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Book reviews

Early Music, Vol. xxxv, No. 4 © The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.

John Haines

The world of Gautier de Coinci

Gautier de Coinci: miracles, music and manuscripts , ed.

Kathy M. Krause and Alison Stones ( Turnhout : Brepols ,

2007 ), € 90.50

Gautier de Coinci (also Coincy) could easily be consid-ered one of the most neglected composers of medieval music. Guillaume de Machaut has his biographies and editions of his works, as do Leoninus, Perotinus and even Adam de la Halle. But Gautier, with 22 musical works to his name, and over 150 different readings between them, all found in his lengthy verse work the Miracles de Nostre Dame , has received comparatively little musicological scrutiny. This despite the fact that Gautier is not only one of the earliest known Western art music composers, but the first known editor of his own musical compositions, over a century before the great Machaut. Thankfully, this volume begins to redress the situation. Kathy Krause and Alison Stones have assembled a collection of 15 essays (plus an excellent introduction by Ardis Butterfield) on Gautier’s Miracles that focuses on three aspects as indicated in the book’s subtitle: ‘ miracles, music and manuscripts ’ . My review will follow this order.

The ‘ miracles ’ of the book’s title are found in two sec-tions totalling seven essays, so nearly half the volume; these are mostly standard literary studies. The section titled ‘ Figures and types ’ (pp.195 – 277) offers four essays focusing on the miracles in Gautier’s work. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski compares medieval childbirth mira-cles to the few such miracles in Gautier’s work; Yasmina Foehr-Janssens investigates sinful characters in the Mira-cles ; Kathy Krause looks at how women are gazed upon in the work; and Nancy Black studies depictions of the Vir-gin in one manuscript. The volume concludes with three essays subsumed under the title ‘ Contexts ’ (pp.279 – 343). Laurel Broughton visits such themes as the rose in a few miracles; Adrian Tudor compares Gautier’s Miracles with the older Vie des Pères ; and Brian Levy’s posthumous essay finds humour in the relation between Gautier’s work and the fabliau . All of these essays stress just what an outstand-ing, heterogeneous work is Gautier’s Miracles .

The manifestation of the subtitle’s second theme, ‘ music ’ , is found in a section titled ‘ Words and music ’ (pp.99 – 193) that contains yet more literary studies of the

kind just described. The two essays by Pierre Kunstmann and Robert Clark, although sound analyses of annomina-tio , might have been placed in a section separate from music. The three essays in this volume devoted to music begin with Frédéric Billiet’s theme of Gautier as a com-poser caught between orality and literacy, followed by Claire Chamiyé Couderc’s analysis of the three-song cycle of Sainte Léocade, which also emphasizes the oral – written divide. With the final musicological essay, the reader finds a gem (pp.167 – 93). In her analysis of Gautier’s responsory ‘ Gaude, Maria Virgo ’ , Barbara Haggh presents her trade-mark smooth blend of historical investigation, literary analysis and musicological source work. Here we learn much about Gautier, his ecclesiastical milieu and the kind of music that must have influenced him.

With the last word in this volume’s title, ‘ manuscripts ’ — oddly enough, the first section in the book — the reader finds this volume’s strongest set of contributions (pp.19 – 98), bulwarked with six highly useful appendices (pp.345 – 442). These list in various ways all or parts of the 80 known sources of Gautier’s Miracles ; Appendix II lists just those books containing music. The three essays on manuscripts open with Olivier Collet’s study of the Miracles within the context of other Marian col -lections. Kathryn Duys shows how Gautier’s somewhat paradoxical identity as a trouvère-monk is reinforced in the Miracles ’ s words and images. And Alison Stones, in her typical virtuoso manner, reveals the broader context of the Miracles ’ s artwork.

One illustration discussed by Duys will be of special interest to the readers of Early Music . It is a depiction, found in one of the earliest Miracles manuscripts, of Gautier as a vielle player sight-reading from an open bifo-lium of music (p.53, fig.1; Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale 10747, f.3r). For the record, having discovered this same image independently of Duys in 2002, I had finished an essay on it in 2004 that has not appeared yet ( ‘ A sight-reading vielle player ’ , in The sounds and sights of perfor-mance in medieval and Renaissance music , ed. B. Power and M. Epp (Aldershot, forthcoming)). The fact that both Duys and I devoted published work to this image inde-pendently of each other attests to its exceptional nature. It is not, to quote Duys, that trouvère chansonniers ‘ don’t usually portray … minstrels playing from notated music ’ (p.52); to my knowledge, they never do. This image of Gautier the vielle player is the only known medieval image of an instrumentalist sight-reading from notated music.

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I mention it because it points to a still mostly unexplored area of manuscript study on Gautier. The earliest datable book of Gautier’s Miracles dates from 1266, and yet we know he finished his work around 1227. We also know that Gautier supervised an elaborate copying process of his work during the decade leading up to its completion, in which Gautier’s own friend Robert de Dive, prior of Noyon, helped with the copying and dissemination of the Miracles (p.40). What were these earliest exemplars like? How closely do the extant manuscripts, removed from these copies by a half a century or more, resemble them? It is unfortunate that the editors of this volume did not at least begin to tackle this problem, since it is an important one. With such a large amount of extant codices, we have in Gautier’s Miracles a rare opportunity to investigate how both texts and music were transmitted in the 13th century. The image of the sight-reading vielle player is suggestive of certain music-copying practices, some of which I inves-tigate in the forthcoming essay just mentioned.

This volume is representative of modern research on medieval works, with its predominance of analyses focus-ing on how a given theme or technique is deployed in one or more literary works. This is a valuable approach, but other kinds of research are also needed if one is to achieve a rounded, interdisciplinary perspective. For many late medieval works of literature (whether in alphabet letters or musical notes), there is a resounding dearth of reliable historical research, the trouvères being the most shocking example of this. By ‘ historical research ’ , I mean research not only on the historical data surrounding book produc-tion, as mentioned in the preceding paragraph, but what can be known about the authors of literary works and their associates. In Gautier’s case, there is a great deal that could be studied, such as the noble milieu into which he was born, his musical training in Soissons, his duties at Vic-sur-Aisne and later at Soissons, and the courts with which he maintained regular ties. Such research might also shed desperately needed light on the several early trou-vères associated or contemporary with Gautier, such as Vidame de Chartres and Colin Muset mentioned by Ardis Butterfield in her introduction (p.12). To be fair, some of the essays in this volume make passing contributions to these historical problems. For example, Claire Chamiyé Couderc offers a brief tantalizing historical sketch of Gautier (pp. 150 – 1); Kathy Krause considers that literary treatments of women may reflect their situation in medieval society (p.251); and Nancy Black asks whether Gautier’s miracles were read aloud in the Parisian liturgy (pp. 272 – 4). A few contributions from historians would have been welcome additions to this already interdisciplinary collection.

A warning to the non-specialist reader. You will be expected to know not only modern French, since five of the 15 essays are in that language, but also Old French for the quoted texts. Thankfully, Barbara Haggh offers ele-gant translations of her excerpts in Latin, so knowledge of that language is not required. Otherwise, this is a fine and indispensable contribution to the ongoing study of one of the earliest composers, editors and possibly even per-formers of early music, Gautier de Coinci.

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