Andrew Hughes
Rebellion and Serendipity
What prompted me to spend most of my professional life on the Becket office? How did I come across it in the first place?
As was a common practice in the 1940s in Britain, my headmaster wrote: "if Hughes does not learn to cooperate and conform he will make nothing of his life". Perhaps such comments were designed to stimulate creativity and initiative. In any case, at Oxford I ignored the admonition.
In the third and final year of a undergraduate degree at Oxford, music students were required to choose a historical period in which to specialise. I must have seen the sign-up lists before choosing, so, observing that nobody had selected the Middle Ages, I chose that period. Naturally, I knew nothing about the era, and had probably never even heard a piece of medieval music or chant. So much for rebellion. I have sometimes used this anecdote to illustrate that one does not have to know anything about a subject in order to work in it: one merely has to have the right curiosity and work habits.
In the special field I was assigned one of the 13th-century motet manuscripts as the required 'score' and, no doubt, some texts which I have forgotten. Having done this work and managed not to get a fourth-class degree (but one better: the 'one' here being ambiguous), I progressed to doctoral work. As usual, at Oxford, one acquires an MA degree simply by paying a fee, and one progresses straight to the doctoral program. Again, as is usual for Oxford, there is no course work and, in general, little or no supervision. The perceptive reader may notice how frequent here are references to tutors and supervisors.
For the DPhil, at the time a lower degree than the MA, I started work on 14th-century Italian part-music, soon to discover (or be told by my supervisor) that various scholars were working on that topic, so I shifted to early 15th-century English liturgical music, most of which, other than Old Hall, had not been published. In fact, working on Old Hall at some other place in England, was Margaret Bent (now C.B.E, which shows just how excellence - and perhaps conformity - can succeed, even for musicologists, and even if the financial compensation for medieval work is not commensurate). We later collaborated on the new edition of that fine manuscript.
English motets and Masses of this period are often based on chant tenors. Some of those in Old Hall had been identified by the original editors, and Margaret and I were able to identify others. Two previously unknown identifications came my way in an unrelated, chance perusal of The Use of Sarum edited by Walter Howard Frere. At the end of that volume, he transcribes the Sarum Tonary. There I noticed incipits of two of the unknown Old Hall chants. Serendipity. They were identified as belonging to the office of Thomas Becket. But where were the complete chants? As is well known, the office for Becket is damaged, often completely removed, from British manuscripts as a result of Henry VIII's mandates. Eventually, I suppose as a result of reading around the subject, I found reference to a manuscript in Paris, and obtained photographs. Since then, of course, as result of my increasing interest in the office, hundreds of other sources, musical and textual, have turned up, including some British manuscripts which remained undamaged, or at least readable.
This piece of luck brought Thomas to my attention. But what of the larger, liturgical context of this particular office? Was that important to consider in order to research Becket adequately? I cannot now remember whether further reading around Becket brought Analecta Hymnica to my attention, but another piece of luck certainly did. The tenor of an important early 15th-century Mass has the incipit Quem malignus spiritus. It was unidentified. Years of scouring liturgical indices and many enquiries produced no source. These searches introduced me to dozens (if not 'scores') of liturgical books that had been edited, including, of course, the many chant books that had by then been published. This exposure to printed editions perhaps inspired my interest in chant and liturgy, about which of course I also knew nothing. Thirteen years later, as I was inventorying an Antiphonal, then kept in the parish church of Wollaton, I found, in the very last few folios, the evil spirit (not the one that had driven me for decades, however). Quem malignus spiritus is a chant in the office for St John of Bridlington. Who on earth was he?
Researching into this somewhat obscure saint took me at last to Analecta Hymnica, where I found John's office among versified offices galore, or as they were then called Reimoffizien, or Rhymed Offices. The editors had published some 1000 such offices, in about ten volumes, giving very brief (and sometimes untraceable) references to their manuscript sources. Rebellion and insanity now set in seriously. I discovered that almost nobody knew anything about this repertory of late medieval liturgical offices. As with the non-existent speciality for the undergraduate degree, here was an opportunity to do research in a topic about which then no-one new anything very much, using thousands of manuscript sources about which also very little was known, distributed all over Europe and N.America, and about which I could therefore assert what I wished without much fear of challenge. An obvious choice for a megalomaniac.
Researching this repertory, in the process of which I identified most of the hundreds of offices for Becket that are now known, forced me to look at manuscript Breviaries and Antiphonals. There are dozens of texts that describe the Divine Office and how it is structured, and many that relate, in very general terms, what liturgical books contain. To my dismay there was, literally, nothing that described in anything like sufficient detail how liturgical books, especially manuscript books, were organised and structured. Again, nobody was doing it, so of course I had to. Some ten years of very frustrating work, mostly with several thousand manuscripts in Europe, and with printed texts, resulted in Medieval Manuscripts for Mass and Office: a guide to their organization and terminology, in which I describe in incomprehensible detail (like the books themselves) just what the title suggests. In order to cope with the many tables and tiresomely long descriptions in narrative of how the material is written on the page and how it changes from period to period of the church year, I evolved a set of abbreviations and other short forms, absolutely necessary to preserve what sanity I had left. They drive others to madness. Similarly, I devised a system of reasonably transparent geographical sigla, long before RISM was started, which have now infected all of my data.
In the process of all this research, I noticed frequent assertions about various aspects of both liturgy and chant that, it seemed to me, were not documented appropriately, perhaps for reasons that I have often found myself: the documentation is scattered in hundreds of disparate places, or would require massive amounts of apparatus to be adequate Nevertheless, I became suspicious that references accepted by most as standard works needed a good deal more evidence. My anxiety on this topic has usually proven not to be paranoia. In particular, general statements about chant, especially chant of the later repertory about which little was (and often is) or can be known, seemed to be little more than impressions. How much counting has been done, how much could in fact be done simply by the eye and hand, to justify overarching theses? I myself have asserted that the 13th-century Dominican office chants were highly edited. This was an impression gained through transcribing the whole of Humbert's Antiphonal, which forms a major part of both LMLO and the ChantWord Dictionary, mentioned elsewhere in this piece. It was also based on the corroborating knowledge that the Dominican Use was a compilation from several other major Uses, including Sarum, and adopts a major Cistercian revision of chant in the twelfth century. But I have yet to demonstrate this impression in specific musical terms. Statistical demonstrations, sometimes reliable, were possible earlier for textual material. Similar large-scale and detailed analysis of chant became possible only with computers. How else could one find every occurrence of the motive acdcba except by memory and impossibly laborious eyeballing? Fortunately, a younger breed of more confident scholars, able to handle the computer, is beginning to remedy these circumstances. I should mention David Hiley and other European scholars, and members of the Becket team identified here. I set out as far as possible to put aspects of chant on a more scientific basis. My ChantWord Dictionary, to be found on this site, is perhaps the database I find of most general use for statistical observations.
Back to Becket. Having wasted my early education, as the headmaster thought I was doing, I managed to acquire some skill in writing applications for grants, and I left Britain, unable to find a university with a permanent position and an insane asylum. I ended up in N.America. At first in the States, and later in Canada, I was able to benefit from numerous grants that should have gone to younger and more deserving (because younger) applicants. More recently I have decided that youth is wasted on the young. Since the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada is so generously funding the Becket Project. As a result of these quite frequent grants and, in my younger days, during numerous trips around Europe and N.America I acquired hundreds of microfilms and, more recently, CDs of liturgical books.
An account of the manuscripts I investigated, and the continuing saga of the versified office repertory, is to be found, with numerous excruciatingly long lists and intimidating short forms, in Late Medieval Liturgical Offices, some material of which is excerpted on this site. The initial work on Becket and versified offices was done, of course, on index cards, later on index cards with holes and knitting needles (what on earth were such cards called?). The advent of the computer made it all so much harder, because at first there were very few programs that would handle humanistic needs. My first attempt at sorting 400 incipits on the university computer mainframe crashed the system, which had to be 'rebooted' (an Initial Program Load): "too large and complex for its memory" I was told.
The result of those experiences, of course, was another foray into something nobody was doing, at least for the very specialied tasks that I needed. Programming (and indeed, building, diagnosing, and repairing) computers had to be mastered. Things are so much better, especially now that Microsoft has 'adopted' many of the convenient routines for which one had earlier to rely on other producers.
Recently, the Becket project has taken a more organised aura, with the team of productive, imaginative, varied, skilled, vigorous, and argumentative young and more experienced scholars from whom I learn or think about something new almost every day. Now I have to find something else about which to rebel. Perhaps I'll be lucky in that endeavour, too.
The patron saint of the Becket (or the versified office) project is St Dympna. Who on earth was she? Patron(ess?) of the insane and elderly. Rebellion and serendipity: does one make the other more likely?
What prompted me to spend most of my professional life on the Becket office? How did I come across it in the first place?
As was a common practice in the 1940s in Britain, my headmaster wrote: "if Hughes does not learn to cooperate and conform he will make nothing of his life". Perhaps such comments were designed to stimulate creativity and initiative. In any case, at Oxford I ignored the admonition.
In the third and final year of a undergraduate degree at Oxford, music students were required to choose a historical period in which to specialise. I must have seen the sign-up lists before choosing, so, observing that nobody had selected the Middle Ages, I chose that period. Naturally, I knew nothing about the era, and had probably never even heard a piece of medieval music or chant. So much for rebellion. I have sometimes used this anecdote to illustrate that one does not have to know anything about a subject in order to work in it: one merely has to have the right curiosity and work habits.
In the special field I was assigned one of the 13th-century motet manuscripts as the required 'score' and, no doubt, some texts which I have forgotten. Having done this work and managed not to get a fourth-class degree (but one better: the 'one' here being ambiguous), I progressed to doctoral work. As usual, at Oxford, one acquires an MA degree simply by paying a fee, and one progresses straight to the doctoral program. Again, as is usual for Oxford, there is no course work and, in general, little or no supervision. The perceptive reader may notice how frequent here are references to tutors and supervisors.
For the DPhil, at the time a lower degree than the MA, I started work on 14th-century Italian part-music, soon to discover (or be told by my supervisor) that various scholars were working on that topic, so I shifted to early 15th-century English liturgical music, most of which, other than Old Hall, had not been published. In fact, working on Old Hall at some other place in England, was Margaret Bent (now C.B.E, which shows just how excellence - and perhaps conformity - can succeed, even for musicologists, and even if the financial compensation for medieval work is not commensurate). We later collaborated on the new edition of that fine manuscript.
English motets and Masses of this period are often based on chant tenors. Some of those in Old Hall had been identified by the original editors, and Margaret and I were able to identify others. Two previously unknown identifications came my way in an unrelated, chance perusal of The Use of Sarum edited by Walter Howard Frere. At the end of that volume, he transcribes the Sarum Tonary. There I noticed incipits of two of the unknown Old Hall chants. Serendipity. They were identified as belonging to the office of Thomas Becket. But where were the complete chants? As is well known, the office for Becket is damaged, often completely removed, from British manuscripts as a result of Henry VIII's mandates. Eventually, I suppose as a result of reading around the subject, I found reference to a manuscript in Paris, and obtained photographs. Since then, of course, as result of my increasing interest in the office, hundreds of other sources, musical and textual, have turned up, including some British manuscripts which remained undamaged, or at least readable.
This piece of luck brought Thomas to my attention. But what of the larger, liturgical context of this particular office? Was that important to consider in order to research Becket adequately? I cannot now remember whether further reading around Becket brought Analecta Hymnica to my attention, but another piece of luck certainly did. The tenor of an important early 15th-century Mass has the incipit Quem malignus spiritus. It was unidentified. Years of scouring liturgical indices and many enquiries produced no source. These searches introduced me to dozens (if not 'scores') of liturgical books that had been edited, including, of course, the many chant books that had by then been published. This exposure to printed editions perhaps inspired my interest in chant and liturgy, about which of course I also knew nothing. Thirteen years later, as I was inventorying an Antiphonal, then kept in the parish church of Wollaton, I found, in the very last few folios, the evil spirit (not the one that had driven me for decades, however). Quem malignus spiritus is a chant in the office for St John of Bridlington. Who on earth was he?
Researching into this somewhat obscure saint took me at last to Analecta Hymnica, where I found John's office among versified offices galore, or as they were then called Reimoffizien, or Rhymed Offices. The editors had published some 1000 such offices, in about ten volumes, giving very brief (and sometimes untraceable) references to their manuscript sources. Rebellion and insanity now set in seriously. I discovered that almost nobody knew anything about this repertory of late medieval liturgical offices. As with the non-existent speciality for the undergraduate degree, here was an opportunity to do research in a topic about which then no-one new anything very much, using thousands of manuscript sources about which also very little was known, distributed all over Europe and N.America, and about which I could therefore assert what I wished without much fear of challenge. An obvious choice for a megalomaniac.
Researching this repertory, in the process of which I identified most of the hundreds of offices for Becket that are now known, forced me to look at manuscript Breviaries and Antiphonals. There are dozens of texts that describe the Divine Office and how it is structured, and many that relate, in very general terms, what liturgical books contain. To my dismay there was, literally, nothing that described in anything like sufficient detail how liturgical books, especially manuscript books, were organised and structured. Again, nobody was doing it, so of course I had to. Some ten years of very frustrating work, mostly with several thousand manuscripts in Europe, and with printed texts, resulted in Medieval Manuscripts for Mass and Office: a guide to their organization and terminology, in which I describe in incomprehensible detail (like the books themselves) just what the title suggests. In order to cope with the many tables and tiresomely long descriptions in narrative of how the material is written on the page and how it changes from period to period of the church year, I evolved a set of abbreviations and other short forms, absolutely necessary to preserve what sanity I had left. They drive others to madness. Similarly, I devised a system of reasonably transparent geographical sigla, long before RISM was started, which have now infected all of my data.
In the process of all this research, I noticed frequent assertions about various aspects of both liturgy and chant that, it seemed to me, were not documented appropriately, perhaps for reasons that I have often found myself: the documentation is scattered in hundreds of disparate places, or would require massive amounts of apparatus to be adequate Nevertheless, I became suspicious that references accepted by most as standard works needed a good deal more evidence. My anxiety on this topic has usually proven not to be paranoia. In particular, general statements about chant, especially chant of the later repertory about which little was (and often is) or can be known, seemed to be little more than impressions. How much counting has been done, how much could in fact be done simply by the eye and hand, to justify overarching theses? I myself have asserted that the 13th-century Dominican office chants were highly edited. This was an impression gained through transcribing the whole of Humbert's Antiphonal, which forms a major part of both LMLO and the ChantWord Dictionary, mentioned elsewhere in this piece. It was also based on the corroborating knowledge that the Dominican Use was a compilation from several other major Uses, including Sarum, and adopts a major Cistercian revision of chant in the twelfth century. But I have yet to demonstrate this impression in specific musical terms. Statistical demonstrations, sometimes reliable, were possible earlier for textual material. Similar large-scale and detailed analysis of chant became possible only with computers. How else could one find every occurrence of the motive acdcba except by memory and impossibly laborious eyeballing? Fortunately, a younger breed of more confident scholars, able to handle the computer, is beginning to remedy these circumstances. I should mention David Hiley and other European scholars, and members of the Becket team identified here. I set out as far as possible to put aspects of chant on a more scientific basis. My ChantWord Dictionary, to be found on this site, is perhaps the database I find of most general use for statistical observations.
Back to Becket. Having wasted my early education, as the headmaster thought I was doing, I managed to acquire some skill in writing applications for grants, and I left Britain, unable to find a university with a permanent position and an insane asylum. I ended up in N.America. At first in the States, and later in Canada, I was able to benefit from numerous grants that should have gone to younger and more deserving (because younger) applicants. More recently I have decided that youth is wasted on the young. Since the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada is so generously funding the Becket Project. As a result of these quite frequent grants and, in my younger days, during numerous trips around Europe and N.America I acquired hundreds of microfilms and, more recently, CDs of liturgical books.
An account of the manuscripts I investigated, and the continuing saga of the versified office repertory, is to be found, with numerous excruciatingly long lists and intimidating short forms, in Late Medieval Liturgical Offices, some material of which is excerpted on this site. The initial work on Becket and versified offices was done, of course, on index cards, later on index cards with holes and knitting needles (what on earth were such cards called?). The advent of the computer made it all so much harder, because at first there were very few programs that would handle humanistic needs. My first attempt at sorting 400 incipits on the university computer mainframe crashed the system, which had to be 'rebooted' (an Initial Program Load): "too large and complex for its memory" I was told.
The result of those experiences, of course, was another foray into something nobody was doing, at least for the very specialied tasks that I needed. Programming (and indeed, building, diagnosing, and repairing) computers had to be mastered. Things are so much better, especially now that Microsoft has 'adopted' many of the convenient routines for which one had earlier to rely on other producers.
Recently, the Becket project has taken a more organised aura, with the team of productive, imaginative, varied, skilled, vigorous, and argumentative young and more experienced scholars from whom I learn or think about something new almost every day. Now I have to find something else about which to rebel. Perhaps I'll be lucky in that endeavour, too.
The patron saint of the Becket (or the versified office) project is St Dympna. Who on earth was she? Patron(ess?) of the insane and elderly. Rebellion and serendipity: does one make the other more likely?