1 - Landscapes and Soundscapes

Summary

Around the year 1280, the music of the west country was considered something special. The Parisian music theorist Anonymous IV, writing of techniques for concluding an organum (that is, a composition in which two melodies sounded simultaneously, in this earliest phase of western art music's unusual capacity), stated that it was normal to end on the interval of a 5th or unison, except in the west country of England, where a 3rd might be heard. He actually used the word ‘westcuntre’ in his treatise, otherwise written in Latin. We do not know whether he meant the region of Somerset, Devon, Cornwall, Dorset, and parts of Wiltshire that has been taken to comprise the west country for the purposes of this book. If, as has been suggested, he was an Englishman influenced by Roger Bacon, who probably grew up in Somerset, he may well have done. In that case, it is clear that a distinctive and perhaps admired musical practice was found there and deemed worthy of honourable note.

The west country's other venerable claim to musical fame is also mediaeval: the Sarum Rite, or Use of Sarum. This was a very different matter from the actual distinctive sounds in performance of what Anonymous IV was describing, being primarily the dissemination within most English cathedrals, and some liturgical establishments abroad, of Salisbury Cathedral's ‘good constitutional practice’. True, the Use of Sarum entailed some idiosyncratic elements of musical performance practice, such as troped Kyries ‘in which each phrase was sung with the words of its prosula by soloists and repeated melismatically by the choir’. But it is important to realise, as Nicholas Sandon points out, that ‘Sarum chant cannot claim any great originality’. Sandon continues:

Very little of it was peculiar to Salisbury, and although the Sarum versions of widely disseminated chants may show variance in pitch, underlay or degree of elaboration, the variants are insufficiently large, systematic or stable to constitute a recognizable dialect … Even if it were possible to identify a sizable body of chant specifically composed at or for Salisbury, this would almost certainly not allow the identification of a local idiom; late medieval West European chant is simply not distinctive in this way.