Адемар Шабаннский: Монах, композитор и историк XI века

11th century French monk, composer, scribe and literary forger

Adémar de Chabannes (988/989 – 1034; also Adhémar de Chabannes) was a French/Frankish monk, active as a composer, scribe, historian, poet, grammarian and literary forger. He was associated with the Abbey of Saint Martial, Limoges, where he was a central figure in the Saint Martial school, an important center of early medieval music. Much of his career was spent copying and transcribing earlier accounts of Frankish history; his major work was the Chronicon Aquitanicum et Francicum (Chronicle of Aquitaine and France). He is well known for forging a Vita, purportedly by Aurelian of Limoges, that indicated Saint Martial was one of the original apostles, and for composing an associated Mass for Saint Martial. Though he successfully convinced the local bishop and abbot of its authenticity, the traveling monk Benedict of Chiusa exposed his forgery and damaged Adémar's reputation.

Besides perhaps Guillaume de Machaut, more is known about the life of Adémar than any other medieval composer. Part of this was from the well recorded notoriety he would achieve from various infamous events, but also because the Abbey in which he worked preserved a huge amount of his literary and musical manuscripts. Unlike other documents there, the Adémar collection was later purchased by Louis XV, and thus spared from the substantial destruction of documents there during the French Revolution. Adémar was born at Chabannes, a village in today's Haute Vienne département of France. Educated at the Abbey Saint Martial de Limoges, he passed his life as a monk both there and at the monastery of Saint Cybard at Angoulême. Adémar died around 1034, most probably at Jerusalem, where he had gone on a pilgrimage.

Adémar's life was mainly spent in writing and transcribing chant books and chronicles, and his principal work is a history entitled Chronicon Aquitanicum et Francicum or Historia Francorum. This is in three books and deals with Frankish history from the reign of Pharamond, king of the Franks, to 1028. The first two books are scarcely more than a copy of earlier histories of Frankish kings, such as the Liber Historiae Francorum, the Continuation of Fredegar and the Annales regni Francorum. The third book, which deals with the period from 814 to 1028, is of considerable historical importance. It relies partly on the Chronicon Aquitanicum, to which Adémar himself added a final notice for the year 1028.

When Adémar joined the Abbey Saint Martial of Limoges, he was educated by his uncle Roger de Chabannes, cantor of the Abbey between 1010 until his death in 1025. Adémar apparently succeeded his uncle as cantor on his death. Adémar contributed as a notator to the Abbey's existing chant books learning from his uncle and other manuscripts where he contributed important parts, especially his own compositions. Adémar composed his own musical Mass and Office in the forms developed by the local school of his uncle Roger, using modal patterns documented in the tonaries of the new troper prosers, a chant book organised in libellum structure which separated the contents into collections dedicated to chant genres, especially innovative ones such as tropus and sequence and the elaborated chant of the offertorium. This libellum type was rather extravagant and carefully made by collecting a range of individual contributions.

He embraced the developing tale that Saint Martial, the third century bishop who Christianized the Limoges district, had actually lived centuries earlier, and was in fact one of the original apostles. And he supplemented the less than scanty documentation for the alleged 'apostolicity' of Martial, first with a forged Life of Martial, as if composed by Martial's successor, Bishop Aurelian. To effect this claim, he composed an "Apostolic Mass" that still exists in Adémar's own hand. The local bishop and abbot seem to have cooperated in the project and the mass was first sung on Sunday, 3 August 1029. Unfortunately for Adémar, the liturgy was disrupted by a travelling monk, Benedict of Chiusa, who denounced the improved Vita of Martial as a provincial forgery and the new liturgy as offensive to God. The word spread, and the promising young monk was disgraced. Adémar's reaction was to build forgery upon forgery, inventing a Council of 1031 that confirmed the 'apostolic' status of Martial, even a forged papal letter. In the long run, Adémar was successful. By the late 11th century, Martial was indeed venerated in Aquitaine as an apostle, though his legend was doubted elsewhere. The reality of this tissue of forgeries was only unravelled in the 1920s, by the historian Louis Saltet. Mainstream Catholic historians ignored Saltet's revelations until the 1990s.

As an apostle, Saint Martial would be entitled to a substantial mass for the celebration of his feast day within a festal octave. Adémar therefore composed a series of hymns, providing both text and music due to his position as cantor at Saint Martial. This he did by troping, i. e. adding additional text to a number of pre existing hymns and sequences, also providing proper mass chant for Saint Martial as apostle and patron of the Monastery. Following the libellum structure of the manuscript, the elements of the mass are not presented continuously, since the alleluia verses preceding the Gospel and offertories of the Mass were separated as "little books" (libelli), while the sequences are written in a third one. The apostolic mass composed for Saint Martial was exceptionally written unseparated but without the tropes, very likely later on some blank pages of the libellum with the troper of proper chant. The collection dedicated to the birth of the patron saint started separately with newly composed alleluia verses (f. 61' 62), office tropes for the same occasion (f. 62' 70), the whole untroped mass (f. 70' 71), tropes and processional antiphons (f. 71' 73'). It was a kind of addition, because the regular proprium tropes had been written already (f. 42 46'). Introit «Probauit eum» (F Pn lat. 909, f. 70'). Gradual «Principes populorum» V. «Elegit dominus» (F Pn lat. 909, f. 70' 71)
All «Alleluia» V. «Beati oculi» (F Pn lat. 909, f. 71). Offertorium «Diligo uirginitatem» (F Pn lat. 909, f. 71 71')
V1. «Praeceptum a domino»
V2. «Designatus a domino»
Communio «Nolite gaudere» (F Pn lat. 909, f. 71')
Sequence «Arce polorum» (F Pn lat. 909, f. 198 199')
Sequence «Apostolorum gloriosa» (F Pn lat. 909, f. 199' 201'). Finally, recognising the scale of the mass he as cantor had composeed for the monastic community of Limoges Abbey, it needed to make clear that the local patron saint had now to be considered an apostle. Therefore the rubric said «De sancto apostolo Marciale».

These pages of the Troper Sequentiary give not only evidence of Adémar's skills as a hymnographer and composing cantor, they also show his sophisticated way as a notator of using custodes to help the reader's orientation between the lines. The change to another line was preferably chosen where a certain unit like a membrum «Probauit | eum deus | et sci [break to the third line]uit | cor suum» was complete, but not always. If the first note on the next line was expected on the same pitch, an "e" for "equaliter" as a so called "significant letter" was set instead of a custos. The Aquitanian notation also had many agogic details, but could be written in a way that groupings would be still visible, even if a large interval separated them. In comparison with contemporary Italian neume notation which tried to display intervals by a vertical adjustment to represent visibly the difference in height like here, the groups always had to stick together and were difficult to write since the dots needed to be connected. Aquitanian neumes not only spared ink in comparison, but their ability to disconnect connected neumes was also much easier to write. It was an ingenious invention of Roger de Chabannes' generation and his nephew improved it, so that the manuscripts of their scriptorium were the finest written in Aquitaine. The only problem was to understand what was the church tone. Here similar to William of Volpiano's method the tonary worked like a key. The psalmody was indicated afterwards and crucial was the so called «differentia», the way it ended. At the end of the introit, there was the incipit of the psalm «Domine probasti me» (Ps 138) and the «differentia» was notated with the concluding small doxology «seculorum[.] amen[.]». As such it had to be looked up at the tonary dedicated to the psalmody of the Mass chant genre introit which started on folio 255 recto. Doing this, one finds the differentia in the section of «In primo thono authenti proti». Thus, one understands that the beginning means D re a mi―b fa etc., which was like a stereotype to begin and develop the proper melos of the Dorian church tone.

James Grier, Professor of Music History in the Don Wright Faculty of Music at the University of Western Ontario, identifies Adémar as one of the first to write music using the musical notation still in use today. He placed the musical notes above the text, higher or lower according to the pitch: Professor Grier states that "Placement on the vertical axis remains the standard convention for indicating pitch in notation in Western culture and there is far greater weight on pitch than on many other elements such as dynamics and timbre".

Leyser, Karl. "The Ascent of Latin Europe." In Communications and Power in Medieval Europe. The Carolingian and Ottonian Centuries London, 1994. Inaugural lecture, first published as Karl Leyser, The Ascent of Latin Europe. Oxford, 1986.