Tekla L Bude

The Songs of Angels: Performing Community in Late Medieval England is a project that has taken some time to complete.  I spent July of 2011 in London and Cambridge, working with Bridgettine processionals–small music books once used in processions on festival days–from Syon Abbey.  In October, I edited the unique chants I’d found; in November, a group of women from Philadelphia’s choral community gathered together to sing the chants in front of a live audience; in March of 2012 we recorded the chants you hear below.  On July 19, 2015, these recordings were a part of the celebration held for the Syon at 600 celebration at Syon Park, Brentford (once the site of Syon Abbey, and now that of Syon House, the home of the Duke of Northumberland).

Some Background —

Syon Abbey was founded by Henry V on the banks of the Thames just outside of London in 1415.   Though Syon Abbey’s physical walls no longer exist, the Bridgettines of Syon still sing their service today: they are the only English Catholic House to boast an unbroken line and practice stretching back before the Reformation.

The Bridgettine liturgy was, according to tradition, dictated to St Bridget of Sweden by an angel.  It honors the Virgin Mary in a weekly round of prayers, lessons, and songs that tell the story of the Blessed Virgin’s life.  Later additions to the repertoire include antiphons, responsories, and hymns to other famous women associated with the order: Mary’s mother, St Anne; St Bridget herself; and Bridget’s daughter, Catherine of Sweden.  Syon was a locus of female devotion, literacy, and power, and it was also one of England’s most popular pilgrimage destinations — Margery Kempe, quite famously, ends her Boke at its doors.  By the time Henry VIII’s closure of the monasteries forced the nuns of Syon to leave the country in 1539, the Abbey had become one of the wealthiest and most important religious spaces in England.

The Medieval nun was part of a social network of laypeople and professional religious, of sinners and saints, and of wealthy and poor.  When she sang her daily services, she was not only concerned with accurately interpreting what the notes in her liturgical book meant: what intervals she should sing, how long she should hold each note, or whether the text beneath the notes was lined up properly.  She was also concerned about how these notes meant: how her song constituted relationships between those inside and outside the cloister as well as between her and her God.  In a very real way, her own subjectivity was performed in the manifestation of her song.  Her concerns with music theory may have been necessary to her performance, but they did not provide the totality of its meaning.  Unfortunately, modern academic criticism of Medieval song—both by literary critics and musicologists—has a tendency to overlook this incompletion.

My investigation has focused on a few central questions: Where did the processional chants come from?  Were they truly unique – “angelic” – or were there similar chants in other liturgies in the Medieval period?  What sort of poetry was used to honor the women of the church? How does a formal analysis of the relationship between text and tone determine how music means in a performative environment?  There were monks living in Syon Abbey, too, and they sang the chants of the Sarum rite.  How did the men’s and women’s musical worlds interact?  This project was an attempt to answer these questions, and, just as importantly, to bring the written voice into the lively world of performance after 500 years of silence–to ameliorate the distance between the Medieval past and a living present.

The three manuscripts I worked with – Syon Abbey, MS 1, Cambridge University Library Additional MS 8885, and Cambridge, St John’s College MS 139 – comprise over 400 leaves of chant text and tone. Although it is a rare occasion in which one manuscript provides a completely idiosyncratic reading, the amount of archive-trawling that needs to be done to ensure these chants’ uniqueness is risibly huge: not only is there a millennia and more’s corpus of liturgical texts (always accruing new material, too!), but the available chant tones themselves also number in the thousands. Databases and surveys make checking for uniqueness easier, but they do not totally alleviate the terrible fear that somehow, somewhere, a match for these tones might be found.  That having been said, the tropes and chants for the feasts of St Bridget and her daughter, St Catherine, are, to the best of my knowledge, totally original.

Cambridge University Library, MS 8885 95v-96r

Ad musicam!

The Feast of the Birth of St Bridget of Sweden

[Prose]

Note: the text of this well-known hymn is original (though the melody is not)