Music as Gloss in Newly Discovered Notations for Horace's Odes

Abstract

In a new introduction to his article “The Early History of Music Writing in the West,” first published in 1982, Leo Treitler expanded upon the implications of his call for a shift from palaeographic to semiotic study of early notations. What was needed was a reorientation to consider who used notation, for what purpose, using what modes of representation, entailing what conception of musical objects, and on the basis of what sort of knowledge and competence. A possible focus for such inquiry was briefly mentioned, namely neumatic notations added to sources of classical poetry copied from the ninth to the twelfth century. The broad extent of these notations had been known since the pioneering codicological work undertaken by Birger Munk Olsen and Yves-François Riou, as reported in a series of publications beginning in the 1980s, which identified some ninety notated manuscripts. Renewed interest was sparked in the first decade of the new millennium by Jan Ziolkowski’s framing of questions about these notations as a philologist interested in the reception of classical texts. Inspired by Ziolkowski’s exploration of the cultural implications of notating classical verse, Treitler warned that future musical research in this area should not “leap to assimilate this phenomenon to the medieval song traditions of sequence, versus, and conductus and restrict the study of it to the control of the questions we are accustomed to raising about those traditions.”