Music from 1000 years ago: songs, stories and instrumental music from the earliest-known secular European sources.

Introduction

What did secular European song sound like one thousand years ago? Who were its singers and what instruments did they play? Where, and under what circumstances, have their songs survived? Can we ever hope to reconstruct music from such a distant age? These are the questions which led to my initial search for the lost songs of a performing musician whose name remains unknown to us, a search which now culminates - or at least pauses for reflection - in this program: Lost Songs of a Rhineland Harper. Almost one thousand years ago a collection Latin and German song was copied into a manuscript by Anglo-Saxon monks in the Abbey of St. Augustine in Canterbury. The original source - or sources - has long since disappeared, but the manuscript copy has survived to this day, and is now found in the library of Cambridge University. Although we will never know what its exact origin was, one thing is clear: many of the songs copied by the monks come from the milieu of learned, aristocratic churchmen in the Rhineland, where cities such as Cologne, Mainz, Worms and Speyer were centers of culture and power in Germany at the turn of the first millennium. In addition, it is striking that many of the song texts from this collection display an intimate working knowledge of music, the voice, and instruments, especially the harp (cithara, lira) and even the flute (tibia). When considering possible sources of the Canterbury collection, the evidence points strongly to the performance repertoire of a learned "citharista", a bi-lingual harper/singer from the Rhineland, whose songs delighted not only aristocratic bishops and their courts, but also powerful abbots, secular nobility (including the Kaiser’s court), and the young clerical intelligentsia of those bustling river towns with their imposing cathedrals. Here we have the songs of a professional entertainer whose audience was expected to pay for his services (and he might easily have been joined on occasion by another minstrel from the ranks of the itinerant players, or even a poetically-inclined clerical cantor). Our program combines some of the earliest-known musical manuscripts of European song with reconstructions from the Canterbury manuscript, to give a glimpse into the deliciously subtle, long-lost world of an unknown Rhineland harper and his sophisticated audience.

Various, including reconstructions of major portions of the "Cambridge Songbook" (ca. 1000), containing songs of a Rhineland harper; and the "Lay of Attila the Hun" from the Old Icelandic Edda. (full program given below).
I. An Ode to Cosmic Harmony
Quod mundus stabili fide (Rhineland, early 11c)
II. The Image of Dawn
Cigni (Frankish, 10c)
Foebus abierat (Northern Italy, late 10c)
Clangam, filii (Winchester, 10c)
Phebi claro (Provence, late 10c)
Aurea personet lira (Rhineland, early 11c)
III. Songs of the Harp
Caute cane, cantor care (Rheinland, early 11c)
Magnus Cesar Otto (Rhineland, ca. 996-1002)
Rota modos arte (Rhineland, early 11c)
David Reges inclita proles (Rhineland, early 11c)
---------------intermission-------------
IV. The Harper in the Underworld
Felix qui potuit boni (Rhineland, early 11c)
V. The Harper in the Snakepit
Atli sendi ar til Gunnars (Iceland 10c)
VI. Desire and Seduction
Iam, dulcis amica, venito (Aquitaine, late 10c)
Advertite, omnes populi (Rhineland, 11c)
O admirabile Veneris idolum (Northern Italy, 10c)
Puella turbata (Frankish, 10c)
Suavissima nunna (Rhineland, 11c)
Veni, dilectissime (Rhineland, 11c)

----------------- Program description-----------------------------

I. An Ode to Cosmic Harmony: Quod mundus stabili fide (Rhineland, early 11c)
In the neo-Platonic cosmos of many medieval thinkers (and certainly our harper belonged to this group), the visible world could provide tangible expression of the underlying order and harmony of the universe, whose elements vibrate in agreeable concord with their neighbors, symbolizing the unseen forces which keep our world intact.

II. The Image of Dawn
The most poignant medieval image of dawn, known to us from the troubadours, is the erotic alba, a song of illicit lovers who must part after a night of love. But many dawn songs do not describe an amorous parting: they are songs which present the ineffable moment between night and day, when mysteries are made manifest, the light in the sky is in flux, visions occur, and voices of warning are heard mixed with the song of the nightingale. Here, as in the Song of Songs, the worlds of eros and the spirit are inseparable.

III. Songs of the Harp
In the 10th and 11th centuries, two types of harp (Latin: lira, cithara) were known: an archaic, rounded shape with a very few strings all of the same length, and the more familiar, triangular shape with many more strings of varying lengths. From the Canterbury manuscript, these are songs of praise to the harp itself, instrument of kings, healers and magicians, an instrument whose strings vibrate in the hands of the harper like the resonating human soul in the hands of the Creator.
IV. The Harper in the Underworld
Another song from the Consolation of Philosophy of Boethius, ‘Felix qui potuit boni’ tells the story of the mythological singer and harper Orpheus, describing his daring voyage into the realm of the dead to rescue his beloved wife, Eurydice, through the power of song. The fact that this song turns up in the Rhineland harper's collection attests to the power of the Orpheus myth in musical circles throughout the early Middle Ages.

V. The Harper in the Snakepit: Atli sendi ar til Gunnars (Iceland, 10c.)
This is the Old Icelandic Atlakvida ("Lay of Attila the Hun"), the earliest-known retelling of the famous Rhinegold tale and its violent end. In earlier tales, we learn of how Sigurd (in later versions known as Siegfried) killed the dragon Fafnir and stole the gold, and of the ensuing miseries caused by this theft. At this point in the vast legend, Sigurd's widow, Gudrun, has been remarried to the Hunnish King, Atli (Attila), who wants to lure her brothers to visit him, to force them to reveal the whereabouts of the cursed gold. The story takes place in Germanic lands, along the Rhine, even in the mythical "Mirkwood Forest", and it was certainly known to our harper in its orally-transmitted Germanic version. But it has survived in writing only in Iceland, as part of the famous Edda collection. This tale of gold-greed, betrayal and murder is sometimes called ‘The Greenlandic Lay of Atli’, and as such was probably among the first European songs heard in North America, as Norsemen inhabited the earliest white settlements in "Vinland" (now in Newfoundland) more than a thousand years ago.

VI. Desire and Seduction
Many lyrics survive from 11th-century sources which attest to the powerful influence of the Song of Songs ' dreamlike erotic language on medieval poets and singers. There are songs of almost transcendental desire – both feminine and masculine - but also simple, almost farcical lyrics of seduction, and we shouldn't be surprised to find all these delicacies spread by the harper before an appreciative intellectual, even ecclesiastical audience.

This program is offered on a limited basis in 2006.
Video titles of sung texts available for projection (English only).
CD: Lost Songs of a Rhineland Harper (DHM / 2004)