Inter chorum et altare: The Choir Step as ‘Performative Space’ in the Long Thirteenth Century

This study investigates the use of physical space in the performance of late medieval worship, particularly in the thirteenth century. The ‘spatial turn’ in early music studies has focused largely on physical acoustics, architectural layouts, and ceremonial movement as prerequisites to the preparation of historically informed performances. Another tradition has focused upon musical sources, their contexts, contents and notation—particularly its syntax. More recent studies have begun to investigate the phenomenological interstices between these two areas of specialism: for instance, in the experience of using large folio choirbooks at lecterns, read by a group of singers all reading from the same book; or the embodied experience of space within the great gothic cathedrals such as Lincoln and Salisbury. Rebuilt in the thirteenth century, these cathedrals and their collegiate emulators were equipped with a dramatically enlarged gradus chori, the expressly performative liminal space between the choir stalls and presbytery. The quire step is one of several dramaturgical foci in the gothic great church; others, such as the sonic-performative roles of west fronts and interior high spaces, have been investigated by architectural and art historians. These parallel investigations are considered here, alongside the emergence of polyphonic and organ-playing traditions in the thirteenth century, as mutually coherent expressions of an ostentatious, performativity in the High Gothic era.