Sing, Sing, Sing!

   There have been some roistering discussions on the subject of digitising books, but those of us in love with medieval manuscripts can only applaud the ever growing corpus of fully digitised manuscript material that is appearing. I mean, yes, we would love to be able to see and feel and pore over and smell the originals, but we can at least see a much greater sample these days from our own desktop. The e-Codices site from Switzerland is one of the most magnificent, and continually growing.
  Their most recent newsletter reveals a project that has taken this to another level. Musical Treasures from the Library of St Gall shows us some significant samples from a project on early church music. Notker Balbalus (840 -912) was an important composer of early church music, inventing certain musical forms. He is better known to historians as Notker the Stammerer, who wrote a life of Charlemagne. I don't know what it says about historians that he should be known forever by his affliction rather than as Notker the Magnificent Musical Composer.
  His work has been reconstructed by ploughing through various copies which are to be found on the e-Codices site, and having them recorded by the early music ensemble Ordo Virtutum. On the website you can see pages from the various manuscripts while listening to the music from those pages being sung. Fascinating for those of us untutored in early medieval musical notation who think neumes look like trails left by worms across the page. If you really like it you can buy the CD. There are links to all manner of other related materials.
  What makes this a second generation digital project is that not only is it a quite splendid multimedia presentation on the web, it was actually generated from material already displayed on the web. A few Anglophonic institutions which retain suspicious attitudes to anyone wanting to actually utilise images of their hoarded treasures would do well to take a look at this and ponder.
  And yes, I know that the limitations of early musical notation mean that we don't know if it actually sounded exactly like that, but it does bring the pages alive.

Everything in Boxes

  I hope you all had a good Easter. I did. I spent the whole time at a folk festival - great music and dancing, food and drink, and generally good fun. Somehow though, the talk at these events always gets round to "What is folk music?" or "Is this really folk music?". Frankly Scarlett, I couldn't give a damn. It's all music. Sing, dance, pluck, strum, blow, bang, whatever.
  This set us talking about how the chattering classes are always discussing the classification of things. Botanists in Australia have spent years of their lives arguing about how many species of Eucalyptus trees there are, but the trees grow in the forests just the same. Somebody who was singing a song about starfish claimed that zoologists now insist that they should not be called starfish as they are not fish. Instead they should be called sea stars. Trouble is, they are not in the sky and they don't twinkle. I personally have inflicted on the world a PhD thesis on the ethnic classification of the Dayaks of Borneo, and how it doesn't really work because people are not classified by their characteristics in common, but defined by their differences from others, and they usually have relationships with various different groups of others. Phew! It has taken me about sixteen years to reduce my PhD thesis to one sentence.
  We took one of our granddaughters to her favourite science museum, where we went to a presentation on dinosaurs. They explained that Brontosaurus did not exist, because it had previously been discovered and called something else. There were even suggestions of scientific fakery in order to create more classifications of dinosaurs. Some large critter left those bones behind, and he existed, and wasn't classified for millions of years. It must be very galling to be declassified if the corollary is that you didn't even exist. I shall insist on being cremated when I die so that they can't do it to me.
  I bought a chalumeau at the folk festival. That is a kind of proto-clarinet. On looking up the history of these instruments, there was great argumentation about the precise stage of the process of gradually modifying sound holes and adding levers which makes a chalumeau become a clarinet, and whether the person who is credited with inventing the clarinet really did so, or whether he merely modified a chalumeau. Well, I can blow notes on it now, so a big raspberry to that one. Just stop arguing and make the music.
  Language came into the discussion. There was a French singer who had lived for many years in northeast England and who spoke with a brilliant Geordie accent. She said she hadn't known that there were people in England who spoke other than "proper" English. She originally came from Nimes in the south of France. I went there once, and discovered that there were people who spoke French in a manner that my old French teachers would have thought was most incorrect. But we put all these things in boxes and write rules and fail to recognise that the rules don't always fit. In an earlier posting English 4 U I wrote something about the changing language and got emails from people effusively congratulating me on confirming their prejudices about the necessity to retain "proper" English, when I was saying the exact opposite.
  Paleography, of course, is not immune from this kind of discussion. Learned folks are always arguing about whether you can define a script by the funny little twiddle on the top of the s or whether you should define it by the slope of the ascenders or other minutiae, when we know that in the real world there is an endless range of variation which tends to clump into loosely defined patterns which we dignify with names. But then we talk as if the classifications were the reality, not simply something which we have made up in order to help us think. I have had numerous emails from people sending me pictures of bits of writing so that I can tell them the name of the script so that they can read it. (??!)
  I recently acquired a couple of books about medieval musical notation, and discovered that the same old story goes on there. There are names for the various evolving styles of musical notation, but no exact place where one turns into another. But somehow the emboxment becomes more important than understanding the process of evolution. So we are back where we started, with music, having got absolutely nowhere.

Paul Simon was Right

"When I think about the crap I learned in high school, it's a wonder I can even think at all" sang Paul Simon in one of his more insightful moments. The trouble is, these days even the crap I learned is proving less and less useful.

I used to be pretty good at using mathematical tables; log tables, sine and cosine tables, logs to the base e. I'm not sure they helped me to understand mathematics exactly, but I could pass exams.Then I graduated to the slide rule. My Dad gave me his special one when I went to university. I still have it somewhere, along with the highly expensive electronic calculator that replaced all of those. I think I can now do all of those calculations on my mobile phone, if I can only work out which sequence of buttons to push.

Then there was the arcane equipment of the chemistry lab, large unchanged since the days of medieval alchemists. It's many a long year since I, or anybody else in the western world, was required to use a beam balance or perform a titration, or fiddle around with stuff made of complex tubing filled with mercury which splurted into the sink if you turned the taps in the wrong sequence. Now it's all done with machines that go ping.

It was in my high school years that I first attempted to learn the guitar; not actually in school of course because in those days guitars were the territory of social deviants like rock-and-rollers and unwashed folkies. A few of us battled along with American how-to manuals and some mutual solidarity, but learning to tune by ear was an issue in the absence of classical training. I recently took up music again, and having an interest in things with large numbers of strings, bought myself one of those newfangled electronic tuners. "How do I program it?" I asked the leather jacketed, silver studded and pierced helpful youth behind the counter. He gave me a blank stare. "How do I make it go?" "You push the little red ON button." he replied, still bewildered. "But how does it know which note I want to play?" He twanged a guitar string in its general direction. "It tells you what note you're playing, and here it tells you whether it's sharp or flat." He obviously thought I was lapsing into senility, but no, I was just delving into ancient but no longer necessary bits of knowledge. Now if I had had one of those things when I was fifteen, perhaps I might have learned how to play the guitar better, rather than spending half my life tuning it.

Music helped to put another nail in the coffin that contains my useless knowledge. In order to maintain my multistringed instruments, I went to buy a Vernier caliper for measuring string gauges. The very helpful salesman handed me something that looked like a Vernier, but had no calibrations on it and no Vernier slide. I must have been staring at it like a complete idiot, because he said, very kindly and gently, "It's got a digital readout." Then he pushed the little red ON button. That's it! Even my esoteric knowledge at reading obscure calibration instruments is redundant.

I do think that with all our highly precise machining of strings and other instrument parts, as well as digital measuring equipment, we might be getting rather more fussy about tuning than about the music itself. I have wondered whether those medieval musicians really played largely out of tune most of the time. A hurdygurdy maker I met once claimed that the precursor of the hurdygurdy was used in the monasteries to teach the melodies of Gregorian chant. As the hurdygurdy is a notorious beast to keep in tune even with modern technology, I suspect I may be right about that.