Scribes of Musical Cultures. Decoding Early Technologies of Music Writing in Latin Europe c. 900–1100

Project Information

SCRIBEMUS

Grant agreement ID: 101042655

DOI

10.3030/101042655

EC signature date 17 October 2022

Start date 1 June 2023

End date 31 May 2028

Funded under

• European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 497 793,00

EU contribution

€ 1 497 793,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI DI PAVIA
Italy

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - SCRIBEMUS (Scribes of Musical Cultures. Decoding Early Technologies of Music Writing in Latin Europe c. 900–1100)

Reporting period: 2023-06-01 to 2025-11-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The project aims to reconstruct and understand the phenomena underlying the first large-scale diffusion of neumatic notation in 10th- and 11th-century Europe, as well as to study the historical (political and ecclesiastical) dynamics that may have favoured its spreading.

From Bach to Beethoven, Verdi to The Beatles, whether elite or popular genres, our collective musical culture was shaped by complex technologies of music writing first invented ca. 1200 years ago in western Europe. SCRIBEMUS will elucidate the first spreading of musical notation in Latin Europe, one of the most debated topics in historical musicology since the 19th century.

The project will address significant lacunae in our understanding of how music scripts were shaped and exchanged within transregional networks of singer-scribes. It will assess how scribes mediated contemporary writing practices and visual culture in the creation of musical notation, as well as the impact of politics and monastic institutions–especially convents–in the first adoption and diffusion of the musical staff.

The project's international team will undertake the first large-scale and fully interdisciplinary analysis of hundreds of surviving musical sources across two centuries (ca. 900–1100); we will literally read beyond the surface of extant palimpsests manuscripts using multi-spectral imaging and digital processing to reveal a corpus of so-far 'hidden' melodies.

SCRIBEMUS will go significantly beyond the state of the art in the field by exploring the scribes' intellectual approaches that guided their graphic representation of sound. In three intersecting work packages, the project will cross the disciplinary boundaries between music, Latin palaeography, linguistics, the study of past musical cultures, and computational science. SCRIBEMUS will fundamentally advance our understanding of how early singers developed sophisticated ways to visualise, read, and perform musical sound, changing the course of music history to this day.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

New findings from the SCRIBEMUS project are transforming our understanding of early medieval musical notation. At the heart of this research is the recognition of a previously unacknowledged South Frankish notational family—an insight that brings coherence to long-debated regional styles such as Catalan, Novalesa, and Bolognese. Once viewed as isolated or anomalous, these notations now appear to be local adaptations of a broader, interconnected system of musical writing. This reframing challenge the longstanding narrative that situates Aachen and the Carolingian court at the centre of notational innovation. Instead, it suggests a more decentralized, organic development—where regional scripts were not simply peripheral echoes of a central model, but part of a vibrant, multi-directional evolution of musical literacy. Perhaps most significantly, these findings confirm a hypothesis I proposed several years ago: that a Southern Frankish notational family existed alongside the well-known West and East Frankish traditions. This recognition not only fills a gap in our historical understanding but also opens the door to an entirely new field of inquiry into the cultural and musical networks of the northern Mediterranean. The work of SCRIBEMUS is thus not just refining our knowledge—it is redefining the map of early medieval musical writing.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The most breakthrough aspect of SCRIBEMUS’s research is the conceptualisation of the idea of a ‘south Frankish’ notational family. Those names (Catalan, Novalesa, Bolognese) which scholars have been questioning for years make now much more sense as regional adaptations of a shared music script. Everything became also all the more interesting, since, unlike the West and East Frankish notational varieties (as described in Rankin 2018, Writing Sounds in Carolingian Europe. The Invention of Musical Notation) that may have been more or less loosely related to the reigns of the divisio imperii, and spread therefore along networks favoured by a geo-political dimension, the south Frankish tells us instead of other networks, favoured instead by other dynamics like language (I call it this area ‘the romance arch’), trade (northern mediterranean), and intellectual exchange, as we will hear from Patrick Marschner in a bit. In a sense, this is a more vital (perhaps even more ‘real’) scenario than the well-established narrative of a radial dissemination of everything from the central Carolingian court in Aachen. Moreover, what is particularly noteworthy about all this is that these newly revealed connections led us to the confirmation of a hypothesis I formulated some years ago about the existence of a Southern Frankish notational family, to be added to the West and East Frankish families already identified by Susan Rankin in her 2018 book Writing Sound. The project is, effectively, opening a whole new direction of studies in the writing of music in the northern Mediterranean in the tenth and eleventh centuries.

Music scribe