Not all medieval people agreed that such opulent decoration pleased or praised
God, however. At the end of the eleventh century, the new commercial economy and
the profit motive that fueled it led many to reject wealth and to embrace poverty as a
key element of the religious life. The Carthusian order, founded by Bruno (d.1101),
one-time bishop of Cologne, represented one such movement. La Grande
Chartreuse, the chief house of the order, was built in an Alpine valley, lonely and
inaccessible. Each monk took a vow of silence and lived as a hermit in his own small
hut. Only occasionally would the monks join the others for prayer in a common
oratory. When not engaged in prayer or meditation, the Carthusians copied
manuscripts: for them, scribal work was a way to preach God’s word with the hands
rather than the mouth. Slowly the Carthusian order grew, but each monastery was
limited to only twelve monks, the number of Christ’s Apostles.
And yet even the Carthusians dedicated their lives above all to prayer. By now
new forms of musical notation had been elaborated to allow monks—and other
musicians—to see graphically the melody of their chants. In Plate 5.8 on p. 188, a
manuscript from a Carthusian monastery in Lyon, France, the scribe used a red line
to show the pitch of F (you can see the letter F at the left of each red line) and a
yellow line for the C above that. The notes, square-headed and precisely placed, can
easily be transcribed (by a musicologist who knows their conventions) onto a modern
five-line staff.
