Notker, called Balbulus (Stammerer), was a monk
of the Benedictine Abbey of St. Gall near Zurich,
Switzerland. He is known as a composer, a poet, a
biographer, and a theorist.
Notker was born about 840 of prominent Swiss
parents, who sent him as a child to study with the
monks of St. Gall. St. Gall was a very influential
monastery with a valuable musical library. Notker
remained as a monk in the abbey for the rest of his
life, and aside from being a revered teacher at the
school, he is mentioned as holding the offices of
librarian, master of guests, and precentor, or choirmaster.
Notker was reputed to have been of frail health
and to have stammered, but he seems to have had
a significant talent for music, and popularized the
sequence, a new type of liturgical hymn. This was
a hymn sung after the Alleluia and before the
Gospel in the Latin mass. Notker composed music
and lyrics for these hymns, and in about 880, created a book of hymns containing a number of
these sequences.
In addition to lyrics for hymns, Notker also is
known to have written some lives of saints, poems,
and letters, and is generally thought to be the
anonymous “Monk of St. Gall,” who in 883–84,
wrote the anecdotal and idealized biography of
CHARLEMAGNE entitled Gesta Caroli (The deeds of
Charles). The book, composed for the Holy
Roman Emperor Charles the Fat, helped glorify
Charles’s great-grandfather Charlemagne as a legendary hero among the German-speaking people.
Notker died in 912. Always venerated by the
monks of St. Gall, Notker was beatified by the
Catholic Church in 1512.
Bibliography
Murdoch, Brian O. Old High German Literature.
Boston: Twayne, 1983.
Thorpe, Lewis, trans. Two Lives of Charlemagne. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1969.