Hubald

, Hucbald, or Hugbald, a monk of St. Amand, in Flanders, who preceded Guido more than one hundred years, was contemporary with Remi, and author of a treatise on music, which is still subsisting in the king of France’s library, under the title of “Enchiridion Musicae,” No. 7202, transcribed in the eleventh century. In this work there 4s a kind of gammut, or expedient for delineating the several sourrds of the scale, in a way wholly different from his predecessors; but the method of Guido not only superseded this, but by degrees effaced the knowledge and remembrance of every other that had been adopted in the different countries and convents of Europe. However, the awkward attempts at singing in consonance, which appear in this tract, are curious, and clearly prove that Guido neither invented, nor, rude as it was before his time, much contributed to the improvement of this art.

Hubald was not only a musician, but a poet; and an idea may be formed of his patience and perseverance, if not of his genius, from a circumstance related by Sigebert, the author of his life, by which it appears that he vanquished a much greater difficulty in poetry than the lippogrammists of antiquity ever attempted: for they only excommunicated a single letter of the alphabet from a whole poem; but this determined monk composed three hundred verses in praise of baldness, which he addressed to the emperor Charles the Bald, and in which he obliged the letter C to take the lead in every word, as the initial of his patron’s name and infirmity, as thus:

“Carmina Clarisonse Calvis Cantate Camoenae.”'

Hubald died in the year 930, at the age of ninety.

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