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Music in the Craft Cycles
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
It would be difficult, even if it were wise, to isolate the music of the craft cycles from that which preceded it in liturgical drama. In some ways the sources and antecedents of craft cycle music are more important than the subject itself. Let us, then, begin with the place of music in liturgical drama. Every student of the liturgy is aware of its large musical content; in fact, almost all of the liturgy which is intended to be heard by the congregation is sung. This music is called plainchant or plainsong. One obvious reason why most of the liturgy has always been sung is to be found in the very ancient and genuine reliance upon a union of words and music to express in sound the highest and most profound emotions. To the Protestant and modern ear this union will often seem no more than an eccentric way of speaking the words. Yet even Protestants sing hymns and psalms; they do not say them. And it was not so very long ago that a great deal of English lyric poetry was regarded as inseparable from the melodies which accompanied it. One also recalls Greek drama and its superb unification of the three arts of poetry, music, and the dance. No one is surprised, therefore, to find that when drama came out of the liturgy the melodies came along with the words. Indeed, here was somewhat the same inter-dependence and union that had been in Greek drama. Liturgical drama was truly musical drama.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1932
References
1 A useful description of it is in Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, s.v. Plainsong, by W. H. Frere.
2 The wretchedly inartistic recital of plainsong in most Catholic churches today does not help to alter this opinion.
3 This paper is not the place for anything like a thorough study of music in liturgical drama. And the scope and difficulty of such a study is enormous. E. Coussemaker's Drames Liturgiques (1865) is, to my knowledge, the only extensive, printed musical text of medieval dramas. While it is extremely valuable as the only edition, it is full of inaccurate musical transcriptions, and it contains only twenty-two of the hundreds of liturgical plays and near-plays now known. Hence, the study will have to be made from the manuscripts themselves. F. Liuzzi in Studi Medievali, Nuova Serie (1929) ii, 74–109, has written an admirable article on “L'espressione musicale nel dramma liturgico,” but he has based his treatment upon the Coussemaker text—which necessarily limits the significance of his remarks.
4 I am indebted to Signor Liuzzi's article for this illustration. The play is printed by Coussemaker, op. cit., pp. 280–282.
5 A good example is the Cividale Planctus (Coussemaker, op. cit., p. 289).
6 In Sheila Kaye-Smith's play, “The Child Born at the Plough,” in Saints in Sussex (1926), p. 40.
7 The Medieval Stage (1903), ii, 90.
8 Printed, without music, in The Non-Cycle Mystery Plays, edited by O. Waterhouse, for E.E.T.S. (1909).
9 Towneley Plays, “Secunda Pastorum,” E.E.T.S., p. 122.
10 For an explanation of the historical and musical significance of the term crotchet as used by the Shepherds see Hope Traver, “The Relation of Musical Terms in the Widkirk Shepherds' Plays to the Dates of Their Composition,” MLN xx (1905), 1.
11 R. H. Morris, Chester During the Plantagenet and Tudor Reigns (n.d.) pp. 12–13, 346–350.—Chambers, op. cit., ii, 259.
12 Words and music for all of these can be had in the Graduale Sarisburiense (ed. W. H. Frere, 1894) or in the Antiphonale Sarisburiense (ed. Frere, 1901–25). Of course one cannot be certain that the Sarum melody, or tonus, was used throughout England. Unfortunately, service books from the precise locality of the various cycles are rare and incomplete.
13 The tradition of angelic singing is an interesting one. The subject has been well treated by J. R. Moore, who, in JEGP xxii (1923), 89–99, intimates that the tradition grew up in liturgical drama.
14 York Plays, edited by L. T. Smith, pp. 483, 484, 487.
15 Idem, plates ii and iii, reproduced in facsimile, but not in color, from British Museum Add. MS. 35290 (formerly Ashburnham), folios 238 and 238 verso. The third song in this place begins at the middle of f. 238 verso.
16 Idem., 521–526.
17 For accurate information about the significance of the red notation see J. Wolf, Geschichte der Mensural-Notation vom 1250–1460 (Leipzig, 1904), i, 369–373. I hope to print revised transcriptions of all six songs at an early date.
18 See above, note 15.
19 Op. cit., 525–526. Their construction of a source is ingenious but not musically probable. There seems to me no direct influence here of liturgical music.
20 Idem, 523–525.
21 It may be conveniently seen in The Oxford Book of Carols, (1928), p. 44.
22 Words and music in Thomas Sharp, A Dissertation on the Pagents or Dramatic Myseries Anciently Performed At Coventry (1825), pp. 115–118. Both Sharp and Hardin Craig in Two Coventry Corpus Christi Plays, E.E.T.S., (1902), pp. 31–32, assume that these two stanzes are separate songs; but the stanzas are obviously of one song.
23 See the frequent items paid for the singing and paid to the singers in R. H. Morris Chester During the Plantagenet and Tudor Reigns (n.d.), extracts from the Chester Smiths' accounts, Brit. Mus. Harley MS. 2054; in M. H. Peacock London Times Literary Supplement, xxvii (June 7, 1928), p. 431, a letter giving extracts from the Wakefield Burgess Rolls; in R. Davies Extracts From the Municipal Records of the City of York (1843); and in T. Sharp Dissertation on the Pagents … at Coventry (1825), Coventry records reprinted from Sharp by Hardin Craig in Two Coventry Corpus Christi Plays (1902), p. 72 ff.
24 Transactions, Conn. Acad. of Arts and Sciences, ix (1892–95), p. 228.
25 It has not been generally recognized that Chaucer's Troilus and Creseyde was in the fourteenth century sometimes so recited.
26 E.E.T.S. edition (1896), p. 23.
27 This is roughly the conclusion of M. L. Spencer, Corpus Christi Pageants in England (1911), pp. 196–201.