One who has mastered Musica, Boethius concluded, and only such a one, can truly judge the work of a
musician, whether composer or performer. The composer and performer are after all concerned only with
music, a subrational art, while the philosopher alone knows Musica, a rational science. The stringent
differentiation between music and Musica, and their relative evaluation, were easily translatable from
Platonist into Christian terms and remained standard in music treatises until the fourteenth century and
even beyond. The idea that music was ideally a representation of Musica remained current in certain
circles of musicians, and in certain genres of music, even longer than that.
FIG. 3-2 Frontispiece of a mid-thirteenth-century manuscript—Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Pluteo 29. I—
representing the musical cosmology described by Boethius in De institutione musica.
At the height of the Carolingian renaissance, the liberal arts were studied at the great Benedictine
abbeys, such as St. Gallen (where the Irish monk Moengal instructed the likes of Notker and Tuotilo), St.
Martin at Tours (where Alcuin himself taught beginning in 796), St. Amand at Tournai (now in the
southern, French-speaking part of Belgium), and Reichenau (on an island in Lake Constance,
Switzerland). The libraries of all of these monasteries contained copies of Boethius’s treatise on music,
and Neoplatonist ideas about Musica were incorporated as theological underpinning into liturgical music
study. At the same time, however, the pressures of liturgical reorganization and chant reform created the
need for a new kind of theoretical study, one that served the purposes not of theological or ethical
indoctrination but of practical music making and memorization. Beginning very modestly, this new
theoretical enterprise, and the documents it generated, led to a complete rethinking of the principles not of
Musica but of actual music, as we understand the term today. Its repercussions were nothing short of
foundational to the tradition of “Western music,” however we choose to define that slippery term.
TONARIES
Among the earliest documents we have for the Carolingian reorganization of the liturgy and the
institutionalization of Gregorian chant are the manuscripts, which begin to appear soon after Pepin’s time,
that group antiphons (represented by their incipits or opening words) according to the psalm tones with
which they best accord melodically. These lists, which began to appear long before the Franks had