Musica enchiriadis

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Representation of an organum in Dasia notation. Musica enchiriadis , late 9th century

Musica enchiriadis (“Handbook on Music Theory”) is the title of a textbook on singing the organum from the 9th century AD. This “handbook” falls into the early phase of occidental polyphony . Organum meant adding one, and later several, voices to the unanimous Gregorian chant . It was obviously intended as a practical guide for monastic singing practice in order to practice singing the organum.

According to the ideas of the early medieval music world, only certain intervals and part guides were considered for the voices added to Gregorian chant. The Musica enchiriadis thus exclusively describes the fifth organum and fourth organum . These forms of the organum are also known as the parallel organum; This means that the voices move predominantly in parallel movement, always with a fifth or fourth apart, as well as doubling in the octave.

Exceptions here are the beginning and the end of a song. The voices come out of harmony and move towards the parallel movement; at the end of the chant the voices “run” towards each other again ( occursus ) in order to close again in unison.

Representation of the tone system of that time in Dasia characters and modern transcription (the lowest tone corresponds to a capital G). The tone system consists of four unconnected tetrachords and two tones added above (b and c sharp). The tetrachords all have the same structure (whole tone-semitone-whole tone).

For the graphical representation of the voice movement, this textbook developed its own notation , which made use of the so-called Dasia script (from old Greek daseia , "rough breathing" - in relation to the aspiration of a word in Greek prosody ) to clarify the pitches . The notation is like a coordinate system (see illustration). The pitches in Dasia characters are plotted on the ordinate axis and the text syllables run along the abscissa . Presumably due to the relative inconvenience, the notation of the Musica enchiriadis found no future in the further recording of the polyphonic music. But perhaps it was only intended for didactic purposes from the start.

There is a connection to the Musica Albini written by Alkuin in terms of content, because both writings indicate that the single tone is the smallest element of music and that this is comparable to the letter as the smallest part of linguistic theory.

The anonymously handed down script was long ascribed to the monk Hucbald (* around 840; † 930). The more recent research into the music of the Middle Ages , however, agree that this assumption is hardly tenable. It is more likely that the script was created around 900 in Werden Abbey : Two copies from the 10th century name the Werden abbot Hoger († 906), whose abbey is dated from 898 to 902, as the author. Werden was also the place where the oldest known fragment ( Düsseldorf, Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek , K3: H3) was written, and also the place where the Bamberg manuscript ( Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek , Var. 1), which is called textual most reliable copy of the Musica enchiriadis is considered to have been written. The high degree of circulation of the Musica enchiriadis is unusual and striking: hundreds of copies were found across Europe, i.e. H. handwritten copies, found - which speaks not least for the intention of creating a textbook.

literature

  • Barbara Hebborn, Die Dasia-Notation, (Bonn 1995) ISBN 978-3-922626-79-4 [1]
  • Dieter Torkewitz : The oldest document on the emergence of occidental polyphony (= archive for musicology . Supplement 44). Stuttgart 1999.
  • Michael Walter : From the beginning of music theory and the end of music. About the topicality of the Middle Ages in music history. In: Acta Musicologica . Volume 70, 1998, pp. 209-228 ( PDF ).
  • Ernst Ludwig Waeltner: The Organum until the middle of the 11th century. Tutzing 1975.

See also

Web links