One of the gifts of my particular time at HMML has been the installation of a music exhibit in the various display cases. What a happy alignment of interests! Since I wander past the exhibit every day, and have had occasion to lunch with Sarah, the intern who contributed to its existence, I thought I’d post a few of the tidbits here.
First, because I am a wee bit homesick, and because my husband Tom would LOVE this, is the “random physical object in a music-adjacent world”: the five-dollar bill signed by Elvis Presley. You know, I’ve thought about the collecting of artists’ signatures, and I’ve thought about music and money, but I’ve never actually thought of those categories as a Venn diagram!
What this says about music and fan culture and the provision of ready paper, of course, could be a narrative all its own. I’m here for the pop of pleasure that the unexpected brings, and will not talk about whether or not our own Velvet Elvis – another kind of artistic adjacency -- might or might not have ornamented the bathroom in our early years. Ahem.
On the more serious front, there’s the binding scrap, with its oh-so-visible adjustments (read: manuscript cutouts) to accommodate its post-musical role as book-binding material:
The physicality of the loss, with its five strips removed -- presumably so that the page would lie flat around the binding cords that would have tied a bulky front or back cover to the spine of the book – speaks to the parchment’s afterlife.
But equally important to my eye (and ear) is the representation of how the music sounded across the page. Above, we get the more ornate, multi-note neumes of the opening of the introit antiphon. You can just see the bowl of the “P” since the line of the letter has been trimmed off to the left. Underlining shows what’s survived: Protector noster, aspice Deus, et respice in faciem Christi tui… — “Look upon us, O God our protector, and look upon the face of your anointed…” Then, in contrast, the simplicity of its accompanying psalm tone: Quam dilecta tabernacula tua, Domine virtutum — “How lovely are your dwelling places, O Lord of hosts.” Note note note note note note.
And then, wow, the Alleluia (with the red bar for a squiggly ornate “A”) and the soloistic falderol of the tumbling untexted neumes before the start of the verse. What a contrast! Even when we can’t reconstruct the specifics of the pitch from the musical source itself (since these are unheighted neumes; we get the musical gesture but not the musical notes), we can tell that variety was at the heart of the service, and can see visibly (wow, that Alleluia) what relish a musician of the day might have felt in working through the combination of obligatory text and the musical variety that comes with it.
For my third example, I have lingered by the least familiar items, the Ethiopian examples, since I know relatively little about them, and HMML has been so active in the preservation of those materials. Ethiopia was HMML’s first significant project with Eastern Christian manuscripts – one that resulted in a collection of 9K microfilms, the Ethiopian Manuscript Microfilm Library (EMML). It’s a real research boon. Plus, I was able to sit in on a lunch-and-learn about repatriating some … inappropriately sourced … manuscripts that had turned up in the West and needed to be sent back to their true home. There should be a HMML news story soon; the trip resulted in some impressive international press!
Anyway, among the music materials on display, there is this lovely combination book of Marian praises and liturgical items – the Me'eraf, which is a book for the Divine Office:
You’ll notice that this 18th-century book has had what we describe in my world as “extensive wear.” It’s not pristine-clean; the large visible stain at the bottom is joined by what I would guess are the oils and fingerprints that discolor the bottom right margin where the page would be touched to turn it. You can still see the pricking marks along the edges that guided the shaping of the page. Though its ornate upper border still is present, the darkening of the page suppresses its once-vivid colors. And you can see there on the bottom left that someone wrote in the once-blank spaces. This is a book that was used.
It is also a book that includes interlineal (between the lines) musical details. In that way, it’s much like the books with which I am familiar. Whether in Austria or Ethiopia, church scribes found ways to represent a complicated art. There are words, there are sounds, there are pauses and contrasting musical gestures. To copy such a thing is a time-consuming act. To copy such a thing is a labor of love. To copy such a thing is a gift to humanity – a spiritual legacy that is still visible to us in the present day. That’s a thread of human connection right there, and one that brings my book-loving heart a moment of deep and satisfying pleasure.
To have a display is always a joy; there are more things in the world than one researcher can ever, ever see. The display cases give the scholar-in-residence a chance to wander around looking at the things that caught another person’s eye, and the threads that tie those disparate objects together.
A display like this activates an internal ear, giving me space to imagine contexts and sounds in new ways. I’ve spent an uncomfortable amount of time “reading” the scores in my head as I do a few necessary stretches. Toes, heels, toes, heels, to the accompaniment of a mental reconstruction of some quite experimental works.
As I’ve dwelt with the display—and, as the finishing touches appeared, with its explanatory labels—I’ve realized how much these encounters feed the focused work inside my carrel. How does music manifest outside performance itself? What do our own musical shorthands suggest about how a historical person might have understood such a reference? What does alluding to music do in a particular context? And might the strange-to-me, known-to-thee quality of some of these items—that mix of recognition and bewilderment—help me think about how people with different kinds of musical knowledge encountered the same object? Such questions follow me back to my research. In its own way, the musical display will have influenced the shape of the discussion that emerges from my own project research.
All because a person needs to get up and stretch every couple of hours.
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