RELIGIOUS BOOKS
NICHOLAS VINCENT
THE EARLY CHURCH IN HARMONY
The Christian West and its Singers:
the first thousand years
Christopher Page
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 400PP, £30
Tablet Bookshop price £27
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ttempts to recreate ancient music have ranged from the anachronistic to the truly awful, the war hymn of the ancient Britons in Bellini’s
Norma, or the invocations of almighty (though unpronounceable) “Fthà” in Verdi’s Aidabeing typical of the genre. Christopher Page, who is a lecturer in medieval English literature at Cambridge University, makes no claim to recapture the vanished sounds of the first mil- lennium. Instead, through a meticulous survey of the documentary and archaeological evi- dence, he seeks to establish what is (and more often what is not) known about the role of singing and singers in early Christian worship. Entering the minefield of liturgical studies with a merry whistle and barely a glance at the carnage that earlier scholars have left behind, Page accepts that music was so essen- tial an element of Jewish worship that psalm singing would already have been familiar to the early Christians long before the invention of any Christian “liturgy”. Christians interro- gated by Pliny were accustomed to singing hymns of praise before dawn on the Sabbath, and despite his apparent distaste for the rit- ualisation of worship, St Paul refers to song on several occasions. The gnostic Acts of John even portrays Christ at the Last Supper dan - cing and singing with his disciples. By the early third century, there is evidence that, in some churches, boys were employed for the singing of psalms, their voices being preferred for their pre-adolescent purity. The office of “lector”, often held by young boys, may have involved singing as well as recitation (although a key piece of evidence here is somewhat bizarrely buried by Page in his later discussion of the fifth-century Gennadius, Bishop of Marseilles). Alternatively, they may have been trainee presbyters, chosen for their family connections to the priesthood. In Rome itself, as late as the fourth century,
even the language of the liturgy, whether Latin or Greek, remains uncertain. Carthage per- haps made a greater contribution to the Latin liturgy than Rome. By the fifth century, how-
22 | THE TABLET | 22 May 2010
Orpheus with his lyre. Arcosolium in the Christian cemetery of SS Pietro e Marcellino, Rome
ever, the singing of psalms seems to have been entirely customary and “cantors”, albeit hold- ing a status little higher than gravediggers, were employed in many churches. The uncle of the historian Gregory of Tours was so accomplished a singer that he rose to become a sort of live-in tenor to the new barbarian court at Cologne. Meanwhile, in Vandal North Africa, a lector named Theucarius, charged with the training of 12 small boys, may be identifiable as the Christian world’s first choir- master (a figure in this instance of good rather than evil omen).
Rome’s singing school, the schola can -
torum, came into existence by 700, perhaps modelled upon the recruitment of orphans for song already pioneered in the great orphanage of Constantinople, by which time a large part of the Office, now identifiable as
The uncle of Gregory of
Tours was so accomplished a singer that he became a sort of live-in tenor to the new barbarian court at Cologne
the Mass, was sung, at least on greater occa- sions such as Easter Sunday. Music and the Mass, indeed, developed hand in hand, with the needs of music and its syllabic pronun- ciation ensuring that a hyper-correct form of Latin was preserved in the West when the laity might otherwise have reduced Latin to a mutually incomprehensible series of regional dialects. Rome was thus central to the preservation not only of tradition but of communication within Europe. It was from the Roman schola cantorum that Pippin, the father of Charlemagne, recruited singing teachers for the revival of music in the north, and from
here it is a fairly short step to Rouen and the origins of “Gregorian” (here styled “Frankish- Roman”) chant; and thence back to Italy for the emergence, thanks to Guido of Arezzo and his invention of the stave, of the first prac- tical musical notations from which such chant can be not only studied but performed. Even Guido, Page reveals, was as much interested in ideas of purity and the correct transmission of tradition as he was in music for its own sake. Page writes with scholarly rigour and with
detailed citation of sources, yet for a general as opposed to an exclusively scholarly audi- ence. This is a thoughtful and provocative new look at the early history of the Church, valuable not just for the history of music but for all manner of subjects, from the history of childhood (still an honourable theme for church historians) to the linguistic and cultural trends of post-Roman society. It is also beau- tifully illustrated. If, on occasion, there is a hint of self-indulgence and a risk that the purely musical materials are swallowed up within their context, then the context itself is so fascinating and so lucidly expounded that it would be churlish to object. Nonetheless, in so comprehensive a survey, there are some odd gaps. While Page accepts the Judaic origins of much Christian worship, for example, he has virtually nothing to say on the music or musical traditions of the Jews. There is nothing here on secular music in its late- or post-Roman context. Nothing on instrumental music (despite the development of the stave from an earlier system of “string” notation based upon the stringing of a lyre or vihuela), or on the role of organs or other instruments in the liturgy. Perhaps most sur- prising of all, there is not a single reference to St Cecilia. If Cecilia’s credentials, as a martyr who died singing to the Lord, were good enough for Purcell, Handel and Britten, then they are surely good enough for this approach- able and in many senses magnificent history of the origins of Christian song.
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