The Musical World of the Birgittine Order- A comparative study of four Birgittine abbeys
The Order of the Birgittines, founded by St. Birgitta of Sweden, is the only monastic Order with an Office intended to be sung by women: the Cantus Sororum. The Musical World of the Birgittine Order - A Comparative Study of Liturgical Sources from four Birgittine Abbeys aims at a comparison of the musical and liturgical relations between different Birgittine abbeys. Comparative studies concerning Birgittine abbeys have until now never been properly investigated why a study of sources will give important knowledge on questions of transmission, variation and local customs in various abbeys. This will be done by investigating sources from a selected number of preserved collections from the late Middle Ages into the modern era from the following abbeys: Vadstena (SE), Maria Refugie (NL), Mariëntroon (BE), and Altomünster (DE). The sources will be examined by a comparative analyse in order to uncover musical and liturgical relations within and between the abbeys in order to map differences and similarities. The project consists of three parts:
1. Making inventories of a selection of manuscripts and publish in a database.
2. Mapping the Birgittine infrastructure and soundscape.
3. Discuss the question on the construction on musical identity in the Birgittine order.
The overall aim of The Musical World of the Birgittine Order is to gain insight in how chant traditions can develop over time and will contribute to the little investigated field of chant after the Middle Ages.
1. Making inventories of a selection of manuscripts and publish in a database.
2. Mapping the Birgittine infrastructure and soundscape.
3. Discuss the question on the construction on musical identity in the Birgittine order.
The overall aim of The Musical World of the Birgittine Order is to gain insight in how chant traditions can develop over time and will contribute to the little investigated field of chant after the Middle Ages.
Final report
‘The Musical World of the Birgittine Order: A Comparative Study of Four Birgittine Abbeys’ is a project whose overarching goal has been to advance knowledge of the chant and liturgy in the monastic Order of St. Birgitta. This has been accomplished by comparing the preserved source material from the four Birgittine monasteries in Vadstena (SE), Maria Refugie (NL), Maria Troon (BE), and Altomünster (DE). This goal was founded on the desire to investigate an area that research has not yet sufficiently explored, namely comparing the melody tradition among different Birgittine monasteries, as well as the melody tradition of the Birgittine Order after the 16th century.
The project had two partial goals. The first was to write a monograph based on sources from the Birgittine monastery Maria Refugie (founded in 1437 and still functioning today) where I describe the changes in the Birgittine liturgy in general, based on the four monasteries named above, and on the situation in Maria Refugie in particular. This is the first study to have treated and described the liturgical song tradition of the Birgittine Order from the 14th century until today. The choice of Maria Refugie as the main source is due to its excellent surviving material. The second partial goal of the project has been to create a database inventorying parts of the manuscripts included in the research project.
However, after completion the project’s three most important results have proven to be somewhat different, and may be summarized as follows:
1. The creation of a theoretical foundation for the discussion of chant in religious contexts, especially monastic Orders.
2. A monograph that constitutes a long-term study of the chant and liturgy of the Birgittine Order.
3. A database that includes largely unexplored material.
In the following presentation, points 1 and 2 are treated together.
1 and 2. Theoretical Foundation and Monograph
The monograph Birgittine Chantscapes: Chant in the Order of the Birgittines during 800 Years is a study that summarizes event stretching from the 14th century until the present day. The book is the result of the attempt to describe and discuss a tradition in an extensive treatment, based upon a coherent theoretical conceptual framework utilizing the concepts of charisma and its routinization derived from Max Weber, which explains how the uniqueness of the Birgittine Order could have been maintained, and how the distinctive character of the Birgittine Order has been sustained through the centuries. The chantscapes mentioned in the title is a concept developed further from the concept of soundscapes, a term coined in the 1970s by the musicologist and composer Richard Murray Schafer. Chantscapes are to be understood here as all the liturgical chants that are part of a particular liturgical and spiritual context intended to create cohesion and meaning for those who participate or listen. Music analysis often plays a crucial role in the book’s discussion of these issues. The book takes its chronological starting point in my treatment of the rise of Birgittine liturgy in the 14th century, a period for which we strictly speaking have no sources. I provide a proposal for a chronology of the path to a corpus codified in preserved manuscripts from the second half of the 15th century. With the Birgittine monastery Maria Refugie as a focus, the Birgittine chant and liturgy are described until about the year 2020.
The study makes evident that the Birgittine chant tradition is a consistently coherent repertoire where the sisters’ chants in mass and liturgy interact to form a whole that provides a unified expression of the spirituality of the Order. At the center is the sisters’ Office liturgy Cantus sororum, which has as one benefit the best-preserved source material, and for another benefit provides textual and musical expression for Birgittine spirituality and, by extension, the identity of the Order in the clearest way. The liturgical chant of the brothers is also part of this interactive whole, but due to sparsely preserved material has been more difficult to study. A prominent feature in this historiography has been the interplay between elements that change very little (e.g. fidelity to the chant texts, the design of the liturgy) and those that have been subjected to major change (e.g. certain chants that have received new musical reinterpretation, and even upon more than one occasion). I explain this fidelity to tradition as part of Saint Birgitta’s charisma and routinization successfully shaping the Order’s identity in the monastic landscape. Changing ideals of the surrounding world, such as humanism’s interest in a clear declamation of the text, a transition to major/minor tonality, and the shift to vernacular lyrics in the 1970s, are all reflected in the source material and demonstrate the Birgittines’ awareness of contemporary trends within the framework of their traditional liturgy.
In brief, the results may be described as identifying a negotiable surface that can be recognized in the source material: certain recurring materials are renegotiated at different times, resulting in melodic variation or certain altered liturgical practices.
3. The Database birgittine.org
The other partial goal of this project has been the creation of a database. The database is called birgittine.org and includes an inventory of 22 manuscripts from the 15th to the 19th centuries with a total of 3,600 entries. The database is part of the larger umbrella website https://cantusindex.org/ which is a freely available resource that unites several databases from different countries presenting Gregorian chant. birgittine.org not only provides a text search function, but also a melody search to aid in examining melody concordances. It also contains information about the placement of individual chants in the liturgy. The work of inventorying Birgittine manuscripts has resulted in my being able to show significantly richer source material for the Birgittine liturgy than was previously treated by research. However, the manuscripts have not been unknown, and it is hoped that sources from the period after the 16th century can also be taken into account in future research. The material is unevenly digitized; no material from Maria Refugie has ever been digitized.
Diffusion and collaboration
The project has on two occasions been forced to postpone the final reporting date, due to the pandemic, when it was not possible to use the internationalization funds within the projected timeframe. Some conferences and the like where partial results have been presented are as follows:
‘Double Liturgies – The Case of the Order of the Birgittines’, Rethinking the Medieval Double Monastery in Interdisciplinary Perspective, Admont, October 2022.
‘Monastic Chant through 600 Years – A Case Study of the Order of the Birgittines’, guest lecturer at Leuven University, November 2022.
‘Sång i den heliga Birgittas klosterorden – ett chantscape’, Musikforskning idag, Falun, June 2022.
‘Why Was the Birgittine Order So Popular in the Low Countries?’ invited participant/speaker, Scandinavia and the Low Countries: Connections across the North Sea ca. 1100–1400, Bergen, November 2022.
‘Monastic Chant through 600 Years: A Case Study of the Order of the Birgittines’, IMS 2022: 21st Quinquennial Congress of the International Musicological Society, Athens, August 2022.
‘Troping Like a Birgittine – A Brief Introduction to the Birgittine Tropes for Benedicamus Domino in Lauds and Vespers’, Musical and Poetic Creativity for a Unique Moment in the Western Christian Liturgy, c. 1000-1500, European Research Council (https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/864174), Oslo, 13-15 October 2021.
‘Divided but United: The Birgittine Double Abbey Liturgy’, MedRen, Basel, July 2019.
‘Remembering Birgitta with Music’, International Medieval Congress, Leeds, July 2018.
‘The Invitatory Antiphons in the Birgittine Office Cantus sororum’, Cantus Planus, Växjö, August 2018 (for which conference I also served as arranger).
Since Saint Birgitta and the Birgittine Order have attracted a great deal of interest both within the academic community as well as in lay circles, I have had many opportunities to make my research available. In addition to several popular science lectures, I have participated in concert activities and produced with my ensemble Gemma a CD recording in 2018: Maria! Maria! 400 Years of Birgittine Chant. Stockholm: Sterling Records CDA 1828-2, available on Spotify. I have also participated in podcasts, for example in Linnaeus University’s Humpodd: https://humpodd.wordpress.com/2019/02/28/sjungom-systrar-och-broder/
An intermediate category is my storytelling performance Gaude Birgitta, where I myself sing and speak about the song tradition of the Birgittines. Here is a short presentation of Gaude Birgitta: https://lnu.se/mot-linneuniversitetet/aktuellt/nyheter/2019/karin-ger-konserter-i-klostermusik-for-att-na-fler-med-sin-forskning/ The program has been presented an estimated twenty times in widely varying contexts.
New Research Questions
Even though research on the Birgittine Order has been lively for more than a hundred years, and in addition to the interest of historians has also attracted musicologists and liturgical scholars, several research questions remain to be explored. I would like to highlight two overarching questions. My research has discussed a large amount of source material, which could not always be treated in a satisfactory way since this was not the purpose of the project. Only a small number of these sources have ever been treated in detail, either by me or previous researchers; this is particularly true for sources after the 16th century. Here there are rich opportunities for new research that can shed further light on the long history of the Birgittine Order and which can also contribute to new entries in birgittine.org. The other major issue that my study has discussed in part concerns Birgittine historiography, in particular questions of authorship and fidelity to the source, i.e. Saint Birgitta, how she was written into the history of the Order, and the implications this has for the view of the Birgittine order and for further research. Here, questions, especially questions about source criticism, become important; the theoretical foundation upon which I base my study can be a help in examining the more ideological motivations for how previous research has been conducted and the results that have been produced. These, above all, are the two major research areas that I hope this work has been able to contribute to future Birgitta studies.
The project had two partial goals. The first was to write a monograph based on sources from the Birgittine monastery Maria Refugie (founded in 1437 and still functioning today) where I describe the changes in the Birgittine liturgy in general, based on the four monasteries named above, and on the situation in Maria Refugie in particular. This is the first study to have treated and described the liturgical song tradition of the Birgittine Order from the 14th century until today. The choice of Maria Refugie as the main source is due to its excellent surviving material. The second partial goal of the project has been to create a database inventorying parts of the manuscripts included in the research project.
However, after completion the project’s three most important results have proven to be somewhat different, and may be summarized as follows:
1. The creation of a theoretical foundation for the discussion of chant in religious contexts, especially monastic Orders.
2. A monograph that constitutes a long-term study of the chant and liturgy of the Birgittine Order.
3. A database that includes largely unexplored material.
In the following presentation, points 1 and 2 are treated together.
1 and 2. Theoretical Foundation and Monograph
The monograph Birgittine Chantscapes: Chant in the Order of the Birgittines during 800 Years is a study that summarizes event stretching from the 14th century until the present day. The book is the result of the attempt to describe and discuss a tradition in an extensive treatment, based upon a coherent theoretical conceptual framework utilizing the concepts of charisma and its routinization derived from Max Weber, which explains how the uniqueness of the Birgittine Order could have been maintained, and how the distinctive character of the Birgittine Order has been sustained through the centuries. The chantscapes mentioned in the title is a concept developed further from the concept of soundscapes, a term coined in the 1970s by the musicologist and composer Richard Murray Schafer. Chantscapes are to be understood here as all the liturgical chants that are part of a particular liturgical and spiritual context intended to create cohesion and meaning for those who participate or listen. Music analysis often plays a crucial role in the book’s discussion of these issues. The book takes its chronological starting point in my treatment of the rise of Birgittine liturgy in the 14th century, a period for which we strictly speaking have no sources. I provide a proposal for a chronology of the path to a corpus codified in preserved manuscripts from the second half of the 15th century. With the Birgittine monastery Maria Refugie as a focus, the Birgittine chant and liturgy are described until about the year 2020.
The study makes evident that the Birgittine chant tradition is a consistently coherent repertoire where the sisters’ chants in mass and liturgy interact to form a whole that provides a unified expression of the spirituality of the Order. At the center is the sisters’ Office liturgy Cantus sororum, which has as one benefit the best-preserved source material, and for another benefit provides textual and musical expression for Birgittine spirituality and, by extension, the identity of the Order in the clearest way. The liturgical chant of the brothers is also part of this interactive whole, but due to sparsely preserved material has been more difficult to study. A prominent feature in this historiography has been the interplay between elements that change very little (e.g. fidelity to the chant texts, the design of the liturgy) and those that have been subjected to major change (e.g. certain chants that have received new musical reinterpretation, and even upon more than one occasion). I explain this fidelity to tradition as part of Saint Birgitta’s charisma and routinization successfully shaping the Order’s identity in the monastic landscape. Changing ideals of the surrounding world, such as humanism’s interest in a clear declamation of the text, a transition to major/minor tonality, and the shift to vernacular lyrics in the 1970s, are all reflected in the source material and demonstrate the Birgittines’ awareness of contemporary trends within the framework of their traditional liturgy.
In brief, the results may be described as identifying a negotiable surface that can be recognized in the source material: certain recurring materials are renegotiated at different times, resulting in melodic variation or certain altered liturgical practices.
3. The Database birgittine.org
The other partial goal of this project has been the creation of a database. The database is called birgittine.org and includes an inventory of 22 manuscripts from the 15th to the 19th centuries with a total of 3,600 entries. The database is part of the larger umbrella website https://cantusindex.org/ which is a freely available resource that unites several databases from different countries presenting Gregorian chant. birgittine.org not only provides a text search function, but also a melody search to aid in examining melody concordances. It also contains information about the placement of individual chants in the liturgy. The work of inventorying Birgittine manuscripts has resulted in my being able to show significantly richer source material for the Birgittine liturgy than was previously treated by research. However, the manuscripts have not been unknown, and it is hoped that sources from the period after the 16th century can also be taken into account in future research. The material is unevenly digitized; no material from Maria Refugie has ever been digitized.
Diffusion and collaboration
The project has on two occasions been forced to postpone the final reporting date, due to the pandemic, when it was not possible to use the internationalization funds within the projected timeframe. Some conferences and the like where partial results have been presented are as follows:
‘Double Liturgies – The Case of the Order of the Birgittines’, Rethinking the Medieval Double Monastery in Interdisciplinary Perspective, Admont, October 2022.
‘Monastic Chant through 600 Years – A Case Study of the Order of the Birgittines’, guest lecturer at Leuven University, November 2022.
‘Sång i den heliga Birgittas klosterorden – ett chantscape’, Musikforskning idag, Falun, June 2022.
‘Why Was the Birgittine Order So Popular in the Low Countries?’ invited participant/speaker, Scandinavia and the Low Countries: Connections across the North Sea ca. 1100–1400, Bergen, November 2022.
‘Monastic Chant through 600 Years: A Case Study of the Order of the Birgittines’, IMS 2022: 21st Quinquennial Congress of the International Musicological Society, Athens, August 2022.
‘Troping Like a Birgittine – A Brief Introduction to the Birgittine Tropes for Benedicamus Domino in Lauds and Vespers’, Musical and Poetic Creativity for a Unique Moment in the Western Christian Liturgy, c. 1000-1500, European Research Council (https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/864174), Oslo, 13-15 October 2021.
‘Divided but United: The Birgittine Double Abbey Liturgy’, MedRen, Basel, July 2019.
‘Remembering Birgitta with Music’, International Medieval Congress, Leeds, July 2018.
‘The Invitatory Antiphons in the Birgittine Office Cantus sororum’, Cantus Planus, Växjö, August 2018 (for which conference I also served as arranger).
Since Saint Birgitta and the Birgittine Order have attracted a great deal of interest both within the academic community as well as in lay circles, I have had many opportunities to make my research available. In addition to several popular science lectures, I have participated in concert activities and produced with my ensemble Gemma a CD recording in 2018: Maria! Maria! 400 Years of Birgittine Chant. Stockholm: Sterling Records CDA 1828-2, available on Spotify. I have also participated in podcasts, for example in Linnaeus University’s Humpodd: https://humpodd.wordpress.com/2019/02/28/sjungom-systrar-och-broder/
An intermediate category is my storytelling performance Gaude Birgitta, where I myself sing and speak about the song tradition of the Birgittines. Here is a short presentation of Gaude Birgitta: https://lnu.se/mot-linneuniversitetet/aktuellt/nyheter/2019/karin-ger-konserter-i-klostermusik-for-att-na-fler-med-sin-forskning/ The program has been presented an estimated twenty times in widely varying contexts.
New Research Questions
Even though research on the Birgittine Order has been lively for more than a hundred years, and in addition to the interest of historians has also attracted musicologists and liturgical scholars, several research questions remain to be explored. I would like to highlight two overarching questions. My research has discussed a large amount of source material, which could not always be treated in a satisfactory way since this was not the purpose of the project. Only a small number of these sources have ever been treated in detail, either by me or previous researchers; this is particularly true for sources after the 16th century. Here there are rich opportunities for new research that can shed further light on the long history of the Birgittine Order and which can also contribute to new entries in birgittine.org. The other major issue that my study has discussed in part concerns Birgittine historiography, in particular questions of authorship and fidelity to the source, i.e. Saint Birgitta, how she was written into the history of the Order, and the implications this has for the view of the Birgittine order and for further research. Here, questions, especially questions about source criticism, become important; the theoretical foundation upon which I base my study can be a help in examining the more ideological motivations for how previous research has been conducted and the results that have been produced. These, above all, are the two major research areas that I hope this work has been able to contribute to future Birgitta studies.