Music: Mystery Tune

Swinging their scimitars and invoking the name of Allah, the Saracens descended on the great monastery at Luxeuil in Burgundy (now France) one day in 732 A.D. in the flood tide of the great Moslem invasion of Europe. In the ensuing plunder, the monastery’s library was scattered — including a Bible scriven some 30 years before, near the end of the Merovingian dynasty. A fragment of that Bible has now turned up at Yale University. Most exciting fact about the find : it is probably the oldest manuscript of Christian music in existence.

When Yale Music Historian Leo Schrade came across the faded parchment, which had lain unnoticed for years in a dusty stack at the university’s Branford College Library, he spotted, above the Latin words from Jeremiah (Lamentations 3: 13-34), the spidery hooks, loops and slashes of the ancient musical-note symbols called neumes. * The sheet resembled the earliest known neumatic documents, but was probably at least 100 years older. Yale’s Latin Professor Clarence Mendell had bought the document in 1938 from London’s E. P. Goldschmidt & Co., Ltd. Experts traced it back to Luxeuil, after that to the abbey library at Admont, Austria, where it had come to rest as part of the bookbinding of a 12th century manuscript. There it remained until 1937, when it was sold to Goldschmidt.

Experts agree that the parchment indeed dates from either just before or just after 700 A.D. Determining the age of the musical notations was a knottier task, since they could have been scratched in almost any time up to the 12th century, when that kind of notation went out of style. Infra-red and ultraviolet photography made the words and music assume about the same intensity, a fact that leads Schrade to believe that “at least the sub stance of the inks is basically the same,” hence, that the neumes were written not long after the words.

In 1938 Branford College had paid about $100 for the fragment. Now, if it were for sale, a fair asking price would be $15,000. Professor Schrade rescued his treasure from the dust, had it cleaned, photographed and installed in an air-conditioned basement vault. Probably no one will ever know what it sounds like; scholars have not succeeded in transcribing the old neumes into modern notation.

* The neumatic system derived from the accents used in the Greek chorus to show which syllables rose, which fell. It was used for Gregorian chants, whose narrow tunes were intoned in unison by monks.