Got any more information on that? It sounds enormously interesting!

Oy... medieval music theory is such a huge subject that I couldn't begin to do it justice in a HN comment. The short version is that some time in the 9th century monks developed neumes, an early form of musical notation, to write down the chants they chanted at different times of the day. Medieval music theorists classified those chants according to the last note (what we now call the "tonic") and the most common note (what we now call the "dominant"). There were 262144 theoretically possible melodies (8 notes long, 6 possible notes, but some were rejected for music-theoretic reasons so the actual space was rather smaller) which could be indexed by their sequence in a collated list of melodies ("on the Sunday after Pentacost sing the 7th chant in the Lydian mode" or whatever).

If I had to pick a "best-of" reading list, I'd say the 9th-century "Musica Enchiriadis", Berno's "Prologus in Tonarum", and Boethius's "De Institutione Musica". These all assume a familiarity with Platonic music theory, so at least skim through Plato's "Timaeus" first. There will also be more references to astronomy than will make sense to somebody in the modern age, because music and astronomy were believed to be essentially the same thing. Also more recent research has found that actual musicians of the time seem to have completely ignored the theorists. Some things never change.

Not quite the same, but related.

In the 18th Century Presbyterian Church, they only sang Biblical psalms set to simple (but distinct) tunes and without any musical accompaniment. This was known as exclusive psalmody.

The psalms weren't the prose-style you'll find in any print Bible though, they were their own translation called the Metrical Psalms. Its 1650 edition proved very long lasting.

Many of these psalms were set to common metre, meaning that if you found such a psalter and tried singing it to some well-known tune it will very likely 'fit' the lyrics. You could try Psalm 23 set to the tune of The British Grenadiers, or Amazing Grace, or even The Star-Spangled Banner: https://thewestminsterstandard.org/psalm-23/

This was actually how the psalms were practised by congregations in my home country. The psalm lyrics were considered too sacred for practice, so they set the same tunes to other (sometimes comical) lyrics and practised those during the week. Then on Sunday the minister would say something like 'we will now sing Psalm xx to the tune of lilies', and the congregation would know the tune even if they hadn't memorised the psalm lyrics.

Still happening in the Free Church of Scotland. They have psalters with pages split horizontally, so you have the words at the top and the tune at the bottom.

Trust the medieval Church for sucking the fun out of everything.

There were monks whose job was to chant various psalms at specific tempos through the night so they would know when it was 4am to wake up the cook so he could start breakfast. I don't know if I could ever hate music, but that would get me close.

Oh my. After about a single night of that I would invent a water clock.

Considering water clocks date back to 1500 BCE it wouldn't be hard.

So what did the monks in the pre-1500s do?

BC, there were no Christian monks for at least another 15 centuries after the κλεψύδρα was invented.

Unbelievably, there were very few medieval monks before the birth of Christ.

They had them! But Benedictines were required to do some things the hard way. Dominicans and Franciscans just set an alarm and went to sleep.

You're not a monk, though. The tedium and inconvenience is the point.

Seriously? This sounds so weird, it must come from a movie, please.

The Name of the Rose, maybe.

Would love to know more about this

This sent me down a rabbit hole; I would love to see your source I can't find any. The idea that someone might carefully pace their recital in order to keep accurate track of time across several hours is threshold-hard to believe. It seems _possible_ but unlikely, and the kind of story which is likely to grow with retelling.

The closest mention I can find is this [1]:

> Early monastic rules say little about how time was determined, though the Rule of the Master notes that pairs of monks took turns, in weekly shifts, trying to stay awake while the others slept in order to awaken the abbot on time. Several possibilities for deter- mining that time are likely, however, including the use of calibrated candles or lamps of oil, [...] the recitation of a certain number of psalms, [etc]

However, here is it only mentioned as a possibility, not an actuality, and no sources are provided.

There appear to have been several orders who practiced 24-hour prayer by taking shifts, see for example the Acoemetae [2]. Here we do have Monks staying up all night reciting psalms but I can't find any indication that the prayers themselves were used to keep track of time.

The only reference to prayer-as-timekeeping that I can find seems to be in Medieval recipe books [3], which apparently would say things like boil this fish for as long as it takes to recite the lords prayer three times. Dead-reckoning works well on such short time-scales!

Even as early as the 500s there appear to have been timekeeping methods accurate enough to tell that dawn was approaching. When the skies are clear you can read this from the stars and accurate-enough water clocks have been in Europe since ~ the 500s. So there doesn't seem to be a need to perfect the act of spending hours reciting psalms at the right tempo.

[1]: https://libres.uncg.edu/ir/uncg/f/M_Helms_Before_2004.pdf [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoemetae [3]: http://the-history-girls.blogspot.com/2017/08/cooking-on-pra...