Music from choirbook leaves

Rowan Watson, National Art Library:
My role at the Museum is to look after the collection of illuminated manuscripts in the Museum’s library, the National Art Library. What we are looking at here are two single leaves, cut out of a choirbook. The original book is German, of the thirteenth century I should think. There is no indication of date in it of course. And the first question is why do we have them as single leaves? The reason really derives from the particular nature of the collection of illuminated manuscripts at the V& A which is brought together in the nineteenth century in order to provide source materials for design students. Here we have the V& A, the government funded enterprise – set up after the Great Exhibition of 1851 – with a great educational role, as it has today. So rather than collecting expensive complete manuscripts it bought on the market leaves cut from illuminated manuscripts. Now this today seems to us today a rather barbaric activity but you can trace the history of cutting up medieval manuscripts in order to have single leaves back to the eighteenth century. And what is the rationale? Well, in many manuscripts you get very few pages that have images and ornament. Rather than carry the whole book, you want the illuminated part so the page it cut out. In fact design museums – and art museums – in Europe throughout the nineteenth century are putting together large and small collections of these single leaves so that in the case of the V& A or the South Kensington Museum as it was known until 1899, by the year 1900 there are over two thousand single leaves cut from illuminated manuscripts. And here we see an example of just that.

Glyn Davies, V& A Curator:
I’m Research Fellow and Curator here at the Museum working on the Medieval & Renaissance redisplay all the way from its inception seven years ago through to its completion now as we prepare to open the galleries. Both of these leaves are going into a display which looks at the great church, so monasteries and cathedrals – and their place in society really during the period from about 1000 to around 1250 which is about the time these choirbook leaves would have been made. And at that time the great church was the hub of a whole range of not only religious activity but also scholarship and artistic production. And we have to imagine that probably these choirbook leaves would have been made by monks or clerics in their free time whilst they were based at a large ecclesiastical foundation. We thought it was tremendously important not only for our visitors to be able to appreciate the wonderful visual beauty of these manuscript leaves but also to get a sense of how they might have been used and what that would have meant and so that really involved us in thinking more about the music that is depicted on them and what that would have sounded like.

Jennifer Smith, Royal College of Music :
On the Listening Gallery Project my role has been to find the chants that would go with the objects which are to be shown in the exhibition and then to transcribe these chants from the early manuscripts, to try and find them in the modern – well nineteenth century monastic books – and then transcribe them into our modern notation.

Allegra Giagu, Royal College of Music:
To sing these pieces it is a very different experience to - for instance – we all study opera, we study song repertoire, we study classical period, romantic period, obviously we dip into Baroque and Renaissance – but in terms of singing medieval music it is a very different style, there is a lot less vibrato. You do need to access a different part of your voice and also a different part of your emotions as well. It is a different kind of line that you need to sing. It is a much longer line. You need to stagger your breathing amongst your colleagues. It is choral singing without it being choral singing. It has got an awful lot of soloistic requirements I suppose but I mean it is very different to what we actually sing – but a learning experience I think very valuable.

To be a part of an exhibition at the V& A is an honour for us all. Its so close to our college it is such a huge part of London’s culture and the thought of being listened to by people who are interested in culture, and in art and in music – it is really what we are here for. We are here to be part of London’s – of the world’s – music scene and any opportunity that we are offered in that way. This is wonderful in that sense.