Humphrey – Dom Anselm – Hughes was a renowned musicologist and leading expert on mediaeval music. His interest had begun when he was an undergraduate at Keble College, Oxford, and his first work “Early English Harmony” (volume II) was published in 1912, the year of his ordination as a priest. His scholarly book on Worcester mediaeval harmony was published in 1928, and was the work which made his name.
A Recovered Art Form
The book illuminates the nature of choir music in the thirteenth and fourteenth century, using fragments which have only survived because the vellum on which they were written was recycled for other uses. The fragments came from the library of Worcester Cathedral where they had been found re-utilised in fifteenth century book bindings or wrappers for bundles of papers such as accounts.
Other sources were the flyleaves of books in the Bodleian and the British Museum, and an early thirteenth century Worcester Psalter at Magdalen College, Oxford (generously returned to Worcester Cathedral many centuries later). The book demonstrates that they formed portions of at least three Worcester choirbooks.
“No certain light can be thrown on the problem of the date at which the musical value of these fragments were so little esteemed that they were turned over to the binders. […]
It was a pre-Dissolution event, at any rate: for the bindings are medieval bindings of the Worcester monastery. As to the cause of its disintegration, we are not without reasonable conjecture: by the middle of the fifteenth century the art had advanced, the fashion had changed; and the authorities at Worcester, who little dreamt that five centuries later men would be treasuring every scrap of evidence about their musical culture, had no compunction in passing out their disused and obsolete choirbooks as waste.”
At one point in the book, Humphrey speaks of pondering regretfully:
over the mutilated remains of the Gloria Laus et Honor, recreating in our imagination the splendid and mystic ceremonies of our forefathers as they worshipped in and around the Cathedral of Worcester in the wonderful thirteenth century.
His intense interest in earlier centuries of Christian worship was part of his Anglo-Catholicism, that very potent movement in the Church of England which is “generally reckoned as beginning with John Keble’s Assize Sermon in 1833” (Dom Anselm Hughes, The Rivers of the Flood: A personal account of the Catholic revival in England in the Twentieth Century).
Worcester Mediaeval Harmony of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries
by Dom Anselm Hughes, OSB, MA (of the Pershore Community, published by The Plainsong and Mediaeval Music Society (1928, Nashdom Abbey, Burnham, Bucks)
Notes on Pricksonge (regarding some of the illustrations in “Worcester Medieval Harmony”)
Plainsong (or Gregorian chant) consisted of a single melodic line sung from memory.
Pricksonge was very different: it was notated music that could be read and performed by multiple singers. It was so called because of the medieval practice of “pricking” or marking musical notes onto a manuscript.
Pricksonge was a type of early polyphony, i.e. singing which has multiple independent melodic parts; thus, pricksonge included early forms of counterpoint and descant.