Benedictine monastery in Switzerland, and one of the most important musical and literary centres during the Carolingian and Ottonian periods; also the city of the same name.
The origins of St Gallen go back to a hermitage established in c613 by the Irish saint Gallus (c550–c627). Gallus had accompanied St Columbanus to the Continent. Exiled from Luxueil by the Merovingian King Theuderic II (595–613), Columbanus went to Zürich and later to Bobbio. Gallus, however, fell ill and stayed at Zürich, founding his hermitage nearby, where he was joined by a small community. In 720 St Othmar (c689–759) took charge of the hermitage and founded the cloister. The house followed a Rule based on that of Columbanus until 760, when it became dependent on the bishopric of Konstanz and adopted the Benedictine Rule. Louis the Pious (814–40) made St Gallen an independent royal abbey in 818.
With the 9th century, under Abbot Gozbert (816–37) the monastery entered its period of greatest prosperity, both economic and artistic. Rebuilding began in 830, perhaps following a plan still extant in the library. The learned and powerful abbots Grimald (841–72) and Salomo (890–920) enlarged the cloister’s holdings and encouraged its intellectual life. Scholars, poets, and musicians flourished under them, notably Hartmann II (d 864), the Irishman Moengal (d 869), Iso (d 871), Ratpert (d 890), Notker ‘Balbulus’ (d 912) and Tuotilo (d 915). Their output consisted of chronicles, biblical commentaries, hymns, antiphons, tropes, versus and versus ad sequentias, including Notker’s Liber hymnorum, an extraordinary cycle of versus ad sequentias inspired by the proses in an antiphoner brought to St Gallen by a monk from Jumièges c860.
The achievements of the Carolingian school at St Gallen were mainly literary, although it is likely that Hartmann, Ratpert and perhaps Notker wrote melodies for some of their works. It is almost certain that Tuotilo, a poet, instrumentalist and sculptor, composed the melodies of his tropes (e.g. Hodie cantandus). The outstanding achievement, however, remains Notker’s development of the fully-fledged East Frankish versus ad sequentiam from the West Frankish models (see Crocker).
The community was also concerned with the preservation of liturgical chant. The monks regarded St Gallen and Metz as the main centres of the authentic Roman tradition. From this belief there rose the legend that during the reign of Charlemagne (d 814) the Roman cantors Petrus and Romanus, bound for Metz, had arrived at St Gallen, that Romanus had fallen ill and remained there, and that he had taught the authentic Roman tradition to the abbey’s schola and introduced the use of the significative (or ‘Romanian’) letters. The source for the legend, with the symbolic names of the cantors and the striking parallel to the foundation of St Gallen, is the Casus monasterii Sancti Galli by Ekkehard IV (d 1060). No earlier document, including the earlier Casus, mentions it.
The artistic traditions of the monastery continued until the early 11th century through the works of Ekkehard I (d 973), Hartker (d 1011), Notker Labeo (or ‘Teutonicus’; d 1022), translator of Boethius and of Martianus Capella and writer of the earliest music treatise in German, and Ekkehard IV. Nevertheless, the 10th century brought a decline in royal support; there were invasions by the Hungarians in 925 and the Saracens in 954. Emperor Conrad II (1024–39) in 1034 ordered the adoption at St Gallen of the Cluniac reforms, which further constricted artistic activity. The Annales ceased in 1044 and the Casus in the early 13th century. It is significant that when the Casus was resumed in 1335 in German by Christian Küchemeister, he should have been a townsman, not a monk.
By the 14th century St Gallen had lost its strong intellectual tradition. Abbot Heinrich von Gundelfingen (1411–17) allowed the members of the Council of Konstanz (1414–18) to remove hundreds of manuscripts, most of which were never returned. Similar depredations occurred during the Council of Basle (1431–49).
The early 16th century brought a revival of music at the monastery. Joachim Cuontz copied manuscript 546, the last of the St Gallen tropers, in 1507. Fridolin Sicher (1490–1546) became organist in 1515 and contributed a songbook and a tablature to the library (MSS 461, 530). Part-singing began in 1531, but instrumental music was not admitted until 1692 despite an attempt to introduce it in 1645. Two songbooks, the Heer Liederbuch (MS 462) and the Tschudi Liederbuch (MS 463), came to the monastery from the historian Aegidius Tschudi (1505–72).
The Reformation clashes did not spare St Gallen. It was occupied by the Protestants (1529–31) and sacked by Berne and Zürich in 1712, when the church’s paintings were destroyed and the library looted. Most of the books taken to Berne were returned; those in Zürich were sold and some eventually entered the Zentralbibliothek. The 17th and 18th centuries were musically undistinguished at St Gallen.
The monastery was dissolved in 1805, but the library remained in the custody of some of the former monks, notably the historian Idelfons von Arx (1750–1833). In 1844 St Gallen was made a bishopric; the conventual church became the cathedral and the library is now the capitular library. It remains among the most important monastic libraries still in situ, with some fundamental sources for the history of plainchant, including some of the earliest fully notated chant books. The liturgical and musical manuscripts comprise nos.337b–547, including 339 (PalMus, 1st ser., i, 1889/R), a 10th-century gradual; 359 (PalMus, 2nd ser., ii, 1924/R), a cantatorium, c900; 390–91 (PalMus, 2nd ser., i, 1900/R), the 10th-century antiphoner of Hartker (d 1011); and a group of tropers (10th to 12th century): 376, 378, 380, 381, 382 and 484. The tropers are particularly important as sources for the works of the St Gallen school of the 9th and 10th centuries.
The manuscripts mentioned above reflect the rise of the cloister’s musical scriptorium in the 9th, 10th and 11th centuries, which produced liturgical manuscripts not only for St Gallen but for other centres such as Minden. They are notated in a fine neumatic script different from German neumes, which appears in some other Swiss and south German scriptoria (e.g. Einsiedeln and St Emmeram). They transmit a graphic tradition of chant characterized mainly by numerous rhythmic neume forms, episemata and significative letters. Few sources are as rich in rhythmic signs as these: even though rhythmic notation was used in sources from nearly every region, they predominate in the early East Frankish and Messine sources.
The notation in the early St Gallen manuscripts is not diastematic, but shows traits suggesting the melodic versions that Peter Wagner called the ‘German plainsong dialect’ (Wagner, 1930–32/R, ii, pp.v–xxxvi). The influence of the monastery was perhaps overstressed by the monks of Solesmes in their restoration of the chant, and some scholars have suggested that St Gallen was perhaps peripheral to the main tradition of plainchant. The lasting influence and popularity of the Carolingian and Ottonian poet-musicians of the abbey, however, is attested by the wide diffusion of their works. (See also Notation, §III, 1(iv)(a).)
St Gallen grew around the cloister in Carolingian times; until the 14th century it was ruled by the abbots, but it became independent in 1353 and a royal town in 1450. Joachim von Watt (Vadianus) (1484–1551), a Reformation leader, founded the Stadtsbibliothek with his own library. Dominicus Zyli published a German hymnal in the city before 1553, and in 1682 Christian Huber (d 1697) published his influential Geistliche Seelenmusik there. One of his descendants, Ferdinand Huber (1791–1863), became a prominent composer of lieder. A collegium musicum was founded in 1620 and evolved into the Städtsingerverein, as it is known today. The city has a symphony orchestra, founded by Albert Meyer (1847–1933), and another choir, the St Galler Kammerchor, founded in 1937. Younger ensembles include a period instrument ensemble, the Collegium Musicum St Gallens, and the Bach Choir.
PalMus
A. Schubiger: Die Sängerschule St. Gallens vom achten bis zwölften Jahrhundert (Einsiedeln and New York, 1858/R)
P. Wagner: Einführung in die gregorianischen Melodien: ein Handbuch der Choralwissenschaft, i (Leipzig, 2/1901, 3/1911/R; Eng. trans., 1901/R); ii (Leipzig, 1905, 2/1912/R); iii (Leipzig, 1921/R)
O. Marxer: Zur spätmittelalterliche Choralgeschichte St. Gallens: der Codex 546 der St Gallen Stiftsbibliothek (St Gallen, 1908)
R. van Doren: Etude sur l’influence musicale de l’abbaye de Saint Gall (VIIIe au IXe siècle) (Brussels, 1925)
P. Wagner, ed.: Das Graduale der St. Thomaskirche zu Leipzig (14. Jahrhundert) (Leipzig, 1930–32/R)
A. Scheiwiler: Das Kloster St. Gallen: die Geschichte eines Kulturzentrums (Einsiedeln and Cologne, 1938) [with extensive bibliography]
R.L. Crocker: The Early Medieval Sequence (Berkeley, 1977)
E. Ehrenzeller: Geschichte der Stadt St Gallen (St Gallen, 1988)
W. Vogler, ed.: Die Kultur der Abtei Sankt Gallen (Zürich, 1990)
S. Rankin: ‘The Earliest Sources of Notker's Sequences: St Gallen Vadiana 317, and Paris, B.N., lat. 10587’, EMH, x (1991), 210–343
A. Haug and G. Björkvall: ‘Tropentypen in Sankt Gallen’, Recherches nouvelles sur les tropes liturgiques [Huglo Fs], ed. W. Arlt and G. Björkvall (Stockholm, 1993), 119–74
S. Rankin: ‘From Tuotilo to the First Manuscripts: the Shaping of a Trope Repertory at Saint Gall’, ibid., 395–413
S. Rankin: ‘Ways of Telling Stories’, Essays on Medieval Music: In Honor of David G. Hughes, ed. G.M. Boone (Cambridge, MA, 1995), 371–94
W. Arlt and S. Rankin, eds.: Stiftsbibliothek Sankt Gallen Codices 484 & 381 (Winterthur, 1996) [facs., with extensive bibliography]
ALEJANDRO ENRIQUE PLANCHART