MUSIC:
Music constituted an important element in Irish culture both in pagan and in Christian times. Hectateus, the great geographer quoted by Diodorus, is the first who mentions the name Celt and he describes the Celts of Ireland as singing songs in praise of Apollo and playing melodiously on the harp (c. 500 B.C.).[415] Native Irish literature abounds in reference to music and musicians who were always spoken of in terms of the highest respect. Everywhere through these ancient records we find evidence that the Irish people both high and low were passionately fond of music. It entered into their daily lives and formed a part of their amusements and celebrations of every kind.[416] Zeuss in his Grammatica Celtica (1853) was the first to give the key to the nature of the musical instruments used in ancient Ireland. The references to music given by Zeuss were taken from glosses dating from 650 A.D. to 900 A.D. and written by the Irish monks of St. Gall. O’Curry,[417] Joyce,[418] and Flood[419] have followed up the work of Zeuss, so we have now a fairly clear idea of the state of musical culture during the period under investigation. Flood gives the names of twelve different instruments in use and of nine professional names of the performers.[420] It is not without significance that the harp is the national symbol. There are references to the harp in Irish literature probably as early as the fifth century.[421] O’Curry was so impressed with the many evidences he found of a high degree of musical culture that he could not restrain his enthusiasm. He says: “If ever there was a people gifted with a musical soul and sensibility in a higher degree than another I would venture to assert that the Ancient Gaedhil of Ireland were that people.”[422]
The monks were no exception to their fellow-countrymen in their love of music, consequently in Christian times music was intimately connected with public worship.[423] In the early ages of the Church many of the Irish ecclesiastics took delight in playing the harp and in order to indulge this innocent and refining taste they were wont to take with them a small portable harp when going from place to place.[424] Figures of men playing the harp are common on the stone crosses seen at Graig, Ullard, Clonmacnoise, Durrow and Monasterboice, as also on the shrines of ancient reliquaries.[425] It appears from several authorities that the practice of playing on the harp as an accompaniment to the voice was common in Ireland as early as the fifth or sixth century.[426]
During the long period when learning flourished Irish professors and teachers of music would seem to have been quite as much in request as teachers of literature and philosophy. In the middle of the seventh century Gertrude (daughter of Pepin, Mayor of the Palace) when abbess of Niville in Belgium engaged Foillan and Ultan brothers of St. Fursey to instruct her nuns in Psalmody.[427] It has been asserted that Gregorian chant coloured much of the music of Ireland from the fifth to the eighth century, but Gregorian chant dates only from 593 A.D. and, as Flood pointed out, both the psalmody and the hymnody of the Irish were distinctly Celtic in the first half of the seventh century and were mainly adaptations of the old pre-Christian melodies.[428]
The musical fame of St. Gall monastery in Switzerland is known to many, but the fact is often ignored that its foundation in 612 A.D. is due to the Irish saint Cellach whose name has been latinised Gallus or Gall. St. Gall was a student of the monastery of Bangor (in Co. Down, Ireland) and the friend and pupil of Columban whom he accompanied to the Continent. When St. Gall died in 645 A.D. the fame of his music school had spread far and near.[429] In the year 870 A.D. Moengal, another Irishman, was appointed headmaster of the Music School of St. Gall and under his rule it became “the wonder and delight of Europe.”[430] Moengal laboured for ten years on behalf of the school. It should be added that Moengal was also learned in theology and secular sciences. “Erat in divinas et humanis eruditissimus.”[431] The copying of music became such a feature of the work done at St. Gall that “the scribes of this monastery supplied all Germany with manuscript books of the Gregorian Chant, all beautifully illuminated.”[432] Moengal gave music its highest place amongst the arts and the school of St. Gall reached its highest perfection under three of Moengal’s pupils, Ratpert, Notker and Tuotilo.[433] In Zimmer’s opinions there were very few men who exercised such a beneficent influence over Germany in the ninth century as did Moengal and his successors.[434]
Moengal was succeeded in 890 A.D. by Tuathal (latinised Tuotilo and sometimes Tutilo), his pupil and fellow-countryman. Tuotilo (d. 915 A.D.) was even more famous than his master and was not only a skilled musician but was famed as a poet, orator, painter, goldsmith, builder and sculptor. We are told that he was a skilled performer on the cruit and psaltery. Père Schubiger published many of the tropes composed by Tuotilo. Flood assures us that two of these Hodie Cantandus and Omnipotens Genator betray the well-known characteristics of Irish music.[435] Tuotilo also composed the famous farced Kyrie, Fons Bonitatis, included in the Vatican collection of Kyriale.[436]
Another famous pupil of Moengal’s was Notker or Notker Balbulus the author of a valuable collection of hymns known as Liber Ymnorum Notkeri which was illuminated by an Irish artist. Notker shed undying lustre on the school of St. Gall and was one of the most celebrated musicians of the Middle Ages.[437]
St. Gall was not the only monastery of Irish origin in which the study of music was pursued with success. Indeed, the musical influence of the Irish monks was felt over the whole west of Europe wherever their monasteries were established, not only in Ireland and Scotland but also throughout a large part of England, France, Belgium, Germany, Italy and Austria.[438]
Hymnologists are more or less familiar with the hymns composed by Irish poets such as Sedulius, Dungal and Moengal, and by saints like Sechnall, Columba, Molaise, Cuchuimne, Columban, Ultan, Colman, Cummian, Aengus, Fiacc, Brodan, Sanctan and Moelisu.[439]
Thus did the Irish monks both by their teaching and by their writings promote the cultivation of music in a very practical way. Nor was the theoretical aspect of music neglected. Donnchadh, an Irish bishop of the ninth century, who died abbot of Remigius, wrote a commentary on the work of Martianus Capella, a well-known volume on the “Liberal Arts,” a section of which treats of music. The greatest of his contemporaries, Johannes Scottus Eriugena, in his famous philosophical work De Divisione Naturae, written in 867 A.D. expounds organum or discant a hundred years before the appearance of Scholia Enchiriadis and Musica Enchiriadis.[440] He also wrote a commentary on Martianus Capella which is now in a Paris MS. of the ninth century.[441]
Summarising the history of Irish music prior to the close of the ninth century Flood says:[442] “The Irish were acquainted with the Ogam music tablature in pre-Christian ages; they had battle marches, dance tunes, folk songs, chants and hymns in the fifth century; they were the earliest to adopt the neums or neumatic notation for the plain chant of the Western Church; they modified and introduced Irish melodies into the Gregorian Chant; they had an intimate acquaintance with the diatonic scale long before it was perfected by Guido of Arezzo. They were the first to employ harmony and counterpoint; they had quite an array of bards and poets; they employed blank verse, elegiac rhymes, consonant, assonant, inverse, burthen, dissyllabic, trisyllabic, and quadrisyllabic rhymes, not to say anything of the caoines, laments, elegies, metrical romances, etc.; they had a world-famed school of harpers, and finally they diffused musical knowledge over Europe.”