The 12th-Century Eastern Mediterranean as a Cross-Cultural Notational Laboratory

Musicological discourses often divide between “musical notation” as an exclusively Western phenomenon, distinctive from other traditions for providing precise indications of pitch, and other types of visualized musical instruction that involve “musical cues” which are possible to realize only based on preexisting knowledge of the melodic content of a given cue. I would like to challenge this Eurocentric historiographical narrative on pre-modern music by examining the written transmission of melodic content in the medieval Eastern Mediterranean, based on four case studies of visualized musical instruction used in that environment. The first case study will be an excerpt from a Latin liturgical manuscript of the so-called Liturgy of the Holy Sepulchre, used by the crusader community established in Jerusalem beginning in 1099. I will demonstrate how the notational vocabulary as well as other visual elements found in this excerpt reflect a mix of differing European traditions that bore new meanings upon their Eastern relocation. The second case study is one of the three Hebrew piyyutim set by Obadiah the Proselyte to Norman notation—unusually written from right to left—of the kind he had probably learned back in his youth in Southern Italy, as part of his clerical education. The two remaining case studies represent two distinct groups of Eastern written sources which include entirely different types of visualized melodic instruction originating in the twelfth century: a Greek liturgical chant set to Middle Byzantine neumes and a 1-page Judeo-Arabic treatise of music theory that visualize melodic formulae using tablature-like textual indications. After briefly presenting these four case studies of visualized musical instruction, I will discuss their shared motivation to transmit precise pitch content and the extent to which it is possible to identify any historical, visual, or conceptual links between them, at times even reflecting aspects of cross-cultural interplay.