Musical Instruments in Medieval Psalm Commentaries and Psalters

Abstract

fT IS COMMONLY HELD among musicologists that a great variety of musical instruments was freely employed in medieval liturgical music. That the organ was in fact used we know from unequivocal documentary evidence,' but such is not the case with other instruments. A different kind of evidence is offered to prove their presence in the liturgy. Instead of a few positive statements from contemporary sources that the instruments were actually used there are innumerable pictures of them and literary allusions to them without direct reference to their liturgical status. Music historians, confronted with this virtual omnipresence of instruments in medieval literature and iconography, have simply assumed that liturgical music must have used instruments.2 There is a certain plausibility about this assumption since the liturgy is the very center of medieval musical life and one naturally associates the prominence of instruments in medieval art and literature with it. There is also, in my opinion, a sort of agnosticism involved, a feeling that the vast number of instrumental references cannot be systematically interpreted and classified. And because they cannot, one safely assumes that at least some of them are related to liturgical music practice. I believe, on the contrary, that virtually all medieval references to instruments can be classified within well-defined