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Learn about: the Old Hispanic Chant, methods for analyzing music we can’t hear, and what we can learn from medieval processions.
Here’s the Big Why: “I think these artifacts that we have – these musical and liturgical artifacts – are as valuable as a Gothic cathedral. And in a way even more valuable, because a Gothic cathedral is a space in which something precious happens. But we have the evidence of the Something Precious. And if we take that seriously, and we look at it, there’s a huge amount for us to learn about how to approach God in different ways.” – Emma Hornby
About Emma Hornby: Dr. Emma Hornby is Professor of Music at the University of Bristol, UK. She works on Western liturgical chant, and in recent years has focused on the Old Hispanic rite. She is currently leading a Leverhulme International Network, collaborating with colleagues in Spain to explore the processional practices of early medieval Iberia. Her recent research focuses on how Old Hispanic chant texts and melodies interact in order to promote a particular devotional state or theological understanding. Her books include Music and Meaning in Old Hispanic Lenten Chants (co-authored with Rebecca Maloy) and Medieval Liturgical Chant and Patristic Exegesis.
Manuscript image above from “Musical Values and Practice in Old Hispanic Chant” by Emma Hornby
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Transcript of Old Hispanic Chant, with Emma Hornby
Sarah Bereza: Old Hispanic chant – where did it come from?
Emma Hornby: Old Hispanic chant is what they sang in modern day Spain and Portugal up until about the year 1080. And it seems to have been composed, compiled in the seventh century. Our earliest evidence is a little bit later, early 8th century, but this is very ancient Christian chant. It’s Latin, it’s Roman Catholic, but it’s not Gregorian chant. It’s absolutely not the liturgy and not the chant that they were doing in Rome or across the rest of Western Europe. It’s a local way of singing in worship.
How does Old Hispanic Chant Relate to Gregorian Chant?
Sarah Bereza: Can you tell us a little bit about the story of Gregorian chant and other kinds of chant. I think many of our listeners will have experienced Gregorian chant, but there are so many other regional chant families.
Emma Hornby: In the very early Middle Ages, I mean as Christianity was spreading across Europe, pretty much everybody was singing chant, but there was no sense that there was one authoritative way of doing it. There is a tradition which is associated with Milan, which we still have – the manuscripts are much later, from the 12th century – but we have that tradition. Then there were traditions associated with Gaul. We’ve lost almost all of that, the traditions associated with Ireland. Again, we’ve lost almost all of that. Benevento in southern Italy and then Iberia, Spain and Portugal. And then there were chant traditions also associated with Rome.
Emma Hornby: In the eighth century for various reasons, the emperors of pretty much what’s modern day France and Germany – Francia – took on the Roman way of doing liturgy and the Roman way of singing that went with it (or what they thought it was the Roman way of singing that went with it). And that’s what spread like wildfire across western Europe. So that by the 10th or 11th century, they were pretty much singing the same songs on the same days, right across western Europe, from Dublin to Dubrovnik. And we have evidence from both ends of that scale.
Sarah Bereza: This is kind of a political unification – by unifying liturgical elements, unifying the empire.
Emma Hornby: Absolutely so. And it came with a narrative of authority and of uniformity. So it wasn’t just Roman chant but this was Gregorian chant whispered into the ear of Pope Gregory the Great by the Dove of the Holy Spirit. And the iconography is all about that. So the fact that they go on and doing their own indigenous chant in Spain up until the year 1080 when Pope Gregory VII and the king of the time, King Alfonso, they made a deal that they would switch across to doing Roman liturgy with Gregorian chant. It was a big controversy at the time. You know, there was pushback against it, but in a way it was incredible that they’d kept going with their local tradition that long – that they submitted to the authority of the Pope for hundreds of years, but they didn’t submit to the authority of the Pope’s liturgy.
What Manuscripts of Old Hispanic Chant Still Exist?
Sarah Bereza: What does that mean for the manuscripts left in the archive? I’m imagining like you’ve got this stuff that you’re not really allowed to do anymore, and yet we apparently still have manuscripts a thousand years later.
Emma Hornby: That’s right. And what we have is bits and pieces. There will have been hundreds and hundreds of manuscripts circulating in the Middle Ages. And what we have is 40 manuscripts or fragments. Quite a lot of our fragments are where a manuscript of Old Hispanic liturgy was used to protect a later manuscript as fly leaves or as binding fragments. So we’ll have a manuscript from, let’s say, the 10th century or the 11th Century, where the original manuscript probably had 300 folios. That’s 600 pages. And what we have is two folios, one bifolium, so that’s four pages and the rest is gone. Just gone, just disappeared. And then occasionally we have the whole book.
Emma Hornby: And what seems to have happened mostly is that when they were suppressing the liturgy, it seems that at the Abbey of Santo Domingo de Silos, they gathered together basically an example of each book. So we have a book for the Advent and Christmas season. We have a book for Eastertide and post-Pentecost. We have books for the saints, we have books for things like marriage and ordinations and consecrations of churches; special occasions. What we’re missing from that monastery had is Lent. So clearly the Lent book got lost. So that’s one thing that we have. And then we have a book for what you do at nighttime, and a book of the Psalms, and a book of the canticles and a book of hymns. And it really is as if some librarian in the monastery library there in about the year 1100 thought, I had better collect together all of this or it’s going to be lost.
Sarah Bereza: Thank you, old librarian.
Emma Hornby: Yeah, exactly. Thank you very much, old librarian. And then apart from that, we have three or four just very beautiful presentation books. Mostly associated with the kings of Léon-Castile where we have the king’s monogram in the book, or we know that the book was copied for the king and it’s full of gold leaf. And I would not be the person who destroyed that book. Even if the Pope said, you’re not going to do this liturgy anymore, that book’s going to be kept because it’s so precious.
Sarah Bereza: And a presentation book is very different from what a monk would have been singing from?
Emma Hornby: Absolutely. Yeah. We can tell that none of our surviving manuscripts were heavily used. If they were heavily used, they’d be covered in thumb marks and wax, that sort of thing. And they’re not. They’re mostly in good condition – they were library copies. They were either reference copies – you’d go and check what the chant is for Tuesday. Or they are presentation copies, which are incredibly valuable objects, which almost become part of the kind of the liturgical furniture of an institution.
What the Manuscripts Tell Us About the Sound of Old Hispanic Chant?
Sarah Bereza: So what do these manuscripts have to tell us about musical sound?
Emma Hornby: This is the really fun bit. We have thousands and thousands of these chants with musical notation, which is very exciting. Within each notational symbol, it tells you whether the melody goes up or down. But it does not tell you how far up or down it goes. So I can tell you the contour of a lot of this music, but I have no idea what any of the notes are. I have no idea what any of the intervals are.
So actually for us now as modern scholars, what we’re seeing is visual patterns. I mean we do tend to sort of hear them in our mind’s ear. You know, you get to the point where you kind of [sings]. But I don’t know if that’s what it was. You know, I’m imagining that. So we have lots and lots of information about the melodies from these manuscripts, but you have to let go of all of your understanding of how music works and of how musicology works in order to analyze it, because you can’t use any of the usualmethods.
Emma Hornby: When we analyze music, we think about, what’s the final note? What’s the final chord? How did the cadences work? what kind of range does this song have? Does it go from very low to very high? I don’t know. I don’t have any of that information. What’s the main note that gets used? You know, is there a note that you latch onto through the piece as being important? I have no idea.
How to Analyze Old Hispanic Chant?
Sarah Bereza: How do you analyze the music then?
Emma Hornby: It’s all pattern matching. What we developed, and it’s over the last 10 years or so with my collaborators, with Rebecca Maloy in particular, we’ve developed analytical methods which we use. We use software to help us, but, but it’s coming from our brains mostly. It’s the kind of pattern matching that they do with genetic code, with genetic DNA sequencing. We have used bits of that kind of computer code in order to do our analysis.
Emma Hornby: So we’re looking for strings of notational symbols that repeat, and then we’re looking for strings of notational symbols that repeat with gaps or strings of notational symbols that nearly repeat. And then we’re seeing those across in our database. We have about seven or 800 chants, and that’s growing all the time. We’re building up an understanding of what kind of patterns come round and round and what contexts they’re used in.
Melodic Grammar in the Old Hispanic Chant
Sarah Bereza: One of the terms that you’ve used is a melodic grammar. Can you tell us what that, what you mean by that?
Emma Hornby: Conceptually, this probably goes back about 20 years to when I was writing my doctorate. I started reading bits of Steven Pinker and bits of Noam Chomsky. So these ideas of generative grammars. And I began to think about whether music might have some of the same characteristics. These are massive repertoires, which were carried for hundreds of years without notation before they were notated.
Emma Hornby: And even when they’re notated, you have to know how they go before you can read the notation. So the notation is an aid, but not a replacement for the knowledge of it. And then in that generative grammar work by the linguists, they’re talking about the slots into which things go. So that, in a sentence, you probably need a noun to be a subject, and then a verb, and then a noun phrase to be an object. And then you can build on a prepositional phrase on the end. And there were rules about how those things work in different languages. But if you’re in a particular point in a sentence, there’s a limited number of choices in order to say something which makes sense within that language.
Emma Hornby: That got me thinking, well, when we’re working with medieval chants, if I’m at a particular point in a phrase, or a particular point in the whole chant, are there limited number of options of what somebody listening in the 9th century would listen to it and say, “Yeah, fair enough,” rather than, “What are you doing?
You don’t do that there!” And that’s indeed what we found in these Old Hispanic chants We don’t know what any of the notes are. And yet I can see a string of notational symbols and say, well that’s the cadence. Or I can look at another string of notational symbols and say, that’s a cadence, and it always comes at the ends of sentences.
Sarah Bereza: You’re not just looking at the notation, you’re looking at it next to the text. And you can see where the end of the text is, because you can read the Latin.
Emma Hornby: Exactly. And the text is a major part of the notation actually. I mean, if you saw the words “Mary had a little lamb,” you now have a tune in your head. Text is perfectly good musical notation. And these squiggles that the scribes put on top are sort of an added extra reminder.
Old Hispanic Processional Chants
Sarah Bereza: Can we talk about processional chants?
Emma Hornby: A processional chant, simply is a chant that is sung while some people are moving around the church or moving around in a ritual manner. We still have processional chants in modern practice. So think of what happens in many churches in Advent: you often have big Advent ceremonies with people moving around the church with candles.
Emma Hornby: Processions go back as long as humans have been doing rituals in a way. And some of it is purely pragmatic. If somebody dies, you want to have a bit in the church where you dedicate their soul to God. So you need the body to be in the church. And then a bit later you need the body to be in the tomb, and the tomb is not going to be in the same place as where you did the dedicating the soul to God bit.
So people have got to move the body from that church place, to wherever you’re going to bury them. And you’re not going to do that just kind of shuffling along in an awkward way. You’re going to do that in a ritual way because you’re in the middle of a very solemn ritual. There you are. You have a procession. And in processions, very often people sing. And it’s partly just to cover up the awkward silence. And it’s partly to make it more special, to make it more sacred.
Sarah Bereza: For Old Hispanic chant, are there lots of processional chants? Is that the connection here?
Emma Hornby: Not very many. We have about 40 or so. What happened was, I met up with a colleague of mine, David Andrés Fernández, who’s now at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid. And we met up about three years ago now and we were chatting. He is a specialist, and he works on processions, but he mostly works on processions of the Roman liturgy with Gregorian chants. So he knows all about Palm Sunday processions and all that lot.
Emma Hornby: It just sort of came up in conversation. He said, well, what have you got? And I said, I don’t know. And he said, well who knows? And I said, nobody knows what Old Hispanic processions there are. And he looked at me, and I looked at him, and we felt a grant proposal coming on.
Emma Hornby: So the Leverhulme Trust is funding us with our colleague, Carmen Julia Gutiérrez, also at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid. And they’re funding us for three years, and we are working together as a trio.
Emma Hornby: The first thing we did was that David went through all of the manuscripts, and all of the rubrics (they’re the bits which tell you what to do) to find all of the information we have about when people are moving ritually within the Old Hispanic liturgy. And nobody had done this. I mean this is kind of foundational – that basic work that nobody had done before. So that was the first bit.
Emma Hornby: And then the second bit is then isolating the chant that goes with those, and seeing what we can find out about them. And I have questions: are they just normal chants that you happen to be moving around while you sing? Or is there anything special about them which makes them processional? And those are the things that we’re in the middle of exploring right now.
Sarah Bereza: Any hints to what you’re discovering?
Emma Hornby: That they are really varied. It’s sort of the wrong answer. I was hoping that I’ve got, Oh yes, processional chants are all like insert-neat-catch-phrase. But that’s not how it’s been at all. So for example, there are something like 20 odd chants sung during the dedication of a church, at the bit where they stashed away the relics.
Saints’ Relics and Processional Chants
Emma Hornby: So Saints cults are highly important in this culture. And the saints relics, they’d be in sort of tiny little packets, an inch and a half wide. And it would be a tiny bit of St. Pelagius’s cloak – you know, it’s that sort of thing. Sometimes they’re body relics, but very often, they’re not body relics. They’re something to do with a piece of the saint’s clothing, or a stone that they walked on, even that. Just little precious objects that relate to a saint. And they would all be stashed in the altar. So when you look at these medieval Spanish and Portuguese altars, there are little niches in the stone where the relics would be kept safely.
Emma Hornby: So when you dedicate a church, that’s the first thing. You’re moving into your new church, you’re dedicating it to God. The next thing you need to do is to safely stash away all of the relics in the altar. And there were 22 chants associated with that. Processional chants, which are happening during the stashing of the relics, are really varied. About eight or nine of them are big. So they have two moments within a chant where you have 20 or more notes on one syllable. And then there are, you know, there are questions that arise for me about how do you keep everyone together?
Emma Hornby: And then at the other end of the scale, I have a couple – maybe two or three – of those relic chants, where the most you ever have is two or three notes on one syllable. And if it’s two or three notes on one syllable – the beginning of the next syllable, even if you’re moving around, that helps to keep you all together, and it gives it a rhythm, the natural rhythm of the text. But when you’ve got 25 notes – I think the largest of them has something like 47 notes on one syllable – and it’s just madness. So then, I don’t know, is that the people or the person doing the singing, are they standing still while other people are doing the moving around?
Emma Hornby: There are so many questions that are raised by it. So it’s fascinating, but also slightly frustrating because the only evidence I have – it just says at the beginning of this list of antiphons, it says in Latin “antiphons for the relic procession.” That’s it. That’s the information. That’s all we know. So we don’t know who is moving, and who is singing, and whether they’re moving when they’re singing – we don’t know any of that stuff.
Devotional Experience of Processional Chants
Sarah Bereza: And yet you’ve said that this says something about devotional experience?
Emma Hornby: That’s right. So for some of the processional moments, we have really detailed information. The one I’m going to talk about tomorrow morning, it’s in the Good Friday ceremony, and it’s the adoration of the cross. And we know that a wooden cross and they keep talking about the lignum crucis. And of course there are bits of what they believed to be the true cross in Spain at the time.
Emma Hornby: So in some churches, when they say that you take the cross to the altar, they mean the true cross. They mean the wood that they believe is part of the true cross. Sarah Bereza: And is that what the lignum crucis is?
Emma Hornby: Yes. So they put that on a patten, you know those kinds of those big metal dish things that you put the communion on. But a big one, not a little one. They put the cross on that. They put it on high altar, and then a deacon lifts it up. Remember the people probably can’t see – this is behind the curtain or a screen. This is not for the laity to see. And then while the deacons are singing three beautiful but complex chants, the cross is brought out, and they process either to the chapel of the holy cross, or to a church with the holy cross.
Emma Hornby: So either they’re moving across the church, or everybody is going (and this is with the congregation as well), processing through the streets to the next church. And so we have songs that they sang there. Then when they get to the next church, everybody kisses the cross. It is the adoration of the cross. And they sing a hymn while they do it. And everybody sings the hymn. The rubric is very clear that the bishop and the deacons and the clerics and the people – everybody sings.
Sarah Bereza: So I’m guessing there’s no 45 note melisma!
Emma Hornby: Simple melody, really simple. It’s a beautiful hymn. It’s an alphabet. It starts with the very famous text by Venantius Fortunatus, which is Crux fidelis, which is part of a much longer hymn, part of Pange lingua, which is very famous, but it’s this one stanza, Crux fidelis.
Emma Hornby: And then whoever created this hymn text, goes through the alphabet, A, B, C, D, E… So each stanza begins with the next letter of the alphabet. Which would help you remember it. It works through from the Incarnation all the way through the Nativity through to the Passion. There’s about nine verses on the Passion, which is not surprising. It’s Good Friday, right? Then Resurrection, Pentecost, Ascension. And then you get the Last Judgment. So then you get about two or three stanzas about the Last Judgment and about how – it gives me shivers – a procession of angels carry the holy cross at the Last Judgment to protect the faithful. So they’ve just carried the cross in real life. And now they’re singing about angels carrying the cross, and that will protect them at the Last Judgment.
Emma Hornby: It’s amazing. And then they go back to the cross and they have these stanzas of praise to the cross at the end. It is the most incredible text. It just gives me shivers thinking about it. I think, wow, that’s an amazing literary achievement. I don’t think the whole congregation is singing all those stanzas; they wouldn’t know them. But I think they’re all singing Crux fidelis. So I think it probably goes Crux fidelis, stanza, Crux fidelis, stanza. Everyone would get to join in the refrain. And then I worked out how long it would take. And it’s about half an hour. So half an hour is actually plenty of time. However big your congregation, half an hour is plenty of time for your congregation, for everybody to kiss the cross and then to go back either to the main church or to the main altar with your cross, and safely stash it back in the treasury.
Emma Hornby: So that’s really exciting for me. Thinking about what are the logistics of this thing? Even when I don’t know what the notes are, I can still roughly work out how long you can take to sing it. We don’t know what the notes are, but with that hymn, Crux fidelis – that’s in circulation. Everybody in Europe is singing Crux fidelis. So I thought, I just wonder if we know this melody. And I was just browsing – I mean it was about the fourth thing I looked at. It was really quick. I was looking at a manuscript from Aquitaine in the 11th century, which has pitch, and it’s the same melody. So I could match it up. You know, my notation goes dot, dot, curve meaning two notes and the other one goes [sings]. It’s like, yeah, it’s the same thing and you can work through and it’s the same thing right through. So I can sing that melody.
Repeating Pitch Patterns in Old Hispanic Chant?
Sarah Bereza: So I’m curious. I’m thinking of Old Beneventan music where it’s like, well, we have this pattern that probably had a repeating pitch. Like if you have this pattern, it means these pitches. So if you are able to see the Pange lingua hymn from Aquitaine, and see the pitches for that, are you able at all to map it onto other songs?
Emma Hornby: No, that’s not how it works. It’s not like a graph. You might, with modern notation, if the note is lower down on the page, you know it’s a lower down note. Even if you can’t read notation, that height metaphor is in operation. No, we don’t do that. It’s nothing like as precisely heighted as the Beneventan materials. It’s quite annoying – but like a challenge. And we have across the whole repertoire – not the processional chants – I mean the whole repertoire of tens of thousands of chants – we have about twenty six or so chants which are preserved with pitch. And I’ve done a lot of work on those in the last few years. Again with Rebecca Maloy. And what we found is when we have repeated combinations of notational symbols in the old notation, and then you look at those and how they map on to the pitched notation, it doesn’t always mean the same thing in the pitch notation. There’s something like six different pitch outlines. That combination goes [sings].
Emma Hornby: I mean there’s so many that you can do with that. And that was slightly annoying, but it does mean that you really have to be really careful not to assume that just because a few of the notational symbols are the same, it means the same. We would only really latch onto it when it’s bigger than that when you’ve got sort of seven or more notes, which are all equivalent. But yeah, we have to be really careful with it.
Thoughts for Practitioners Today
Sarah Bereza: So a lot of our listeners are practitioners, and I’m curious if you have anything to say to them and the practice of what they’re doing. To be clear! There’s a lot of value in doing work that doesn’t have immediate relevance, but you know, if you have
some connections, that’s also really nice.
Emma Hornby: It’s a voyage of discovery, looking at these Old Hispanic materials. So few people have looked at them partly because it’s obscure, partly because it’s not Roman, it’s peripheral if you see what I mean. It’s geographically peripheral because, quote, “who cares about Iberia?” You know, it’s not central Europe and it’s peripheral because it may be Roman Catholic, but it’s not Roman. And it’s peripheral because we’ve only got 40 manuscripts, not hundreds. In all those ways, it’s sort of obscure and on the edge. So it’s hardly been looked at. But then when we do look at it, it’s so sophisticated theologically. I mean it’s a proper trinitarian theology, but it’s not the same emphasis. You don’t get the same Good Friday experience as you would get in a Roman liturgy church. It’s a different deal. And yes, you’re still adoring the cross, but that great big alphabet hymn – and that’s just part of what they’re doing on Good Friday – It gives you a very particular theological experience.
Emma Hornby: And I think there are things that modern practitioners can really learn about the value of putting together something that really is thought-through theologically. That you know what doctrine you’re wanting to communicate to your congregation. Even if you just said it to them in words, they would have no idea what you were talking about. And yet that can be implied in your choices of materials, and for church musicians, for composers, again, the way you present text gives people a particular experience of that text. And we all know that implicitly. Where do you punctuate your text? How often do you cadence?
Emma Hornby: My cantors sometimes have cadences every two words. They are really breaking up the text and that gives you time to really digest what’s just happened. Or they’ll have a moment where the music just goes along, and then you do have this massive outpouring of song for twenty notes on one syllable and maybe that happens on the word, “we will be saved”. And so there’s a moment where time just stops on the word “saved”. And that’s an opportunity for everybody just to think about that for a moment.
Emma Hornby: I don’t think we do enough of that in modern liturgy. Certainly within the Protestant tradition, it’s all about making sure you communicate the text. And I mean obviously that’s really important, but there are moments when you’ve communicated enough of the text that people now know what word they’re on. And if that’s a really important word, that can be an opportunity to jubilate to allow the praise to go wordless.
Emma Hornby: These are not primitives. These are the brightest and the best minds of the early Middle Ages. I think these artifacts that we have – these musical and liturgical artifacts – are as valuable as a Gothic cathedral. And in a way even more valuable, because a Gothic cathedral is a space in which something precious happens. But we have the evidence of the something precious. And if we take that seriously, and we look at it, there’s a huge amount for us to learn about how to approach God in different ways.
