If you have noticed
the playing time above – eight minutes thirty four seconds –
you will have hazarded a guess that this is not a run-of-the-mill
CD. And given that, alongside the short playing time, the purely
auditory pleasures to be derived from it are less than wholly
exceptional, one may be tempted to dismiss the disc rather peremptorily.
To do so would be
wrong; there are other things of profound interest and suggestiveness
here. The CD exists to illustrate a thesis argued by Stuart Lyons
in his book Horace’s Odes and the Mystery of Do-Re-Mi (Oxbow Books).
I haven’t, I regret, read Lyons’s book although I have read and
admired his earlier translation of the odes of Horace, and listening
to this disc makes me want to read the new book.
My understanding is that Lyons’s new books puts its stress
on the idea that Horace was as much a musician and songwriter
as a poet pure and simple and that, as such, he was important
in the creation of a Latin equivalent to the earlier modes of
Greek lyric song. This proposition is then related to a seemingly
rather startling speculation: that when Guido d’Arezzo, in the
eleventh century, invented the stave and the do-re-mi system
of solmization (originally known as ut-re-mi rather than
the modern do-re-mi) his real source was not the eighth-century
hymn by Paul the Deacon, in praise of St. John the Baptist,
the first six half lines of which provided the famous mnemonic:
Ut queant laxis resonare fibris
mira gestorum famuli tuorum,
solve polluti labii reatum,
sancta Iohannes!
Rather, suggests
Lyons, Guido d’Arezzo was actually drawing on a setting of Horace’s
Ad Phyllidem (Odes, Book IV.9), which survives in a tenth-century
Carolingian manuscript, now preserved in Montpellier. Lyons
believes that it was this melody that Guido drew on. Not having
read Lyons’s book I don’t know whether he argues that the manuscript
preserves a melody that survives from Horace’s own time or,
more likely, that it was a later creation. Either way, the Montpellier
codex certainly preserves one of the earliest surviving settings
of a Horatian ode. Guido was, Lyons suggests, attracted to the
melody of the setting because, after an initial middle C, each
of the five succeeding half lines begins one note higher than
the one before.
What we are offered
on the CD is, first, a realisation (by Lyons and Iain Kerr)
of the Montpellier setting of Horace; second, a performance
of Lyon’s translation of the ode in a musical setting based
on the Montpellier manuscript, though necessarily somewhat adapted;
and, finally, the first verse of the eighth-century hymn in
plainchant.
Pleasantly performed
by Christopher Gabbitas - of the King’s Singers - and the excellent
lutenist David Miller, the results are pleasant and intriguing
listening.
As it happens, Arezzo
is one of my favourite places in Italy. Walk up the hill from
the railway station towards the historic centre and you meet
a statue of Guido; since the Horatian ode here sung was probably
a kind of birthday poem for his patron Maecenas, and since Maecenas’s
family had their background in Arezzo there is an attractive
circularity to the ideas and materials presented here.
In truth, however,
the CD will only yield its full value, I suspect, if read alongside
Lyons’s book; it would appear, in truth, to be designed - or
at any rate to function best - as a complement to the book,
rather than a fully satisfying independent entity.
Glyn Pursglove
Christopher
Gabbitas (baritone); David Miller (lute) 
