Lot 24

Miniature Choirbook with Guidonian hand, in Latin, manuscript on vellum

Estimate

3,000 - 5,000 GBP

bidding is closed

Description

123 leaves, 82mm. by 60mm., wanting a leaf or two from the beginning, else complete, collation: i^{6, ii-xiv^{8, xv^{13 (i a singleton), written space 42mm. by 65mm., musical notation in black ink on four 4-line red staves with accompanying text for first fifteen gatherings, sixteenth gathering with single column, 18 lines in brown ink in a small Italian bookhand, rubrics in red, initial letters touched in yellow with some simple penwork tracery, numerous 1- or 2-line initials in alternate red and blue, some staining to first leaf and minor burn to fore-edge, else in good condition, in early binding of brown leather over thin wooden boards, tooled with floral panels, leaves and symbols surrounding the Virgin holding the Christ child above a winged face, some traces of gilding to Virgin on backboard, remnants of clasps, binding a little scuffed with some worm-damage, minor water-damage, and top and bottom of spine now exposed, original stitching reinforced, in fitted red morocco box}}}

Provenance

provenance

Written by an Italian monk, Frater Joannes de plebe, perhaps for his own personal use, who names himself as the scribe in a colophon on fol. 121v.

Catalogue Note

text

This volume contains a collection of music and prayers clearly intended for private use. The main body of the text contains collections of musical forms such as the 'Seven Tones' (fol. 1r) and ones more specific to the monastic office such as the 'Twelve Lections' (fol. 9r & 15r), as well as a Gradual (fol. 16r-110v).

These are complemented by the presence of a Guidonian hand on fol. 122r. This hand takes its name after its probable inventor, Guido da Arezzo (d. after 1033). This musical scholar and teacher was assigned the task of training singers for the cathedral of Arezzo, and he developed the ancestor of the modern system of precise pitch notation through lines and spaces, and a method of sight-singing based on the syllables ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la, each representing what he named "neumes". In the early twelfth century Sigebertus Gemblacensis described Guido using the joints of the hand as an aid in teaching this hexachord, and we can probably assume that he was referring to the series of syllables which were to be written on pupils' hands as in the drawing in this manuscript. They are written from the ut at the top of the thumb to the mi at the base, across the upper part of the palm from fa-ut to fa-ut, up the little finger and from there in ever-decreasingly smaller circles anti-clockwise across and around the other three fingers towards the la-sol in the middle of the fore-finger. Memory aids such as this were often smudged or washed away during the activities of the day, and so needed frequent replenishment, and what we have here is a template for an apparently forgetful student to renew his crib-sheet before class.

While this method of learning sight-singing was extremely common until the mid-sixteenth century, such diagrams in manuscripts are not. The fundamental study of them remains that of J. Smits van Waesberghe, Musikerziehung: Lehre und Theorie der Musik im Mittelalter (1969), 126-43, where he catalogues and describes twenty-five examples. The present manuscript compares well to those catalogued there, and the attention to detail in the shading around the hand and the filigree-cuff around the wrist reveals this to be an exceptionally fine example.

In addition, the last gathering contains an assemblage of prayers to various saints, and those to be sung on the death and during the burial of a variety of persons, including bishops, priests, a wife, a father or a mother, brothers (probably of the community) and benefactors, and the form of absolution to be administered at the point of death. The volume ends with the opening words of the Gospel of John in neat and tiny red ink enclosed within a blue penwork circle.