Yale Journal of Music & Religion Volume 3 | Number 1 Article 4 2017 Liturgical Singing in the Lutheran Mass in Early Modern Sweden and its Implications for Clerical Ritual Performance and Lay Literacy Mattias O. Lundberg Uppsala Universitet Follow this and additional works at: http://elischolar.library.yale.edu/yjmr Part of the Liturgy and Worship Commons, and the Musicology Commons Recommended Citation Lundberg, Mattias O. (2017) "Liturgical Singing in the Lutheran Mass in Early Modern Sweden and its Implications for Clerical Ritual Performance and Lay Literacy," Yale Journal of Music & Religion: Vol. 3: No. 1, Article 4. DOI: https://doi.org/10.17132/2377-231X.1066 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by EliScholar – A Digital Platform for Scholarly Publishing at Yale. It has been accepted for inclusion in Yale Journal of Music & Religion by an authorized editor of EliScholar – A Digital Platform for Scholarly Publishing at Yale. For more information, please contact [email protected]. 61 Liturgical Singing in the Lutheran Mass in Early Modern Sweden and Its Implications for Clerical Ritual Performance and Lay Literacy Mattias Lundberg If ever there was a category of music in Swedish history that perfectly illustrated the relevance of the scholarly dictum “normaliter non in actis”—that whatever is normal and expected in a given context is naturally absent from its written documents—it is that of liturgical chant in the early modern Lutheran Church of Sweden. In fact, the spirit of the opposing sentence from Roman law, “quod non est in actis, non est in mundo” (whatever is absent from the documents is also absent from the world), may in itself account for the slanted historiographical view of liturgical music in Sweden that the discipline of musicology has often presented. Music that was performed only once or twice for a limited circle of listeners has frequently been highlighted because the sources so readily allow it. However, in order to understand the liturgical music that was most widely sung and heard in Sweden for hundreds of years, we must direct our attention to the fringe cases and anomalies, where something did not function as expected. This article will show how scholarly attempts to trace Lutheran chant traditions in Sweden are relevant to the study of historical literacy and learning by rote, since the musical inflections in question were the main means of relaying biblical texts to laypersons of varying degrees of literacy and nonliteracy. Early modern Swedes rarely heard the Bible read; instead, as we will see, it was chanted according to a set of melodic formulas known as accentus formulae, a practice that seems to have made a strong impression on the laity. Priests relied on such chanting in fulfilling their obligation to teach biblical passages to the laity, much like the poets or narrators in the predominantly oral cultures described by Eric Havelock. The message, according to Havelock, “could not be published or communicated except in performance, and here he [the poet or narrator] was very conscious of his virtuosity. While he may not always have recognized the cultural meaning of what he was preserving, he was very vividly aware of the techniques that he wielded to make it stick.”1 What Havelock calls “the psychology of the poetic performance” similarly informed the musical performance that enabled illiterate laity to partake in the texts conveyed by liturgical chant. This process became more complicated as different degrees of literacy emerged in the broader strata of Swedish society. The Concept of Clerical Singing in the Mass Musically and liturgically speaking, Sweden experienced a slow and cautious Reformation. Although concrete evidence for congregational singing is conspicuously lacking before the early seventeenth century,2 initial impulses emanating from the Hanseatic city of Stockholm in the late 1 Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 145. 2 On the protests against sixteenth-century reforms in Swedish liturgy, see Martin Berntson, Mässan och armborstet: Uppror och reformation i Sverige 1525–1544 (Skellefteå: Artos, 2010); and Folke Bohlin, “Till frågan Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 3, N o. 1 (2017): 61–76 62 1520s met with resistance in many parts of the kingdom. What remained resilient from pre- Reformation times was the singing of the lectionary (from the prophets, the Gospels, and the Pauline epistles) and the eucharistic sections of the Mass, from the late sixteenth century onward exclusively in the Swedish vernacular. This liturgical practice was generally described as a special ritual act by the priest: att mässa (“to chant the Mass”). In the period 1531–1811, from the first liturgical order for the Mass in the vernacular published by the Stockholm reformer Olaus Petri to its equivalent in 1811, roughly 35 million Sunday Masses are likely to have been celebrated in the Lutheran Church of Sweden, effectively involving every individual in the population on a regular basis.3 The melodic formulas that were sung at the vast majority, if not all, of these services are little known today, to musicians as well as musicologists and church historians. They are the subject of a forthcoming study by the author. This article focuses on the contextual factors of such singing in relation to laypersons. In early modern Swedish (analogous to other Germanic languages), the verb att mässa means “to chant” (literally, “to Mass”). Today this expression must be used with caution, partly because it has undergone a pejorative shift in the last 100 years and now connotes a monotonous, unreflective, or doggedly insistent mode of speech. Moreover, there is very little free recitation in the present Mass of the Swedish Church; the only text that is still chanted to fixed recitation formulas is the preface, that is, the beginning of the eucharistic prayer.4 In early modern times, the infinitive form att mässa was predominantly used in the sense of free cantillation, especially of biblical readings and other parts of the Mass that were sung to accentus formulae. An instance can be cited from the Växjö Consistory Records of 1713: “When he [the priest] came from the pulpit before the altar, he chanted some of the text and read the words of institution” (När han war kommen utaf Predike-Stohlen för altaret, så mässade han sombdt och läste instichtelse orden).5 As late as 1898, the word is still used positively with reference to a chaplain in Strängnäs: “Pladecius was a master singer and thus held as the greatest chanter in the diocese” (Pladecius var storsångare och såsom sådan stiftets förnämste messare).6 The musical dictionary of Carl Envallsson states that “the Swedish Mass in general one hardly dares to mention [due to what was at the time perceived as a poor state of practice]. A priest who chants well is, however, an ornament for the service” (den Svenska mässan i allmänhet vågar man numera knappt omtala. En präst, som mässar väl, är likväl en prydnad til gudstjensten).7 om församlingssång före reformationen,” Upptakter i den svenska vokalmusikens historia (Gothenburg: Ejeby, 2014), 85–99. 3 See Olaus Petri, Then swenska messan . med orsaker till var före hon nu så hållen warder (Stockholm: Kungl. Tryckeriet, 1531) and Kyrko-handbok (Stockholm: Nordström, 1811). My estimate is based on the number of Sundays and observed feast days in the Swedish church calendar, matched against the number and distribution of church buildings. It should not be taken as an empirical dataset and serves only to give some idea of the frequency of this ritual in early modern Sweden. The country’s population grew from fewer than 900,000 in 1531 to 2,411,382 in 1811. 4 Den svenska kyrkohandboken 1986 (Stockholm: Petra, 1987) and Förslag till Kyrkohandbok för Svenska Kyrkan (Svenska kyrkans utredningar, 2012:2). 5 Växjö domkapitels akter (Växjö Consistory Records), 1713, no. 258, Landsarkivet, Vadstena. 6 Strengnäs stifts herdaminne, ed. Klaës Alfred Hagström (Strängnäs, 1897–1901), vol. 2 (1898), 257. 7 Carl Envallson, Svenskt musikaliskt lexikon (Stockholm: Maquard, 1802), s.v. “Psalmodier.” Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 3, N o. 1 (2017): 61–76 63 Accentus singing (in Swedish, mässning) is a distinct system in which a fixed melody has inflections that reflect the inherent clause structure of the text. Andreas Ornithoparcus defines it thus: Concentus can be the leader and director of all that is sung: that is, hymns, sequences, antiphons, responsories, introits, tropes, and so forth; accentus, of all that is read: that is, gospels, readings, epistles, orations, and verses from the prophets. (Ita ut concentussunt hymni, sequentie, antiphone, responsoria, introitus, tropi et huiusmodi; accentus vero eorum que leguntur: ut sunt evangelia, lectiones, epistole, 8 orationes, prophetie, dux atque moderator existeret.) Accentus singing was generally taught according to sets of rules attached to different punctuation signs and clause endings (the most important source for Swedish practice being Laurentius Petri’s De punctis distinctionum et accentu ecclesiastico [On the Punctuations and Accents of Church Readings], dating from the 1560s). It is also exemplified in documents such as the Allmänt bruk at siunga bönerna (Common Practice of Prayer Singing; published in several editions, the largest probably being that of 1701), which tells the priest how to chant in a “grammatically correct” manner, using different melodies for questions, full clauses, half clauses, and so on. This type of source is descriptive rather than prescriptive—that is, it purports to reflect actual practice rather than an ideal or desirable situation. Accentus singing also reflects a reverence for scripture in that the audible result is not seen as consisting of two separate elements (a melody connected to a passage of text). Rather, the chant is a unified utterance in which the text governs the melody and the melody enhances the grammatical, narrative, and dramatic contents of the scriptural passage for each Sunday (providing a conceptual link between the “narrated event” of the biblical texts and the “narrative event” of chanting).