How did medieval people learn music? The answer was not confined to treatises or classrooms. Musical knowledge passed from voice to voice and instrument player to instrument player, through listening, imitation, gesture, repetition, and varied kinds of participation – in worship, ceremony, dance. Music, as we know, was preserved and reshaped in manuscripts, but was also embodied in performance, devotional practice, memory, and the daily routines of religious and educational communities.
These processes of musical learning have often been studied within separate regional and disciplinary traditions. Histories of music education in Latin Western Europe do not always enter into sustained conversation with scholarship on Russian, Ukrainian, Balkan, and other Slavic cultures. Yet bringing these traditions together raises productive questions:
How was musical knowledge made teachable?
What relationships connected theory with practice, written texts with oral transmission, and technical instruction with spiritual formation?
What can manuscripts, diagrams, rubrics, corrections, and performance traditions tell us about teaching as it actually occurred?
A hybrid session that I am helping to organize for the 2027 International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo seeks papers addressing these questions.
Call for Papers
“Pedagogies of Sound: Medieval Music Education in Slavic and European Contexts” International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, May 13–15, 2027 Hybrid session
The
session explores music education across medieval and early modern
European and Slavic traditions, focusing on the transmission of musical
knowledge through pedagogy, performance, spirituality, and creative
practice.
Possible topics include theoretical instruction, chant
pedagogy, performance traditions, mystical and devotional approaches to
musical learning, manuscript culture, and the relationship between
theory and practice. We particularly welcome comparative and
cross-cultural perspectives connecting Western Europe with Russian,
Ukrainian, Balkan, and broader Slavic contexts.
The session comes at a
moment of renewed scholarly interest in premodern pedagogy, cultural
transmission, and global approaches to medieval studies. The forthcoming
Russian translation of Music Education in the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance also points to growing international engagement with the
history of music education and creates an opportunity for broader
dialogue between Eastern and Western European scholarly traditions.
By
foregrounding Slavic and Russian-language perspectives alongside Latin
European materials, we hope to foster conversation across disciplinary,
regional, and linguistic boundaries. A designated translator will be
available to help facilitate discussion.
In our medievalism discussions this
semester, we’ve often asked a deceptively simple question: what
does it mean to “use” the medieval past? Sometimes the past is
reconstructed. Sometimes it is stylized, or put to a political
agenda.
And sometimes it
becomes something stranger: a set of sonic materials that can be
rearranged, fragmented, and reimagined.
Alfred Schnittke’s
Minnesang (1981) belongs very much in that last category.
Rather than reconstructing medieval song, Schnittke treats it almost
like archaeological fragments – pieces of melody, pieces of language,
pieces of texture that can be layered together into something
new.
What he tells us is that the past can be fully present, and yet sound
nothing like the past at all.
Before looking at how the piece works, it helps
simply to hear it.
Stefan
Parkman and the Danish
National Symphony Choir ℗ 1992 Chandos Records
Alfred Schnittke
and the Past
Alfred Schnittke (1934–1998) was one of
the most distinctive composers of the late Soviet period. His music
is often associated with what he called polystylism. He enjoyed the
mix-and-mingle of different genres’ conventions, with Renaissance
and Romantic language butting up against popular music styles, in a
vertiginous swirl of sound. As he put it,
“The goal of
my life is to unify serious music and light music, even if I break my
neck in doing so.”
His life was complicated by the
fractious and often oppressive cultural environment of the late
Soviet Union. During the Brezhnev era (1964–1982), artistic life
was shaped by political surveillance, ideological expectations, and a
leadership culture that prized stability over reform. Schnittke
himself experienced travel bans after abstaining from a Composers’
Union vote in 1980, and Minnesang was created at exactly that moment in his career. As a student of
Shostakovich, the question of politics’ potential influence on his
personal safety, let alone his musical reception, must surely have
been on his mind.
At the same time, he cultivated
an unusually deep relationship with the musical past. As a teenager
studying in Vienna in 1946, he later recalled a key and abiding
insight that was to influence his musical choices throughout his
life:
“Every moment there was a link in the historical
chain… the past represented a world of ever-present ghosts.”
That
sense of the past as ever-present becomes crucial for our
understanding of Minnesang.
The Piece: Minnesang (1981)
Schnittke
wrote Minnesang for 52
vocal parts, dividing the choir at times into dozens of independent
lines. The work draws on around twenty medieval German songs,
including material by:
Walther
von der Vogelweide
Neidhart
von Reuental
Wolfram
von Eschenbach
Heinrich
von Meissen
the
Monk of Salzburg
Yet Schnittke insisted that
he was not “composing” with these songs in the traditional sense. Rather,
he took a mosaicist’s approach:
“I
set the task to limit myself with only montage work without changing
any note of these songs.” (Schnittke
Program Notes, as quoted in Smirnov)
Even
the texts themselves are treated differently than one might expect.
The Middle High German language, largely opaque to modern listeners,
becomes part of the sonic texture, transformed,
as Schnittke claims, into simple phonemes
which help to create a
particular mood.
In
other words, the medieval material becomes sound matter.
What Is Schnittke’s Medievalism Doing?
This piece
belongs to a broader cluster of works in which Schnittke explored
spirituality and historical memory, including:
Requiem (1975)
Der Sonnengesang des Franz von Assisi (1976)
Symphony No. 2 “St. Florian” (1979)
Minnesang (1981)
Faust Cantata (1983)
Scholars sometimes frame this group as exploring tensions between
intuition and rationality, or what Zhanna Lehmann calls
gnosis – direct experiential insight rather than theoretical
knowledge. All of the works have medieval(ist) themes, and all were
written before his formal conversation in 1985. At one level, these
could be seen as an exploration of faith. At another, they are also
a dabbling in what history means to the present day.
That
perspective matters for Minnesang, because the piece does not
attempt to reconstruct medieval music historically. Instead, it asks
what happens when medieval fragments become objects of
contemplation.
Seeing the Music
Because the work involves so many
voices and overlapping layers, it can be hard to hear the structure
on first listening. This gave me a good excuse to learn a bit about
spectrograms, which show sound visually:
bright dense regions = many voices / louder passages
thin bands = fewer voices or sustained tones
vertical streaks = consonants, rhythmic entrances, or sudden dynamic
changes
Spectrogram generated in Sonic Visualiser; max frequency set to 6000 Hz
The spectrogram makes the piece’s
structure unusually easy to see: expansions appear as widening bands
of color, while the exploratory passages show thinner textures in
which individual melodic fragments briefly emerge.
Structural Overview of Schnittke’s Minnesang
I combined my
assessment from Sonic Visualiser with my own close listening to
generate the analysis provided here. (This assessment draws on
acoustical markers, not score analysis.)
Time
Layer
Label
0:00
STRUCTURE
Intro w/canon
1:57
STRUCTURE
X (melodic/textural exploration)
1:57
EVENT
fragments of tunes
3:24
EVENT
contrary motion
3:42
STRUCTURE
first build
3:42
EVENT
sudden reduced texture
4:54
STRUCTURE
Y (melodic/textural exploration)
4:54
EVENT
rising
7:22
EVENT
unison
7:53
STRUCTURE
full texture
7:53
EVENT
blocks of sound
10:51
EVENT
pile up
11:39
STRUCTURE
climax
11:59
EVENT
start collapse
13:11
STRUCTURE
last build
13:11
EVENT
reduce then build
13:53
STRUCTURE
Z (melodic/textural exploration)
13:53
EVENT
fragments of tunes
15:20
STRUCTURE
END
An assessment of Schnittke’s
structure
I.
Introduction (0:00–1:57)
0:00
— Intro w/canon 1:56
— “X”
The
opening establishes the material contrapuntally, with fragments
surfacing within a relatively transparent texture. There is an
emphasis on paired voices in canon, but in the context of a thick
texture in which individual gestures retain attention only briefly
before dissolving back into the mass of sound. If you look at just
the first 90 seconds, you can see these canons clearly:
Short
fragments will start in a lower voice, to be paired directly with a
voice slightly higher in the texture. These two-voice groupings are
more prominent than the (softer and higher) voices which sing
aligned, also in a fragmented, disconnected smattering of
phrase-fragments.
Gradually,
the texture widens out – a pattern that will repeat twice more over
the course of the piece – in order to set up a new section (“X”)
devoted to exploration of fragments of the various Minnesang tunes.
Here
the choir begins to play with melodic fragments more explicitly.
Individual gestures emerge momentarily before giving way to others,
producing a shifting field of brief melodic appearances rather than
sustained thematic statements.
Exploratory
Cycle 2 (3:42-7:22)
3:42
— texture widens
out 4:54
— Section Y:
exploration of melodies: rising
melody at first, later
“Ich habe” (5:26); and a dotted rhythm melody (6:26) each emerge
briefly for attention
7:22
— unison reset
After this section’s expansion of tessitura, this cycle moves
through a series of fragments, some with surprisingly clear profiles.
It ends by drawing to a unison, which acts as a structural pivot,
resetting the texture before a broader expansion.
Central Expansion and Climax
(7:53-11:59)
7:53
— full texture, with blocks of sound 10:51 —
accumulation begins
11:39
— climax 11:59 — start of collapse
From the unison, Schnittke quickly
rebuilds the choral mass. The texture expands through alternating
blocks of sound, shifting between low and high registers and
increasing in dynamic intensity. The spectrum gradually
widens – particularly upward – before the addition of a low pulsating
foundation.
At 10:51 a more continuous accumulation
begins, leading to a sustained and prolonged climax centered around
11:39. At this point the spectrogram shows the maximum spectral
saturation of the entire piece: full tessitura with sustained soprano
intensity.
Dissolution and reconfiguration
(11:59-15:20)
11:59
— thinning / collapse 13:11 — reduction
then renewed build-out of the texture
13:53
— Section Z: medieval lyrics re-emerge as a focus
After the climax the texture thins but
retains strong harmonic bands. Rather than dissolving entirely, the
music reorganizes itself, preparing one final gesture: a final rapid
expansion of the texture leading into a renewed lyrical exploration
of the Minnesang fragments.
This final cycle might perhaps be
considered a coda, but to me it serves more as a reframing, turning
back to those earlier exploratory sections, reconsidering what these
medieval fragments can do for us as pieces of sound.
Schnittke’s compositional process
Just a few observations, and those
derived largely from listening rather than from such things as
sketches and interviews:
CANON: First, several scholars,
including Mark Jennings (2002), note that the work pays homage to the
medieval period through canonic
writing. Groups
of voices enter one by one or in imitation; they often enter as voice
groups. This mirrors medieval compositional practice, but here
it becomes a
generator of texture
rather than counterpoint to be heard clearly. The
example above shows how Schnittke deploys this writing, particularly
in the introduction to the piece, orienting us to an imitative allusively "medieval" style, but not
one which will drive the remainder of the piece. His primary technique, to my ear, is not so much canonic writing but rather that of textural design.
TEXTURAL
DESIGN:The piece operates through repeated
two-stage cycles:
1) There is a rapid
expansion of the texture (shown on the spectrogram with those curving
lines that show the basses expanding downward to claim a full
tessitura).
2) We move to what
I think of as exploratory play, with thinner textures revealing a
variety of treatments of the fragments that Schnittke uses as mosaic
tiles.
Each cycle increases the
spectral density and
register width
until we come to the
climactic plateau at 11:39, after which the texture
dissolves and reforms for the final expansion.
If I am right, this assessment shows is that Schnittke’s form in Minnesang is governed
primarily by textural dramaturgy rather than harmonic progression or
melodic recognition.
FLICKERING: For a piece nominally
“about” medieval tunes – and a whole host of those, at that –
the presence of any one tune is remarkably fleeting. Melodies emerge
briefly from the texture and then vanish. Or, in imitation passages
(e.g. 4:54) we might have a cascade of rising lines as one voice, and
then the next, and then the next take over our attention as they work
through their canonic exposition. But these fragments operate at the
level of the phrase, or even half-phrase. We never sit long enough to
“have the tune.” For a piece designed around Minnesang, the
fragments flicker, but do not linger long enough to become a
focus:
a fragment appears
it dissolves a new
fragment appears
The past is never stabilized – it winks in and out.
What the Past Becomes
Taken together, these
features – canonic writing, cycles of expansion and exploratory
thinning, and the fleeting appearance of melodic fragments – shape
the way the medieval material functions in Minnesang.
One
of the most striking things about the piece is that it does not
attempt to restore medieval song as something historically intact.
The tunes themselves rarely stabilize long enough to become
recognizable musical objects. Instead, they surface briefly within
the texture and then dissolve again, reappearing later in altered
contexts. It is the textures and treatments that guide our listening,
not the tunes.
In this sense, the medieval songs operate less as themes than as
sonic artifacts. They provide the raw material for canonic cascades,
for textural expansions, and for the exploratory passages where
fragments briefly step forward before yielding to the next gesture.
What drives the listener’s experience of the piece is therefore not
melodic recognition or harmonic progression, but the unfolding of
textures and the shifting ways those fragments are deployed.
This
distancing of the melodies is reinforced by the way the work treats
its texts. The Middle High German texts are largely unintelligible to
modern listeners, and Schnittke himself tells us that he treats them
primarily as phonetic sound. The melodies appear only in fragments,
rarely long enough to stabilize as recognizable tunes. Even the
stylistic gestures – canon, imitation, layered voices – function less
as historical reconstruction than as textural devices. The result is
that none of the usual grounds for musical judgment quite apply. The text cannot
quite be interpreted, the melodies never quite become themes, and the
style never quite settles into historical pastiche.
The medieval material is therefore present, but at a
remove – circulating within the piece as sound rather than as
historical artifact. Minnesang
does not attempt to recover the medieval past so much as to place it
into motion again. The old songs flicker through the texture, briefly
audible before dissolving back into the larger choral complex. The
past is not restored here. Instead, it is rearranged, reframed, and
reimagined. What remains is not “pastness,” but sound itself: a
field of textures through which the medieval fragments briefly pass.
The medieval does not carry inherent meaning; we cannot quite hold it
in the ear. Yet for Schnittke it becomes a palette of color, applied
here and there until recognizable shapes and patterns emerge.
The result is a paradox that lies at
the heart of Schnittke’s medievalism: the past may be fully
present, even the sole source of melodic material, and yet sound
nothing at all like the past
we imagine.
WORKS CONSULTED
Mark
D. Jennings, 2002. “Alfred
Schnittke's Concerto for Choir : musical analysis and historical
perspectives.” PhD Diss, Florida State.
Zhanna
Lehmann, 2018. “Alfred Schnittke’s quest for a universal musical
language in the Penitential Psalms (1987–88).” Ph.D.
diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Dmitri
Smirnov, 2002. Liner notes to Schnittke, A.: Choir Concerto /
Minnesang / Voices of Nature (Holst Singers, Gledhill, Layton),
Hyperion 00602448807229.
One of the small, slightly ridiculous things I
sometimes do in the archive is count the lines in decorative initials – the
enlarged “drop caps” that begin sections of text.
Example of a drop cap "H" for "Herr" (spelled "Her" by this scribe):Her du
hast gesegnet den ertrich, du hast hin gekert die gefencknus Jacobs (Ps 84/85: Benedixisti
Domine terram tuam, avertisti captivitatem Jacob.) From Prime, Bregenz VLB, fol
50v.
Two lines. Three lines.
Occasionally six.
If you’ve never spent
time staring at an early modern prayerbook, this may sound like the sort of
scholarly detail that proves that historians have too much time on their hands.
But sometimes those
tiny details tell us something important.
Recently I went through
the Office of the Virgin in a sixteenth-century German prayerbook from the Lake
Constance region and tagged every decorated initial. Not just whether there was an initial, but how large it was: two
lines, three lines, sometimes a larger marginal initial. I also recorded the
genre of the text that followed – psalm, antiphon, collect, hymn, and so on.
In other words: I
counted them.
Every. Single. One.
The result is the sort
of table that delights the inner nerd.
Total
Total Larger Caps
3-line (or more)
2-line
Includes Latin incipit
TOTALS
117
92
29
63
41
Psalm
37
34
17
17
28
Antiphon
26
20
3
17
5
Collect
14
14
3
11
4
Chapters / lessons
10
8
3
5
1
Ymnus
7
6
1
5
1
Other
3
5
2
3
1
Responsories
3
3
0
3
1
Versicle
17
2
0
2
0
Table 1. Raw counts of decorated initials by genre in
the Office of the Virgin from Bregenz VLB Hs 17, copied by Scribe 2. Before
interpretation, the numbers simply show how often each type of text is
introduced with enhanced initials.
At this stage the numbers are just numbers. We’ve
known for years that manuscripts use two-line and three-line initials as a kind
of visual hierarchy (Hughes MMMO). Two-line initials mark many items—antiphons,
collects, and psalms. But the three-line initials cluster strongly around
psalms, and around the structural openings of the Hours.
To make the pattern easier to see, I reorganized
the data and highlighted three clusters:
Table 2. Percentages of each genre marked by enhanced
initials. Converting the raw counts into proportions reveals the manuscript’s
visual hierarchy: psalms (yellow) receive enhanced initials most frequently,
while musical texts (orange) and collects (blue) are marked but less often
emphasized.
Once the colors are added, the structure of the
Office jumps out immediately.
The psalms dominate the enhanced initials.
They receive the largest and most frequent decorative emphasis. Visually, they
anchor the page.
The musical genres, by contrast – antiphons
and hymns – are consistently marked but rarely elevated to the highest level of
prominence. They are clearly signposted, but not treated as the structural
core.
The collects occupy an interesting middle
position. They are marked reliably and occasionally emphasized, suggesting that
the scribe saw them as moments of liturgical articulation – points where the flow
of psalmody gathers into a focused prayer.
Put together, the
manuscript’s visual system reflects a three-part hierarchy of the Office:
·Psalms
as the structural backbone
·Musical
texts as framing elements
·Collects
as moments of devotional focus
This is interesting,
and maybe even a bit disconcerting, because if you ask a modern musicologist
what matters most in the Office, the answer is often the antiphons. Those are the musically
distinctive parts. They carry the chant melodies that change from feast to
feast. They are where the repertoire becomes specific.
But this prayerbook
suggests that the Thalbach sisters who used it experienced the Office somewhat
differently.
For them, the
antiphons were important – but the psalms
were the real center of gravity. Psalms structured the Hours. They
carried the devotional weight. They were the texts that deserved the most
visual attention on the page. And, of course, they were the first texts that
novices would have learned – the most familiar part of the Latin liturgy. The
heavy presence of Latin incipits for the psalms – and the relative paucity of
those labels for other genres – reinforces their importance to the Sisters
whose book this was.
In other words, the
page layout quietly encodes that understanding of the centrality of psalmody.
The decorative hierarchy mirrors the liturgical one, our musical longing
notwithstanding.
Which is why counting the lines in drop caps – two lines,
three lines, occasionally six—turns out not to be ridiculous after all.
WORKS CITED
Bregenz, VLB Hs 17, a Thalbach Sister's Prayerbook from the 16th century
Hughes, Andrew. Medieval Manuscripts for Mass
and Office: A Guide to their Organization and Terminology. Toronto :
University of Toronto Press, 1995/r2017.
