Feast day: April 6

Bl. Notker the Stammerer

Monk · c. 840–912

Patron of Musicians

A stammering, frail monk of the great abbey of St. Gall who became one of the finest poets and musicians of his age, composing sequences still echoed in the liturgy.

Notker, nicknamed 'Balbulus,' the Stammerer, was a monk of the great Swiss abbey of St. Gall in the ninth century, one of the most renowned centres of learning and music in early medieval Europe. Frail in body and hesitant in speech — a contemporary praised him as 'stuttering of tongue but not of intellect' — he became a teacher, poet, and musician of lasting influence.

He is best remembered for developing the 'sequence,' a form of liturgical chant sung at Mass. The story goes that Notker found it hard to memorize the long, wordless melodies that followed the Alleluia, and hit on the idea of setting words to them, syllable by syllable, as an aid to memory — and so helped shape a whole genre of medieval hymnody.

A man of wide learning, he also wrote saints' lives, letters, and a famous collection of anecdotes about the emperor Charlemagne, the 'Deeds of Charlemagne,' which preserves a vivid, half-legendary memory of that ruler a couple of generations after his death.

Notker died at St. Gall in 912 and was long venerated there as a saint, his cult confirmed in 1512. He is honoured as a patron of musicians — a tribute to the monk whose stammer helped give the Church some of its song.

He could barely speak, yet he wrote soaring sacred poetry and music — proof, his brothers said, that God's praise needs no perfect tongue.

Image: Unknown authorUnknown author (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.

Source: newadvent.org/cathen/11125b.htm