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Musical Instruments in Medieval Psalm Commentaries and Psalters BY JAMES W. McKINNON 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 evi- dence,' 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 medi- eval art and literature with it. There is also, in my opinion, a sort of agnosticism involved, a feeling that the vast number of instrumental ref- erences 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 literary and iconographical categories. In this study I propose to deal with one of the most important of these, that which concerns the instru- ments mentioned in the Psalms. The subject has both a literary and an iconographical aspect. The literary aspect is represented by the frequent x See, e.g., Wulfstani Cantoris Narratio Metrica de Sancto Swithuno, verses 141- 172, ed. Alistair Campbell (Verona, 1950); Itinerarium Baldrici, in J. P. Migne, Patrologiae Cursus Completus: Series Latina, Vol. 166 (Paris, 1854), cols. 1177-78; Ars musica Joannis Aegidii Zamorensis, XV, in Gerbert, Scriptores, Vol. II, p. 388. 2See Arnold Schering, Auffiihrungspraxis alter Musik (Leipzig, 1931), pp. io-12; Rudolf Ficker, "Polyphonic Music of the Gothic Period," The Musical Quarterly XV (1929), p. 494; Gustave Reese, Music in the Middle Ages (New York, 1940), pp. 124, 325; Alec Harmon, "Medieval and Early Renaissance Music," Man and his Music (Fairlawn, N.J., 1958), pp. 66-69. Musicologists recently arguing against the use of instruments are Edmund Bowles, "Were Musical Instruments Used in the Liturgical Service during the Middle Ages?", The Galpin Society Journal X ('957), pp. 40-56; and Frank Harrison, Music in Me- dieval Britain (London, 1958), p. xiv; idem, "Tradition and Innovation in Instru- mental Usage oo1100-145o," Aspects of Medieval and Renaissance Music (New York, 1966), pp. 3g9-335.This content downloaded from 131.111.184.3 on Tue, 25 Feb 2020 16:49:19 UTCAll use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms