HUCBALD OF SAINT-AMAND

Benedictine poet, hagiographer, and theorist of gre gorian chant; b. c. 840; d. saint-amand, France, June 20, 930. He studied with his uncle Milo and heiric of auxerre before becoming director of schools at Saint-Amand. Hucbald's musical fame rests on the Offices he composed and his treatise De institutione harmonica, one of the first attempts to unite Greco-Boethian theories with chant practice and to find an accurate symbol for pitch notation [M. Gerbert, Scriptores ecclesiastici de musica sacra potissimum, 3 v. (Milan 1931) 1:104–121]. His poem in honor of Charles II the Bald, Ecloga de calvis, is a tour de force, using only words beginning with "c" [Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Poetae (Berlin 1826–) 4:265–271]. Lives of several saints [Patrologia Latina, ed. J. P. Migne, 217 v. indexes 4 v. (Paris 1878–90) 132:825–1050] may safely be attributed to him.

Bibliography: h. mÜller, Hucbalds echte und unechte Schriften über Musik (Leipzig 1884). l. van der essen, "Hucbald de Saint-Amand et sa place dans le mouvement hagiographique médiéval," Revue d'histoire ecclésiastique 12 (1923) 331–351; 522–552. r. g. weakland, "Hucbald as Musician and Theorist," Musical Quarterly 42 (New York 1956) 66–84. "The Compositions of Hucbald," Études grégoriennes 3 (1959) 155–162. y. chartier, "La Musica d'Hucbald de Saint-Amand: Introduction, établissement du texte, traduction et commentaire" (Ph.D. diss. University of Paris, 1972); L'Œuvre musicale d'Hucbald de Saint-Amand: Les compositions et le traité de musique (Quebec 1995). r. l. crocker, "Hucbald" in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, v. 8, ed. s. sadie (New York 1980) 758–759. d. m. randel, ed., The Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music (Cambridge 1996) 398. n. slonimsky, ed. Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, (New York 1992) 808.

[r. g. weakland]