3. Giulio Minniti: How the Rhythm was Lost: Progressive Decline of Nuance in Beneventan Notation
Channel: SMNF cz
Date: 23/12/2020

Cantus Fractus 2020 conference
http://www.smnf.cz/en/news/Virtual-conference-Rhythm-in-Music-and-the-Arts-in-the-Late-Middle-Ages/

How the Rhythm was Lost: Progressive Decline of Nuance in Beneventan Notation

Giulio Minniti, Harvard University


It is a cliché in Plainchant scholarship that as centuries go on, monodic musical notation abandons rhythmic nuance in favour of intervallic precision. Like all clichés, it relies too much on suppositions that have rarely if ever been questioned to prove satisfactory.
This is certainly so for Beneventan notation, one still in want of a complete assessment of its rhythmic characteristics. The 1955 essay in Paleographie Musicale XV, still the largest on Beneventan notation, overestimates contingent ink marks (as with episema), limits itself to noticing truisms (the disappearance of quilisma in later sources) or renounces to interpret its impressive catalogue of neumatic shapes altogether. PEATTIE-KELLY 2017 tackle several single signs of Beneventan notation and their meaning (‘acuasta’ ‘pressus’ ...) but mostly in the context of the manuscript Benevento 40, a source in the middle point of Beneventan notation chronology—with rough extremities being Montecassino 269 (year 949) and Benevento 21 (14th c.).

For my Ph.D. at Harvard University I have also studied rhythmic organization in Beneventan notation. At Cantus Fractus I trace its decline presenting examples broader and grounded in more sources than past studies have done. I contextualise how later sources progressively dismiss rhythmic finesse due to calligraphic changes, to the undifferentiated use of the same shapes for different rhythmic profiles, to the loss of interest toward certain details and so forth. Only ‘coupure neumatique’ proves exceptional in its constant use in Benevento through centuries— perhaps hinting at the fact that its current understanding might need to be reviewed.
I posit my case study as empirical and evidence-based in observing a phenomenon—that of approach to rhythm in later Plainchant notation—still dominated by taken-for-granted surface comments.