It is unfortunate, but the study of mediaeval music began with some serious misunderstandings, and those misunderstandings still colour players’ attitudes today, since inevitably players are a generation out in all scholarly matters – players play, they do not research for themselves.
Mediaeval music was essentially forgotten by the eighteenth century; only the Roman Catholic tradition of “Gregorian chant” preserved even a shadow of mediaeval sound, and by 1700 even this was plastered over with harmonies and rhythms that almost completely obscured the music itself.
But the mid-century saw a general revival of interest in the mediaeval world – new churches were already being built in a sort-of gothic style, but Horace Walpole brought the style out of the religious sphere when he built his house “Strawberry Hill” in a (very approximately) “Gothic” style, and published the first Gothic novel, “The Castle Of Otranto” in 1764 to widespread acclaim.
As a result there were the first stirrings of interest in mediaeval music in the second half of the eighteenth century, but it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that mediaeval music as a whole began to be recovered from obscure volumes in old libraries. But Gregorian chant was still seen as the typical mediaeval music.
And there was a particular problem with this: the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries were the age of the Great Hero – the Great Man, pushing history forward by his own sheer greatness. Consequently the myth grew up that Gregorian chant had been composed by Pope Gregory the Great himself, back around 600AD, and that therefore the music of the church from that point on was fixed and unchanging.
Around the middle of the nineteenth century the work of Pothier, Macquereau and others at Solesmes demonstrated beyond doubt that the Gregorian chant was a dynamic, evolving music, with multiple roots and a complex history. There were major changes in the late eighth and ninth centuries as the corpus assimilated Gaulish chants, and also a little later in the ninth century when the influence of the new keyboard instruments began to be felt, and in the eleventh centuries when the Cistercians attempted to “purify” the chant in accordance with their preconceived ideas of what the chant should be, but these were merely accelerations in a constantly evolving tradition. The scholars at Solesmes have identified chants dating from every century from the ninth to the sixteenth, and in fact some of the chants in the current edition of the Liber Usualis date from the nineteenth and even the twentieth centuries.
To us, the attribution to Pope Gregory was ridiculous. Yet outside the Catholic Church, the idea of mediaeval church music as a given, as fixed, is still potent! For example, when it is noted that a thirteenth century motet shares its bass with a piece of Gregorian chant, it is assumed that the composer of the motet has copied the bass from the chant; the much more likely explanation, that the composer of the motet was also the composer of the chant, is rarely considered!
This is even taken to the point of claiming that there was no original composition in the Middle Ages – that all composers did was to take a line from a chant and set words to it, perhaps with some basic harmonies added. Yet throughout the Middle Ages there are bodies of important religious music which are not based on chant; indeed are in one of several quite different musical styles, and in the later Middle Ages there is quite a lot of nonreligious music which again does not use a chant; all these are brushed aside in order to fit the stereotype of a Church suppressing all originality throughout the Middle Ages – a stereotype which is laughable not only in music but in literature, science and technology.
Initially, in the early nineteenth century, of course there were problems understanding the notation, especially as several systems of notation were in use simultaneously in the Middle Ages, each of which was continuously evolving throughout the period.
For example, there was the system of assumed accidentals known as “musica ficta” – imagined notes.
“Musica ficta” was known as a phrase long before detailed contemporary accounts of the system were located. A few fifteenth century references were found quite early which included examples, and although the explanations were not understood, scholars believed they could still understand and use the examples. Sadly, this was not in fact the case; the examples were misinterpreted in such a way that by the end of the nineteenth century it was believed that any accidental could be introduced under the guise of “musica ficta” simply because it sounded good to nineteenth century ears.
And, unfortunately, this wrong view is still influencing modern editions of mediaeval music – most especially (and fortunately for the true mediaeval musician), fifteenth century mediaeval and renaissance music. So we find even now sharpened leading notes, flattened high notes and other modern conventions applied as “musica ficta” to fifteenth century music completely without justification. They may have sounded pleasing in a Victorian parlour; they would have been utterly inappropriate in a mediaeval solar.
This does illustrate a problem with all mediaeval notation; it is very rare indeed to find musical notation which is by modern standards complete. Late mediaeval music omits musica ficta and usually any indication of speeds, speed changes and loudness changes; earlier music fails to indicate the lengths of notes clearly, and earlier still hardly at all; and in that period even pitch is often unclear; earlier still the player has to be content with mere indications of going up or down in pitch.
Even so, the situation is by no means as bad as it is sometimes painted: editors will often ignore such indications as there are. Plicae and liquescent notes may be treated as ordinary notes, or omitted; sets of apostrophae as long notes – or as equal repeated notes – without comment, especially in pressus and orisci; virgae and puncta will not be distinguished; nor will currentes and climaci; the poor quilisma is used so badly and inconsistently that it damages the notes on either side. Worst of all, and yet found almost everywhere, Romanian letters are omitted and ignored.
So the poor would-be performer of mediaeval music is left relying on a few reasonably trustworthy editors – who are almost all performers, unsurprisingly – or have to go back to the original sources and edit them for themselves.