The Natural Power of Music

Abstract

Among the early medieval authors, Amalarius of Metz (8th–9th century) is one of those who discussed the impact of religious music and song on the body and soul. In his main work: the Liber Officialis, listening and singing liturgical music are depicted as having a corporeal effect that generates sensations of an intense sensory and emotional character. In Amalarius, living the musical religious phenomenon not only coincides with the idea that music can evoke emotions but there is something that goes further. What Amalarius emphasizes is a particular emotion: a “spiritual state” of the nakedness of the heart, almost a weakness of those who are capable of tears and sensitive to God’s voice. During the patristic era, especially in the East, “penthos” (compunction) was used to describe the experience of tears in prayer or meditation; however, Fathers of the Church described liturgical music as an obstacle to compunction. For this reason, an evolution of that compunctory doctrine emerges from the exposition of Amalarius. In this context, it is not a question of crying for one’s sins but of exploiting a natural power (vis) of music. By simply listening to music, a person would seem capable of being moved and reaching a particularly “receptive state” to welcome the Word of God and make it bear fruit. What Amalarius describes in religious music seems to be the natural experience that one feels when, just listening to a melody, a tear spontaneously falls. This physical reaction is connected to a spiritual transformation that seems to pass through the flesh (carnalia) of our humanity. The result of this singular experience, strongly connected to musical ethics, is the conversion to good action and the possibility to dispose human beings to attentive, deep, and fruitful listening.

1. Introduction

This paper aims to study the value of Gregorian chant within the liturgy according to the exposition of an early medieval author: Amalarius of Metz. An attempt is made to contextualize and analyze how this author became the authority for presenting the ratio (rationale) and the necessity of listening to a musical moment within the celebration as well as the possibility of emphasizing certain characteristics peculiar to Gregorian chant. Amalarius’s contributions were made known primarily by means of his liturgical exposition on the gradual responsory contained in the Liber Officialis and the Hellenistic philosophical reflection on the natural force of music, arrived at in the Middle Ages by reading the Latin translations of Boethius and his reception of those doctrines.

2. Materials and Methods

The applied method is analytical with a focus on ad fontes (the sources). The text of Amalarius and the authors, directly or indirectly cited, are read and explored in their original context and in their subsequent reception and application.

3. Amalarius and His Liber Officialis

Amalarius of Metz was a bishop and intellectual belonging to the second generation1 of the Carolingian Renaissance (Tabacco 2010, p. 136; Barbero 2004, p. 244). He lived in Gaul, in the heart of the empire (Ewig 2004, p. 152), in the late 8th and early 9th centuries, and his life exemplifies the life of an intellectual in this period of history2. His name, traditionally but without certain historical evidence (Steck 2000, pp. 7–19), has been associated with the city of Metz that, from the 8th century, "became the most famous Carolingian centre for the cultivation of Roman music, even giving its name to certain melodies composed by the Franks" (Rankin 1994, p. 276).

In addition to his ecclesial duties, first in the administration of the Trier region as metropolitan (Diosi 2006) and later of the diocese of Lyons, Amalarius played a significant role in many areas of social and political life in the historical period of the late 8th and early 9th centuries. He was an imperial ambassador to the East in Constantinople (Cortoni 2016, pp. 56–59; Vedriš 2018) along with his friend, the abbot Peter of Nonantola3. He was a traveler with a passion for learning about the sources of the subjects he studied, a canonist and organizer of community religious life4, a theologian, and an author of prose and poetry.

Among his many interests, however, one especially stands out: liturgy. Amalarius seemed moved by both a pastoral zeal and an intellectual passion that led him to describe, explain, and research not only “how” one should celebrate, but especially the “why” of the many elements that populated the rite in his time (Flores 2016, pp. 97–98). This led him to draft his main work: the Liber Officialis5 (Amalarius of Metz 1950b, pp. 9–543). It is a liturgical commentary, an expositio missae6, which also uses the rhetorical technique of allegoresis (Zambon 2021, pp. 78–81; Eco 2016, pp. 97–140) through the fourfold sense of Scripture (Ivorra Robla 2007, pp. 91–130). It could almost be considered an early medieval liturgical phenomenology animated by catechetical pedagogy (La Rosa 2022, pp. 156–75), which is characteristic of early medieval spirituality (Vauchez 2020, pp. 7–28).

The work, in addition to the author’s passion, is the result of a necessity born from what the liturgy in Gaul was experiencing in the era inaugurated by Charlemagne. It was with this emperor that the “Roman” liturgy, imposed throughout the Carolingian empire (Müller 2017, p. 94), was born. It is called “Roman” but it is the result of the meeting of the liturgical tradition of Rome (Romano 2020, pp. 25–74) with that of the ancient Franks (West Germanic culture) and, for this reason, we can refer to it as a Frankish–Roman liturgy (Hiley 2009, pp. 94–96; Raffa 2011, pp. 123–40). Similarly, its chant, the so-called “Gregorian chant”, is the result of incorporating the “romana cantilena” (old Roman chant) into Gallican traditions (Apel 1998, p. 106; Ruini 2011, p. 49; Levy 2000, p. 81). Pope Adrian I, in fact, had been asked for the liturgical books of Urbe (Neunheuser 1999, p. 98; Pecklers 2013, pp. 77–76) so that they could be copied and imposed, as an instrumentuum regni (instrument of political unification) in all the territories subjected to the authority of Charlemagne and his immediate successors (Tabacco 2010, pp. 135–45; Jaschinski 2018, p. 50). Similarly, papal cantors also traveled to the Gauls to teach authentic Roman melodies (a phenomenological aspect of the liturgy), as in the case of Simeon: the papal schola’s secundicerius (Cattin 1991, p. 69). In addition to liturgical formularies, the Carolingians also viewed “music as a political program” (Rankin 1994, p. 275).

Those formularies (Sacramentaries, Antiphonaries, and Graduals), however, were missing many celebrations and, therefore, had to be completed. The additions are easily distinguishable because they were drafted in a different style peculiar to the lands of those intellectuals in the imperial circle (Pecklers 2013, p. 79). This was a group of intellectuals that the emperor wanted around him in what was called the Schola Palatina. This was not a “school” as we would understand it today but more precisely an “academia”. It was the occasion for meeting and the possibility of disputing issues of culture intimately connected to the imperial government programs that Charlemagne himself desired and supported (Cardini and Montesano 2006, pp. 152–53). The term Schola Palatina is an “expression we find under the pen of Alcuin, designating a small group of learned men close to the sovereign, engaged in continuous discussions concerning all kinds of learned subjects” (Riché and Verger 2019, p. 21). The Schola Palatina includes, for example, the monk Benedict of Aniane who was one of the great protagonists of the Carolingian Renaissance (Tabacco 2010, p. 141) and author of liturgical formularies (Deshusses 1979, vol. 1, p. 67).

The genuinely Roman elements, moreover, were not always understood and, consequently, it was incumbent to answer the question of “why” it should be celebrated that way. It was a real search for the liturgical “ratio” in a period of liturgical reform and renovation often called renovatio (Levy 1998, p. 215). Amalarius himself uses the term ratio in describing his way of proceeding in the expositions of his treatises and says, “in quo discamus de officio missae, quid rationis in se contineat diversitas illa quae ibi agitur” or, “that we may learn about the office of the mass and the purpose behind the variety that we practice during its celebrations” (Amalarius of Metz 1950b, p. 257). Moreover, as Jun Nishiwaki also notes in the specific case of some liturgical chants, Amalarius presents something original that differs from both the Roman and Metz traditions (Nishiwaki 2017, p. 104).

Amalarius can be considered a key figure in early medieval and later liturgical–musical history. As Anne Walters Robertson writes: “His influence was still evident in the eleventh century, however, in works like the widely circulated Liber Quare, a tract in dialogue form” (Walters Robertson 2000, p. 301; Liber Quare 1983). In fact, many “Passages from the Liber officialis were incorporated in many later liturgical commentaries” (Dyer 2018, p. 114), such as, for example, William Durand’s Rationale divinorum officiorum (13th century) (Durand 1995–2000; Grillo 2022, pp. 59–61).

4. The Natural Power of Music: Plato and Boethius

Chapter XI of Liber III of Liber Officialis, the important liturgical commentary written by Amalarius, is entitled “De Officio lectoris et cantoris” (Amalarius of Metz 1950b, pp. 292–99): “On the office of the lector and the cantor” (Amalarius of Metz 2014, vol. 2, pp. 69–85). In it, we read a sentence that seems to go beyond the mere description and explanation of the liturgical action and thus enter into the merits of the philosophy of music. The chapter is devoted to exposition on the liturgical ministries of the lector and the cantor in relation to that celebratory moment that corresponds to the epistle and the gradual responsory. The author begins defining and describing the protagonists of this part of the Mass: “The reader is so called because he has the task of reading the reading. The reading is so called because it is not sung like the psalms and hymns but only read. [...] The cantor has many offices and each of them is named according to what he performs.”7 The definitions given by Amalarius are often based on the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville (6th–7th century), but here he seems to go beyond what might be considered the “classic” definitions, for his time, of the Cantor. Isidorus of Seville, in fact, summarizes the definition of the cantor as “Cantor autem vocatus quia voce modulatur in cantu”: “he who conveniently moves his voice in song” (Isidorus of Seville 2014, vol. 1, p. 620). For Amalarius, the cantor has many offices that are described and explained with images based on the Bible: the Cantor is the preacher, the farmer, the cattleman, etc., and his chant depicts the New Testament, Christ, the Arts, etc. (Dyer 2018, pp. 127–40).

In particular, this author presents a relationship between what is read and what is sung that seems to be based precisely on music and its natural properties. The phrase in question is the following: “Musica habet quandam naturalem vim ad flectendum animum” (Amalarius of Metz 1950b, p. 296) that Eric Knibbs translates as “Music has a kind of natural power for moving the spirit” (Amalarius of Metz 2014, vol. 2, p. 79). The expression is followed by an explicit and unique, within the expositio (Hanssens 1950, p. 349), quotation from the late Roman philosopher Severinus Boethius (5th–6th century) that serves to ground the statement in “de naturali vi musicae” (the natural power of music)8.

Curiously, Amalarius does not cite the precise passage where the expression vis musicae9 is encountered but reports the effects of music on humankind and the narrative of what happened with Timotheus of Miletus in Sparta. Before delving into the quotation and its context, both in Boethius’s and Amalarius’s treatments, we might ask why our author uses this philosopher to make his expositio. Medieval reflection on music rests its foundation on classical philosophy, which in this period enters through the writings of a number of authors of late antiquity (Atkinson 2009, pp. 49–84). In fact, as John J. Contreni writes: “ancient Roman classics were part and parcel of the intellectual and educational revival sparked by the Carolingian literary elite” (Contreni 2016, p. 22).

In particular, the philosophy of music owes much to the work of Severinus Boethius (Orbetello 1989, pp. 161–65) who, in the early Christian Middle Ages, was considered an auctoritas to refer to. Boethius, Roman by birth but intellectually trained in Athens, is credited with translating the Greek classics into Latin, which allowed them to be read in later centuries in the West (Gilson 2020, p. 155). Until the ninth century, however, Boethius’s thought had not yet been recovered. Alcuin of York (8th–9th century), one of the great protagonists of the Carolingian Renaissance, is credited with this accomplishment. From the writings of this Anglo-Saxon monk and intellectual10, the Roman philosopher Boethius began to be referred to by leading medieval thinkers as among the authorities in philosophy and theology (Lluch-Baixauli 1997, p. 136). Amalarius, who explicitly refers to Alcuin as one of his teachers11, thus resorts to Boethius to ground his argument.

In his philosophical treatise on music (Donato 2021, pp. 135–52), the De Institutione musica, Liber I (Boethius 1990, pp. 87–137), which contains the passages quoted by Amalarius, one sees in its conclusion this statement: “Musicam naturaliter nobis esse coniunctam ut ea ni si velimus quidem carere possimus” (Boethius 1990, p. 99), which we could translate as: “music is tied to us so naturally that even if we wanted to, we could not do without it”. There is an intimate bond between humankind and music to the extent that it is capable of generating transformations in humans since it enters from the ear straight to the heart (Boethius 1990, p. 93). We must consider how, in ancient culture, the heart was often the seat of intelligence and, in this way, connected to human behavior (Clément 1998, p. 43; Callahan 2003, p. 198). This is a question of “musical ethics”, i.e., how music can influence human behavior. The history of music also testifies to an ethical reading of musical genres and modology that parallels the symbolic interpretation of music theory (Campesato 2021, pp. 67–82). In fact, the title of the first chapter of this Liber reports, after the above-mentioned statement “Musicam naturaliter nobis esse coniunctam”, the sphere in which it can act, i.e., behaviors: “et mores vel honestare vel evertere”: “and elevates or destroys behaviors” (Boethius 1990, p. 89). Boethius’s work, then, opens with ethical–psychological reflections (Rainoldi 2000, pp. 27–30). This choice of his manifests his intention to show how theoretical reflection on music should never be separated from that of its moral and spiritual impact (Donato 2021, p. 164).

Boethius also grounds these claims by resorting to certain auctoritates. We encounter examples drawn from famous classical authors (among them Pythagoras, Cicero, Terpander, Empedocles, etc.) who seem to be more connected to a “music therapy” associated with the psychological and cathartic effects of music (Rainoldi 2000, p. 27). Singing is seen as capable of working “wonders in the face of crises of soul and body” (Boethius 1990, pp. 96–98). The first to be cited is Plato and concerns the episode of Timotheus of Miletus from the fifth–fourth century B.C. (Comotti 1996, p. 37–42) in whom the focus is precisely on the ethical question connected to music and education. It concerns the narrative of what happened in Sparta when this celebrated poet and cithara player made an innovation that, at least for his contemporaries, had a negative repercussion on both ἁρμμονία (harmony)12 and on παιδεία (education) (Beschi 2023, pp. 1–12), an enterprise so dear to the Spartans.

To understand who this character was and what he had done that was so reprehensible to the Spartans, it is interesting to consult the Σοῦδα, the 10th-century Byzantine encyclopedia, which provides an idea of what Eastern history has preserved in its memory about some famous characters. The encyclopedia states the following under the entry Τιμόθεος ὁ Μιλήσιος: “Timotheus, (son) of Thersander, or of Neomususus, or of Philopolis, Milesio, lyric poet. He added the tenth and eleventh chords (to the lyre) and changed the archaic music to a sweeter one”13. This change aroused great outrage and resulted in the issuance of a decree in which the Spartans expressed public disapproval of Timothy and forced him to cut the strings he had added to the lyre. The accusation was precisely that he had taught the young people things that were not right, i.e., singing built on the chromatic genre instead of the enharmonic genre. This teaching, it was feared, would have the consequence of making molles, that is, weakening, the strength and virility of the Spartan boys. Plato, in his work Πολιτεία (The Republic), inserts this testimony concerning Timothy to emphasize how the state must also supervise music (Plato 2009, p. 457) so that it retains a specific identity manifested by certain characteristics: modest, simple, virile; it was not to be effeminate, unrestrained, or unstable14. The supervision of the Spartan state authority was exercised by means of a law, the application of which led to the issuance of that decree which prohibited the indiscriminate teaching of all “musical modes”15 to children16.

This quotation from Plato, within Boethius’s treatise, served as an introduction for the Roman philosopher confirming the need for an accurate exposition of musical theory in order to guide intellectual effort “so that what is inherent in nature can also be appreciated on the basis of science” (Boethius 1990, p. 99).

5. The Gradual Responsory

Boethius’s treatment and, consequently, its original context with its explicit reference to Plato, enters Amalarius’s liturgical work and constitutes almost an interruption within his exposition. For our author, however, the context is decidedly different since this is neither a philosophical writing nor a music theory but a liturgical commentary within which the philosophy of music becomes an important element to ground his reasoning. We will try, now, to enter more into the context in which this quotation is situated, namely, Chapter XI of Liber III of his Liber Officialis. As mentioned above, this point of the discussion sets forth the “De Officio lectoris et cantoris”: the role and ratio of the reader and cantor within the celebratory moment that corresponds to the epistle and the gradual responsory.

This is a ritual moment that we can encounter not only in the Mass but also in the Liturgy of the Hours17 and which can be summarized by the Latin expression lectio cum cantico: after listening to “something that is read” (usually sacred scripture or patristic texts) there follows the meditative listening to “something that is sung”. Amalarius speaks of a ritual action with which he certainly would have had personal experience in the 9th century. Thus, it is not merely a theoretical reflection but his testimony of the “canere cum” (singing together) (Amalarius of Metz 1950a, p. 29) that would indicate precisely community singing with its dynamics, as well as musicological, anthropological, and spiritual elements. This lectio cum cantico constitutes a significant liturgical model that belongs to the Christian liturgical tradition from at least the 4th–5th centuries to the present. There are many testimonies of the Fathers of the Church in this regard and we infer them, often, from their homilies in which they refer to these chants that we call “interlectionary” (Righetti 2014, vol. 3, pp. 282–85). Our attention, then, must shift to the musicological characteristics related to the liturgical moment mentioned by Amalarius and, in particular, to its specific musical moment: the gradual responsory.

As we have said, in this part of the celebration we can identify a succession of two ministerial actions (that of the lector and the cantor) characterized, phenomenologically, by the offering of listening to a reading and, following that, a chant. Specifically, the chant presents a characteristic that distinguishes it from other liturgical–musical moments: it is not a simple, almost cantillated melody, but a true melismatic chant that requires a particularly trained cantor. This means that the individual syllables of its text are intoned on various polysonic neumes18 ranging from low- to high-pitched, making this liturgical–musical genre distinctly “virtuosic”. The name gradual responsory derives, first of all, from the place where it was performed. “Gradual” sees its etymology in the Latin gradus and stands for the steps of the ancient medieval ambo as we can still find today in the Basilica of St. Clement in Rome (12th century). This was the liturgical place reserved for the proclamation of the Word of God (read or sung) that saw the minister ascend to a higher position to proclaim the sacred text in the liturgical context.

The name ambo, in fact, comes from the Greek ἄμβων and indicates this movement of ascending (ἀναβαίνω) (Kunzler 2018, pp. 300–1). On a symbolic level, the ambo allows one to perceive the “height” of the sacred text proclaimed there and, from a functional point of view, was a clever acoustical device thought up before modern electronic sound amplification systems (Jungmann 1963, vol. 1, p. 333). From an elevated position, sound can spread better into the liturgical space of late antiquity and medieval basilicas. The classical Isidorian definition of the responsory, quoted abundantly in later centuries, describes it as “uno canente, chorus consonando respondeat” (Isidorus of Seville 1989, p. 56) (to one who sings, the choir responds by singing together)19. Thus, it is understood that a soloist (praecentor) who offers the first part of the chant, called a responsum, is followed by a repetition of the same by the schola of singers (succentores) (Amalarius of Metz 1950a, p. 55; Baroffio 2012). This responsum is also followed by a versus, which constitutes one of the most virtuosic moments in the entire Gregorian chant repertoire and is always entrusted to the cantor (Apel 1998, p. 243).

The resulting musical phenomenon is clear: the possibility of experiencing a moment of listening to a melody in which the text seems almost secondary given the large number of neumatic melismas that amplify the vowels of individual syllables. An example that can help us understand this effect perceived by the listener can be found, for example, in the gradual responsory of Easter Day: Haec dies (Graduale Novum 2011, pp. 166–67). In it, as is indeed the case in this liturgical–musical genre, the text is sung on rich melismas that, in correspondence with the verb exultemus (central at the hermeneutical and theological level in the understanding of the versus), are realized with more than thirty sounds belonging to various neumatic figures.

Amalarius’s phrase: “Musica habet quandam naturalem vim ad flectendum animum” refers, given its location, to precisely this characteristic moment of musical and meditative listening within the liturgical celebration in which music is perceivable, as a sensory and spiritual experience, in all its power. Specifically, we could say that the vis of the music is here the result of all the components of Gregorian chant and its “aesthetic project” (Rampi and De Lillo 2019, pp. 30–54): the melodic line with its rich neumatic figurations, the mode, and all the elements of musical and textual rhetoric designed for its composition that come to be implemented in the performance of a ritual action.

This liturgical–musical genre, despite having seen its composition in the medieval centuries within a specific celebratory project, is found, even today, in the Graduale romanum (Graduale Romanum 1974) as a possibility for today’s Catholic liturgy. It falls, thus, within the proper chant of the Catholic liturgy as evidenced by the current documents on Sacred Music of the Catholic Church that indicate Gregorian chant as the proper chant of the Roman rite (Girardi 2014, p. 271). In number 116 of Sacrosanctum Concilium, we read: “The Church acknowledges Gregorian chant as specially suited to the Roman liturgy: therefore, other things being equal, it should be given pride of place in liturgical services” (Sacrosanctum Concilium Oecumenicum Vaticanum II 1963b). Furthermore, in number 52 of Musicam Sacram, it is specified that, “Above all, the study and practice of Gregorian chant is to be promoted, because, with its special characteristics, it is a basis of great importance for the development of sacred music” (Sacrosanctum Concilium Oecumenicum Vaticanum II 1963a). These documents suggest how Gregorian chant, at least on a theoretical and exemplary level, constitutes a particular soundscape of the Roman rite in the tradition of Western Catholic religion. This soundscape, realized through a precise aesthetic peculiar to this musical genre, is acknowledged as having “special characteristics”, though without listing them. The work of Amalarius of Metz, who as early as the 9th century speaks of a force of music (vis musicae) that can be experienced in the liturgy, seems to describe and explain both its potentiality and its uniqueness, qualities that would seem to be included among those very “special characteristics”.

6. Compunction

But what would be the force of music (vis musicae) within this liturgical context of lectio cum cantico? To understand this, we must consider the particular expositio within which Amalarius inserts the parenthesis in which he quotes Boethius and, consequently, Plato. Our author is attempting to explain the meaning of the versus of the gradual responsory and, in order to do so, he makes use of the biblical image of the farmhand taken from the Gospel of Luke: “Who among you would say to your servant who has just come in from plowing or tending sheep in the field, ‘Come here immediately and take your place at table’? Would he not rather say to him, ‘Prepare something for me to eat’?” (Luke 17: 7–8). Amalarius states that the singer is the servant who is plowing the field. The action of “plowing”, an image that describes the singing of the gradual responsory, is a force that is capable of “breaking” the hearts of the hearers as if they were a field to be plowed. This is an allegorical image to describe compunction, a key word for understanding liturgical singing in the Carolingian era (Nishiwaki 2016). The etymology of this word, in Latin compunctio, sees precisely a puncture (punctio), which, for our author, can be described by the image of the plow’s wooden pole sticking into the ground. Immediately after quoting the Gospel, in fact, Amalarius states, “He plows who furrows hearts with the plow of compunction. There is no doubt that even our fleshly hearts are furrowed through the sweetness of melody, and that they open themselves like furrows through the confession of the voice and tears” (Amalarius of Metz 2014, p. 79). What follows, at this point in the discussion, is his assertion that music has a natural force, as Boethius himself states in his work on music.

In his brief study on the cantor in Amalar, Dyer seems not to deepen the theme of compunctio but focuses only on the “sweetness of the voice”. The cantor, on the other hand, is “like the plowman who calls out to the oxen to drag the plow more cheerfully”. The sweet voice of the cantors “drive their own hearts and [those] of others to tears or to the confession of sins, as if opening up the mysteries (secreta) of the earth”, as does the farmer’s plow. Amalar believed that “the sweet voice of cantors” aids devotion “so that by its sweetness it might be fitting to encourage the people to confess the Lord” (Dyer 2018, p. 137). A similar reflection is presented by Nils Holger Petersen’s recent musicological study where he seems to insist on the adjective suavis in reference to the Carolingian liturgical chant: “It is well-known, that Carolingian commentators, as well as earlier ones, not least including St Augustine around 400, were occupied with the sound of the singing voice. Negatively, they would warn against the seductive quality of the voice; positively, they could ascribe to the sweet (suavis) sound of the song of the cantors the ability to lead the faithful to God” (Petersen 2020, p. 1). But, in my opinion, this vis musicae is not only concerning the suavitas.

The “force” of which Amalarius is speaking is a force capable of arousing deep emotion that, phenomenologically, manifests itself in tears. Felice Rainoldi describes this vis as a natural (psychological) influence that music has on the human soul (Rainoldi 2000, p. 177). The exact term to describe it is, as we have said, compunction but what we find in Amalarius’s exposition seems to be an original evolution of this spiritual doctrine proper to his time that does not seem to be echoed or deepened by other later authors20. An extensive diachronic comparative reading of the medieval and later sources is not the subject of this study of a particular liturgical soundscape. Notwithstanding, I can say that, in the following centuries, Amalarius’s work entered into the abbreviationes losing its original authenticity. For example, in William of Malmesbury’s Abbreviatio Amalarii (11th–12th century) (William of Malmesbury 1980) the author “took the time not only to abbreviate but also to revise the Liber officialis by Amalarius of Metz” (Hayward 2017, p. 226).

It is not, here, a matter of simply being moved but of a particular spiritual state that makes a person particularly receptive to listening. Amalarius seems to reiterate the concreteness of this weeping precisely by using the word carnalia (fleshly heart). In speaking of compunction in the Middle Ages, we are not referring to a mere sentiment. We need to remind ourselves of a characteristic of the medieval period, namely, its being an age that saw a certain centrality of concrete emotional experience. When, especially in the early medieval centuries, we find references to “emotions”, it is a reference to a personal and communal experience. Emotionality plays a very important role and, consequently, the liturgy is also a locus in which it is manifested and experienced: weeping becomes a concrete way of manifesting conversion21, or, as Nils Holger Petersen says about the notion of sweetness, “to bring people closer to God through contrition and God’s salvation. The song functioned as a sacred sign of the divine” (Petersen 2021). This is, as Mary Carruthers writes, really a “deep theological and mystical experience” (Carruthers 2013, p. 89) that, in my opinion, is evoked not only by sweetness but more by an experience that includes all the aesthetic–musicological characteristics of the liturgical repertoire of the early Middle Ages.

Medieval mystical literature scholar Niklaus Largier, while not specifying which authors he is referring to, points out that, in the Middle Ages, there was an awareness of the link between musical experience and its effects on the bodies and souls of those who experience it: “The best examples of this might be found in texts where medieval authors discuss the impact of church music and song on their souls. Listening and singing the experience of music are portrayed as having a corporeal effect that produces sensations of an intense sensory and emotional character” (Largier 2003, p. 9). As early as the 9th century, then, we find that awareness, now also confirmed by recent studies, which states that “music does not only express the emotions [...], but also evokes emotions” (Sloboda and Juslin 2012, p. 82). Music and its power are enthusiastically embraced in the anthropological and spiritual dynamics that insist on liturgical action and, precisely because of this, we are faced with a particular reception of this ancient doctrine regarding compunction. Amalarius’s reflection probably anticipates and prepares what we will later find in the iconographic program of the choir of the abbey church of Cluny (11th century). In this testimony of Romanesque art, the ten wooden columns of the choir represent a path to salvation, testifying, as Jacques Viret observes, that from the 10th century, owing in part to the Cluniac monks, the idea that “music leads man to salvation” seems to spread in Europe (Viret 2016, p. 93).

During the patristic age, especially in the East, compunction was referred to by the term πένθος, meaning “sorrow”, but with a specific meaning that identified it as an inner sorrow that succeeds in opening humankind to a relationship with the divine and with neighbors (Marchetti-Salvatori 1990, pp. 419–22). For those authors, music, particularly music in the liturgical context, was seen as one of the main obstacles to achieving this inner state. As Irénée Hausherr’s famous study points out, the liturgy was often seen as an obstacle to compunction. In particular, then, it even seems that for the Eastern patristic tradition, hymns and tonality are a ground from which compunction cannot arise (Hausherr 2013, p. 135). In the West, between the end of the patristic era and the beginning of the medieval one, Isidore of Seville (6th–7th century), states that singing the psalms can console the sadness of hearts. The image of the heart broken by the power of music seems to be contained in Isidore’s sentence where we encounter both carnalia corda and a verb—insono—describing precisely a singing that enters inside the heart22. In his reasoning, however, the force that allows the heart to be penetrated is that of the sacred text and not of the modulation of the voice. The power of singing the psalms (psallere), moreover, had already been recognized by John Cassian (4th–5th century) in his treating of the “igniting of prayer”. In his reasoning, this Church father pointed out how singing could elicit a privileged condition for fostering prayer23.

Amalarius, on the other hand, does not speak of the singing of psalms but precisely of the natural power of music and, because of this, seems to go beyond what we encounter in Isidore, even presenting an evolution of the doctrine of compunction. The ambiguity of music, and specifically of canora musica, is nevertheless present in his reflection where we also encounter an explicit quotation to Cyprian of Carthage (3rd century): “He tempts our ears through harmonious music, to soften and weaken our Christian strength upon hearing a sweet sound” (Amalarius of Metz 2014, vol. 1, p. 101)24. Here, too, we can see commonalities with Boethius’s quotation and, in particular, the verb mollio (to weaken) that relates to the accusation made by the Spartans against Timothy of Miletus. What Amalarius accomplishes, then, seems to be the synthesis of two parallel reflections. On the one hand, the Christian doctrine concerning compunction and, on the other hand, the medieval philosophy of music with its roots in Plato’s reflection. Music naturally (naturaliter) has this force that can bend the human soul and does so by arousing this particular state of the spirit, compunction, which manifests itself in a purifying weeping. This cleft in the heart would allow the sacred text to be heard before the responsory to enter deeply into a person’s soul.

7. Conclusions

Amalarius of Metz’s exposition on the gradual responsory bears witness to a liturgical practice peculiar to a historical period, the Carolingian revival (8th–9th centuries), and to a geographical area: Gaul. As we have seen, within his discussion the author inserts a quotation that belongs to the philosophy of classical music, allowing us to grasp some of the characteristics proper to the musical phenomenon itself within a liturgical experience. Reading what this explicator and commentator of the early medieval liturgy writes, it does indeed seem that the liturgy makes its own awareness of the power that music naturally possesses, as well as an attempt to harness that power for the benefit of the spiritual experience of those living that moment.

Precisely because it is a “force” that is able to act within the interiority of humankind, this also raises the ethical question related to musical genres. Music, then, has an ambivalence that leads it to be both a positive and a negative presence within the human religious experience. What Plato asserts as the duty of civil authority in policing licit melodies, probably, translates into an equal responsibility entrusted to religious authority in ensuring, within the liturgy, a musical experience that allows for an authentic experience of internalization and meditation connected to what is proclaimed in the sacred text. This experience, from Amalarius’s exposition, is associated with a precise liturgical–musical genre proper to Gregorian chant: the gradual responsory with its musicological characteristics. The “force”, then, would seem to reside in a modal and melismatic soundscape. Owing to this force of music, humankind is able to achieve a spiritual state of acceptance of what is heard and, consequently, the possibility of meditation upon and internalization of the sacred text.

Even today, Gregorian chant continues to find an appreciation as a soundscape to accompany meditative and relaxing moments, beyond Catholic liturgical practice. This may be attributable to its natural force that, in its compositional aesthetics, can express itself with great effectiveness in the human soul. The “beauty” and fascination of this musical repertoire, then, appears to derive not only from a musical language based on melodic and modal components capable of describing the text but, at the same time, seems linked to its ability to make an exegesis of the text in musical terms. Moreover, chant recognizes the natural power of music that, for humankind, becomes a force capable of speaking to the inner self (heart) by evoking emotions that transform and direct behavior and, in particular, dispose human beings to attentive, deep, and fruitful listening.