Speaking Nearby History: The Fictional, the Historical, the Imagined, and the Real

MARK DYER

Independent composer and researcher

Part I

A town, a church, a composer and his music: musical manuscripts as windows into speculative musical histories

This section describes a curious manuscript of late medieval music, found at St Cuthbert’s Church in Cuddwich, Cheshire, England. Cuddwich (Cuþwycin Old English) is recorded as “Cudewihc” in the Domesday Book. It is the most westerly of the so-called -wich towns in eastern Cheshire (including, north to south, Northwich, Leftwich, Middlewich, and Nantwich) and bears a saintly link to its sister civil parish and village of Cuddington in Western Cheshire (figure 1). These etymological associations are pertinent in the consideration of St Cuthbert’s Church, reflecting ecclesiastical ties and similarities with neighbouring parishes. The original nave of St Cuthbert’s (figure 2) was built in the Decorated style and dates back to the fourteenth century, making it a contemporary of St Mary’s Church, Nantwich. Indeed, there are many historical and architectural ties with this sister church as well as with a chapel of ease in the parish of Acton. Much of the building was restored and transformed in the gothic revival style by the celebrated Victorian architect Christopher Melen (figure 3) in 1893. ¹

Figure 1. Map of Cheshire showing the proximity of Cuddwich to neighbouring villages and towns.

Figure 2. St Cuthbert’s Church, Cuddwich: (a) Southern aspects and (b) nave.

Figure 3. Photograph of architect Christopher Melen, with minor insect damage.

The music manuscript in question was discovered at St Cuthbert’s in the early 1990s. Having been badly preserved in the church archives, the manuscript was in poor condition. To make matters worse, the original document has since been lost to a fire that destroyed much of the building’s structural integrity and led to the dissolution of St Cuthbert’s church and its parish (figure 4). Our only record of the manuscript’s contents are low-definition computer scans (figure 5), made by a church volunteer shortly after the manuscript’s discovery. ² Thanks to this individual, hundreds of facsimiles were preserved this way. On the basis of these scans, the manuscript was unofficially dated to the late fourteenth to early fifteenth century. ³ It is therefore a possible contemporary of the renowned Old Hall Manuscript (British Library, Add MS 57950) associated with the household chapel of Thomas, Duke of Clarence, and, afterwards, the Chapel Royal. ⁴

Figure 4. St Cuthbert’s following fire damage. Clipping taken from local newspaper Chewing the Cudd. ⁵

Figure 5. Examples of manuscript scans, made by an anonymous volunteer.

Though enjoying humbler origins than the Old Hall MS, our manuscript also contains sacred music typical of the late medieval era. The single composer represented by the remaining facsimiles is one “M le Gan.” Incidentally, a fragment of parchment found at St Mary’s details a bequest made to a certain Marcel de Gagne. ⁶ Though the parchment has suffered over the years from ink corrosion and bleed, the semblance of “[-]‘57’” accompanying the name more likely indicates a year of birth rather than of payment. ⁷ Additionally, analysis of the scant records at St Cuthbert’s indicates the provision of a grave for one “Gan” between the years 1395 to 1400. If this le Gan is our composer, we might place his lifespan as between 1357 and 1395–1400. It is likely that Marcel le Gan travelled to England from France in the late fourteenth century, where his apparently close ties to St Cuthbert’s would have been unusual for a church of its small size. ⁸ Aspects of le Gan’s life remain elusive, though the traces of his activities as a composer survive.

The music preserved in the manuscript discovered at St Cuthbert’s, which was presented in a recent edition, ⁹ was written for three voices. Typical for the time, the notation (scribe unknown) is full black with red and blue colouration. ¹⁰ The surviving works comprise three Marian antiphons and three movements from the Ordinary of the Mass (a Gloria, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei). The presence of such principal devotional texts offers further parallels with the Old Hall MS and perhaps hints toward a grander performance setting than that of St Cuthbert’s. Might this music have been written for the newly built St Mary’s, Nantwich, ¹¹ or, perhaps, the recently renovated choir stalls at Chester Cathedral? ¹² Beside the above bequest, there is little evidence to connect le Gan with these two institutions. Regardless, it is hard to imagine him operating in such proximity without at least a peripheral musical role.

The music includes sophisticated isorhythmic ¹³ and canonic ¹⁴ techniques. Let us look at the canon in the Gloria preserved in our manuscript. The “telescoped” setting, in which the cantus and contratenor bisect the text between them while sharing the same melody a fourth apart in imitation at one bar’s distance (example 2), is wonderfully constructed. This point of imitation then extends to two bars in the “Qui tollis” section. The tight-knit texture, efficient setting of the text, and changing point of imitation may have provided a model for Thomas Byttering’s celebrated setting of the same text in the Old Hall MS. ¹⁵ The circumstances under which the young English composer came to see or hear our Gloria remain a mystery, but one that is not outside the realms of possibility. ¹⁶

Example 1. Gloria, cantus and countertenor, bars 1–10.

The same extract exhibits the unorthodox vocal writing found throughout the manuscript. Note the disjunct melodic leaps of both ascending and descending major sevenths. Other movements feature melodic ninths, tenths, and elevenths. These jumps and the extreme vocal tessituras (making frequent use of ledger lines) employed by le Gan would challenge the most seasoned medieval (and modern-day) singers. Finally, we might observe the striking harmonic relations in the above passage. The preparation and resolution of harmonic dissonances between voices are certainly atypical of the time.

While le Gan’s compositional style exhibits influence from the previous French generation, ¹⁷ his use of isorhythmic techniques is particularly unique. The aforementioned Gloria features a neat, six-bar talea (or rhythmic cell). However, the Beata progenies features three simultaneous talea (figure 8), one in each voice, of varying mensuration (perfectum maior, perfectum minor, and imperfectum maior) and length (six-, five-, and four-bars). ¹⁸ These rhythmic cells phase and interlock with one another in a complex and rather mechanical manner.

Example 2. Rhythmic talea in Beata progenies, first section.

In parallel to contemporary documents, the remnants of this manuscript provide us with a vital link to Anglo-French musical cultures in the late medieval epoch. They open a window onto a vibrant, cosmopolitan network of individuals, operating within interconnected historical spaces and places, weaving intertextual webs of musical reference-making and influence. If only it were still fully in existence, this document would undoubtedly be deemed a national heritage treasure of historical and musical significance.

Part II

Algorithmic art-anthropology: the fictional and the real

The first half of this chapter is a fiction. The manuscript, Marcel le Gan, St Cuthbert’s Church, the architect Christopher Melen, the parchment fragment, and the town of Cuddwich are figments of my imagination; they do not exist. Or do they? The images featured in figure 5, and thousands similar, were generated by a GAN machine learning algorithm trained on digital scans of the Old Hall MS, in collaboration with software engineer Dr Christopher Melen at the RNCM Centre for Practice and Research in Science and Music (PRiSM). A GAN (general adversarial network) is a form of deep learning, generative modelling algorithm. The model uses two neural networks in a zero-sum game to generate progressively more authentic adaptations of the training data. I then pieced together the algorithm’s digital outputs to form the folios of a fabricated music manuscript, before transcribing and editing the new notation for performance with EXAUDI vocal ensemble. ¹⁹ This process is detailed in full elsewhere. ²⁰ In this sense, the manuscript and its music do exist, but within the context of a multidisciplinary creative project, Scribe (2022), by the author. From the images generated by the GAN algorithm, I derived a manuscript and music, a composer, a town and church, and so on.

The second part of this chapter introduces and compares a small body of diverse scholarship relating to the fictional and the historical. It might be read in combination with the first part, serving as a tangential context to the first, or separately as a short, distinct essay.

The historical and the imagined

This process of derivation might be contextualised within several theories and practices that explore the relationship between history, imagination, and fiction. Art historian Carrie Lambert-Beatty uses the term parafictional to describe artworks in which “real and/or imaginary personages and stories intersect with the world as it is being lived.” ²¹ Artists such as Michael Blum, ²² Walid Raad, ²³ and 0100101110101101.org (Eva and Franco Mattes) ²⁴ use quasi-historical or -factual objects and media, in purposefully designed curatorial settings, to create constructed fictions that, crucially for Lambert-Beatty, are “experienced as fact.” ²⁵

Many of composer Jennifer Walshe’s creative outputs might be described as parafictional. In her ongoing interactive projects Grúpat (2007–) and Aisteach (2015–), Walshe, under various pseudonyms, uses music, images, stories, and installations to open up an imaginative space and ask “what if?” questions regarding Irish culture. ²⁶ Walshe describes these projects as “imaginary histories.” ²⁷ Her emphasis on historiography, archival methods, and the museum setting might suggest a history-specific subcategory of parafictional art.

Historian Niall Ferguson offers another paradigm for blending history and imagination. “Virtual history” is a methodology in which counterfactual simulations of historical events acknowledge the chaotic nature of causation and contingency. ²⁸ Rather than accept the determinist version of the past offered by history, a virtual history seeks to “attach equal significance to all [possible] outcomes” ²⁹ in order to “understand how the past ‘actually was.’” ³⁰

Similarly, anthropologist Tim Ingold describes the “rupture between the real world and our imagination of it” (emphasis added) that occurred with the growth of concern for empirical, scientific investigation. ³¹ Rather, Ingold posits that the imagination is “world-forming” ³² and converges with scientific inquiry “as a way of knowing-in-being.” ³³ This imagination of real life is not a creative art project or academic methodology, but a way of conducting life and knowledge generation—an ethical onto-epistemology.

Imagining the real

While stemming from diverse disciplines and directed toward various aims, these theories share certain ontological, rhetorical, and phenomenological conceptions of how imagination and art can interact with “real” life. One such conception is a cultural and symbolic structuring system within which these practices project a sense of reality and fantasy. In contextualising her practice of imaginary histories, Walshe utilises an ontology of art suggested by the Irish mythological hero Fionn mac Cumhaill, ³⁴ in which “whatever happens is art, it’s just … the framing.” ³⁵ From this, we might deduce that, for Walshe, whatever we can imagine is history, depending on the framing structure we adopt. This framing in parafictional artworks is detailed further by Lambert-Beatty as a “system of inclusions and exclusions that determine what can be sensed.” ³⁶ Lambert-Beatty here evokes sense in the meaning of philosopher Jacques Rancière, as what can communally be said, thought, and felt and who can say, think, and feel it. Parafictional artworks have the potential not only to reconfigure what we believe about a certain topic (e.g., that a French composer was resident in North-West England in the fourteenth century), but also to alter what we perceive fact, history, and reality to be ontologically—the boundaries between which are instructive and porous. In his conception of virtual history, Ferguson appropriates notions of chaos theory to demonstrate the potential hazards (or possibilities) of our framing devices remaining too rigid. Ferguson reminds historians that the very act of selecting a particular source for scrutiny, “through the prism of hindsight,” distorts that source’s significance and confuses the significance we might attach to other, not-yet-written histories. ³⁷ All three theorists suggest that the framing structures we use to demarcate history (whether “real” or imagined) are, ultimately, situated, socially (re)constructed, and plastic: situated, in that the histories (or artworks of invented history) need to be placed within a specific context, creating relations between broader narratives, material artefacts, or even romanticised ideals of the unknowable past ³⁸ in order to achieve cultural or personal significance; socially constructed, in that these contexts—the relations between elements and the meaning attained—will vary and coexist between cultures, individuals, and periods owing to myriad parameters and value systems; and plastic, in that, owing to this variation, any contexts and meanings are malleable, ripe for moulding into various shapes by artists and historians alike.

In addition, these framing structures themselves require furnishing with rhetorical devices. Both Lambert-Beatty ³⁹ and Ferguson ⁴⁰ claim that any reimagining of reality or history, respectively, requires a degree of “plausibility.” In parafictional art, the rhetorical device necessary to achieve this is “stylistic mimicry”: ⁴¹ that is, adopting the lexicon, forms, and aesthetic of the particular world the parafictionalist is infiltrating. For Walshe, this involves finding a “tiny crack” in history in which “a seed could land.” ⁴² Her language evokes notions not only of insurgency, of working within the history that is reimagined, but also of the conditions for a fiction’s survival in the minds of audiences. In Grúpat and Aistech, these conditions are similarly stylistic and rhetorical. As in the acts of imagination described by Ingold, ⁴³ the conditions are things encountered and events witnessed, which the parafictional artist can pull in and draw upon. The above claims for plausibility are not intended to limit the imagination, but to account for (and perhaps infiltrate) the multiplicity of audiences’ experiences, knowledge, and expectations. There is a balancing act in which the fantasy needs to be credible for an audience, by utilising rhetoric and mimicry, but still allow the artist to conjure that which doesn’t exist, to say something new.

Finally, the above theorems and practices hint toward the phenomenological affect a fictional history might have on audiences. Walshe expresses a desire to “open up [a] space” for the intervention of “beautiful” experiences. Such a desire seems fitting with many artistic practices, but the emphasis here on doing so by purposefully misleading audiences is perhaps unique. Walshe explicitly denies any attempt to ridicule the unknowing audience member, ⁴⁴ though ridicule and usurpation may be intrinsic to parafiction. ⁴⁵ Instead, we might understand this space in relation to Ingold’s conception of dreaming as empathy, as “establishing a communion of feeling and affect …, of opening oneself up” ⁴⁶ to another’s (imagined) perspective of the world. This communion might refer to the experience shared by unknowing audience members or the dialogue (even if based on a fiction) between audience and Walshe; but it is, regardless, a communion of generous edification and re-evaluation. Through this empathetic space, such parafictional work has the potential, both before and after disclosure, to “make a new reality sensible: accessible both to feeling and reason.” ⁴⁷ If a spectator is phenomenologically affected—emotionally, logically, and socially—the parafiction, the imagined or simulated history, is real, no-less-real, or more real than reality itself. ⁴⁸

Speaking nearby history

We might now relate these conceptions of fictional-cum-imagined histories back to the Scribe project. As conceded at the beginning of this section, the composer Marcel le Gan and his music do not exist, and never have existed. Yet, of course, they do. The edition is a physical print and digital object, and includes music derived from a digital artefact that, generally, resembles a music manuscript from the era in question. The music is unusual but, perhaps, believable. ⁴⁹ Le Gan has a projected lifespan and a headstone in the graveyard of a Gothic church, in a village whose name has Old English derivatives. These have been detailed in papers at esteemed research conferences and in publications such as this chapter; albeit fabricated, these publications have footnotes and (that scholarly armament) references! They exist on paper—historical vapourware. But like myths and fables, they also exist in the minds of those that encounter and share them. ⁵⁰ As Lambert-Beatty might say, “they achieve truth-status—for some of the people some of the time.” ⁵¹

We might differentiate Scribe from the practices discussed above owing to its use of machine learning technologies as a mechanism through which to explore parafictional histories. In its use of deep learning and neural synthesis to perform transformative engagements with the world and its inhabitants, Scribe might be described as an instance of “algorithmic art-anthropology.” ⁵² The GAN network is solely trained on the Old Hall data set. The outputs it generates might be seen as statistical samples or regurgitations of this data; it replicates pixel distributions, with no contextual knowledge of what the symbols mean, how they were created, or how they should be read. In this sense, nothing new is created. Yet, the newly generated manuscript images and the music they describe open an interpretive space to be navigated by me (the palaeographer and editor), the musicians, and the listener; they “speak nearby” ⁵³ to the original Old Hall MS. As a creative process, Scribe speaks nearby to the practices of palaeography and history-building, both of which are in equal parts fragile and privileged acts. As an art-cum-historical object, a performance of Scribe speaks nearby to the early music genre—how we listen to, consume, and contextualise such music.