I think you're on to something with the distinction between the timeless Middle Ages and the "secular" Renaissance. One of the more interesting things about Gregorian Chant is that it does not notate rhythm. The Notre Dame School (around 1200) first introduced rhythmic notation to Western music. In other words, these composers made a deliberate effort to quantify time. Is it a coincidence that almost immediately after this the Renaissance dawned?
As usual, Mr. Iron, your thought-provoking comments are a pleasure to read. The increasing "rhythmicity" of Western music, even within the plainchant tradition, is something I have noted, though my expertise in the early musicological development of Western chant is limited.
The drone in the Roman Chant is exactly what Notre Dame composers used to embellish the plain chant melodies! It's also just like the ison in Byzantine Chant. It's funny how everyone hits upon the same solutions.
Yes, the lack of rhythmic notation - having sung it a lot of Gregorian chant in a schola (not as a professional musician but as someone who loves it and the Mass of the Ages), the rhythm asserts itself naturally. In my experience, Gregorian chant does take you wonderfully and deeply out of time because it becomes prayer.
Agreed, Gregorian chant has a wonderfully timeless quality. I think of it as having a "soft rhythm"—the vocalization of notes follows a system of duration, but without the mechanical rigidity of a clock, and the rhythm emerges in part from the words themselves rather than from an external tempo that is imposed on the words.
Agreed. I think we see the intensity of that experience in the title that Fermor chose for the book he wrote about his monastic experiences: A Time to Keep Silence.
I’m pleasantly surprised to see Patrick Leigh Fermor’s little book! My sister recently introduced me to his A Time to Keep Silence, and now I’ll have to read it.
"She mentions how medieval tapestries depicted various stages of the same event, thus “collapsing time into space,”
This goes back further than the medieval tapestries. It's a big feature of iconography to put a bunch of related events into a single picture frame, with the picture frame of an icon being understood to represent a "flash" - a captured moment or set of moments in time. So you'll see something like the Nativity, around the cave with the Virgin and the infant Christ, the dispute of Joseph (with an old man in a fur coat who is actually Satan) over Mary's pregnancy, the appearance of the angels to the shepherds off in the distance, and the impending arrival of the Magi, and even sometimes the Flight into Egypt, all in the same image. But this goes back even further to the Egyptian antecedents to Byzz iconography. It was common in classical Egyptian art to show a lot of different scenes in sequence, like a comic strip, with all sorts of things happening on the side panels. Time for the Egyptians wasn't really a thing either; the annual flooding of the Nile was the absolute rock bottom foundation of existence, so that was a lot more important than a society or an individual's passage through "history".
Interesting connection to the Egyptians (especially the role of the annual flood), that hadn't occurred to me. I learned the term "simultaneous narration" for the iconographic technique that you mentioned; I'm not sure if that's an official term, but it stayed in my head. I'm not an expert in Eastern iconography, but in my experience simultaneous narration is pretty much standard practice for depictions of scenes—is that right? I think that Dr. Rackin found the medieval technique particularly significant because, unlike Eastern iconography, it was part of a culture that immediately preceded Renaissance culture, which quickly became incompatible with or even hostile to cyclical time and historical/artistic timelessness.
Fascinating. I don’t think I had necessarily ever considered specifically this sense of medieval time as expressed in this distinctive element of its visual art, though I do seem to recall C.S. Lewis describing something similar in his introduction to what he called the “Medieval Model” in The Discarded Image.
It reminds me of the Eastern Orthodox distinction of chronos and kairos time, with the latter being the expression of time as experienced in eternity, of which worship (and especially the Divine Liturgy) participates. Given the common origins of both traditions, and the described experience of the monastic life (and while I have not spent much time in monasteries, I have had the experience of attending certain services in the course of the liturgical cycle—especially during Holy Week—and losing the sense of the year in which I am attending that same service) I suspect they are related.
Also, seems to have some similarities to Heidegger’s conceptualization of Dasein, though his was likely only a negative reflection, grasping for a sense of timelessness lost in the dead philosophies of modernity.
Thank you for these reflections. The distinction between chronos and kairos is definitely pertinent here, even in the form that we use in rhetoric and narrative studies, where chronos is sequential time and kairos is episodic, or where chronos is duration and kairos is the mystery of the non-durational, opportune "moment" which can intersect with chronos and thereby bring resolution or fulfillment.
"the dead philosophies of modernity"—that's well said.
I have read that book you mention by Patrick Leigh Fermor. Indeed, my late husband lent it to our parish priest (who had a somewhat monkish temperament.) It is rather different from Leigh Fermor's other books.
By the way, did anyone notice the pearls and the cross necklace around Pinturicchio's angel? I've never seen an angel with jewelry, unless I've missed such details in the past.
The necklaces in that painting are part of why I find that angel so uniquely captivating. I don't think I've ever seen an angel depicted with jewelry like that, and you're right, jewelry of that nature seems to be very unusual in late medieval/Renaissance depictions of angels.
Strange coincidence—you were writing this question precisely when I was answering it in the response to Stanton. A Time to Keep Silence (New York Review Books, 2007, p. 34).
A question for you, Mr Keim: have you ever considered compiling all the Via Mediaevalis posts into a book at some point? There is so much wonderful information so far (I haven’t finished the posts I missed), and all are surprising, enriching, inspiring, and deeply thought~provoking. And also very helpful in sorting out the kinds of things we can learn from our ancestors and are urgently needed to apply in this chaotic, often demonic, modern world. And one more point: all this info you’ve been giving needs to be recorded and kept for the future, lest we forget our incredible patrimony. Just saying…. We will get old (well, I already am!) and die. Many souls will need this kind of information for the future, and electronic data often disappears or becomes hard to find. (I’m the family archivist, so I have a passion for saving information that could be useful in the future, which will be passed on some day.)
I think you're on to something with the distinction between the timeless Middle Ages and the "secular" Renaissance. One of the more interesting things about Gregorian Chant is that it does not notate rhythm. The Notre Dame School (around 1200) first introduced rhythmic notation to Western music. In other words, these composers made a deliberate effort to quantify time. Is it a coincidence that almost immediately after this the Renaissance dawned?
As usual, Mr. Iron, your thought-provoking comments are a pleasure to read. The increasing "rhythmicity" of Western music, even within the plainchant tradition, is something I have noted, though my expertise in the early musicological development of Western chant is limited.
As an illustrative example, compare the more recent Easter Sunday Introit (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RS8USaGrwpk) to the Old Roman Chant version as interpreted by Marcel Pérès (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X76IGrfTEOM).
The drone in the Roman Chant is exactly what Notre Dame composers used to embellish the plain chant melodies! It's also just like the ison in Byzantine Chant. It's funny how everyone hits upon the same solutions.
Yes, the lack of rhythmic notation - having sung it a lot of Gregorian chant in a schola (not as a professional musician but as someone who loves it and the Mass of the Ages), the rhythm asserts itself naturally. In my experience, Gregorian chant does take you wonderfully and deeply out of time because it becomes prayer.
Agreed, Gregorian chant has a wonderfully timeless quality. I think of it as having a "soft rhythm"—the vocalization of notes follows a system of duration, but without the mechanical rigidity of a clock, and the rhythm emerges in part from the words themselves rather than from an external tempo that is imposed on the words.
I said this in a restock but it’s worth commenting here: To leave time behind has a strong tug on the heart of contemporary man, I think.
Agreed. I think we see the intensity of that experience in the title that Fermor chose for the book he wrote about his monastic experiences: A Time to Keep Silence.
We exist in time in the world and outside time in the heart of God to whom everything is NOW. What an amazing mystery!
Well said, Father.
I’m pleasantly surprised to see Patrick Leigh Fermor’s little book! My sister recently introduced me to his A Time to Keep Silence, and now I’ll have to read it.
I highly recommend it.
"She mentions how medieval tapestries depicted various stages of the same event, thus “collapsing time into space,”
This goes back further than the medieval tapestries. It's a big feature of iconography to put a bunch of related events into a single picture frame, with the picture frame of an icon being understood to represent a "flash" - a captured moment or set of moments in time. So you'll see something like the Nativity, around the cave with the Virgin and the infant Christ, the dispute of Joseph (with an old man in a fur coat who is actually Satan) over Mary's pregnancy, the appearance of the angels to the shepherds off in the distance, and the impending arrival of the Magi, and even sometimes the Flight into Egypt, all in the same image. But this goes back even further to the Egyptian antecedents to Byzz iconography. It was common in classical Egyptian art to show a lot of different scenes in sequence, like a comic strip, with all sorts of things happening on the side panels. Time for the Egyptians wasn't really a thing either; the annual flooding of the Nile was the absolute rock bottom foundation of existence, so that was a lot more important than a society or an individual's passage through "history".
Interesting connection to the Egyptians (especially the role of the annual flood), that hadn't occurred to me. I learned the term "simultaneous narration" for the iconographic technique that you mentioned; I'm not sure if that's an official term, but it stayed in my head. I'm not an expert in Eastern iconography, but in my experience simultaneous narration is pretty much standard practice for depictions of scenes—is that right? I think that Dr. Rackin found the medieval technique particularly significant because, unlike Eastern iconography, it was part of a culture that immediately preceded Renaissance culture, which quickly became incompatible with or even hostile to cyclical time and historical/artistic timelessness.
Fascinating! Wow.
Fascinating. I don’t think I had necessarily ever considered specifically this sense of medieval time as expressed in this distinctive element of its visual art, though I do seem to recall C.S. Lewis describing something similar in his introduction to what he called the “Medieval Model” in The Discarded Image.
It reminds me of the Eastern Orthodox distinction of chronos and kairos time, with the latter being the expression of time as experienced in eternity, of which worship (and especially the Divine Liturgy) participates. Given the common origins of both traditions, and the described experience of the monastic life (and while I have not spent much time in monasteries, I have had the experience of attending certain services in the course of the liturgical cycle—especially during Holy Week—and losing the sense of the year in which I am attending that same service) I suspect they are related.
Also, seems to have some similarities to Heidegger’s conceptualization of Dasein, though his was likely only a negative reflection, grasping for a sense of timelessness lost in the dead philosophies of modernity.
Thank you for these reflections. The distinction between chronos and kairos is definitely pertinent here, even in the form that we use in rhetoric and narrative studies, where chronos is sequential time and kairos is episodic, or where chronos is duration and kairos is the mystery of the non-durational, opportune "moment" which can intersect with chronos and thereby bring resolution or fulfillment.
"the dead philosophies of modernity"—that's well said.
I have read that book you mention by Patrick Leigh Fermor. Indeed, my late husband lent it to our parish priest (who had a somewhat monkish temperament.) It is rather different from Leigh Fermor's other books.
It's a wonderful book, and definitely different from his famous travelogue A Time of Gifts, which I am not inclined to recommend.
By the way, did anyone notice the pearls and the cross necklace around Pinturicchio's angel? I've never seen an angel with jewelry, unless I've missed such details in the past.
The necklaces in that painting are part of why I find that angel so uniquely captivating. I don't think I've ever seen an angel depicted with jewelry like that, and you're right, jewelry of that nature seems to be very unusual in late medieval/Renaissance depictions of angels.
Yes, it stopped me in my tracks. I bet there’s a story behind that that we will never know.
Very insightful and thought-provoking. Thank you!
Fascinating stuff, as always.
In which of his books did Patrick Leigh Fermor write about the French monasteries?
Strange coincidence—you were writing this question precisely when I was answering it in the response to Stanton. A Time to Keep Silence (New York Review Books, 2007, p. 34).
I mean that p. 34 is where the "I found that days..." quote can be found. The entire book is about his experiences in monasteries.
A question for you, Mr Keim: have you ever considered compiling all the Via Mediaevalis posts into a book at some point? There is so much wonderful information so far (I haven’t finished the posts I missed), and all are surprising, enriching, inspiring, and deeply thought~provoking. And also very helpful in sorting out the kinds of things we can learn from our ancestors and are urgently needed to apply in this chaotic, often demonic, modern world. And one more point: all this info you’ve been giving needs to be recorded and kept for the future, lest we forget our incredible patrimony. Just saying…. We will get old (well, I already am!) and die. Many souls will need this kind of information for the future, and electronic data often disappears or becomes hard to find. (I’m the family archivist, so I have a passion for saving information that could be useful in the future, which will be passed on some day.)