of the monastic school". Among his students was Solomon, was later Bishop of Constance from 890 until his death in 912. Notker was often called upon for council from outside the Abbey; on occasion he advised Charles the Fat who visited the Abbey from 4–6 December 883. Charles was the dedicatee of Notker's Gesta Karoli, the earliest biography on Charlemagne. Ekkehard IV lauded him as "delicate of body but not of mind, stuttering of tongue but not of intellect, pushing boldly forward in things Divine, a vessel of the Holy Spirit without equal in his time". Despite his renown in the Abbey, Notker never became an abbot of Saint Gall, and repeatedly declined abbacy offers elsewhere. Notker died in Saint Gall on 6 April 912. Musical works His Liber Hymnorum, created between 881 and 887, is an early collection of Sequences, which he called "hymns", mnemonic poems for remembering the series of pitches sung during a melisma in plainchant, especially in the Alleluia. It is unknown how many or which of the works contained in the collection are his. The hymn Media Vita was erroneously attributed to him late in the Middle Ages. In the preface to his Liber Hymnorum, Notker claimed his musical work was inspired by an antiphoner that was brought to Gall from the Jumièges Abbey, soon after its destruction in 851. Ekkehard IV wrote of fifty sequences composed by Notker. He was formerly considered to have been the inventor of the sequence, a new species of religious lyric, but this is now considered doubtful, though he did introduce the genre into Germany. It had been the custom to prolong the Alleluia in the Mass before the Gospel, modulating through a skillfully harmonized series of tones. Notker learned how to fit the separate syllables of a Latin text to the tones of this jubilation; this poem was called the sequence (q.v.), formerly called the "jubilation". (The reason for this name is uncertain.) From 881–7 Notker dedicated a collection of such verses to Bishop Liutward of Vercelli, but it is not known which or how many are his. Literary works He completed Erchanbert's chronicle, arranged a martyrology, composed a metrical biography of Saint Gall, and authored other works. Gesta Caroli Magni The "Monk of Saint Gall" (Latin: Monachus Sangallensis; the name is not contemporary, being given by modern scholars), the ninth-century writer of a volume of didactic eulogistic