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.”