to central Europe, involve two land-locked countries surrounded by other nations. They override considerations of political history or present situation, wealth, or language. The character of both countries is therefore drawn importantly from geographical position, and attractions related to place and size. Medieval authors noticed this, too, thus giving a further example of the usefulness of descriptive and analytical tools from a medieval thought-culture. From Isidore of Seville, through the medieval Genesis commentary tradition to Robert Grosseteste, the verdict is essentially the same. Place matters. Peoples are separated from one another according to where they are born. The world is not divided into race but into place.3 Other medieval conceptual tools for dealing with cultural difference include, as we have seen, a view of the unlimited opacity or ‘aggregation’ of ‘stuff ’ — of substance, both seen and unseen (such as sound), that can be contained, for example, in the ‘ensouled body’, differentiated and identified through the recognizable character of a ‘figure’. We have spoken of stuff, or pre-existent substance, contained and divided into chunks, 3 

Cf.  Robert Grosseteste in his Genesis Commentary (Hexaemeron, ed. by Dales and Gieben, pp. 19–21) who quotes and refers to Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, vi.x.1–2, xiv. iii.27–28 as well as Augustine, The City of God, xviii.9 (ed. by Hoffmann, ii, 277–78). Hegel also reiterates this point of view in his Philosophy of History, in which place is dispositive. The Greeks, for example, have historically been independent in their thinking because no central waterway (such as the Rhine River) unites them. See Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, ed. by Moldenhauer and Michel, especially the chapter ‘Geographische Grundlage der Weltgeschichte’, pp. 105–22.

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made recognizable by varied and diverse figurae that indicate differences (differentiae). All of these are medieval explanations of material and difference that find their most conclusive exemplification in music, as we have seen, the music of central Europe. What characterizes this musical culture? First, it is unified. In Budapest, they all play and sing Habsburg composers throughout the year, and further, perhaps not so obviously, folk music permeates concert life. The boundaries between high and low culture, concert and folk music do not reflect musical reality. Hungarian musical culture also defies boundaries between the young and old, city people and the countryside, and between professional and nonprofessional musicians. What Steven Friedson has described with respect to the African musical culture with which he worked for many years is true, as well, so far as I was able to discern, of Hungarian musical culture, that is, that everyone was expected on some level to make music, and into old age.4 Hungarian musical life is a composite culture. There are intrinsically crosscultural resonances, begging the question of ‘cross culture’. If one is to ask the question of ‘What is the “seat of this music’s power”?’, an answer is given by Friedson, namely, ‘to concentrate, focus, achieve, bring into actualization what is potential: the sheer joy of bringing to life through the eyes, ears, body; sources of energy’.5 These are also medieval answers, addressed to the basic issue 4 

Cf. Friedson, Dancing Prophets, pp. 110–11, 126: aggregation as propensity, ‘growing old together’, the expectation that one will remain musically active throughout life; that ‘everyone is expected to sing’, which also blurs distinctions between the individual and community, young and old. Reciprocity of communal musical experience requires something from each participant. The distinction between ‘concert life’ and whatever might be its opposite is particularly emphasized in the United States, essentially a nineteenth-century country, with communal institutions formulated after such were established in Europe. Dobszay, ‘Der Weg einer sapphischen Melodie in die Volksmusik’, also makes a point of the unity of a given music culture, with reciprocal influence between ‘Kunstmusik’ and ‘Volksmusik’. 5  Friedson, Dancing Prophets, p. 39, who continues ‘the bodily sensations induced by drums sounding, the rhythmic modes of the visbaza spirits, the dynamic power of call and response singing, the intensity of clapping augmented by concussion sticks, and the sound of trance dancing itself are more than acoustical phenomena; for healers and their patients they are physically felt, substantial sources of energy.’ Music reveals the world of causes and names for positive force versus confusion, prevention of clarity which is what witchcraft ‘accomplishes’ (p. 54). Witches have no ‘music’ which is a medieval theme, namely, that music orders, organizes, provides identity from chaotic, uncontained mass (ordo). Friedson expands upon the organizing force of music (p. 113): ‘When I dance now, I have a pattern in my head. When you dance without a particular pattern, your head is not settled. The pattern settles the head’, which is Augustine’s thesis in De musica.

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of the substantiality of unseen substance. According to her own account, the Australian musicologist-anthropologist Catherine Ellis took the vice chancellor of her university to the fringes of the ‘Out-Back’ to observe the ‘Aboriginals’. He came back, very much impressed with what he thought was their ‘spirituality’. It seems that, in this case, as well as with Malawi musicians described by Steven Friedson above, rather than spirituality, the African musicians, as well as the native Australians, were all able to do something with, develop, and understand the substantial realities of unseen substance that totally escape most twentieth-/twenty-first-century Westerners in industrialized, developed, outwardly materially affluent countries.6 Augustine, for example, wrote that pulse was a ‘piece of material’ containing the potentiality of actualization rather than a ‘performance’ to be practised.7 Collecting is by nature unsystematic. One takes what one can get, what comes one’s way — what presents itself. The foundation of the collection in Budapest was the collection of Bartók and Kodály, who did not know what they would find, and who took what they could get. This is very apparent in the folk music archive, which, for obvious reasons, was centred in one place, dur6  This is frequently to be observed in mistranslation, as well as misunderstanding, of what Augustine wrote and meant, as, for example, on the subject of ‘material’. Notions of a more recent ‘materialism’ have intervened, so that writers commenting on Augustine both tend to excise short phrases from his writings in order to make a point and to leap from one treatise, dealing with a delimited subject matter — such as Augustine’s commentary on Genesis, the Gospel of John, or his treatises concerning Free Will or the Trinity — to the other. Although the subject is comprehensive, with a vast literature, and one that has been treated extensively above, it is perhaps useful to note that various doctrines of ‘materialism’ from the seventeenth century to the present share a common differentiation. The seen, visible world and its ‘matter’ as evident to the sense of sight in the phenomenological world around us is regarded as ‘material’, whereas the unseen world of concepts, ideas, emotions, educational experiences, memories, and most importantly for Augustine, sound, time, and motion, are ‘immaterial’ or non-material. This point of view has influenced both translation and interpretation of Augustine’s writing, as, for example, Rist, Augustine, pp. 93–95, within a discussion of Augustine’s view of body and soul. Augustine, however, in the group of treatises written at the time of his conversion on the subjects of the soul, the order that exists amongst the disciplines, and that concerning music, presents a point of view that is to be found in the Timaeus of Plato in its Latin translation and commentary by Chalcidius (see above). Augustine places the seen world in a directly proportional relationship with the unseen as co-equivalent, containing the same properties and propensities for development. 7  See also Friedson, Dancing Prophets, p. 77, describing dance that consisted of delimited ‘bursts of intense energy’, or Augustine’s self-contained ‘pulse’. Steven Friedson has called attention to biological factors, as well, in response, choral response, and aggregation as propensity, for example, in ‘growing old together’ (Dancing Prophets, pp. 110–12).

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ing a certain period. If one wanted to, or in fact could be, ‘scientific’, it would have been necessary to canvas the entire country simultaneously to note exactly which ‘folk melodies’ were present, where, and to do this at regular intervals. Collecting, therefore, is analogous to what individual singer-composers themselves do, namely, appropriate what is there. There are two important aspects to this. First, the medieval concept of ‘pre-existent substance’ is useful in describing what has taken place. Secondly, something must be done with this pre-existent substance, since it tended to be massive, disorderly, lacking, not only in organization, but in specificity, as well as in identity. In other words, one must apply containment and construction, achieving some articulation of what is there. Several constructs have emerged during the course of the twentieth century to both deal with and explain Hungarian folk music. These are treated historiographically, as well as musically, in the preceding chapters. But the medieval answer is that one can identify ‘ways of moving’ or modi that are distinguished by differences (differentiae) indicated in dispositive, defining, linear ways by figurae. Why then are medieval answers important to the questions at hand? One reason for this is that music was a material discipline throughout the Middle Ages. Exactly these questions of mass, material, the nature of substance, and what to do with it were the questions raised within the discipline of music. What is music? What is material? What is the habitus of music?8 And what is the nature of unseen substance in general? How can one divide and control by measuring, namely, identifying such elusive substance as sound, motion (modi, passiones, affecti), and, especially, time? In an earnest, disciplined, systematic manner, medieval writers, building on a heritage of writing from Antiquity, particularly as seminal works were translated from Greek into the Latin language, carefully deal with all of the questions more recently brought up in folk music research. We must listen to their voices. Through the ‘ministry’ discipline of music,9 mentality is made plain — an inner landscape of previous centuries, other continents, other times, but also 8  Neither Pierre Bourdieu nor any other recent philosopher invented or discovered the term habitus; rather, a large literature on the topic exists from Late Antiquity throughout the Middle Ages, as well as centuries of commentary on the nuances of this expression, as used, for example, by Cicero, Quintilian, and Boethius. Habitus constitutes a vast medieval topic. 9  Grosseteste, in his treatises on natural science, designates music thus; see van Deusen, Theology and Music at the Early University, especially the introduction, pp. xv–xvii, in which the questions are raised: What was music’s special ministry? What challenges did thirteenthcentury writers on music acknowledge and accept for themselves? What questions were important to them; what were the generating impulses to these questions; and how did answers find

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the inner cultural landscape of a people making its music: what it means to be a ‘people’, as well as the distinctiveness of its music, and the relationship between both. Music examples of this relationship are plain and potent. Music makes abstractions plain, because, as Augustine stated, we can actually do it, and, further, it is delicious. Throughout the Middle Ages, music was expressed, not in terms of abstractions, but in terms of people doing things, with different gestures, different clothing in different colours, giving forth the important principle of differentiae, as we observed in the examples from Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fonds latin 1118, c. 1000, a manuscript that may have been contemporaneous with the writing of Guido of Arezzo’s Micrologus (who describes modes, or manners of movement, in terms of people moving about and doing things). Medieval people understood that music made inner propensity, motivation, and talent or capacity plain. People in the past, as in another culture, come up with different explanations. We can learn from them, not so much in terms of a search for origins or a historical narrative development, but because their ideas are worth considering for their own sake. An analogy would be travel today. One can take along one’s own culture, or one can try to learn from another. One of the things one can learn from the past is a comparative lesson, namely, that we, mostly, have a narrow view of music today. Within medieval mental and educational culture music, rather than entertainment, background music, career and professional training, or popular expression, was taken absolutely seriously, was, in fact, on the forefront of the material and measurement or physical sciences. Quintilian wrote in his Art of Rhetoric that one could not learn to communicate unless one understood music. Augustine in the fourth century wrote that nothing could truly be understood without the exemplification of underlying principles in music. Medieval culture took him seriously. It appears that, for these people, understanding and performance in music were unified. Music was an exemplary discipline precisely because one actually did it; one learned through doing, filling one’s lungs with air and singing individual tones within a continuity, experiencing change, transformation, and motion, as well as the differences in motions as one sang and played. One also experienced sympathy and antipathy, attraction and distaste, even disgust, as one sang certain songs. So the unseen became experiential; through experience came understanding. application in music, the field of their specialized understanding? A society of concepts will, in the end, be the result, in which each concept possesses a separate, distinct format, but altogether they produce an aggregate of powerful ideas — ideas that changed the complexion of Western music as well as Western intellectual civilization.

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All of these explanatory tools were in place for centuries. We, too, can appro­­ priate them, using them to explain and understand the exemplification of the human spirit, geographical location, and particular, distinguishing features together within a multifaceted composite that comprises the rich resource offered by Hungarian folk music. There are some basic questions and observations, such as why indeed should medieval, and particularly thirteenth-century, insights concerning the compositional process be applied to folk song. Firstly, it appears that the very problems that engendered much organized discussion in the thirteenth century, as a carefully worked-out problem-solving apparatus became available especially in the Latin translations of Aristotle’s Metaphysica and Physica, are the very problems that must be dealt with within the folk song material. The questions ‘they’ ask are essentially those asked by the folk song researchers, namely, what material is at hand, how can this material be reasonably classified, with what compositional method is one dealing, what are the components of these compositions, and what process does one see at work within the material at hand. These questions remain of interest throughout the Middle Ages, so that a descriptive and analytical terminology can be reactivated from these discussions. This terminology has been appropriated in the present volume, that is, concepts such as materia-substantia-natura-silva, modus, figura, differentiae, and cento/punctum. The concept of figura is of particular value, since figurae delineate, set up, and identify rhythmic impulse, arguably the most significant differentiating structural characteristic of a given melody. Figurae are also of much importance for calibrating change within motion, and this is also a seminal differentiation from the other material and measurement disciplines that discuss particular things (arithmetic) and relationship (geometry), as both of these disciplines deal with figurae without motion — in which instances (the figurae of number and diagram) motion has been, so to speak, pressed out of or extracted from figurae. Music uses figurae within ways or manners of moving, modi, delineating differences, differentiae. Figurae always indicate, that is, geometricize, substance, and so they do here, in their configurations and conjunctions, but within motional process and directionality. This is a fundamental, and quite amazing, difference between the mathematical sciences and the exemplary science of music. Modes of motion described in the thirteenth century identify basic characteristic rhythmic motions of the folk song. Another reason for this inclusion of medieval vocabulary and concepts is that there is a profound philosophical unity between the principal preoccupations or topics of discussion in the Middle Ages and those of the nineteenth century. This unity of focus, for example, with respect to material and its nature, prompted great collection/editorial projects such as that of Jacques

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Paul Migne, supported by Herder’s concept of preconceived material as folk song/Poesie — at the disposal of anyone who wished, and was able, to deal in some way with it. (Herder felt himself to have been misunderstood with respect to his perception of materia/Poesie, and indeed, by the early twentieth century, he was. He had never argued for leaving ‘pre-existent material’ as it was.) One way of dealing with pre-existent material was to classify it — place it into types. In speaking of pre-existent material, one needs to keep in mind what is actually there. Due to the tireless work of an interconnected group of Hungarian researchers, cataloguers, and scholars, the documentation at hand is considerable, but it is recent — nearly all of it from the twentieth century. Further, the catalogue of centones itself has been done by a group effort, a corps of known researchers/scholars, but also graduate students. Who has worked on this project at any given time can be documented, but the link between actual component part of the catalogue and a researcher’s identity cannot always be made with certainty. This was true in the Middle Ages as well. Large-scale projects such as the entire body of cantus for the entire liturgical year or the complete commentary on the Bible, the Glossa ordinaria, were most likely group projects — and one can have in mind some reasonable suspects — but the identities of who contributed what remains, with the best of effort, still unknown. Furthermore, an additional commonality exists in that sustained research over a large corpus, such as the medieval Latin sequence or central European folk song, indicates a chronology of topics and methodological directions throughout the twentieth century, and there is a parallel chronology for both sequence and folk song research. One wonders what changes would have eventuated if the career component — the necessity on the parts of professional academics to constantly produce new books and articles as well as personal ambition — could have been removed, and written research could have also constituted a record of perplexities, with at least partial resolutions to these perplexities, rather than ideological certainty, one trend after the other. Perhaps one would also have taken a closer look at the music and texts themselves, rather than placing them in an evolutionary-development organic-genetic paradigm covered under the rubric of ‘style’ with attendant concepts of ‘layer’, ‘traces’, or ‘vestiges’ of much older but not extant melodic/textual material. I came to the conclusion in listening to the collected recordings in the Budapest archive that all of the melodies have a pronounced relationship to both instrumental practice and tonality. (This was in opposition to what is commonly assumed, namely that old style melodies contained reference to neither, and thus could be differentiated as such.) Finally, ‘types’ drew attention away from the melodies themselves, enclosing and delineating a corpus of folk song separated from

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non-folk song, and perhaps making the huge mass of recordings and transcriptions more manageable — more amenable to classification. This has been true, as well, of research within the large body of medieval sequences. Attention has been given to ‘formal characteristics’ such as ‘the double versicle form’ or to the ‘second epoch of sequence composition’, rather than the melodies and texts of the sequences themselves. Again we have medieval answers to basic questions. More than an antiquated repository of tools that have been superceded by modern solutions, medieval vocabulary understood within its contemporary context of education and mentality discloses insights that would have been impossible to arrive at in the twentieth century, but are nevertheless necessary, of great value, and should be taken seriously as voices from the past. The notion of pure, authentic, Homeric, folk substance, unpolluted by towns and cities, organized entertainment, Roma, industrialized technology (such as, for example, running water), composed music in the hands of Brahms or Liszt, or the infiltration of centuries of daily or weekly singing of psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs — a notion based on the appropriation of Herder’s writing funnelled into a search for the origins of a mythic nationhood — have all contributed one way or another to become a bedrock of ideological justification for folk song collection in the twentieth century. Milford Parry wrote, as summarized by George Herzog in the foreword of Bártok’s and Lord’s SerboCroatian Folksongs: If we wanted to form a picture of the great Homeric chants and how they were performed, we should observe the life of folksong where it has best survived today, i.e. on the Balkan Peninsula. Heroic epic songs of Yugoslavia, ‘men’s songs’ come nearest in that region to the type of tradition which was probably the foundation of Homeric epics. […] In addition to the epics, many ‘women’s songs’ — lyrical songs — were collected; these are less outstanding in the historical and literary perspective […]. Research on the music of the collection was for a long time hampered by the unavailability of a real connoisseur of the folk music of eastern Europe. This was remedied when the late Béla Bartók came to this country.10

Here, two reasons for collection are given, that of appropriating pre-existent substance useful for compositional purposes (Bartók), and to find out ‘how music was sung in the mythic past’ (Parry and Albert Lord). Parry, summarized by Herzog, continues:

10 

Bartók and Lord, Serbo-Croatian Folk Songs, p. ix.

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The patient search conducted by Mr. Bartók and his colleague, the composer Zoltán Kodály, soon revealed that what had been accepted as Hungarian national music, through the effusive Rhapsodies of Liszt and Brahms which followed in the wake of the sparkling ‘alla Ungharese’ movements by Haydn and others had little to do with the folk themselves. It was merely an inflated elaboration of the popular entertainment music of the town, propagated by Hungarian gypsies. But the countryside still possessed an entirely different body of old melodies, simple and sturdy, practically unknown in the Hungarian cities. […] Under the influence of the Hungarian peasant tunes, Bartók and Kodály, in the first decades of the century, began to develop a new national school of composition.11

In this pure, authentic folk music, rhythm was of little consequence, since its patterns in eastern European music are free, very rich, and even diffuse; the basic structures are overlaid by a free, rubato performance and luxuriant ornamentation […]. But the details of this ornamentation and of the plastic fluctuation of time and of intonation were caught and notated by the author, as in other transcriptions of folk melodies with an exactitude practically photographic. South Slavic folk music has an especial appeal. This may well be due to the contrast between the essential simplicity of its basic materials and the passing quality of life achieved through an abundance of expressive devices, including ornamentation.12

It is uncommonly difficult to translate into words what music substance contains. One can have full empathy with Parry in attempting to describe the music material, its transformation by the syllables with which tones were paired and to which tones were bonded, as well as all of the variables of actual performance, both vocal and instrumental. Nevertheless, these passages bring together a coalition of late nineteenth- / early twentieth-century ideological commonplaces as a reaction, among other factors, to industrialization: that towns, the broad category of ‘entertainment’, and Roma were all responsible for infiltrating, and essentially spoiling, pure, authentic, germane expression of the folk, irrespective of the fact that central Europeans have for many centuries lived predominantly in towns, that there are towns at regular intervals all over central Europe, that ‘entertainment’ is primarily carried out in groups (of the folk), and that Roma not only can be found in the countryside but are an obvious component of the total folk. Further, however, this collection of ideological emphases excludes what is a firm basis for considering ‘origins’, that is, the 11  12 

Bartók and Lord, Serbo-Croatian Folk Songs, p. x. Bartók and Lord, Serbo-Croatian Folk Songs, pp. xii–xiii.

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daily cantus, hymns, and sequences that constituted the life of the folk in this part of the world for nearly a millennium. This view of pure folk substance is basically and essentially a-religious, avoiding the reality of music/textual traditions that must be taken into consideration. Daily life was interwoven with faith, expressed as well in the large collections of sequences and cantiones that increase rather than vanish during what is considered to be post-medieval centuries. Further, these ideological thrusts are based on oppositions: composed music versus folk music, towns versus countryside, authenticity versus adulteration, natural versus artificial, pure versus derivative, positive versus pejorative, the genuine people versus Roma, and so on. It is remarkable how these dichotomies not only have survived for the last century, but by repetition have become accepted doctrine, constituting implied underlying research agendas. If one, however, dispenses with the cleft between categories of composed and folk music and, by so doing, is relieved of the burden of causality, it can be seen that both categories participate in a music environment, using the same building materials such as sound, time, and movement. Dissipated dichotomies result in disappearing agenda-driven arguments. What can take their place? One answer to this question is the use of the past as a conceptual laboratory for the present. Medieval terminology and conceptual orientations provide us with tools. Music made known the structures not only of the physical world around us, but of the invisible world of unseen substance, best exemplified in sound. Music, situated between what could be seen and quantified and the invisible substance of the soul, not only made abstractions such as particularity, relationship, and movement plain, it revealed the internal substance of what peoples were made of: deep-seated properties perfected by situation, responses, influences both from within and without — all of the intangible features of what we know as culture. Music, furthermore, made all of this plain because it could be made and heard. As one of the researchers in the Budapest archive put it, ‘There is much more to be found out about folk music.’ The insights of medieval writers grant us freedom from received structures of the recent past. Many writers have recently noticed the amazing lack of a reliable working knowledge of the history of Western music among ethnomusicologists.13 As the result of early specialization in a chosen geographical area and music culture, as well as a lack of adequate, thoughtful, training in Western music history, an almost superstitious collection of misinformation concern­­ing Western music is in many cases in place as a referent for comparative analysis — 13 

See Kolinski, review of Hood, The Ethnomusicologist.

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or simply as part of an ethnomusicologist’s musical world historical view. What substitutes for reflective study of what is known concerning Western music is a certain mastery of the least appropriate portion of it — namely the typical training in functional harmonic analysis that all conservatory undergraduate students not only receive, but seem particularly adept at assimilating, since functional harmonic analysis was conceived to aid music students to memorize vertical harmonic structures within so-called forms. Functional harmonic analysis is of no use whatever — in fact, with great difficulty it must be unlearned — if one wishes to work, not only with non-Western music, but with early Western music as well.14 Drill in functional harmonic analysis may accomplish one goal — a security of music visualization as an aid to the memorization of frequently encountered harmonic patterns, particularly of nineteenth-century piano music (and as such selects out piano majors who do best at it). What is problematic is the rigidity of music mentality that harmonic analysis and form inculcate in postulating a simplistic norm to which all other sonorous combinations are related. Conceived and aggressively promulgated during the first generation of the twentieth century, functional harmonic analysis and form have constituted the core of music pedagogy in conservatories throughout the world at just the time when both tonal harmonic analysis based on function and their inclusion within forms were irrelevant, not only for the music that was being composed at that time, but also for the emerging disciplinary studies of world music cultures. In summary, what can be learned from medieval analysis of music material? Firstly, the medieval conceptualization of mode is that modes (manners of moving) impose differentiation and individuation upon material substance. This construction (artificialis) upon otherwise unlimited, possibly disorderly, material (materia-substantia- natura-silva) not only makes plain the distinction between nature (what is ‘there’) and artifice (what one does with what is there), but calls forth the entire question of properties with potentiality and the expression, or perfection, of these properties. Materia is potentiality, or ‘pre-existent substance’, that seems to demand not only to be collected but to be expressed. Composition consists of chunks of material placed together. Herder’s concept of Poesie, that is, lyric substance, is essentially a medieval conceptualization of material with potential which can be appropriated and used. His interest in and writings concerning Poesie did not constitute a rediscovery of medieval concepts, but a profound philosophical unification of those terms/concepts which 14 

It is debatable whether cantus can be classified as early, since it has constituted the musical background of composers well into the twentieth century.

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absolutely preoccupied medieval writers: materia, motion within materia as well as the contrast and conjunction between inner/outer, external figura and inner substance. From this, that is, both medieval and Herder’s point of view, Hungarian folk song and cantus can both be explained as constituting a repository of material — a stockpile. As such, the following observations have been made concerning folk song during the past century: • Folk song is there. • It is there to be collected into collections (collection was also important for Herder). • It is available, known, in some ways present to most. • It is natural, unrefined (in contrast to mannerism). • It belongs to/is sung and played by natural people — usually people who can be identified as living ‘close to nature’. This distinction between natural and industrialized people becomes an increasingly important distinction during the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and is expressed principally in the German language. One implication is that this folk song material is an indication of emotionally and spiritually healthy inner life, not only of individuals, but of national groups — even the basic life-force of a nation. • Folk song is voice — the lively voice of the people. • Folk song provides the germ and substance of great art. • It refers to large groups, lower classes, country folk, as well as nationalities, but as soon as one breaks this categorization down from an idealized, even fantasized whole into component parts, one finds it full of contradictions, such as country folk. In some situations, as in Australia, the country folk are represented by large-scale sheep and cattle farmers who live on properties as landholders often of wealth and distinction. • Folk music is simple. • Folk music is ‘everybody’s favorite music’.15 15 

See Blacking, ‘Deep and Surface Structures in Venda Music’, p. 103, in which Blacking argues that folk music may be less open to creative expression. Katalin Paksa in her article, ‘Line Starting Ornaments in Hungarian Folk Song’, referring to Rajeczky, ‘Parallelen spätgregorianis-

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• There seem to be discernible orientations within the folk song research itself. Some research evidences propensities for ideological constructs such as adherence to evolutionary positivism or a historical-genetic developmentary construct. That notwithstanding, most researchers agree, at the end of the day, that folk music is generally for social purposes and grouporiented occasions. The famous encouragement of Carl Philip Emmanuel Bach to communicate with oneself while playing the clavichord in solitude is not one of the characteristics of folk music. It should be mentioned, on the other hand, that a public concert is also a social occasion. • All of these characteristics can be found in cantus, as well as the sequence, in addition to other features mentioned as related to folk music, that is, pentatonic emphasis, extensory devices, variants, and ornamentation. All of the research directions of the past c. 120 years are common as well to both folk music and to research on the sequence. Alan P. Merriam has been quoted as stating: In my view, it is never too early to suggest hypotheses and lines of further inquiry. This is, after all the principle upon which science and the accumulation of knowledge is predicated. The building and subsequence destruction of hypotheses and principles always leaves us with more accurate and greater knowledge […] failure and subsequent corrections are a necessary part of procedure.16

Hornbostel claimed a strong opposition between post-medieval Western music and non-Western music with regard to the general direction of melodic move-

cher Verzierungen im ungarischen Volkslied’, brings out practices of melismata, added tones, and ornamentation shared by folk song, Roma music, and ‘art-songs’ of the nineteenth century, also with the comments, ‘Later Hungarian art-songs became increasingly syllabic, and ornamentation disappeared from folksong collections. Increasingly, fault was found in gypsy flourishes, and with the over-ornamented songs of village church cantors and old peasant women’; ‘Care is to be taken in order to prevent the tune of the song from being deteriorated by flourishes and other out-of-the-place and wrong notes so that its well-sounding accompaniment be clean, forceful, in harmony with the holiness of the place and the character of the organ’ (pp. 232–33). The distinction between sacred and secular, between folk, art, and Roma music increases during the course of the late nineteenth century, to be strengthened in the twentieth. Cf. collections of folk hymns in Katholikus Egyházi Énektár, ed. by Tárkány, with Zsasskovszky and Zsasskovszky. This habit of adding additional notes to hymn and gospel song tunes has also been prevalent within North American Protestant evangelical music through the 1970s. 16  Alan P. Merriam, ‘Ethnomusicology Revisited’, Ethnomusicology, 13.2 (1969), 223–24, quoted in Kolinski, review of Hood, The Ethnomusicologist, p. 146.

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ment.17 John Blacking, in addressing the problem of music description, maintained that no system of analysis was sufficiently powerful to explain what one could know intuitively as the result of actually experiencing a culture and essential differences within that culture. In cultural analysis, the interaction of musical and non-musical processes produced sonic order.18 The hypothesis advanced in this study of folk music construction is that medieval discussions of principles concerning the seen as well as the unseen material of sound provide a background for understanding not only medieval music, but also essential elements of Hungarian folk song. These are absolutely pivotal discussions, with questions, in the Middle Ages — as broadly interpreted as possible — and are also crucial issues today. I do not bring to this discussion, as a formidable group of Hungarian researchers have done, for all practical purposes, an inborn, inherent knowledge of both Hungarian culture and traditions and especially of the poetic nuances of the marvellously expressive — filled with lyric propensity and potentiality — Hungarian language, and one enters this discussion arena with humility and trepidation. Thus, one speaks, not only with one’s own voice, but with the insight of music as a centuries-old discipline, dealing with the physical realities of material and measurement — musica disciplina. What does music as a discipline have to say to us? Sound, most importantly, is material; modes differentiate within this material. Modes always constitute an artificial, formative, active dimension showing that artifice can also be mental processing. Further, modes differentiate emotive/affective material: ornamentation likewise for both cantus and folk song results from, and is indicative of, these differentiations involving emotive substance. Material, for both cantus and folk song, was and can be considered to be a fund or resource of potential material, a preconceived material to be collected and used. Herder’s view of collections of folk song as a poetic substance arises from the perceived medieval equivalence (silva) of spiritual/emotional or seen/physical substance based 17 

Cf. the discussion by Kolinski, ‘The General Direction of Melodic Movement’. Cf. Blacking, ‘Deep and Surface Structures in Venda Music’; List, ‘The Distribution of a Melodic Formula’, who states that certain melodies are ‘similar’, without specifying a methodology that would deal with this similarity (pp. 50–51), and considers that a particular melody or ‘formula’ itself is not diffused, rather, a ‘style’. Evidence for this point of view is the fact that the phrases of which the ‘melodic formula’ is composed are not always found in association but, like building blocks, can be found in association with other phrasal structures. This has been observed in both oral as well as written melodies, i.e. an essential characteristic of melodies in general is not related to either oral or written transmission. 18 

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on Chalcidius’s translation of Plato’s Timaeus and the reception of the Latin Physics of Aristotle in the early thirteenth century. Working with this pre-existent substance can be regarded, then, as placing self-contained chunks of this substance together in a manner (mode) befitting the person doing so, as well as the occasion. Whether the church cantor or the old peasant woman think of themselves as participating in a storehouse of material, the answer is probably yes, and then perhaps no, since obviously thinking about what one is doing, actually doing it, or composing — actually placing chunks together — are three quite different ways of dealing with process and cognition. Medieval authors thought long and hard about the unseen material of sound and what is an unseen substance within cultures. Their insights can be taken seriously, their outlook liberating, their vocabulary useful because it also teaches us to deal with words and concepts that put us in touch with a mentality that would never have otherwise occurred to us, and so teaches us to deal with ‘the other’ in productive, open inquiry.

Appendices

Appendix I Herder on Homer and Winckelmann: Selected Quotations, with Introduction, Commentary, and Notes Herder’s use of Winckelmann exceeds his quotation of Homer by more than twofold, and the superficiality of his allusions to Homer belies the fact that Herder not only knew Greek but actually translated Homer. His allusions to Homer are expressed in the most general of observations, often as repeated self-contained modules, leading to a reinforcement of his previously stated points of view, and refer, almost exclusively, to secondary literature. On the other hand, statements such as the following, found in his treatise Nemesis (the goddess of justice who punishes pride and arrogance), would indicate a closeness to Homer’s text or, at any rate, to Homer as an imagined person. In a context advocating ‘die wachsame, bescheidene Klugheit schützet, Unverstand und Übermut aber jederzeit sich selbst verderbet’, writes Herder, ‘Auch deswegen liebe ich dich, du guter alter Homer!’ (Also because of this I love you, you good old Homer!).1 Further, it is of interest to note the range of titles and subjects which Herder seizes as an opportunity to insert his concept of Homer, or within which he draws conclusions based upon his mention, finally, of Homer. These topics include the following: 1. direct references to medieval authors with respect to Homer, 2. the separation between Poesie and Prose, song and non-song, 1 

See also the indices to Herder’s Werke, ed. by Brummack and Bollacher, especially vols i and iv, from which the majority of quotations and references included are taken (hereafter ‘Frankfurt edition’ and cited in the text by volume and page); here, vi, 576.

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3. Homer and the poet’s influence (Wirkung) upon a nation, co-equivalence of music with Poesie, Gedichte, Seele 4. Homer and collection, both the importance of collection, of the collective unity (all particulars within an entirety, of this collective unity as an authentic, rudimentary, foundational source (Urwelt)), and collection as nature, rationale, methodology, and goal for folklore, 5. Homer and Geschmack (taste).2 It is valuable to note Herder’s own prophetic statement of what had been made of Homer: ‘er [Homer] sich selbst am meisten wundern würde, wenn er wiedererscheinend sähe, was man zu jeder Zeit aus ihm gemacht hat’ (‘Homer would himself be the most amazed if he could return and see what one today had made out of him’).3 This would also certainly be true of Herder himself, who helped himself to a well-known, pre-existent conceptual substance and worked with it, block by block, chunk by chunk. Herder, in fact, expresses this in his Ideen, which he described as built up of stones for a building which only centuries can finish (Berlin edition, vi, 32, 23–26: ‘Schon die Bildung unsers Wohnhauses und aller Stoffe, die es hergeben konnte, muss uns auf Hinfälligkeit und Abwechselung aller Menschengeschichte bereiten, mit jeder nähern Ansicht erblicken wir diese mehr und mehr’; note the similarity of these allusions to Alfred the Great’s mention, above, of commodious houses built for our use). This ‘stuff ’ is held together as mass with commensuration between Körper and Seele: ‘es heißt in der Körperwelt Schwere, in der Geisterwelt Trägheit’ (Berlin edition, vi, 34, 7–12) as well as ‘und den Menschen aus einem Stoff webte’ (Berlin edition, vi, 34, 33). What appears to be the case here is not a difference in substance or attributes between Körper and Seele — both have mass and weight — but rather between ‘uncontained’ and ‘bodily containment’ which is the basis of Aristotle’s differentiation in De anima. In this context, it is important to reflect on the education Herder himself would have had and what he would have known — the furnishings of his mind and the mental place from which he wrote his voluminous works. Herder would have gone through a school curriculum that had existed essentially unchanged in its structure since the Middle Ages and on to follow a career 2 

Quotations given are summarized, paraphrased, or more literally translated into English, depending upon the length and importance of the passage. 3  Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, in Werke, Auswahl in acht Teilen, ed. by Naumann (hereafter ‘Berlin edition’ and cited in the text by volume, page, and line number(s)), v, 86.

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path that again would have been indistinguishable from a medieval curriculum vitae. As a matter of fact, one is reminded of the parallels between the careers of Herder and the thirteenth-century teacher, administrator, pastor, and bishop Robert Grosseteste.4 For example, in addition to similar assignments leading, eventually, to responsible administrative posts, both were occupied their entire lives with learning languages and with translational projects, and both were voracious readers. Neither wrote a large-scale, comprehensive work, a Summa, summarizing all that they had written, the result, no doubt, of a large burden of administrative duties during the second halves of their lives, combined with wide-ranging, prolific writing and immense reading activity. Both were, during their own lifetimes and later, criticized for this, that is, that they wrote no all-encompassing, systematic summaries of their life’s work. Herder taught first in the cathedral school in Riga and was ordained in 1765, therefore obviously had studied philosophy/theology as the culmination of preparatory liberal arts disciplines in particulars, connections, and motion, with music as the exemplum of all three basic studies. He resigned his position in Riga, travelling to Strassburg, then became court preacher to the Count of Schaumburg-Lippe, Bückeburg, and, eventually, entered public life as the Generalsuperintendent of the Lutheran clergy, Weimar. All this is well known, but the implications of his education and his career have not been taken into consideration; rather, later concepts and points of view have been superimposed upon his writing. His publications during an essentially medieval career, that is, a comprehensive university training that enabled one to teach, preach, write, and work within ecclesiastical environments on many levels, and with changes in focus and directionality through a career, show that Herder was not perceived at the time as he is today, that is, as a Bahnbrecher and as a revolutionary, departing from the past. Furthermore, if his works had contained radical departures from what would have been conceptually available and comprehensible to those who read him as his contemporaries, his writings would not have been published during his own lifetime, nor would they have received such acclaim in that his Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache won a prize given by the Berlin Academy of Sciences. Further, in midcareer, Herder was appointed to a considerable administrative post within the Lutheran Church. What Herder did was to recombine concepts for which underlying assumptions had long been familiar. But Herder’s writings, in turn, became a pre-existent substance — an available material — to be used by those 4 

See the introduction to van Deusen, Theology and Music at the Early University.

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who could and chose to do so, appropriated, piece by piece, according to the connections one either viewed as necessary or desired to make. What did Herder actually do with the Middle Ages? He found building blocks, piled up, useful for the separation he was making between Dichtkunst — lyric, poetic substance — and what Dichtkunst was not, as well as its direct connection, hence, validity, to Homer. Connections — copulationes to appropriate a much-used Latin expression — between Poesie and Homer are to be found again and again, as we see in the passage to follow, from the Wirkung der Dichtkunst (Frankfurt edition, iv, 191–93: this sub-section is entitled ‘Wirkung der Dichtkunst unter den Arabern, die einen Teil Europas überschemmten’): Von jeher waren die Araber Dichter, ihre Sprache und Sitten war unter und zu Gedichten gebildet. Sie lebten in Zelten, bei immerwährender Bewegung und Veränderung, unter Abenteuern und dabei in sehr einförmigen, alten mäßigen Sitten, kurz, ganz in dichterischer Natur. Statt der Kronen rühmten sie sich der Turbane, statt der Mauern, ihrer Zelte, ihrer Schwerter statt der Schanzen und statt bürgerlicher Gesetze ihrer Gedichte. Auch haben diese von jeher mehr auf ihre Sitten gewirket, als jene vielleicht je auf Sitten wirken können. Welch ein Abdruck sind die Gedichte der Araber von ihrer Denkart, von ihrem Leben! Sie atmen Ununterwürfigkeit und Freiheit, sind voll des Abenteuergeistes, der Ehre zu Unternehmungen, des Muts, der so oft in unauslöschliche Rachsucht gegen die Feinde, als Treue gegen die Freunde und Bundsgenossen ausbrach. Ihr Ziehen und Entfernen hat den Abenteuergeist auch in der Liebe geboren, verliebte Klagen samt männlichem Mut, im Andenken seiner abwesenden Braut alles zu unternehmen. Lange vor Mahomed waren sie Dichter, als dieser ihnen aber seine poetische Religion, und sein Meisterstück von Dichtkunst, wo er alle Dichter zum Wettkampf vorrief, den Koran eben aus poetischer Kraft, und im dichterischen Glauben aufgeschwatzt hatte, wirkte er dadurch in ihre Sitten, wie in ihre Dichtkunst. Der Glaube an Gott und seine Propheten, die Ergebung in seinen Willen, die Erwartung des Gerichts und das Erbarmen gegen die Arme ward ihr Gepräge. Als sie von den Griechen alles annahmen, nahmen sie die Mythologie und den Geist griechischer Dichtkunst nicht an; sie blieben ihrer Poesie treu, wie ihrer Religion und Sitten: ja durch jene haben sich diese eben auch so lange unverändert und unverrückt erhalten. Als Araber einen Teil Europens überschwemmten und Jahrhunderte darin wohnten, konnten sie nicht anders als Spuren, wie ihrer Dichtkunst, so auch ihrer Wissenschaften und Sitten lassen. Durch jene, die Dichtkunst, haben sie vielleicht so viel gewirkt, als durch diese, die Wissenschaften, die wir fast alle aus ihren Händen empfingen, und die Sitten sind ein Gefolge von beiden. Es kam ein Geschmack des Wunderbaren, des Abenteurlichen in Unternehmung, Religion, Ehre, und Liebe nach

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Europa, die sich unvermerkt von Süden immer wieder nach Norden pflanzte, mit der christlichen Religion, und zugleich mit dem nordischen Riesengeschmack mischte, und einen sonderbaren Druck auf die Sitten der Völker machte, auf die er flog.

In this section, see Herder’s note to Thomas Warton’s History of English Poetry, with a ‘first preliminary dissertation of the origin of the Romantic fiction in Europe’ (Frankfurt edition, iv, 190): Artus und seine Tafelrunde, Karl der Große und die Pairs von Frankreich, ReenRitter-und Riesengeschichten entstanden: denn der Geist dieser Völker war zu massiv, als daß er den Duft der arabischen Dichtkunst rein fassen konnte, er mußte mit ihren Ideen vermengt, und glechsam in Eis und Erz gehüllet werden […]. Das Wunderbare ist die einzige Nahrung der Menschen in dem Zustande, da diese Völker damals waren […] die Kreuzzüge nach Orient sind deren gewiß Eine. So wie sie nun von Sitten und Sagen, mit Gründen der Religion unterstützt, sonderbar hervorkamen; so hatten sie wiederum auf die Sitten und Sagen Europens noch einen sonderbaren Einfluß. Nun flossen Erzählungen, Wunder und Lügen noch eines dritten Weltteils dazu: Norden, Afrika, Spanien, Sicilien, Frankreich, das gelobte und das Feenland wurden gepaaret. Der europäische Rittergeist wird morgenländisch und geistlich: es entstanden Heldengesänge, Abenteuer und Wundererzählungen, die aufs unwissende und abergläubige Europa zum Erstaunen wirken. Alles war voll Sagen, Romanzen und Romane. An den Höfen der Könige und in den Klöstern, auf Märkten und selbst in Kirchen wurden Gedichte gesungen, allegorische Ritterspiele, Mysterien und Moralitäten gespielt. Die Mönche selbst machten dergleichen und sie hatten des Volkes Ohr.  Da man damals sehr wenig Bücher hatte, da ausser geistlichen Gesängen und Legenden, Erzählungen der Art, die beste Seelenweide waren, und dazu eine so prächtige, wunderbare, fernhergeholte Weide: so stand alles und gaffte und horchte. Die Conteours, Jongleours, Musars, Comirs, Plaisantins, Pantomimes, Romanciers, Troubadours, und wie sie zu verschiedenen Zeiten, in verschiedenen Absichten und Örtern hiessen, waren damals Homere, sie sangen Gesta und Fabliaux fernher, und waren die Stimme der Zeiten. (Italics are Herder’s.)

Herder here describes medieval people as ignorant and superstitious, considering that he as well as his contemporaries occupied a much more advanced position, thereby bringing to the fore a division between what he purports to present as positive and what he actually writes. On the one hand, poetic substance is soulish substance but, it would seem, evidences itself only in categories such as ‘Knightly Entertainments, Mysteries and Moralities, Songs and Legends’ that only the ignorant and superstitious can fully appreciate, which are relegated to the category of ‘entertainment’ and, further on, ‘decoration’ (Schmuck). Herder here has built up a composite of conceptual modules, appropriating the chunk of ‘animated soulish substance = Poesie’ with the chunk of what he had been

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recently reading (as identified in his footnotes), that is, current French and English writers of the time. The juxtaposition of the chunks was fully persuasive for him (as also for Kodály). That, in his composition, these chunks bring together a unified composite obscures for him the fact that he has brought together two contrary positions that are, if not logically untenable, extremely precarious. Further, the view of medieval Europeans presented here contradicts what he knew from his own reading, and which he himself also contradicts. To continue (Frankfurt edition, iv, 190): Wenn es nun schon ziemlich ausgemacht ist, was das Feudal-Ritterwesen, Kreuzzüge und was zur Herrlichkeit dieses Zeitalters gehört für gute und nachteilige Wirkung auf die Sitten Europens gemacht haben: so ist der Schluß über die Poesie, die davon sang, ziemlich gleichförmig. Sie gehörte mit zur Pracht und zum Schmucke dieser Aufzüge, Einrichtungen und Abenteuer: die Dichter selbst zogen mit, und waren den Fürsten zur Seite.

Taking blocks of conceptual substance, as he states, from an acquisitive, even predatory, reading of Warton’s History of English Poetry with its preliminary dissertation ‘On the Origin of Romantic Fiction in Europe’, as well as Thomas Percy’s ‘Essay on the Ancient English Minstrels’ in vol. i of Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, Richard Hurd’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance, as well as the Mémoires de la chevalerie of ‘Mr. Curne de St Palaye’, vol. i: Histoire litteraire des Troubadours, Herder places together ‘blocks’ of conceptual substance, that is, Arabs, Greeks, Homer, medieval people, and processions of poets, maintaining that in each case, identity/nature is co-equivalent with Geist/Poesie. The copula, or connecting link, is tenuous, thus making the blocklike characteristic of his compositional method that much more obvious. Poesie is Geist (whatever is belebt) within Natur/Materia and can be recognized when far away. His emphasis is clearly Poesie and the separation of Poesie from whatever it is not. (Although Herder nowhere makes such a claim, what he implies is that Prose (or whatever the opposite of Poesie might be) is, on the other hand, close to us and present, the German Alltag.) Further, Herder himself appears to be more naive than the ‘medieval people’ he seeks to describe, in that he has taken quite literally whatever he has read, or believes he knows, concerning the Middle Ages — a literal-mindedness that stands in sharp contrast to the multilayered significances of medieval literature, and secondly, stands in contrast to the purpose of troubadour/trouvère literature in serving as exemplum to intellectual principles.5 The mental framework that provided both background and 5 

See, for example, van Deusen, ‘The Paradox of Privacy in the Love Songs of Adam de la

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motivational impetus to, for example, troubadour and trouvère composition is ignored in Herder’s concentration on lyric substance and Dichtkunst. In this case, as above, the compositional method of placing together self-contained conceptual building blocks — Herder’s legacy from a long past, a method with which he was familiar even to the point of unreflected usage — overrides a consideration of the mental framework that provided both background and motivational impetus to, for example, troubadour and trouvère composition. Herder is a composer — one who places objects of conceptual substance together, appropriately enough to his way of thinking and to the purposes at hand — not a philosopher, who looks for the hidden motivations for what happens; nor does Herder possess musical insight beyond the principles of particulars, connections, or the nature of musical motion that he would have learned at school. Taking such a literal point of view — carting off building blocks of conceptual substance without taking into consideration reasons why they were, after all, to be found in situ — leads Herder then to give the most superficial of reasons for their existence, namely, that they were ‘decorative’ (Schmuck). Poesie, on the one hand, is Herder’s priority, placing in his hands a coupling agent that brings together his disparate conceptual modules. In order for Poesie to serve this function, Poesie needed to be separated from whatever it is not — of which Herder was not so certain. On the other hand, however, in doing this, Herder has separated Poesie from life as it is lived on a day-to-day basis. Herder noticed this, too, since he remarks in many contexts that previously Homer had been read for advice in statecraft and how to conduct one’s life (as in Einfluss der schönen Wissenschaften, Frankfurt edition, iv, 225). Interestingly, Herder’s view of Poesie as Schmuck has been repeated, as a raison d’être for the inclusion of tropes and sequences within the Mass liturgy, and for conductus, especially within processionals to the present day. It would seem to be a topos for which one need not take responsibility, nor provide any rationale. As we see from the passage quoted above, Herder also makes the connection between procession and decoration. Another of many examples will serve to demonstrate Herder’s composition that consists of placing together blocks of substance connected, then, by the priority of poetic substance. In one context Herder writes (Wirkung der Dichtkunst, Frankfurt edition, iv, 197, concerning the Latin language):

Halle’; also borne out by Carol Symes’s recent study of the late thirteenth-century intellectual, political, and cultural climate of Arras, A Common Stage.

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Das Volk verstand diese Sprache [Latin] nicht, und aufs Volk konnte die Dichtkunst also nicht wirken […]. Gelehrte schrieben für Gelehrte, Pedanten für Pedanten, die meistens […] gar keiner Wirkung der Dichtkunst fähig waren. — Schrieb man also für die, so brauchte es auch keiner poetischen Talente, keiner Kraft und Absicht zur Wirkung.

Compare this with the following (Einfluss der schönen Wissenschaften, Frankfurt edition, iv, 224): Wo nämlich ist der sogenannte schöne Ausdruck so genau und natürlich das Bild und Kleid der Wahrheit, als bei ihnen, Griechen und Römern? Wer die Sprache der Natur lernen will, wo lernt er sie mehr, als bei ihren ersten Dichtern? Wer bürgerliche Weisheit sehen will, wo sieht er sie mehr als in ihrer Beredsamkeit und Geschichte? Homer war der erste Philosoph, und Plato sein Schuler: Xenophon und Polyh, Livius und Tacitus sind große Menschen.

Herder goes on to observe that an understanding of the biblical scriptures, necessary for a theologian’s education, is impossible to obtain without knowledge of the Greek and Latin authors he names. The coupler of Poesie/Natura/Geist serves to bring together seemingly antithetical statements. Herder’s blocks of ‘pre-existent substance’ are multifarious, as with all writers, but the importance of Herder’s knowledge of the biblical scriptures, as well, cannot be overemphasized. Even what has been regarded as the most groundbreaking and radical of his contributions, contained in his treatise on language, Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache, in which he explores basic sound substance which all human beings share from childhood (and especially in childhood), is a placing together and expression of two conceptual materials or building blocks: first, sound as material substance, limitless or delimited by conscious boundaries imposed upon it for particular reasons; and, secondly, the formulation in chunks, as seen for example within the structure of Psalm 8 (which Herder would certainly have known by memory). Herr, unser Herrscher, Wie herrlich ist dein Name in allen Länden! Besingen will ich deine Hoheit über dem Himmel mit dem Munde des Unmündigen und Säuglings Eine Feste hast du dir gegründet um deiner Widersacher willen, dass du zum Schweigen bringst den Feind und den Rachgierigen. [O Lord our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth! who hast set thy glory above the heavens;

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Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength because of thine enemies that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger.]6

1. Direct References to Medieval Authors Bei den meistern sieht man offenbar, woher sie gekommen, von welchen Geschich­ ten sie der gebrochene Nachhall sind, und Bako [Roger Bacon, Herder’s emphasis] nennt die älteste griechische Dichtkunst mit Recht einen Jüngling, der mit morgenländischem Winde zum Zeitvertreibe auf einer griechischen Flöte pfeift. Hier ists nur unsre Sache, den Eindruck zu bemerken, den nach den eignen Märchen der Griechen selbst, dies alles auf sie gemacht hat. Von diesen alten Kosmogonien, Hymnen, Geheimnissen, Fabeln rechnen sie selbst ihre politische und moralische Sittlichkeit her: noch nach Jahrhunderten waren die Namen Linus, Orpheus, Musäus, Thales — und wie sie weiter heissen, als Wohtäter der Weisheit und als Väter ihres Ruhms heilig. (Wirkung der Dichtkunst, Frankfurt edition, iv, 170)

‘Bako’, who also occupied himself with the question of the order as well as relationship amongst the disciplines, is mentioned more than once, as in Herder’s Einfluss der schönen Wissenschaften (Frankfurt edition, iv, 226): ‘Von Bako bis zu Leibnitz waren helle Köpfe in der Philosophie auch Freunde der Ergötzenden und Schönen: ihr Ausdruck war klar, wie ihr Geist und selbst ihre Spiele wurden Denkmale der Wahrheit.’ ‘Bako’ was the common designation for Roger Bacon, not Francis Bacon; further, Roger Bacon’s preoccupation was with light, as is the case for Herder. See his treatise on Plastik, especially Frankfurt edition, iv, 278–79, in which he writes that light exposes connection, making connection plain (thus substituting light for music, the discipline that exemplifies connection); and that the eye is the Handhabe der Genie — the ‘handle/operation’ of genius. Although also choosing light as his emphasis, Roger Bacon, however, reiterates his point of view, quoting Augustine, that nothing could be truly comprehended without music as the best example of the underlying principle to be understood. Herder further cites ‘Bako’, who he placed together with Homer: Rabelais und Swift, Butler, and selbst der große Bako waren witzige Köpfe: der letzte gehört auch zu denen — deren Ring durch ein Gedankenpaar vortraulich 6  The two translations are nearly contemporaneous, that is, the German ‘Zürcher Bibel [Zwingli]’ of the late sixteenth century and the English King James Version, early seventeenth century. For an indication of how ubiquitous the motifs, concepts, and actual language of the Psalms were for every kind of expression, for example, social protest, see van Deusen, The Place of the Psalms in the Intellectual Culture of the Middle Ages.

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keusch vermählt oft tausende gebär…es wäre aber nicht mein Feind, dem ich ihren Witz und ihre Bildersprache wünschte. Bako war dem scholastischen Scharfsinn feind, aber nur dem scholastischen Scharfsinn, der jede lebendige Kreatur Gottes in Moder auflöset. Wahren Scharfsinn liebte und bewies er selbst. (Frankfurt edition, iv, 356–57; the editors refer to the quotation of a verse by Johann Philipp Lorenz Withof, namely the poem, ‘Betrachtung über die eitle Bemühungen nach einer zeitlichen Glückseligkeit’, from that author’s collection, Gedichte, 1751, but make no mention of, or reference to, Roger Bacon.)

Herder quotes and translates ‘Shaftesburi’ into German, referring to the Traurige arme Dame, Philosophie, sagte Shaftesburi, sie ist in dunkle Mauren, Kollegien, und Schulkerker eingeschlossen, und sinnt und denket verlegt, was sie nicht hat, nicht genießet, und denkt, wovon und worüber sie nichts empfindet. Was war die scholastische Grübelei der mittlern Jahrhunderte, auf den toten Aristoteles eingeschränkt, den man nicht verstand und desto mehr zerlegte? Und was sind die tauben Begriffe, Wortkränze, und Abstraktionen, jene Legion moralischpolitischer Systeme, jenes Triktrak philosophischer Sprache, wo alles entweiht ist, wo niemand mehr was denket oder was dabei will, weder Autor noch Leser? Wortidole, und desto mehr werden sie angebetet, weil sie nichts würken sollen und nichts würken. (Vom Erkennen und Empfinden der menschlichen Seele, Frankfurt edition, iv, 376)

Bacon, in many contexts, had also railed against this, that is, against academic posturing, referring to his colleagues in Paris as the vulgus, who professed much, understood little, and were totally disinterested in the truth. In the Opus maius, Bacon writes, ‘When philosophers (scientiae) are told in these days that they ought to study optics, or geometry, or the languages, they say with a smile, what is the use of these things’, and, quoting Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations: When we have been handed over to school masters, we are not only imbued with divers errors, but truth yields to vanity and firmly-established nature herself gives way to mere opinion […]. Philosophy is content with few judges, shunning purposely the multitude to which it is the object of suspicion and hatred.7

The tenor of Herder’s argument and the manner in which the argument is made is closely related to that of Bacon, as one notes in comparison. Herder, like Bacon, laments that 7  See Bacon, Opus maius, ed. by Bridges, ii, p. xxii; The Opus Majus of Roger Bacon, trans. by Burke, especially ch. 1 which discusses ‘Causes of Error’, namely, obstacles to grasping truth, submission to faulty and unworthy authority, influence of custom, popular prejudice, and concealment of one’s own ignorance. See also van Deusen, ‘Plundering the Past’ and van Deusen, ‘Roger Bacon on Music’.

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Die Philosophie, jetzt so verschrieen und unwürdig verachtet wird, als weiland! Ihre lieben Anbeter, die Fabrikanten nicht goldner und silberner Tempelchen, sondern holzerner Kompendien, Theorien und Systeme. (Vom Erkennen und Empfinden der menschlichen Seele, Frankfurt edition, iv, 376–77)

Instead of a search for truth, Philosophy as a discipline had become obsessed with the lesser mental activities of categorizing and systematization. ‘Bako’ is mentioned, or cited, frequently in the same context as Homer, as: O du heilige, liebe Stille zarter, beschneidner Gemüter, wie wohl tust du! Wohl tust du dem, der dich genießet: er erspart sich hundert Vorwürfe, Gaukeleien, Wundernisse, Fragen und Zweifel; er erspart andern den Anblick der Mühe und gibt Tat […] Bako’s Lichtseele hatte mit dem Gestirn viel Ähnlichkeit, bei dessen Verfinsterung er allemal in Ohnmacht sank: er brennet nicht, aber er glänzet sanft und leuchtet. Welch ein liebender Menschensänger muß Homer gewesen sein, wenn man den immer gleichen und sanften Strom seiner Gesänge hinabgleitet! (Vom Erkennen und Empfinden der Menschlichen Seele, Frankfurt edition, iv, 388).

This passage, I believe, refers to Bacon’s life-long preoccupation with the qualities, propensities, and usefulness within a comparative construct of light, not to an 1830 translation and reference cited by the editors of Herder’s treatise (Frankfurt edition, iv, 1152). Medieval ‘Singers of Tales’ were the ‘new Homers’ (see his description of these ‘Conteours, Jongleours, Musars, Comirs, Plaisantins, Pantomimes, Romanciers, Troubadours, und wie sie zu verschiedenen Zeiten, in verschiedenen Absichten und Ortern hiessen’, as ‘damals Homere, sie sangen Gesta und Fabliaux fernher, und waren die Stimme der Zeiten’ quoted above). 2. Separation between Poesie and Prose, Song and Non-song Unter den Griechen hielt er die Fabel länger und fester, als sie ohne ihn wahrscheinlich gedaurert hätte; Rhapsodisten fangen ihn her, kalte Dichterlinge ahmten ihn nach, und der Enthusiasmus für den Homer ward unter den Griechen endlich eine so kahle, süsse, zugespitzte Kunst, als er’s kaum irgend für einen Dichter unter einem andern Volk gewesen. (Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, Berlin edition, ii, 13, 86–87)

But why does Herder think that the Greeks are a ‘Volk’? Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel does not agree, since their geographical situation divided them into disparate groups: Griechenland ist die Substanz, welche zugleich individuell ist: das Allgemeine als solches ist überwunden, das Versenktsein in die Natur ist aufgehoben, und so ist

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denn auch das Massenhafte der geographischen Verhältnisse verschwundern. Das Land besteht aus einem Erdreich, das auf vielfache Weise im Meere zerstreut ist, aus einer Menge von Inseln und einem festen Lande, welches selbst inselartig ist. Nur durch eine schmale Erdzunge ist der Peloponnes mit demselbem verbunden; ganz Griechenland wird durch Buchten vielfach zerklüftet. Alles ist in kleine Partien zerteilt und zuglich in leichter Beziehung und Verbindung durch das Meer… Wir finden nicht diese orientalische physische Macht, nicht einen Strom, wie den Ganges, den Indus usw., in deren Ebenen ein einförmiges Geschlecht zu keiner Veränderung eingeladen wird, weil sein Horizont immer nur dieselbe Gestalt zeigt, sondern durchaus jene Verteiltheit und Vielfaltigkeit, die der mannigfachen Art griechischer Völkerschaften und der Beweglichkeit des griechischen Geistes vollkommen entspricht.8

Hegel writes of the ‘Substanz’ of Greeks/Greece. This point of view evidences continuity with a medieval past in that peoples correspond to the part of the earth from whence they come.9 In Dichtkunst, a separation (not Herder’s, he cites others as noted) is estab­­ lished between Non-Poesie and Poesie/Fabeln/Heldenfablen/Gesang (see Wirkung der Dichtkunst, Frankfurt edition, iv, 15l), as follows: ‘Fabel = Poesie’; substance that contains ‘Macht zu beleben, den Seelen der Menschen einzuherrschen’. This ‘substance’ contains within itself contraries, that is, ‘Hass und Liebe, Mut und Sanftmut, Ehrfurcht gegen die Götter, Schrecken, Zuversicht, Trost, Freude. Sie solls gewesen sein, die rohe Völker unter die Gesetze, Verdrossene zu Kampf und Arbeit, Furchtsame zu Unternehmungen, zur Bildung der Sitten für Menschen und Bürger.’ Poesie, therefore, is Aristotle’s ‘soulish substance’ that contains within itself contrary motions as well as properties; cf. Grundsätze zu Betrachtung der Frage aus der Seelenlehre (Frankfurt edition, iv, 122): ‘Homer entstand in schönen Griechischen Ionian Heldenfabeln in Munde der Griechen und nahmen in einer Zeit, wo Schrift und Prose noch nicht erfunden war, von selbst dichterische Gestalten.’ One asks the question, how does Herder know this? He actually does not; but rather, this statement propels forward his agenda, namely, that Poesie is a ‘substance’, quite apart from its delineation in ‘Orthographie’, that is, the figurae of alphabetical letters within syntax. In defining Dichtkunst, inherent as substance, as Herder believes, within Homeric composition, a separation is also implicit between Poesie and what it is not — a separation between Poesie/Dichtkunst/Kunst and what it is not that also existed within Greek culture itself, as, for example: 8  See Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, ed. by Moldenhauer and Michel, p. 277. 9  See, for example, Grosseteste, Hexaemeron, ed. by Dales and Gieben, pp. 17–48.

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Dass in diesem dichterischen Charakter der Griechen Alles zu bewundern und nach­­zuahmen sei, will ich nicht sagen. Offenbar ward hiermit manches zu sehr Scheugetragen, alles zu flüssig und leicht gemacht. Die Religion ward auch der Wirkung und dem Werte nach Mythologie, die fremde, zumal alte oder AlltagsGeschichte Märchen, die Staatsweisheit Rednerei, die Philosophie Sophistik. Wahrer Wert verlor sich mit der Zeit aus Allem und es blieb schönes Spielwerk, bunte Oberfläche übrig. So lange noch Reste der Heldenzeit da waren und das heilige Feuer der Freiheit hie und da glimmte, waren sie edel, wirksam, fochten und fühlten, bald fochten und fühlten sie, zumal die Athenenser, nur in Worten, gaben sich der Kabale, dem Vergnügen und den Rednerkunstgriffen Preis. (Frankfurt edition, iv, 173)

And further: Homer, der auch in den kleinsten Zugen, die wir kenne, so unendlich sich an Natur und Wahrheit hielt, machte Gesangen Raum, die zum Vergnügen des Ohres sangen, und je besser jemand das konnte, desto mehr war er Poet. (Frankfurt edition, iv, 175) [Homer, who also in the smallest things — as we know — so unendingly remaining close to Nature and Truth, also made room for songs that were sung [simply] for enjoyment [in contradistinction to the Dichtkunst that by means of sound-substance also disclosed hidden rules of morality and statecraft], and, the better one knew how to ‘tickle the ears’ the more he could be called a ‘poet’.]

Even in considering Homer, Herder neglects to say whether he found the distinction between Dichtkunst and what it was not in his own work — or in life. In other words, Poesie or Dichtkunst is more amenable to description and delineation than its absence. Herder goes on to reinforce a further aspect of the separation between Dichtkunst and what it was not (the term Prose is infrequently used), namely, by a comparison between the Greeks and the Romans: Mit den Römern hatte es andere Bewandnis. Sie waren nicht wie die Griechen unter dem Schalle der Leier gebildet, sondern durch Einrichtung, Gesetz, politische Religionsgebrauche eherne Römer. Als die Dichtkunst der Griechen zu ihnen kam, hatten sie ihre Arbeit fast vollendet. In den ersten Zeiten, da Rom in Armut, im Kämpfe and immerwährenden Drange der Not war und wie Horazens Duris — ilex tonsa bipennibus under harten Stürmen erwuchs, waren sie zu beschäftigt und zu roh, als das sie dichten und Gedichte empfangen konnten. (Frankfurt edition, iv, 177–78)10 10 

Cf. Weber, My France, especially the chapter, ‘Nos ancêtres les gaulois’, a distillation of the not-so-disguised agenda here. The ‘adoption’ of the Greeks, that is, Homer and his language, relating the Greeks to themselves as a topic within literature in the German language, stands in

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3. Homer and the Poet’s Influence (Wirkung) upon a Nation Herder refers to Homer and the coequivalence of music and Poesie as Gesang (this coequivalence is also inherent within the Latin word cano, see below) and to the ‘poet’ (Homer) and his nation: Die größeste Verehrung indes ist die bleibende Wirkung, die er auf seine Nation hatte und noch jetzt auf alle diejenigen hat, die ihn zu schätzen vermögen […]. Über die Wahrheit und Weisheit, mit der er alle Gegenstände seiner Welt zu einem lebendigen Ganzen verwebt, der feste Umriss jeder seiner Züge in jeder Person seiner unsterblichen Gemälde, die unangestrengte sanfte Art, in welcher er, frei als ein Gott, alle Charaktere sieht und ihre Laster und Tugenden, ihre Glücksund Unglücksfälle erzählet, die Musik endlich, die in so abwechselnden großen Gedichten unaufhörlich von seinen Lippen strömt und jedem Bilde, jedem Klange seiner Worte eingehaucht, mit seinen Gesängen gleich ewig lebet; sie sind’s, die in der Geschichte der Menschheit den Homer zum einzigen seiner Art und der Unsterblichkeit würdig machen, wenn etwas auf Erden unsterblich sein kann. (Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, Berlin edition, iii, 13, 85)

Cf. Virgil and the famous opening lines of the Aeneid: ‘Arma virumque cano | Troiae qui primus ab oris’. Cano in Latin also carries the meaning ‘to read aloud’, ‘to tell, speak of, recite’, but not necessarily ‘sing’. Herder continues (p. 85) ‘Homer […] ein Götterbote des Nationalruhms, ein Quell der vielseitigsten Nationalweisheit’ (Homer, God’s emissary for national prestige, a source of many-sided national wisdom). Herder is transferring Homer’s accomplishment from the achievement of a single person to a collective achievement, as shift from particular with delineated individuality to undifferentiated, non-delimited substance or the Latin silva (as outlined above in Chapter 4 on this topic). Herder remarks that ‘Once German was a sister to the Greek’ (Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, Berlin edition, ii, 13,  83), although he does not go further into families of languages, a concept that gained acceptance in the nineteenth century, nor does he pursue possible structural affinities between the two languages, even though he knew both, Greek and German. Herder does discuss Poesie as Natur: Poesie, wahre, wirkende Sprache der Natur…eine Gabe Gottes in der Natur ist gut, and so auch die grosse Gabe über sie alle, ihre lebendige Sprache, Sinne, Einbildung, Handlung, Leidenschaft, alles was die Poesie ausdruckt und darstellt, ist gut clear contrast to the ‘origin’ of the Franks as Roman immigrants: ‘The late Middle Ages ascribed a Trojan ancestry to the Franks’ (p. 21). The Romans, of course, according to Virgil, were originally Trojans, the bitter enemies of the Greeks.

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mithin, kann auch ihr Eindruck auf andere, durch Harmonie und Einstimmung, nicht böse genannt werden. So wie aber alles in der Schöpfung und gerade das edelste am meisten missbracht wird; so kann auch die Poesie, der edle, entzückende Balsam aus den geheimsten Kräften der Schöpfung Gottes. (Wirkung der Dichtkunst, Frankfurt edition, iv, 157)

Poesie, in this passage, as well as many others, has taken the place of silva, that is, the unlimited ‘stuff ’ of creation, enlivened, as well as containing properties (proprietates), motion, and effectiveness. This concept, resulting from the translation of the Greek hyle into the Latin silva, was transmitted through the Middle Ages and is available as well to Herder. In this context Herder states that he has had especially to do with secondary literature concerning Homer, translated into German, that is, Thomas Blackwell’s Untersuchung über Homers Leben und Schriften (Leipzig, 1776), Robert Woods’s Versuch über das Originalgenie des Homers aus dem Englischen (Frankfurt am Main, 1773), and Hugh Blair’s Kritische Abhandlung über die Gedichte Ossian (Hannover, 1785). Herder himself had mastered Greek, but, by his own statement, the use he made of Homer was primarily from translations of secondary literature, a statement that one is inclined to believe, given the superficiality of his remarks concerning Homer, and his manner of working with the ‘idea of Homer’, as a reification device within his writing, rather than a German translation of the actual Greek text itself. Equivalence, Dichtkunst and music: Auch später, wo die Namen aufhören und wahre Gedichte da sind, blickt noch dieser heilige sittliche Gebrauch der alten Dichtkunst durch. Nur von Hymnen und Kriegen der Götter kam man aufs Lob und auf Kriege der Menschen: die ältesten Orden waren heilige Personen, jener bei der Klytemnestra der mächtige unbezwingbare Wächter ihrer Tugend. ‘Die Fürsten, sagt Hesiod (noch von der alten Sitte) die Fürsten kommen vom Jupiter; die Sänger von den Musen und dem Apoll. Glücklich ist der Mann, den die Musen lieben: seine Lippen fliessen über von sanften und süssen Tönen. Ist Jemand, der in seiner Seele einen geheimen nagenden Kummer fühlt; der Sänger, ein Diener der Musen, hebet nur an das Lob der Götter und alten Helden, sogleich vergisst er seinen Kummer und fühlt sein Leid nicht mehr. (‘Muse’, in Wirkung der Dichtkunst, Frankfurt edition, iv, 170–71)

This equivalence, music and Dichtkunst, can be traced, according to Herder, always to Homer: Musik und Dichtkunst: diese standen unter der Aufsicht der Obern und waren von den Gesetzgebern ihrer Staaten zu Grundfaden ihres Charakters angewandt worden, durch die sich nun Gesetze und Lehren schlangen. Homer war ihnen alles, und der feine Blick, mit dem dieser alles gesehen, jeden Gegenstand, nicht straft

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angezogen, sondern in seinem leichten reinen Umrisse, richtig und leicht gemessen, gezeichnet hatte — der feine Blick, das leichte, richtige natürliche Verhältnis in allem wurde auch ihr Blick. Leichte also und natürliche Gesetze, ein geschicktes Verhältnis der Menschen gegen einander waren ihre Anstalt, ihre Erfindung. Die Denkart der Menschen, ihre Sitten und Sprache bekamen einen Strom, eine Fülle, eine Runde, die sie noch nicht gehabt: alles zu Tiefe würde erhöhet, das Schwere leicht, das Dunkle helle: denn aus Homer holten sie Sittlichkeit, Kunst und Weisheit, und freilich machten sie auch aus Homer, was jeder wollte, nachdem ihm eine Lust ankam, dies oder das zu kosten. (‘Muse’, in Wirkung der Dichtkunst, Frankfurt edition, iv, 172–73, Herder’s emphasis)

Herder goes on to extoll the ‘dichterischen Charakter der Griechen’. It would seem that Herder himself does exactly that — makes whatever he wants out of, or placed upon, Homer, namely in this particular case, the well-known words of Christ, ‘Take my yoke upon you and learn of me […] for my yoke is easy and my burden light’ (Matthew 11. 29–30). 4. Homer and Collection, the Equivalence of Collection with Nature, and the Rationale for Collection Homer’s songs were to be collected. Here, Herder himself collects priorities and conceptualizations already established and reiterated in the Middle Ages which would have been familiar to his readership and attributes them all to Homer, superimposing these priorities upon Homer. In this regard, it is useful to note how frequently he refers to, or quotes Winckelmann. Passages, with commentary, follow: Durch ein glückliches Schicksal wurden seine zerstreuten Gesänge zu rechter Zeit gesammelt und zu einem zweifachen Ganzen vereint […]. Wie man ein Wunder der Natur zu erklären strebt, so hat man sich Mühe gegeben, das Werden Homers zu erklären, der doch nichts als ein Kind der Natur war, ein glücklicher Sänger der ionischen Küste. (Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, Berlin edition, ii, 13, 84) [Through a fortunate destiny the scattered songs of this era were collected together, and unified to a two-fold whole. […] Just as one attempts to explain a wonder in nature [cf. Aristotle’s famous automata and eclipses, mentioned in the Metaphysica, for which one observes the phenomena without knowing their causes], so one had gone to a good deal of trouble to explain Homer’s work; he, nevertheless, is a child of nature, a happy singer of the Ionian Coast.]

There is an interesting superimposition here. Homer as ‘by nature a poet’ becomes Homer, ‘a child of nature’. In the first case, one of the properties of

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Homer’s nature is the capacity to make ‘poetry’, discussed throughout the Middle Ages as a property, proprietas, within material substance or nature. In the second statement, ‘nature’ is sought elsewhere than as the material substance which is also ‘soulish substance’. Herder uses ‘nature’ in both senses, as do medieval writers, that is, to refer to ‘inner soulish substance’ and also with respect to the outer, external world. Herder’s assumption is that Homer had collected ‘Fabels’ as objects; Fabula is a frequently accessed medieval expression, implying, among other things, a noteworthy, recognizable, memorable, even wondrous, narrative structure, often skeletal in its outline, that contains a truth to be sought after and disclosed. See, for example, the introduction to Peter Dronke’s Fabula, in which the author points to John Scotus Eriugena’s Periphyseon (completed in the years 864–66), and William of Conches’s Dragmaticon, Bernardus Silvestris’s Cosmographia, and Hildegard of Bingen’s Liber divinorum operum, all of which Dronke characterizes thus: ‘disparate as they are, they exemplify with exceptional clarity a fundamental creative element […]. They are achievements not only of the rational intellect but of the fictive imagination’.11 Further, not only are the objects themselves of importance (to be collected together, as Herder writes), but the connection itself is considered to be a separate entity and of equal importance throughout the Middle Ages, but particularly within the early university milieu of the thirteenth century, in which the term copula is frequently found with obvious emphasis. The emphasis is upon the capacity for, and attainment of, bringing together the pre-existent material at one’s disposal. See also Herder’s Grundsätze zu Betrachtung der Frage aus der Seelenlehre (Frankfurt edition, iv, 113): ‘Genie ist eine Menge in-oder extensivstrebender Seelenkräfte […]. Genie ist eine Sammlung Naturkräfte’ (italics added). That the question of Poesie was not settled at the time of Herder’s writing Wirkung der Dichtkunst is attested by his question, ‘What is Poesie?’ (Frankfurt edition, iv, 153). Herder is writing from the background of what would have constituted a continuous discussion, at least from the thirteenth century on, concerning the nature of material, or nature that contains within itself multiple potentialities for movement, energy, and expression. Thus, Herder’s use of the expression Naturkräfte, taken out of context and, especially, out of Herder’s context, was later manipulated, for example, as ‘force of nature’ or to imply that ‘nature’ should be left alone, should not be improved upon. Collection, of course, is positive, more is better, completeness is laudatory — if perhaps impossible — and the urge or appetite to collect instinctive within human beings, and, according to Aristotle’s Physica, a property of the material 11 

Dronke, Fabula, p. 1.

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itself, as has been discussed above (see Chapters 4 and 5 on material and its properties). One should note Herder’s expressions of optimism in this light as well, as the result of a conscious return, so to speak, to Homer, as in Seelenlehre (cited above). Herder collects many things, including names. Collection, altogether, also constitutes a material. In a significant passage, Herder explores this collected-together, existent, and available material of Poesie: Ich nannte die griechische Mythologie unter den Materialien des Epigramms und der Inhalt so vieler kleinen Spiele des Witzes bestätigt, was ich sage. Sie war kein abstraktes oder unveränderliches System, das allen Gattungen der handelnden und malenden Poesie wenig Stoff geben konnte; sondern eine Reihe von Volkssagen, die durch Poesie und Kunst jedermann bekannt. (Über die Anthologie der Griechen, Frankfurt edition, iv, 510)

5. Homer and Geschmack (Taste) Noch mehr hat auch er die neueren Völker Europas aus der Barbarei gezogen. (Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, Berlin edition, ii, 13, 85) Regeln des Geschmacks und der Menschenkenntnis aus ihm gezogen. (Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, Berlin edition, ii, 13, 86) Da also einmal die griechische Kultur von Mythologie, Dichtkunst und Musik ausging, so ist‘s nicht zu verwundern, dass der Geschmack daran ein Hauptstrich ihres Characters geblieben, der auch ihre ernsthaftesten Schriften und Anstalten bezeichnet. (Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, Berlin edition, ii, 13, 86) [Since once upon a time mythology, poetry, and music comprised Greek culture, it is not to be wondered at that the delineatory characteristic of this culture was taste, a feature attested to by the seriousness of Greek writing, sculpture, and art.]

This is the concept of common substance containing properties which are made manifest by figurae or delineatory characteristics. Wie sich Geschmack und Genie ferner brechen mögen, so weiss jeder, dass Genie im Allgemeinen eine Menge in-oder extensivstrebender Seelenkräfte sei; Geschmack ist Ordnung in dieser Menge, Proportion und also schöne Qualität jener strebenden Grossen. Mithin sind sich beide nimmer an sich entgegen: durch die simple Natur können sie sich nie einander verderben. Die Betrachtung ist des Anblicks wert, denn sie ist Grundlage aller künftigen historischen Phänomene. (Grundsätze zu Betrachtung der Frage aus der Seelenlehre, Frankfurt edition, i, 113) Die Bildung der Griechen, ihr Gefühl für Wohlgestalt, leichte Handlung, Lust und Freude, Mythologie, Gottesdienst, Liebe zu Freiheit, die ihre tapfern Männer und

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edeln Junglinge belohnte, und so viel andre Ursachen, die Winckelmann vortrefflich entwickelt, schuften und entwickelten ihre Kunst zur Blume der Schönheit, sie war lebendig, veredelte Griechische Natur, wie alle vorigen Produkte. (Grundsätze zu Betrachtung der Frage aus der Seelenlehre, Frankfurt edition, i, 124) Was folgt aus dem Allen? ein sehr einfacher Satz, den man sich immer gar zu gern als künstlich und vielfach denket: nämlich, der gute Geschmack war bei den Griechen in ihren schönsten Zeiten so eine natürliche Hervorbringung, als sie selbst als ihre Bildung, Klima, Lebensart und Verfassung. Er existiere wie Alles, zu seiner Zeit und an seinem Orte, zwanglos, aus den simpelten Veranlassungen mit Zeitmitteln, zu Zeitswecken, und da diese schöne Zeitverbindung aus einander ging schwand auch das Resultat derselben, der Griechische Geschmack. Hätte jemand der Griechen Homer sein wollen, unter Umständen, da kein Homer sein konnte, gewiss ist’s, dass nur ein falscher Homer geworden wäre. Apollonius unter den Ptolomäern ist Zeuge. Er trat ins Schiff der Argonauten, wie kam er dahin? war er dagewesen? konnte und wollte ihm jemand nachsteigen? Sein Zeitalter lieferte ihm dazu weder Sitten noch Sprache, weder Inhalt, noch Ohr, und Zweck, noch Empfindung; er ward also ein toter Nachahmer, er sang ausser seinem Elemente. Hätten die Griechen früher so angestrebt, gesungen, was ihnen zu singen nicht gebührte, so hätte auch der gute Geschmack so lange nicht gelebt. Ihr guter Genius bewahrte sie aber vor dieser Bahn des unnutzen, kraftlosen Neides. Sie sangen, woruber sie Herren waren: die Dichtkunst rückte mit dem Zeitalter weiter, sie folgten Homer, indem sie sich von ihm entfernten. Noch bis auf den heutigen Tag sind die Griechen Geschmackskenner von Natur: Leichtigkeit, feine Organisation, Lust und Freude bewahrt sie vor Unnatur, der Pest des guten Geschmacks [Geschmack = Wisdom: goal of theoria]. (Grundsätze zu Betrachtung der Frage aus der Seelenlehre, Frankfurt edition, i, 127)

Using priorities taken directly from the intellectual culture of the thirteenthcentury reception of Aristotle’s Physica and Metaphysica, as well as the integration of the newly translated (from Greek into Latin) Phaedo of Plato, with its image of lyre representing armonia and soul, Herder presents Geschmack as goal to which one strived. Citing Roger Bacon, he begins: Schon Bako hat geklagt, wie aus der Wissenschaft nichts werden konne, wenn man in ihr nur immer das Nützliche, unmittelbar jetzt Nützliche suche, und wenn dies bei Erziehung geschieht, verliert zugleich ein ganzes menschliches Leben. Nicht Was, sondern wie die Jugend lerne, ist das Hauptstück der Erziehung. Geschmack, d. i. Ordnung, Mass, Harmonie aller Kräfte ist die Leier Amphions oder Orpheus, nach der sich Steine zum ganzen Baue beleben. (Ursachen des gesunkenen Geschmacks, Frankfurt edition, iv, 146)12 12 

For the imagery Herder is invoking here, see van Deusen, ‘The Harp and the Soul’.

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Finally, the best school for Geschmack is life, that is, experience: ‘Aber endlich ist freilich die grösste, beste Schule des guten Geschmacks, das Leben’ (Grundsätze zu Betrachtung der Frage aus der Seelenlehre, Frankfurt edition, iv, 147), which is exactly what Aristotle states in the first book of the Metaphysica (i, 981a21f: ‘If, then, a man has theory without experience, and knows the universal but does not know the individual included in this, he will often fail to cure; for it is the individual that is to be cured’). In translating Herder’s Geschmack into the English ‘taste’, one notices a recurrent translational problem, namely, that ‘taste’ is one of the many English words that, through overuse and trivialization, has fallen very nearly into meaninglessness. ‘Taste’ lacks, certainly, precision and pungency, making it difficult to recapture the urgency and seriousness with which Herder obviously regards this concept/term, placing Geschmack, as he does, in the position of truth and wisdom to be intensely and relentlessly sought after through experience and reflection. Geschmack, it would appear, is a priority of Herder’s time, and of Herder himself; as ‘La Harpe’, in his Lycée ou cours de littérature ancienne et moderne (Paris, 1786), states: Mais ce qui pourra surprendre, c’est que ces deux mots, le génie, le goût pris abstravivement, ne se trouvent jamais ni dans les vers de Boileau, ni dans la prose de Racine, ni dans les dissertations de Corneille, ni dans le pièces de Molière. Cette façon de parler […] est de nôtre siècle. (i, 20–21)

Herder quotes Voltaire, as one would assume, and mentions him in many contexts. Voltaire had raised the French goût to an allegorization of Deity, in his ‘Temple du gout’ (1733), and there were eight articles concerning the concept in the Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts, et des métiers, 35 vols (Paris: Briasson, 1751–80). Peter-Eckhard Knabe in his Schlüsselbegriffe des kunsttheoretischen Denkens in Frankreich (Düsseldorf: Schwann, 1972) notes that the term goût is nevertheless uncertain in meaning (Unsicherheit) and that there was no consensus amongst the writers of the articles, Voltaire, Jean-Baptiste le Rond d’Alembert, and Montesquieu. It is of interest here that while Knabe’s index refers many times to the Encyclopédie, as one might expect, there are no references at all to Homer, and only one to Winckelmann, showing how divided the two discourses at that time were. I am, as Knabe, considering Geschmack to be a transfer of meaning from goût, but it is also clear that Herder arrived at his own conclusions concerning this concept, basing his interpretation of a key word within his own contemporary thought-milieu onto the wellknown model presented in the Metaphysica, that is, Geschmack is co-equivalent to Aristotle’s truth, the goal of carefully constructed process. Cf. Ursachen des gesunkenen Geschmacks, Frankfurt edition, iv, 147: ‘Der wahre Geschmack

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würkt durch Genie, und ein edles Genie ist wie ein Stern im Dunkeln, Licht strahlt nur Licht ab’. In this endeavour, as in all others, Herder is consciously harmonizing Augustine with Aristotle within the new-found priorities of his own time, that is, Geschmack and Homer, separately and combined. Herder, moreover, did not think much of the Encyclopédie (Ursachen des gesunkenen Geschmacks, Frankfurt edition, iv, 146).

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Appendix II King Alfred the Great’s Preface to his Translation of Augustine’s Soliloquies from Latin into Anglo-Saxon13 Gaderode me ponne kigclas and stupansceaftas, and lohsceaftas and hylfa to aelcum para tola pe ic mid wircan cude, and bohtimbru and bolttimbru, and, to aelcum para weorca pe ic wyrcan cude, pa wlitegostan treowo be pam dele de ic aberan meihte. Ne com ic naper mid anre byrdene ham pe me ne lyste ealne pane wude ham brengan, gif ic hyne ealne aberan meihte; on aelcum treowo ic geseah hwaethwugu paes pe ic aet ham beporfte. Forpam ic laere aelcne dara pe maga si and manigne waen haebbe, paet he menige to pam ilcan wuda par ic das studansceaftas cearf, fetige hym par ma, and gefedrige hys waenas mid fegrum gerdum, pat he mage windan manigne smicerne wah, and manig aenlic hus settan, and fegerne tun timbrian and paer murge and softe mid maege on-eardian aegder ge wintras ge sumeras, swa swa ic nu ne gyt ne dyde. Ac se pe me laerde, pam se wudu licode, se maeg gedon paet ic softor eardian (maege) aegder ge on pisum laenan stoclife be pis weage da while pe ic on pisse weorulde beo, gee ac on pam ecan hame de he us gehaten hefo purh sanctus Augustinus and sanctus Gregorius and sanctus Ieronimus, and purh manege odder halic faedras, swa ic gelyfe eac paet he gedo for heora ealra earnunge, aegder ge pisme weig gelimpfulran gedo ponne he aer pissum wes, ge hure mines modes eagan to pam ongelihte paet ic mage rihtne weig aredian to pam ecan hame, and to pam ecan are, and to pare ecan reste pe us gehaten is purh pa halgan faederas sie swa. Nis it nan wundor peah man swile ontimber gewirce, and eac on pa(re) lade and eac on paere bytlinge; ac aelcne man lyst, siddan he aenig cotlyf on his hlafordes laene myd his fultume getimbred haefo, paet he hine mote hwilum paron gerestan, and huntigan, and fuglian, and fiscian, and his on gehwilce wisan to pere laenan tilian, aegpaer ge on se ge on lande, od pone first pe he bocland and aece yrfe purh his hlafordes miltse geearnige. Swa gedo se weliga gifola, se de egder wilt ge pissa laenena stoclife ge para ecene hama. Se de aegper gescop and aegderes wilt, forgife me paet me to aegdrum onhagige: ge her hytwyrde to beonne, ge huru pider to cumane. Augustinus, Cartaina bisceop, worhte twa bec be his agnum ingepance; ba bec sint gehatene Soliloquiorum. Pat is, be hys modis smeaunge and tweounga, 13 

From King Alfred’s Version of Augustine’s ‘Soliloquies’, ed. by Thomas A. Carnicelli (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, l969), pp. 47–48

appendix ii

233

hu hys gesceadwisnes answarnde hys mode ponne paet mod ymbe hwaet tweonode, odpe hit. Hwaes wifnode to witanne paes pe hit aer for sweotole ongytan ne meahte.

Appendices

234

Appendix III Concert Programmes: Music Culture in Budapest

Figures 22 and 23. Two examples of recent Budapest concert programmes.

appendix iii

235

Appendices

236

Appendix IV Figurae 160010/0 Rhythmic 160030/0 Rhythmic 160040/0 Rhythmic 160050/1–4 Rhythmic + 4th, g ↓ d; principle of ‘variant’ 160050/4 variant 160050/5 Rhythmic ↓ 5th

160960/0 Rhythmic:

160970/0 interval d ↑ g, g ↓ d (much variance between versions) 161090/0 interval d ↓ a, rhythmic 161530/0 Rhythmic

| (Kodály published this three times, three different versions)

161560/3 interval, 5th d ↓ g, rhythmic 161720/0 Rhythmic

| (regular eighth followed by synco­­pation)

161740/0 Rhythmic

(regular eighth followed by syncopation)

161760/0 Rhythmic 161900/0 Rhythmic 161910/0 Rhythmic

|

|

161920/0 Rhythmic

(has been placed in separate ‘type’, but much more related to 161910/0)

161970/0 Rhythmic 161980/0 Rhythmic

, d ↑ g, c ↓ g

||

appendix iii

237

162000/0 Rhythmic 162080/0 Rhythmic

(all could be viewed as related, and variations on themselves)

and fourth: g ↓ d; g ↑ d

162090/0 162110/0

:|| and triad g h d14

162170/1 Rhythmic,

, 4th b ↓ f (g)

162190/0 Rhythmic

, (bn ab f ) (chromaticism) (this group is related rhythmically)

162220/0 Rhythmic \

162460/0 Rhythmic

(not related by repeated notes)

162470/1 Rhythmic 162480/1 Rhythmic

\

\

(also leap between sections)

162510/0 Rhythmic

, division into ‘chunks’

162511/0 Rhythmic

(all intervals are negotiable)

162590/1 Rhythmic

, repeated

imitating figure, with 4th d ↑ g

\

162611/0 Rhythmic

g↓d \ d↓g

|

170010/0 Rhythmic

at ends of phrases

(170020/0, same, could be ‘variant’ of 170010/0) 170030/0 Rhythmic

|

170290/0 Rhythmic

|

14 

| , phrase end: |

Rhythmic figurae are characteristic features of these types. Rhythm is a life-giving element of melody, analysed in the thirteenth century as modes of motion. They can be used here to analyse rhythmic dynamism on the most basic level, as combinations of long/short, repeated in the recordings.

Appendices

238

170300/0 170320/0

|

170330/1

(end of melody), d ↑ g ↓ d

/

:|| g ↓ d ↓ g

|

| g ↓ d ↓ g, repeated notes

|

| g↓d↓g

170470/0 170490/0

g↓d↓g

|

170520/2

d↑g↓d↓g

| | g↓d↓g

170550/1

| g↓d↓g

170680/0

| g↓d↓g

170740/0 170900/0

/end

171150/0

/end

d↓g d↓g

171500/0

as above (‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star’)

171510/0

as above

171610/0

as above

180010/0

/end:

180100/0

|

180310/0

|



fg

, end repeated notes ;dc

,g↓d↓g

(end repeated notes)

(end repeated notes) , d g d, ↓ g c g (4th)

180330/0

|

181780/0

,d↓g

181790/0

/end gg (repeated note preceded by leap)

181830/0

end

appendix iii

239

181840/1–2

g ↓ d, f ↓ c, d g

181850/0

repeated notes

181860/0

extension,

181870/0

d↑g d↓ga

d d, g ↓ d ↑ g ↓ d d ↓ g

181880/0

d↑g d↓ag

181890/0

d↑gd d↓ag

181900/0

g↓d↑g↓c↑d↓g

181910/0 182010/0

dfg

182011/0

g f# eb c / ch ab g

182030/0

| d c ab g

182040/1–2

leaps/instrumental

182050/0

/c ↓ g

182130/1–2

/ g ↓ c d, ↓ g

182140/0

/ g ↓ c d, ↓ g

182191/0

/as sequence Laude crucis, ‘double stroke’

| predominantly rhythmic (although 182460/0 classified as Kis Kvintváltó) 182970/0

(as above)

183070/0

difference between ‘type’ and ‘melody’: this is a melody (leap/shape)

183310/1–2

| / e q. h ‘figure’ of regular recurring notes:

Appendices

240

183520/0 183670/1–3

5th/4th: leap is important for recognition

/

183730/0 Rhythmic figura:

, also (5th) , also ↓ 5 at beginning

183890/0 Rhythmic 184050/0 (‘chunks’) 184100/0 184120/0

|

(regular rhythmic outline)

184150/0 184240/0 184360/0 184380/0

repeated

184790/0 184870/0 184940/0 185110/0

| (leaps are not important/vary) |

or \

(‘Oh, my darling, […] Clementine’) (repeated notes)

185210/0 185320/0 185370/0

\ \

e q. | …

:|| (2-pt)

185880/0 (2 rhythmic figurae in ‘type’ do not occur together in any version) Poszony, 1958: Tornyosnémeti: Borsod: Meves: /

appendix iii

241

(All examples together constitute variations on themselves, in which every feature is discarded, but type remains.) 190200/0 190210/1–2 190280/0

|

190310/0

|

100010/0 |

100040/1

|

g↓d↓g

|

:g↓d↑gaf g ↓ d ↑ g,

100050/1–2 100190/2

|

|

…

100200/1–6 100201/0

|

| , e ↓ c; b g

100210/2 100220/1

g↓d fg d↓g

100230/1

g↓d fg d↓g

100271/0

d↑g↓cbag

100310/1–2

|

100410/1–3 100540/0 100618/0 100701/0

|

100710/1–4 100782/0

| |

|

d↓g

: a-g ↓ d

Appendices

242

100790/0

|

|

110010/1–2 110240/0 110310/1–6 110340/1–2 110370/0 110400/0

|





dcbf ggg

110430/1–2 110440/0 110450/1–4 110520/1–4 b↓f c ↓ g f ↓ c, b ↓ f, c ↓ fg

110530/1–3 110540/1–5

|

110590/0

|

110640/0

| |

|

Glossary

alternatim: principle of composition in which ways of moving (such as the historical, allegorical, analogical or tropological, and eschatological modi) alternate one with the other, according to the precedent of the Old and New Testaments; exemplified also in text/music modi as articulated and actualized in the cantus. During the course of the Mass celebration, all of the music, as well as the verbal, modi are alternated. This is an important principle of text-music composition throughout the Middle Ages, as well as much thereafter. anima: Latin term comprises mind, soul, intellect, personality, character within one expression; unseen ‘soulish substance’ in an equivalent relationship with visible substance (Aristotle, De anima). armonia (Greek), modulatio (Latin of Chalcidius): bringing together opposing directionalties, intentionalities, or entities (such as force and reason (Augustine)); of particular importance as a concept within the introduction of Aristotle’s Physics in the early thirteenth century, as resolution (concordancia) of ‘contrary motions’ within motion and time. cantus: often translated as (English) ‘chant’; an important concept in the Middle Ages, implying the resource of materia/substantia as a repository of all of the available music/texts for both Mass celebration and the offices. Sound is ‘shaped’ in cantus (Augustine). cento (Greek), punctum, puncta, pungo (Latin): a chunk with perceived containment, a manageable piece of materia such as text, speech, conceptual content, that could be easily retained in the memory (Quintilian); individual, self-contained modules that could be ordered (ordo); English equivalent ‘chunk’. The concept punctum/contra punctum retains this meaning of enclosed module, such as an individual tone set against another enclosed module, resulting in simultaneous occurrence. copula: coupler, joiner, an important concept due to music’s function as exemplifying relationship. Apt bringing together of separate partes is the basis of mastery combined with knowledge of the material with which one is working. corpus: containment, enclosure, delimitation of otherwise inchoate substance, as in Aristotle’s concept of ‘ensouled body’ (De anima).

244

Glossary

differentia (-ae): inchoate, indeterminate, disorganized mass (of sound, of conceptual substance) also designated by the term silva, can be consciously differentiated into particular manners of moving and existence, hence, multiple differences within general mass, indicated by figurae (Chalcidius commentary on the Timaeus); an important term for all of the sciences, as, for example, Abelard (1079–1142) in terms of differentiae of arguments within logical discourse. Differentiae are important as contrasted with, and selected out of, silva, or undifferentiated substance. figura: (one of many translations of Greek schema): delineating, characteristic features that also grant individuality to each punctum, or chunk. There are many equivalent expressions such as littera, instrumentum, numerus, virga, characterismos. (All of the many translations of schema are united by the fact that they are all figurae.) Important to Plato, Timaeus latinus, Augustine, Cassiodorus, Guido of Arezzo, as the delineatory, consistent, memorable, characteristic indication of invisible properties within substance; that is, a differentiating agent within materia-substantia, and within movement, hence useful as differentiating/delineatory agent or ‘instrument’ within each one of the disciplines. Found in relationship to and contrast with varied and diverse figurae variarae, characterae variarae (charivari): appears to be an important medieval topos, as well as an essential distinction that was made between a simple figura (figura simplex) that stood for itself, and an entire alphabet of figurae that, in their varied diversities, indicated a whole variety of characteristics. Varied and diverse figures are also ‘varieties of voices’ (Cicero). Just as the varied and diverse letters (figurae) of the alphabet present a diversity of gestures and delineations, just so the varied and diverse figurae to be seen amongst the peoples of the world — their movements, preoccupations, languages, and habits — present the diversities of human life. This concept is of use for a medieval ethnography (to be found in the many commentaries on the book of Genesis throughout the Middle Ages), but it is also illustrated within the analogical discipline of music by the concept of figures within modes (figurae in modis) and the diversities of the modes or ways of moving indicated by figurae (Guido of Arezzo). firmamentum: pre-existent substance, aggregated substance, used as a foundation for further composition. graduale: book (or manuscript copied by hand) containing all of the cantus for the Mass celebrations within the entire year as they vary from one service to the other. These are the proper cantus of the temporale and, for the saints’ celebrations, the sanctorale, that is, appropriate cantus for the distinctive times of the entire year, day by day. hymn: song with stanzas in which the same melody is paired with several texts. Medieval liturgical inclusion particularly at vespers. Hymns, together with sequences, constitute a large melodic repository for inclusion within what is regarded as folk song. hyle (Greek) translated as the Latin silva: materia/substancia, eventually cantus: Quintilian, in writing concerning argumenta (Institutio Oratoria v.x.33) writes of hyle as materia from which one could fashion arguments. This materia/substantia is the substance of sound/movement/time, divisible into types, related to how one can shape and differ-

Glossary

245

entiate this materia, thus making something out of it, that is, adapt, increase, conserve, use, drive out the unworthy part, diminish, put up with, and deliberate ‘in several manners’ (modi). (Music composition exemplified these treatments of sound as substance in terms of ‘divisions’, augmentation, diminution, conservation (of pre-existent material).) Quintilian rarely used this Greek term, hyle, but in this important case, he uses it in just the manner brought out by Chalcidius in translating hyle into silva. integumentum: a covering of hidden substance, containing movement; the concept/term is important for differentiating the allegorical ‘way of moving’ in which intention or inner substance is deliberately hidden from superficial, hasty, careless notice. interval: space, also as ‘a space of time’ or ‘length of time’ (Cicero); interval is suggested with respect to the perception and measurement of the relationship between high and low (Martianus Capella). locus: Latin translation of the (Greek) topos, (English) ‘commonplace’, (German) Gemein­ platz, that is, succinct statements that are self-contained, dispositive, and require no further explanation. A place to begin or to end an argument or a composition. materia (Latin), substantia, natura, silva, cantus (equivalent expressions): Plato, Timaeus latinus, referring alike to both visible materia as well as invisible materia, opaque, undifferentiated (in contrast to differentiae), inchoate, unlimited, a ‘thicket’ of available resources, that is, pre-existent materia; English equivalent, ‘stuff ’. materia artificialis: undifferentiated, inchoate, materia-substantia-natura that has been worked with, fashioned, arranged, and dealt with in some way (artificialis). A contrast between pre-existent substance or materia and substance that has been appropriated and worked with for some purpose is an important medieval topos. melisma: many tones paired with one or a few syllables of text, resulting in an entirely different syllable-tone relationship compared to, for example, the sequence, with its strict syllable-tone concurrence. modulatio: Latin translation of Greek armonia, that is, bringing together in a well-considered, appropriate manner two completely disparate entities (such as tones); indicates connection between particular things, most of all, appropriate joining (also within ordo). modus (Latin), pathos (Greek), passio, affectus (other translations of pathos): manners of movement identified by and with distinguishing features (figurae). (Modus also has the connotation of process and change within that process.) Modus also contains, but does not necessarily express, emotional substance, such as ‘dignity’ (Dorian mode), or ‘hysterical joy/grief ’ (Phrygian mode), or ‘quiet contentment’ (Mixolydian mode). These descriptions of emotional substances contained within ways of moving or modi vary according to individual writers on music as a discipline in the Middle Ages. motus (Latin), energeia (Greek): Aristotle, Physics, modus implies motion, ways of moving, as well as the possibility that motion can be differentiated.

246

Glossary

ordo: order most frequently based on concept of prior/posterior, as used by Augustine in De ordine. Ordo is exemplified in the discipline of music with respect to particular tones following one after the other, and accrues additional importance within Aristotle’s concept of theoria in which, following an initial question or statement, one increment follows the other within a logical order until a conclusion is reached (Metaphysics, further exemplified in the Physics, Poetics, Ethics, and in the music of the thirteenth century). Ordo also refers to a concept of mastery since the bringing together of partes in an appropriate manner resulted in an effective composition. The ordo of the Psalms was deliberately interrupted to be reordered within the cantus. pars, partes: of eternity, of time, identified as an ‘event’ or ‘occasion’ in which each part differs from the other (Cicero); partes are differentiated by attributes (figurae), or can be related to surface, confined, delimited space. planus: superficies, on the face or surface, a concept that achieves importance as a contrastpair with ‘measurement’; planus versus mensurabilis in a discussion of material properties within Aristotle’s Physics. planctus: based on the category of lamentation within the Old Testament scriptures, introduces the concept of prior/posterior in terms of ‘what has been the case previously’ (favourable), compared to ‘the present’ (unfavourable). This is an ancient example of ‘genre’ based on emotional stance, that is, lament. Poesie: Herder, lyric substance, contained, especially, to Herder’s way of thinking, within the works of Homer. As indicated, its comparative contrast, that is, prose, is more difficult for Herder to describe. poetica (Greek) translated into Latin opera: fashioning a work (opus), as discussed within Aristotle’s Poetica, in which continuous narrative continuity (plot) is measured and differentiated by increments identified by figurae, a structure applicable to, and illustrated by music which also uses time, sound, and motion as materia. proprietas, proprietates (Latin): inherent properties or qualities; all materia contains or ‘participates in’ proprietates that may or may not be expressed, that is, brought to perfection; hence the term-pair proprietas-perfectio, indicated by delineatory figurae, in which the first portion of the music notational figura displays ‘property’ (proprietas), the concluding portion perfectio. pulsus: Augustine, discussed throughout his treatise, De musica, enclosed ‘body’ containing vitality or ‘soulish substance’, that is, ‘enlivened enclosure’ comparable to Aristotle’s ‘ensouled body’ (De anima). Pulsus, for Augustine, makes plain the concept of the ‘substance of the soul’ (which is ‘life’, according to Aristotle), as well as ‘body’, or containment within a generality of sound substance. punctum: Latin translation of cento, see above; contained materia (of sound, time, movement); length approximately what one could speak comfortably on one breath (Quintilian), or conceptual unity that could be retained in the memory (as in Virgil’s Aeneid, or found in the Psalms), hence a compositional building block.

Glossary

247

sequentia, pro sequentia (prosa): the copula or bond between Old Testament (Alleluia) and New Testament reading of the gospel, expressing and delineating the allegorical followed by the eschatological modi or ‘ways of moving’ (manneriae). This transitional function establishes the sequentia as a category within the Mass celebration. The sequentia completes a system of the four modi, alternating between the historical, allegorical, analogical/tropological, and eschatological modes, in combination and alternation with the melodic modi, sequence. There are over three thousand sequence texts and over 1500 sequence melodies in the Middle Ages (c. 900–1600). schema (Greek) translated into figura (Latin): a delineating, linear outline that granted discretion, particularity, and individuality within inchoate mass (Plato, Timaeus latinus, Cassiodorus). silva: Latin translation of Greek hyle (Chalcidius); literally a ‘forest full of trees’, that is, materia/substantia, without limitation, boundaries, containment, without organization (ordo), without differentiation, congested and impacted mass (Quintilian), substantia (Cicero), massa (Augustine), a thicket; but also a repository of ‘pre-existent substance’ available to be used for a specific purpose (Alfred the Great). spatia: space, interval, of sound conceptualized as space, with high and low distinction (Martianus Capella). spolia: remains, ruins, primarily of Roman cities, buildings; an important concept of ‘what is there’, that is, pre-existent substance, to be used, appropriated, rearranged, for specific purposes. This concept of ‘pre-existent substance’ underlies a medieval conceptualization of the compositional process in that one does not strive to be original but to use well what is already available. symphonia: consensus; ‘inner vigour’ (Chalcidius). theoria (Greek), ductus/conductus (Latin): a tripartite model delineated and explained by Aristotle (Metaphysics), of a beginning, perplexing question (incipient moment), that then leads, logically, to a step-by-step process, one increment at a time, to a conclusion, or restful closure (cadence). This model is then exemplified in the Physics as directional motion that could be measured into infinitude, coming eventually to a point of rest, and is exemplified as the continuous process/motion of plot serving as a foundation, measured and differentiated by figurae in the Poetics. Even the Secretum, which apparently was not authored by Aristotle, illustrates this model in terms of curriculum vitae. Aristotle’s theoria was perhaps most clearly understood through music exemplification, for example, by the conductus (ductus, conduct). Timaeus latinus: translation from the original Greek into Latin of the Timaeus of Plato (c. 428–348 bce), by one Chalcidius (second half, fourth century ce), who also wrote a commentary on the portion of the work he translated. Both the Latin text as well as Chalcidius’s commentary on it were of great influence in the Middle Ages (c. 400– 1450  ce); Marsilio Ficino, under the patronage of the Medici family (second half, fifteenth century) emended Chalcidius’s Latin text and applied Plato’s discussion of the importance of hearing and music as a discipline in his own De rationibus musicae

248

Glossary

(On the Principles of Music). The most recent edition of the Timaeus latinus with its list of manuscript sources gives ample indication of just how important this work was; its use of Latin terms, many of which appear in the glossary, are pivotal within the discipline of music. tonus (Latin), tonos (Greek): particular, self-contained sound module, separated from unlimited sound (silva), differentiated by delineatory figura. tropus (Latin), tropos (Greek): most commonly, analogy, metaphor (Quintilian), also indicative of the tropological modus, in which the Latin figurae is prevalent as the concluding figura, indicating a command, such as psallite, laudate. versus: ‘enlivened body’ (Augustine); the possibility is introduced that the same principle of enclosed, contained ‘body’ of enlivened substance (Augustine’s pulsus) can be extended or combined together into the extended body of the versus — an additive, combinatory, process rather than one of difference (between pulsus and versus). Versus indicates an important medieval concept which is not the same as, nor does it occur in a pair of opposites as does ‘poetry’ and ‘prose’ — a much later distinction. via recta: in the context of a discussion of silva, finding or making a way through the disorganized, undifferentiated mass of possible materia/substancia. The topos is an important one in the Middle Ages, both as an expression of this duality, between inchoate substance and individuation, as well as an articulation of mental, compositional work of any kind (Alfred the Great, Dante). virga: differentiating figura delineating characteristic feature within unlimited substance, a ‘twig’ separated out from the thicket of silva, and as such, a music notational figura that indicates, most typically, an accented and/or higher tone. vox: enclosed, contained ‘body’ of sound, important as illustrative of particularity, indicated by figura, that is, virga, punctum.

Bibliography

Primary Sources Alfred the Great, King Alfred’s Old English Version of St Augustine’s Soliloquies turned into Modern English, trans. by Henry Lee Hargrove (New York: Holt, 1904) —— , King Alfred’s Version of Augustine’s ‘Soliloquies’, ed. by Thomas A. Carnicelli (Cam­ bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969) Aquinas, Thomas, In duodecim libros Metaphysicorum Aristotelis expositio, ed. by M.-R. Cathala, O.P. (Torino: Marietti, 1964) Aristotle, The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. by Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols, Bollingen Series, 71.1–2 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984) —— , De anima: On the Soul / Parva Naturalia: On Breath, ed. and trans. by W. S. Hett, Loeb Classical Library, 288 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936, repr. 1957, 1964, 1975, 1986) —— , De anima (On the Soul), trans. by Hugh Lawson-Tancred (London: Penguin, 1986) —— , De anima, translatio vetus, in Pedro Hispano, Obras filosoficas, iii: Expositio libri de anima; De morte et vita et De causis longitudinis et brevitatis vitae; Liber naturalis de rebus principalibus, ed. by P. Manuel Alonso, vol. xvi.1 of the Aristoteles Latinus (Madrid: Instituto Luis Vives de Filosofía, 1952) —— , De arte poetica: Translatio Guillelmi de Moerbeka, ed. by Lorenzo Minio-Paluello, vol. xxxiii of Aristoteles Latinus (Bruxelles: Desclée De Brouwer, 1968) —— , Metaphysica, lib. I–IV.4: Translatio Iacobi sive ‘Vetustissima’ cum Scholiis et Translatio Composita sive ‘Vetus’, ed. by Gudrun Vuillemin-Diem, vol. xxv.1–1a of Aristoteles Latinus (Bruxelles: Desclée De Brouwer, 1970) —— , Metaphysica, lib. I–X, XII–XIV: Translatio Anonyma sive ‘Media’, ed. by Gudrun Vuillemin-Diem, vol. xxv.2 of Aristoteles Latinus (Leiden: Brill, 1976) —— , Metaphysics, trans. by W.  D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924); repr. in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. by Barnes —— , Physica: Translatio Vaticana, ed. by A.  Mansion, vol. vii.2 of Aristoteles Latinus (Bruges: Desclée De Brouwer, 1957)

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Index

Abelard, Peter: 34 accent: 23, 105 accretion: 93 Adelard of Bath: 106 Adorno, Theodor W.: 43, 44 aequales: 24 Agawu, Kofi: 157, 178 Alfred the Great: 69–71 ‘alla Ungharese’: 203 Ambrose, Saint: 91 Analecta hymnica; 149, 151 anima: 64, 67, 80 antecedent: 56 appetite: 65, 165. See also attraction, desire Aquincum: 14 Aristotle: 41, 42, 94, 161, 164 De anima: 11, 20–23, 30–31 Metaphysica: 23, 27, 43, 64, 93, 153, 200 Physica: 13, 27, 30–31, 43, 61, 64, 68, 86, 87–88, 90–92, 107, 108, 160, 161, 171, 200, 209 Arnheim, Rudolf: 43 artificial, artificialis: 10, 205, 206. See also natural ‘art music’: 55 astronomy: 88 attraction: 94, 110, 163, 168, 175, 178, 193, 199. See also appetite, desire Augustine, Saint: 9, 20, 22–24, 29, 31, 91, 96, 101, 103, 110, 163 De civitate Dei: 91, 104, 122–23, 195 Confessions: 104

De genesi ad litteram: 91, 93, 197 De grammatica: 29 De musica: 23–26, 66, 97, 104, 160, 196, 197, 199 De ordine: 29, 104, 122 Soliloquies: 69–70 Augustinian movement, canons regular: 23 Aurelianus: 25 authenticity: 12, 19, 34, 50, 100, 145, 161, 172, 177, 181, 188, 202, 203, 204 automata: 27 Averröes: 87 Bacon, Roger: 33, 36, 88, 155, 156 Bach, Carl Philip Emmanuel: 207 Bakhtin, M. M.: 33 Bárdos, L.: 48 Bartók Archive, Budapest (Hungarian Academy of Sciences): xi, 6, 86, 143, 163, 165, 169, 172, 195 Bartók, Béla: 2, 33, 36, 53–54, 124, 128, 169, 171, 173, 187, 197, 202–03 Basil, Saint: 91 Baud-Bovy, S.: 48, 151 Becker, A. L.: 69, 111–12, 159–60, 179 Becker, Judith: 179 Bernardus Silvestris: 72, 102 Blacking, John: 206, 208 Bloch, Marc: 11 body, corpus: 21–22, 23–24, 25, 31, 64, 104, 111, 142, 170, 195, 198 Boethius: 25, 70, 198

276

Bourdieu, Pierre: 198 bourgeoisie: 14 Brâiloiu, Constantin: 128 Braudel, Fernand: 63, 187 Brown, Peter: 104 Bruckner, Anton: 40 Calvino, Italo: 149–50 cantiones: 156 cantus: 5, 14, 32, 93, 112, 131, 152, 188, 190, 206, 207 cantus firmus: 94, 97, 152 cantus planus/musica mensurabilis: 153 ‘Carolingian Era’: 12, 29 cento, centones: 63, 105 106, 112, 114, 180, 200 Chalcidius: 31, 41, 57–81, 101, 103, 104, 209 chaos: 61 Charles University, Prague: 5 Chrodegang of Metz, Bishop: 54 ‘chunks’: 4, 14–15, 28, 31, 54, 62, 63, 100, 103, 104, 105, 108, 113, 114, 142, 166, 172, 180, 188, 195, 205 Cicero: 28, 58, 68–69, 101–02, 198 Colish, Marcia L.: 93 comparative studies, comparative methodology: 11, 155, 187, 204 consequent: 56 consonancia: 88, 94 containment, see body contiguity: 88 contrary motion: 26, 39, 67, 88, 90, 97, 108, 113 corpus, see body cursus: 25 Dahlhaus, Carl: 42–43 Danckert, Walter: 46 Dante, Divine Comedy: 72–73 Democritus: 89 delectable, see attraction density, see opaque, opacity Descartes, Réne: 13 desire: 22, 30, 35. See also appetite, attraction differentia, differentiae: 1, 34, 63, 109, 119, 159, 165, 171, 196, 198, 200, 205

Index Dobszay, László: 32–33, 52, 125, 126, 127, 157, 162, 167, 170 Dronke, Peter: 58 Eggebrecht, Hans Heinrich: 42–44 Ellis, Catherine J.: 145, 197 Elschek, O.: 52, 155 Elscheková, Alica: 45, 50, 53, 128, 129, 130, 131, 155, 161 embodiment, see body Enlightenment, Age of: 13 experience: 24 explanation(s): 45, 143, 199 Eötvös Lorand University: 2 fabricator, fabricates: 67 Ficino, Marsilio: 41 field work: xii figura, figurae (varied and diverse): 1, 12, 25, 29, 35, 45, 48, 56, 59, 63, 72, 73–80, 94, 96, 100, 105, 114, 119, 122, 139–42, 155, 159, 160, 163, 164, 166, 181, 182, 188, 189, 190, 196, 198, 200–01 Finno-Ugric: 11, 46 firmamentum: 92, 93, 94 forest: 4, 62, 64, 70, 71, 80–81, 102, 103, 165 form: xiii, 12, 38–46, 47, 49, 50, 56, 125, 130, 131, 154, 155, 164, 202, 205 formes fixes: 39 fragmentation: 90 Frazer, James George: 48 Freylinghausen, J. A.: 14 Friedson, Steven: 196, 197 functional harmonic analysis: 205 fundamentum figuratis: 68 Gelasius, Pope: 106 Genesis, commentary tradition: 91, 181, 195 geography: 5, 7, 9, 36, 193, 194, 195 Gersh, Stephen: 65, 69, 127 Gilbertus Porretanus: 72 Ginzburg, Carlo: 126 Glossa ordinaria: 93, 123, 201 Goffart, Walter: 46–47 Gombrich, Ernst: 44–45, 128 ‘goods’: 107, 149

Index Gregory the Great, Pope: 54, 93, 109 Grimm (Brothers): 63 Grosseteste, Robert: 18, 36, 88, 106, 110, 145, 198–99 Guido of Arezzo: 25, 199 habitus: 28, 187, 190, 198 harmonia: 65, 72, 88 ‘Háry János’: 54 Hauck, Gerhard: 43 Hauptmelodie: 49, 56 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: 195 Heine, Heinrich: 18–19, 110 Heves: 3, 4 Hildebert Turonensis: 106 Homer: 30–31, 106 Hucbald of St. Amand: 58 Hugo of St. Victor: 110 Hungarian Academy of Sciences, see Bartók Archive, Budapest hunt: 63 hyle: 21, 31, 61, 68, 101, 104, 161 ictus: 105 imagination: 68, 164, 175, 179, 190 imperfecta: 90, 102, 205. See also perfecta infinitude, see infinity infinity: 89 interval: 72 Isidore of Seville: 18, 106, 195 Jagellonian University, Krakow: 5 Járdányi, Pál: 124–25, 126, 127, 150–51 Jerome, Saint: 107 ‘John Brown’s Body’: 6, 122 Josquin des Pres: 103 kinesis: 87 Klibansky, Raymond: 58, 60 Kodály, Zoltán: 2, 4, 6, 7, 12, 15, 36, 47, 53–54, 63, 124, 152, 157, 161, 169, 171, 172, 173, 187, 197, 203 Kuckertz, J.: 49, 132: Lachmann, Robert: 48 lament: 2, 46, 49, 131 Leichtentritt, Hugo: 40–41, 44 Leonardo da Vinci: 59 light, lux: 91, 108

277

Liszt, Franz: 53 162 Lord, Albert: 202–03 lyric substance, Lyrik: 31 Macrobius: 72 Margit Island: 1–2 Martianus Capella: 71 Marxism: 36, 44, 152 mass: 90, 104, 124, 151, 198, 202 mastication: 110 materia: 55, 57, 63, 90, 103, 107, 200, 205 materialism: 178, 197 McKeon, Richard: xii medium, median: 94 memory, memorization: 27, 42 Merriam, Alan P.: 207 metabole: 87 Michael Scot: 87 migration: 47 mind: 90, 96 ministry discipline: 86, 94–96, 198–99 mode, modes, modi: 12, 35, 63, 71, 74, 97, 104, 119, 132, 155, 198, 200 modulatio: 65 motion: 20–21, 22, 24, 26, 27, 39, 42, 74, 80, 87–88, 89, 90–91, 94, 97, 100, 102, 109, 121, 139, 161, 172, 192, 198, 200, 204 musica disciplina: 208 musica vulgaris: 32–33, 128 mythic structure, mythic past: 9, 52, 180, 202 Nagy, C. B.: 48, 49, 50, 55, 56, 131, 132, 151, 154, 156, 161 national character, see nationalism nationalism: 33, 34, 159, 161, 177–78, 181, 191, 194 nature, Natur, natura: 29–30, 92, 93, 107, 109, 149, 161, 167, 177, 198, 200, 206. See also material, natural/ artificial Naturformen: 44 natural, natura: 10, 205, 206. See also artificial Naturvölker: 19 Nettl, Bruno: 128, 155 Nokter Balbulus: 154 Notre Dame: 152

Index

278

Cathedral: 85–86, 90, 107, 111 School of: 55, 86 Olsvai, Imre: 125 opaque, opacity: 62, 73, 88, 90, 91, 92, 93, 179 Originalgenie: 31 ornamentation: 93, 127, 182, 188 Orpheus: 9 Ossian: 9, 31 Oxford, University of: 106 Paksa, Katalin: 126–27, 206–07 Paris, University of: 85, 92, 156 Parry, Milford: 202–03 pars, partes: 93, 94, 108, 167, 180 participation: 30, 102 pentatonic, pentatonicism: 46, 51, 52, 56, 132, 154 perfecta: 90, 102, 205. See also imperfecta Peter Lombard: 93, 109 Philip the Chancellor: 85–88, 90–94, 107, 108, 109 planctus: 132 Plato: 28, 161, 164 Meno: 58 Phaedo: 11, 21–22, 31, 41, 58, 103 Timaeus: 21, 31, 41, 57–81, 91, 101, 160, 197, 209 ‘Platonic forms’: 41, 160, 164 Plotinus: 25 Poesie: 26–29, 31, 201, 205 Pozsony: 5 pre-existent material: 35, 36, 64, 69, 86, 91, 94, 97, 109, 110, 112, 119, 148–49, 156, 166, 181, 187, 190, 198, 201, 205, 209 privatio: 91–92 Proba: 18, 106 process: 89 properties: 30, 35, 61, 63, 80, 88, 91, 92, 100, 102, 105, 106, 109, 111, 130, 131, 132, 141, 143, 161, 167, 169, 171, 197, 205 proprietas: 84 Prosodie: 28 Psalms, psalter 112, 162–63, Pseudo-Dionysius: 91 pulsus: 23–26, 27, 31, 104, 105

punctum: 48, 97, 105, 108, 200 punctum contra punctum: 97, 108 Pythagoras: 62, 69 Przerembski, Z.: 49, 52 Quintilian: 22, 41–42, 43, 101, 105, 165, 198, 199 Rajeczky, Benjamin: 46, 151, 157, 170, 206 ratio: 65, 108 recombination: 17–18 Regino of Prüm: 25, 71–72, 102 Remigius of Auxerre: 71, 72, 102 representation: 45, 125, 157, 179, 190, 191 Rhabanus Maurus 107 rhythmic figurae: 65, 100, 200, 203. See also figura Richter, Jean-Paul: 105, 160 Riemann, Hugo: 40, 43, 155, 188 Robert Grosseteste: 18, 36, 88, 106, 110, 145, 198–99 Roma: 1, 99–100, 131, 179, 202, 203, 204 Rome, Romans: 18, 46, 52, 122 Rosen, Charles: 41, 43, 130 schema, schemata: 100 Schoenberg, Arnold: 40 Seneca: 107 ‘Sense and Sensibilia’: 31 Siebenbürgenland: 15, 163 silva: 28–29, 31, 57–81, 102, 109, 161 Simplicius, De caelo: 87 Smalley, Beryl: 123 Snyder, Timothy: 190 soggetto cavato: 103 sonus: 93 Soueif, Ahdaf: 175–77 ‘soulish substance’ 20–21, 26, 29–31, 33–35, 57, 90, 104, 111, 204 stemma: 151 Stoetzel, Johann Georg: 14 Stilkritik: 45, 126, 155 stirps, stirps figurae: 68, 71, 73 structuralism: 163, 164 structure: 127, 182 substantia, see materia substantia mobilis: 90 substantia spiritualis: 90 superius: 94

Index style: 38, 41, 44–45, 47, 48, 49, 50, 55, 125, 126–27, 128, 129–30, 154, 155 symphonia: 66 Szabolcsi, Bence: 46–47, 48, 51 Széchényi, István: 162 Székely: 2 ‘Székely Fono’: 4, 15, 54, 179 Szendrei, Janka: 52, 125, 157, 170 Tari, Lujza: 152 taste: 161 term: 21 theoria: 41 thicket: 62, 64, 67, 93, 166 Thijssen, J. M. M. H.: 85–87 Thomas Aquinas: 27, 30 Tode, Heinrich Julius: 14 tone: 72 Tonfall:162 tonus: 25 topoi (commonplace): 38, 101, 124, 203 translatio: 26 Transylvania: 4, 15, 51, 172, 180 tropos: 48 Tschango: 51 ultra mensuram 93 ‘universality’: 44, 56 Urform: 48, 49, 55, 131, 151 Vargyas, L.: 49, 52, 55 versus: 24, 27, 31, 173 vestiges: 201 via recta: 66 Vikar, L.: 48 virga: 68, 71, 73–74 Virgil: 18, 105, 106, 112, 113–14 voice, vox: 66, 206 void: 89 Vulgate, Bible: 112–13 vulgus: 33, 65, 156 Wagner, Richard: 63 Wälder: 28 Weber, Carl Maria von: 63 well-being: 28 Werner, Eric: 48 Whittow, Mark: 53–54 Wilhelm von Habsburg, Archduke: 190

279

William of Auxerre: 109 William of Conches: 72 William of Moerbeke: 27, 87 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim: 42 Wiora, Walter: 32 wood, see forest

Studies in the History of Daily Life (800–1600)

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