Giovanni Varelli has succeeded in transcribing this piece into modern notation:Įverything suggests that these unusual signs were written at the same time as the chant along the bottom of the page, in the early decades of the tenth century. So in fact this newly invented notation of the tenth century conveys some details which are more subtle and sophisticated than can be shown in the standard modern staff notation of more than a millennium later. The curved sign, on the third note from the right in the excerpt above, shows a liquescent syllable in the text, signifying that the letters m and n should be hummed with the mouth closed: these signs are also found in conjunction with the letters r, t and - gn-, showing some sort of semi-vocalised performance. When both voices sing the same note, the two lines converge. The letters on the left show the height at which each note is written, from a up to g, and the vertical lines link the two notes to be sung together. The pitches are shown in much the same way as modern notation, by their height on a stave: the only difference is that the stave-lines have been ruled in the parchment with a dry point, so are virtually invisible. More interesting, though, are the strange patterns of vertical lines with dashes on their tops and circles on their bottoms:Ĭloser inspection reveals that these symbols represent two separate voice parts - the upper part (shown with horizontal dashes) is the melody of the first chant notated at the bottom of the page, and the lower part (shown with circles) is a separate melody to be sung in harmony with the chant melody - a practice known as organum. This in itself was an exciting discovery, as the number of surviving manuscripts of this very early notation is very limited. The second, 'Rex caelestium terrestrium', is a more generic plea for salvation. The first chant is an antiphon in honour of St Boniface, an English missionary who established Christianity in many parts of Germany. At the bottom of the page, on either side of a tear in the parchment which was already present before the text was written, are two short chants notated with neumes characteristic of the early tenth century, in a style known to modern scholars as Palaeofrankish notation. Musical notations in order to add details to the British Library's Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts when he stumbled upon this page completely by chance. Giovanni was systematically working along the shelves looking for medieval The music was discovered by Giovanni Varelli, a doctoral student at Cambridge, while he was working at the British Library on an internship under the Leonardo da Vinci Programme from the University of Pavia. When the manuscript was received as part of the Harley Collection in 1753, nobody paid any attention to these scribblings: the fact that our predecessors chose to deface them with the British Museum stamp is regrettable, but also provides clear evidence that they were not thought to have any significance. The music consists of a brief inscription written in the blank space at the end of a short manuscript of the life of the fourth-century bishop Maternianus of Riems, written down in the early tenth century.
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