and B
in chant.(d after 1271). Theorist. His one extant treatise (CoussemakerS, i, 1–155; ed. S.M. Cserba, Regensburg, 1935) is an encyclopedic compilation touching upon all the principal aspects of music in the Middle Ages: the ars musica, music as a mathematical science, ecclesiastical chant and mensural polyphony. The principal sources of the first two headings are the De institutione musica of Boethius and the treatise of Johannes Cotto. The chapter on mensural polyphony contains four discant treatises, one anonymous and the others by Johannes de Garlandia, Franco of Cologne and Petrus de Picardia.
Hieronymus was a member of the Dominican order and is believed to have been active in Paris at the order’s convent on the rue St-Jacques. His nationality is less certain. The incipit of his treatise states that it was compiled ‘a fratre ieronimo moravo’ (by Brother Jerome the Moravian), but the explicit refers to him as ‘Jeronimus de Moravie’ (Jerome from Moray). Hieronymus is more likely to have come from the convent founded c1235 at Elgin in Moray, Scotland, than from the Dominican community in Moravia (see Huglo, 1994). The contents of his treatise suggest that it was compiled during or after 1272, since the text cites St Thomas Aquinas’s commentary on De celo et mundo of Aristotle, which was apparently completed in that year. The one manuscript preserving Hieronymus’s work, F-Pn lat.16663, which may have been an exemplar intended for reproduction via the pecia system, must have been copied before 1304, when it passed to the Sorbonne on the death of its owner, Pierre de Limoges. The treatise was probably known to the English theorist Anonymus 4, who seems to have based his text on the version of Johannes de Garlandia it preserves.
The aim of the treatise was entirely practical: it was compiled to enable inexperienced ecclesiastics, especially other Dominicans, to judge and perform chant. To this end much of Hieronymus’s text is drawn more or less verbatim from recognized authorities. The opening section, presenting the wide-ranging lore associated with the ars musica, defines music, its name, inventors, divisions, effect, and the discipline of music. For this, Hieronymus culled material from Isidore of Seville, al-Fārābī, Hugh of St Victor, and his fellow Dominicans Aquinas and Vincent de Beauvais, in addition to Boethius and Cotto. Cotto’s account of the hexachord system of Guido is followed by original descriptions of mutation and intervals, and by a discussion of consonances derived largely from Boethius.
Hieronymus’s
consideration of music as a mathematical science opens with the basic
definitions necessary for the ensuing account of relations between numbers
(multiple, superparticular and superpartient, and their compounds) and the
arithmetic, geometric and harmonic means. Numerical proportions of intervals,
the comma, and so on, are demonstrated in copious excerpts from Boethius. Bell
tunings and monochord divisions provide access to audible demonstrations of
these harmonic relationships. The subject of ecclesiastical chant is introduced
through an account of the ancient Greek modes. The church modes are then
described and illustrated by a tonary concluding with an exposition of the use
of B and B in chant.
The two largely original chapters that follow this material are also concerned with chant; like the tonary they appear to reflect the Dominican usage in many respects. The first (chap.24) shows how to compose new chants, while the second (chap.25) discusses singing and forming notes and pauses in plainchant. In the latter chapter Hieronymus observed that the manner of singing described there applied not only to chant, but to all music, including polyphony (musica mensurabilis). The note values shown in Table 1 were given, resolved according to the ‘ancients’ and the ‘moderns’. With certain exceptions, all chant was to be sung in breves of one ‘modern’ tempus. Hieronymus described a group of vocal ornaments including the ‘reverberation’, an appoggiatura of several rapid notes, and the ‘flower’ (flos), a vibrato or trill from above.
Chap.26 presents four positiones, or theses, on polyphony. To a large extent these represent successive stages in the evolution of discant and rhythmic theory, but their subject matter is necessarily the same: rhythm and its notation, vertical intervallic relationships, and the genres and idioms of musica mensurabilis. The first, an unattributed Discantus positio vulgaris pieced together from theoretical material of differing ages and origins, is thus named because ‘certain nations [i.e. schools or academic faculties] commonly use it, and because it is the oldest of all’. It summarizes elementary information on modal rhythm. The long of two tempora and the breve of one are the basic values, while the ternary long and semibreve are described as ‘beyond measurement’. Six rhythmic modes are enumerated, 1st mode (long-breve-long) being distinguished from 5th mode (all ternary longs). The teaching of vertical relationships follows other treatises of the 12th and early 13th centuries in numerous respects: it simply defines the unison, 5th and octave as the best concords, and gives examples of octave and 5th progressions in contrary motion. Brief but important definitions are given for the major polyphonic idioms and genres cultivated by the Notre Dame school: discant, organum purum, organum duplex, conductus, motet and hocket.
The more extended positio that follows, Garlandia’s De mensurabili musica, gives detailed teaching on the rhythmic modes and on the mensural notation that was being developed to facilitate their notation. Consonances and dissonances are classified as perfect, intermediate, and imperfect. Hieronymus’s copy of Garlandia has been ‘modernized’ in comparison with the version of the treatise found in other manuscripts. It is unique in preserving in an integral state Garlandia’s chapters on the idioms of copula and organum per se (see Reimer, chaps.12–13). It also stands alone in including chapters on three- and four-voice writing (chaps.14–16); these may be additions or reworkings by Hieronymus, and include information on falsa musica, rondellus and other forms of variation, and the use of embellishments (colores) in a polyphonic context.
The third positio, the Ars cantus mensurabilis of Franco of Cologne, is ascribed by Hieronymus to Johannes de Burgundia, an Augustinian canon of St Denis, Reims, known as a teacher from other sources. This is possibly the earliest surviving copy of Franco’s treatise, a seminal reworking of rhythmic language and its notation which frees both from the constraints of the modal system.
The fourth positio, ascribed to Petrus de Picardia, is a truncated version of an abbreviatio, or summary, of late 13th-century rhythmic and notational doctrine. The text tells us that it is based on the ars of Franco and on what Petrus described as the arbor (‘tree’, apparently a diagram) of Johannes de Burgundia. The treatise is rich in examples drawn from the motet repertory of the period.
The four positiones are followed by discussions of Greek terminology for the notes of the gamut (important as an early witness to the ‘full’ Guidonian gamut) and of positions on the monochord. At the end of the compilation the tunings of the two-string rebec (C–G) and the five-string vielle are described.
M. Huglo: ‘Règlement du XIIIe siècle pour la transcription des livres notés’, Festschrift Bruno Stäblein zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. M. Ruhnke (Kassel, 1967), 121–33
F.A. Gallo, ed.: P. Picardus: Ars motettorum compilata breviter, CSM, xv (1971)
E. Reimer, ed.: Johannes de Garlandia: De mensurabili musica (Wiesbaden, 1972)
A. Hughes: ‘Viella: facere non possumus’, IMSCR XI: Copenhagen 1972, i, 453–6
G. Reaney and A. Gilles, eds.: Franconis de Colonia ars cantus mensurabilis, CSM, xviii (1974)
C. Page: ‘Jerome of Moravia on the rubeba and viella’, GSJ, xxxii (1979), 77–98
M. Huglo: ‘De Francon de Cologne à Jacques de Liège’, RBM, xxxiv–xxxv (1980–81), 44–60
C. Page: ‘Jerome of Moravia and Stopped-String Instruments’, Voices and Instruments of the Middle Ages: Instrumental Practice and Songs in France, 1100–1300 (Berkeley, 1986), 126–33
S. Pinegar: Textual and Conceptual Relationships among Theoretical Writings on Mensurable Music of the Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries (diss., Columbia U., 1991)
C. Meyer, ed.: Jérôme de Moravie: un théoricien de la musique dans le milieu intellectuel parisien de XIIIe siècle (Paris, 1992)
M. Huglo: ‘La Musica du Fr. Prêcheur Jérome de Moray’, Max Lütolf zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. B. Hangartner and U. Fischer (Basle, 1994), 113–16
FREDERICK HAMMOND/EDWARD H. ROESNER