CORRESPONDENCE

To the Editors of 'Music & Letters'

LATIN POETRY AND CONDUCTUS RHYTHM

David Wulstan's review {Music & Letters, lxxx(1999), 103-5) of Christopher Page's Latin Poetryand Conductus Rhythm in Medieval France raises anumber of interesting questions on which I amsurprised not to have seen more comment, notleast whether, and if so why, we should expect 'arhythmic poetic text' (his emphasis), meaning onecomposed not according to the rules of quantitativemetre but (in the period with which we areconcerned) by syllabic count subject to certainrules for the placement of word accent, to beperformed with what Wulstan calls 'the grace ofrhythm', namely, with some notes quantitativelylonger than others. Is this a valid argument, or amere amphiboly between two different uses of thesame word 'rhythm'?

Obviously Professor Wulstan likes hearing 'thegrace of rhythm'; others of us enjoy the rhythmic-ally neutral performances we are offered nowadays,so much so that when, as at the SouthamptonMedieval and Renaissance Conference in 1996, wehear a conductus performed both in that style andin a mensural version from the late thirteenthcentury, we prefer the former. That, of course,does not prove that the later version was a distor-tion of the earlier, nor a making explicit of what thetwelfth century had taken for granted; nevertheless,it may serve as a warning against too rapid arecourse to the language of 'absurdity', perhapsno less problematic than that of 'reason' and'nature' in the Enlightenment. Why shouldn't thetrain be shunted into the non-rhythmical sidingand out of it? Is that not the much-praised phe-nomenon of variety?

However, the fundamental point is this. Certainverse forms have an integrity of their own, notdependent on their musical setting; Greek lyricmetre is an obvious example, all the more tellingbecause it was written to be sung. Others appear tobe mere outcrops of their music; I suspect that thatwas the case with some of those same lyric metresas handled in the Latin comedy of Plautus. Theverse of the thirteenth-century motet falls squarely

into this latter category; that of the grand chantcourtois into the former. It seems to me that Pagedemonstrates that conductus verse, too, is of thiskind; when Wulstan sees in accent shifts 'a reflec-tion of the underlying musical rhythm whichallows such shifts', I wonder how English spokenverse is so tolerant of, indeed addicted to, accentshifts without benefit of music. One might alsosuggest that where verse has its own integritywithout regard to music, so has music withoutregard to verse; even when it is organized so as toreflect an accentual pattern, it has perfect freedomto ignore the variation and proceed as if it were notthere. That does not disturb an anti-modalist likePage; nor ought it to disturb an anti-anti-modalistlike Wulstan, for a setting that both imposes aregular rhythmical pattern on the music andrespects the Latin word accents is in many casesperfectly impossible.

LEOFRANC HOLFORD-STREVENS

67 St Bernard's Road,Oxford OX2 6EJ.

David Wulstan replies:

Although my friend Leofranc Holford-Strevensmay have enjoyed himself in 1996, he was notpresent, I think, when the pickled sheep wasdisplayed again at the IMS conference a yearlater. There, the reaction appears to have beendifferent and vociferous, this form of 'variety' beingwidely regarded as farce.

The absurdity to which I refer is the notion thatif a conductus section should be found in sine litteranotation, the rhythm of the notation should beallowed; but if someone like Philip the Chancellorshould add a text (such as 'Bulla fulminante','Veste nuptiali' or 'Minor natu films'), the passage(being consequently registered in cum littera nota-tion) should then be docked of its rhythm. Thereare many such instances of verbal farsing in theconductus sources; there are also many motetswhere the source fails to register the rhythm. Itwould be no less absurd to perform these motets ina rhythmless fashion or to 'prefer' them thus. Werewe to apply such fundamentalism to a neumatic

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