Next stop - Vienna

This week we’ve waltzed over to Vienna. (See what I did there?) We’ve now reached the late eighteenth century and the musical centre of Europe has shifted to the capital of Austria, in what was the Austro-Hungarian Empire, ruled over by the Habsburgs and the Holy Roman Empire. Here we encounter some very familiar names from the elite First Viennese School, namely Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven.

The area had been ruled by Josef II, alongside his mother, Maria Theresa, since 1765. Josef believed in Enlightened Absolutism - , he believed that he had been divinely appointed but was enlightened enough to believe that his subjects needed a benevolent and powerful leader to look after them. He was an accomplished musician in his own right and had his own chamber group. He sought to reform many things and rather than embrace Italian opera he wanted to promote the German language through Singspiele. This was sung drama in the local language along similar lines to Lully’s ideas for French opera.

A young Mozart was quick to jump on this bandwagon, eager to show his ability in this new, officially accepted genre. His letters home to his father show his enthusiasm for Singspiele. He wrote Die Entfȕhrung aud dem Serail (The abduction from the seraglio), better known as Il Seraglio, which was premiered at the Vienna Burgtheater in 1782. Have a look at this YouTube clip of the Wer ein liebchen hat gefunden taken from that opera.

By 1783 Josef II had stopped trying to make Vienna and Singspiele the centre of European music. He gave in to the tastes of the general populous and assembled a troupe to perform Italian Opera Buffa (comic opera) as Italian musical influence encompasses the whole of Europe. Opera buffa was born out of short Intermezzo performed in the intervals of Opera Seria productions. These short interludes grew and eventually became full length operas in their own right. Josef, like Louis XIV in France, had his chosen composers and these were Salieri and Mozart. Josef spoke Tuscan Italian, the performers own language, fluently and often attended rehearsals in order to maintain his control over them and his composers. Opera Buffa was also the only genre of opera to be encouraged at this time.

Having learned about the politics and patronage involved in the musical world over the years, in fact, probably back to the days of chant or even before that, I am fascinated by how one ‘wrong note’ or an ‘off-key’ moment could make or break a composer’s career. That old adage of being in the right place, at the right time also seems to be true as there are many talented composers that are rarely heard of purely by way of the fact that their talents were eclipsed by their contemporaries. Take, for example, Giovanni Paisiello, a very successful composer, whose writing sounds similar to Mozart. He was patronized by Catherine the Great of Russia but have you ever heard of him? I hadn’t until now. He wrote a version of The Barber of Seville but now we are more likely to think of Rossini when we hear that title.

This is the last formal blog post for my university degree course and I have thoroughly enjoyed this tour of Western Musical Heritage. I don’t really want it to end and, like any good book, it is encouraging me to read ‘just one more chapter’ so maybe I will. I’m not saying it will become a regular feature but maybe, now and again, I will dip in and out of my copy of A history of Western Music by Burkholder, Grout and Palisca, and take another trip into our musical history. I can now hear the last call for passengers on my trip home so I leave you, for now, with a cheery wave and a tear in my eye. Auf wiedersehen from Vienna.

A hop across the channel

Your turn, Herr Handel. This week I have decided that one can have too much French Baroque music so I have turned to my go-to guy, George Frederick Handel. Now, anyone who knows me well will know that I love singing anything by Handel as his music seems to suit my voice. Currently I am working on As when the dove laments her love from Acis and Galatea for my mid-year exam and it is a really fun aria where the singer can literally go overboard with embellishments if that’s what they want. Personally, I have just added a few subtle ones to enhance the da capo section. Galatea sings that when Acis returns she no longer mourns but “loves the live-long day”. In the second section she sings lustfully about their reunion with lots of panting, wooing and melting murmurs filling the grove. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink and all that. Have a listen to this recording and see what you think. I challenge you not to be instantly hooked and want to listen to the whole work. There is even a DVD version of a 2009 performance, recorded at the Royal Opera House in London, starring Danielle de Niese, conducted by Christopher Hogwood is you fancy tracking it down.

Acis was Handel’s first dramatic work in English. The libretto was by John Gay, a well-known writer from this era. It originally premiered in 1718 as a one act masque but Handel re-wrote it as a two act, staged work in 1739. It was written as entertainment for the royal court and has a rather bucolic setting with lots of nymphs and shepherds prancing about. It contains humour and tragedy in fairly equal measure. To sum it up – Galatea, a semi-divine nymph, has been separated from her lover Acis, a shepherd. They are reunited but, sadly, their happiness is short-lived as the giant, Polyphemus, wants Galatea for himself. Galatea declares her love and constancy to Acis causing Polyphemus to kill him in a jealous rage. Galatea’s friends comfort her and remind her that she can save Acis with her divine powers. She then transforms the lifeless Acis into a beautiful fountain. I’m not sure this was the best use of her powers but why let that stand in the way of a good story.

Handel wrote mainly oratorios as these were performed without staging and therefore could be performed on church feast days and during Lent, when people had to abstain from going to the theatre. His most famous of these being Messiah which was first performed in Dublin, Ireland in 1742. The overture to Messiah is certainly influenced by our old mate Lully as it is written in the French overture style. It starts with a slow section that uses dotted rhythms and is followed by a livelier, fugal section before returning to the first section. Handel’s oratorios contain some gorgeous arias and choruses and I don’t think I could ever get bored of performing Messiah. The music is so enduring and I think that you could walk into pretty much any Western town around Christmas or Easter to find it being performed by at least one choir. I know there were at least two concerts in Christchurch last Christmas, for one I was in the choir and for the other I was in the audience. The Hallelujah Chorus must be the most sung chorus in the whole world. My personal favourite to sing is Rejoice Greatly and here is a clip of Dame Kiri te Kanawa singing it.

Please use this link if the video doesn't play as Blogger doesn't seem to like two videos in one post. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJtupQQ9ZvY

I hope that I have managed to instil in you a bit of my passion for Handel’s work as I cannot imagine life without this glorious Baroque music.

Lully and Louis’s monopoly. Good or bad?

This week in class we mixed things up a bit and staged a debate. One team argued that the musical monopoly held by Lully and King Louis XIV was a good thing for the future of music whereas the other team argued against this. I was in the opposing team and, not being used to taking part in proper debates or being one for any form of confrontation, felt a little wary of the whole idea. My personal views on the subject are somewhat mixed as while the music of Lully’s time has endured and certainly earned its place in history, I wonder what might have been if other composers had been allowed to flourish in Paris during this time.

During this duo’s reign it was certainly a case of your face having to fit. If you weren’t one of the ‘chosen’ few then you might as well give up or move to Italy. Lully was very demanding of everyone he worked with and if you made a mistake or tried to embellish what he had written then you would quite possibly fall out of favour. Lully was not above breaking a musician’s instrument to demonstrate his displeasure.

Something that Lully did bring to his operas, with the help of his librettist, Philippe Quinault, was a proper storyline. This differed from the Italian style where a story was loosely woven to join the many airs and choruses together into an entertainment. Even though Quinault wrote the libretto, he had to keep revising it until Lully was completely happy. As Robert Isherwood writes “Thus, despite the importance of the text in the tragédie lyrique, the composer’s will prevailed over the poet’s.”

Louis eventually lost interest in opera and, influenced by his mistress, Madame de Maintenon, he turned his attention to religion and religious music. Lully, also getting older, also turned his attention in this direction, leaving French opera to its own devices and allowing other composers to finally get a chance to show their capabilities. One of these was Marc-Antoine Charpentier whose opera, Medée was performed in 1693. Charpentier had studied with Giacomo Carissimi in Italy and while his music was still French in style it contained much richer harmonies unlike the rather transparent textures of Lully’s work. Italian versions of Medea were comedies but this French version has a much darker, more serious storyline.

Here is a link to a rather interesting version of the fully staged opera.

It seems to me that while Lully and King Louis played a very important part in the development of French opera during the Baroque period, it really only flourished once they had moved on to new interests. As well as Charpentier, it made way for composers such as André Camprei, who wrote Fêtes Venitiennes in 1710. This work was simpler and more jolly than Lully’s Armide although it was structurally similar with orchestral interludes within the airs. François Couperin as another influential composer and, unlike Lully, was a big fan of the ornament. He even wrote a detailed table of when and how to perform them. As you can see below, the score of La Ténébreuse is liberally scattered with them.

Whatever we think about the monopoly held by Lully and Louis, it is a fact of history and has shaped the music we have today. As for our debate, the team arguing for the monopoly won by one point and I’m ok with that. I may just have to hone my debating skills in case we do it again though.

References

Isherwood, Robert. The operas of Lully. Music in the service of the King: France in the seventeenth century (1973)

We're off to visit Lully in Paris

In this blog post we are jumping slightly ahead and flying to Paris in the Baroque period, so stow your tray tables, return your seats to the upright position and buckle your seatbelt.

Now, Baroque opera is a subject I am much more familiar with, having sung various arias by Handel and his contemporaries. Opera started to develop in the early 17^th century in Italy. Venice alone had seventeen rival opera houses and that was a city smaller than Christchurch is today. The French resisted opera for a long time, preferring its own tradition of spoken theatre and the plays of Molière and Racine. The first attempt to bring opera to Paris was in the 1640s however this was rather unsuccessful. Cardinal Mazarin was a great patron of the arts and was interested in Italian opera. In a very bold move he brought Francesco Cavalli to Paris in order to write an opera, Ercole amante (Hercules in love), as part of the celebrations for Louis XIV’s marriage to Maria Theresa of Spain in 1660. The new opera wasn’t ready in time so one of Cavalli’s existing operas, Il Xerse, was performed instead. Unfortunately, the audience did not enjoy it as it was long and in a foreign language. They did, however, enjoy the ballet music, composed by Jean-Baptiste Lully, an Italian born, French composer, that was performed with it. Lully was not a fan of Italian opera and thought that sung drama was not possible in the French language. This is rather ironic as he went on to pretty much invent French opera in the 1660s.

Lully moved to France as a dancer when he was thirteen. He spent most of his life working in the court of Louis XIV so he knew what the king enjoyed and this enabled him to bring together music, singing and dancing to create French Baroque music. He created the 'French overture' which comprised of two parts, the first slow and stately with dotted rhythms followed by a lively fugue in compound time. This form of overture became widely used across Europe, notably by Bach and Handel. Have a listen to the overture to Lully’s opera, Armide, now. 

Lully gained the exclusive right to produce ‘sung’ opera and also had a monopoly on creating them, writing roughly one a year. He would usually premiere them at Court in Versailles before taking them to the Paris Opera, the Académie Royale de Musique.

In 1670, Lully collaborated with Molière to produce the political satire, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. This was created to gently criticise the monarchy with the main character, Monsieur Jourdain, a wealthy man who wants to use music to make him more cultured and hires people to help him achieve this, depicting the king. It pokes fun at the pretentious, social climbing middle classes and snobbish aristocracy. 

Lully is probably infamous for his tragic death. In those days, instead of a using a baton to conduct, a long stick was used to beat time on the floor. Lully sadly stabbed his stick through his foot and died of a rather nasty, terminal infection.

Right, that's it for this week. I'm off to immerse myself in some more French Baroque opera. 

Whistle stop tour through time and music

Over the last few weeks we have travelled through time, experiencing and exploring the music from the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance. Sadly, the only music playing in my mind at this precise moment is the Dr Who theme tune so let’s replace that quickly with something more appropriate. Here is the Pope Marcellus Mass by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525/26 – 1594), better known as Palestrina, after the town he came from.

Ah, that’s better.

Palestrina was “The” Roman Composer and is the composer most associated with music in Rome from the Sixteenth century. His music was imitated for years to come and young composers were advised to emulate his style for centuries after him. During this period, composers were as much singers as they were composers and Palestrina was educated in a choir school in Rome. After his schooling Palestrina became an organist and choir master back in Palestrina for several years before returning to Rome where he held some very important positions in churches such as St. John Lateran and Santa Maria Maggiore. He also briefly sang with the papal choir in 1555 but had to give up his place because he was married. Palestrina’s first wife, Lucrezia Gori, died as well as two of his three sons. After this he almost became a priest, however, in 1581 he married Virginia Dormoli, a rich widow, making it possible for him to publish his own music.

During Palestrina’s time there was a church council called The Council of Trent. The council sat in a place called Trent in Northern Italy, giving it the name. It was formed in response to the Reformation and its aim was to reinforce the doctrine of the Catholic church. Some of the council wished to limit the use of polyphonic music in church as they believed that these masses were based on secular chansons and that this detracted from the words of the mass. There is a legend that Palestrina saved the polyphonic masses from being condemned by the council by presenting them with a “six voice mass that was reverent in spirit and did not obscure the words.” This was the Pope Marcellus Mass shown above, although the legend is most likely, untrue.

Palestrina wrote 104 masses but only six of these are classed as “free” masses, including the Pope Marcellus Mass. The rest are either imitation masses based on polyphonic models, paraphrase masses or the cantus-firmus method of earlier times. “His sober, elegant music captured the essence of the Catholic response to the Reformation in a polyphony of utter purity.” His music indeed sounds pure and has a crystal-clear quality to it, when you listen to the Pope Marcellus mass particularly. He has moved away from triple meter and is using duple meter instead which would have been frowned upon not so many years before. He uses tiered blocks of voices, four at a time and then all six voices to accentuate certain parts of the mass. He also uses word-painting with the sung pitches rising as “He ascends to heaven” and getting lower as “He descends”. In addition to this he instils greater elements of pathos and emotion than we have heard previously.

As you can see, and hear, we have come a long way from the plain song of the Middle ages and the music is beginning to sound a lot more familiar to our modern, tonally tuned ears. We have popped in to visit the trobairitz, Comtessa de Dia, in the twelfth century, Guillaume de Machaut in the fourteenth and Ockeghem in the fifteenth century, meeting many others along the way. I have found it a fascinating journey so far and I find that I can now appreciate the music I sing much more now that I have an understanding of how it evolved. The history of music isn’t just about learning a list of dreary composers’ names and dates, it is about getting inside those composers’ minds and discovering how each of them added a new building block to create the musical cornucopia we have available to us today.

References: A history of western music – 9^th edition. (Burkholder, Grout & Palisca.)

Jean de Ockeghem and the Mensuration Canon

You could say the title of this blog reads like a mystery novel and in a way that is exactly what a mensuration canon is. More on that later. First I shall set the scene.

France, Flanders and the Netherlands  was home to several prominent composers in the second half of the fifteenth century. One of these was Jean de Ockeghem, one of the leading composers in the Renaissance period. He was born in approximately 1420 in Hainaut, North-eastern France and was a member of the Royal Chapel of Charles I, Duke of Bourbon, becoming a priest in about 1464. He followed in the footsteps of Du Fay, was a contemporary of Busnoys and produced a relatively small number of works despite his renown. He was revered for his masses whilst Busnoys was esteemed for his many chansons. Together they were acclaimed as “the most outstanding and most famous professors of the art of music” by Tinctoris.

Ockeghem wrote 13 masses, a Requiem Mass, 21 chansons and at least 5 motets. Many of his chansons, as well as Busnoys’s were extremely popular and appeared regularly in manuscripts in many other countries. At this time compositions were often rearranged, transcribed for instruments or used as the basis for other composers’ works.

As with Busnoys’s music, Ockeghem’s music featured a mixture of old and new styles. They retained the use of forms fixes, syncopated rhythms, dissonances and the use of thirds and sixths from the previous generation but introduced a more equal use of the different voice parts. They also began to use four voice parts: the cantus or superius, the altus, the tenor and the contratenor or bassus. They also made changes to the vocal ranges for each voice part. 

“Through these changes Ockeghem creates a fuller, darker texture than we find in Du Fay’s works.” A History of Western Music, 9^th Edition. (Burkholder, Grout and Palisca)

Ockeghem’s Missa Prolationum is a great example of this and he contrasts upper and lower voices in pairs as well as writing some sections as trios or duets. It is notated for two voices but sung in four parts. This image shows an example of the original score.

It uses the four prolations of mensural notation, these being either Major or Minor prolation in Perfect or Imperfect time, thus dictating the time signature each part should be sung in. Two parts coming from one notated line is called a canon and, depending on which prolation they are following; they sing the same melody at a different time. This is where we come back to the mystery I spoke of earlier. To quote my lecturer, it is “hidden in the same way as the perfect crime.” As the parts interweave at their differing speeds it is almost impossible to tell which voice is singing the melody as it is so cleverly written with mathematical precision. This is known as a mensuration canon; in fact, it is also a double canon as each of the originally notated two lines is sung in canon. Clever stuff indeed. These canons were greatly valued by musicians for being ingenious and extremely skilful and many enjoyed trying to solve the mystery from written scores for themselves. Here is a YouTube clip of the Missa Prolationum with the score. Embrace you inner Hercule Poirot and see if you can figure it out.

Ars Nova: A stepping stone to modern music

The 14th Century was an interesting time in history. It was a time of global cooling, famine and the black death, when large swathes of the population died. The church was also in turmoil with the popes residing in Avignon in Southern France for much of this period, under the control of the French king, causing rival claims to the papacy to be brought from the Vatican and also Pisa in central Italy. This period (1309-1377) was known as the Babylonian Captivity and was succeeded by the Great Schism in 1378.

Ars Nova, or new art, came about in this period. It was a time of many changes and growth in music particularly in the realms of notation and rhythm. It was also the time when composers started to use dissonances in their music, straying away from the approved and perfect consonances of fourths and fifths. In the 13th century musical notes were grouped into threes, known as perfect time. This represented the Holy Trinity. As the 14^th century progressed composers started to introduce rhythms using groupings of two notes and this became imperfect time. Notation also became more like what we have today.

It was not only a time of change in music. The artist, Giotto (ca. 1266-1337), one of the great artists living in this period, was the first person to start painting in the more realistic style we are used to today. The people depicted in his paintings were more lifelike and he started to experiment with the use of perspective rather than the two dimensional images used prior to that.

With the advent of mechanical clocks coming into regular use, it was possible for time to be measured accurately. This also meant that the rhythm and meter of music could also be measured more precisely whereas, earlier music could be interpreted in many different ways, dependent on who was performing it.

Modern transcriptions use bar lines to help guide the eye; motet notation had no bar lines, nor was polyphony written in score in France in this period. Musicians had to put the polyphonic lines together from a page that displayed the parts in individual blocks. 
Margot Fassler, Music in the Medieval West (New York: Norton, 2014)

Guillaume de Machaut (ca. 1300-1377) was an important composer and poet of this period. He was keen to preserve his work, both religious and secular, so much of his music is able to be performed today. I recently sang Machaut's La Messe de Nostre Dame with a local choir and found it very straightforward to sing. It was more tonally acceptable to my ears than some of the earlier works we have listened to or tried to sing. It is believed to be the first polyphonic setting of the Mass Ordinary written by a single composer. Each of the six movements is written for four voices, the tenor with the duplum and triplum parts above and the contratenor moving against the tenor in the same vocal range.

This period also gave us the birth of the polyphonic song, also known as chansons. The upper (treble) voice became the principal line instead of the tenor. The tenor then became the supporting voice with a slower moving line without text. Added to this was a contratenor singing the duplum line and a faster moving triplum line in the treble range. Here is an example of a polyphonic song by Machaut.

As with every new development, Ars Nova had its dissenters. One of the most notable was Jacques de Liège (ca. 1260 – after 1330) who wrote Speculum Musicae (The Mirror of Music, ca. 1330), a treatise on music which is believed to be the longest surviving medieval treatise on music. He wrote, 
Wherein does this lasciviousness in singing so greatly please, this excessive refinement, by which, as some think, the words are lost, the harmony of consonances is diminished, the value of notes is changed, perfection is brought low, imperfection is exalted, and measure is confused. 
I think that, while change isn’t always a good thing, without the advent of Ars Nova, we would not have music in the form we have today. Music is ever evolving and what we deem experimental music in our current time may well be conceived as old fashioned and quaint by those listening to it 600 years from now. Ultimately it is down to personal preference. Do you prefer the plainsong of the 13^th century or would you rather listen to the polyphony on the Ars Nova? 

Colour within the darkness

When I thought of the Middle, or Dark Ages I generally thought of a more backwards time when the peasants spent their lives working hard in the fields and living a very basic existence while the nobility ruled over them and reaped the benefits. I believed it to be fairly dark time with little in the way of entertainment or enjoyment; where life was governed by the rising and setting of the sun, and the changing seasons. When it came to music my thoughts always turned to church music and Gregorian chant but they never really ventured towards the social music of the time even though I have seen many theatre and television adaptations set in that period featuring dancing and singing. Music was an intrinsic part of people’s lives outside the Church and it was a colourful and vibrant time; a far remove from the imagined darkness. Dancing, especially, was a very popular pastime in both peasant and noble circles.

Often people played music just for their own enjoyment but there were also professional musicians such as bards, jongleurs and minstrels. Bards were poet-singers who would sing at banquets, accompanying themselves on the harp or fiddle whereas jongleurs were lower-class travelling musicians. Minstrels were a more specialised group of musicians and were often employed by the nobility.

The musicians that particularly interest me are the troubadours of the twelfth century, also known as trouvère, depending on which region of France they were from. The troubadours of southern France spoke the Occitan language or “langue d’oc” while the northern trouvère spoke Medieval French or “langue d’oȉl”. They were poet composers and were generally under noble patronage. Among their ranks were many women, known as trobairitz and they were mostly of noble birth. Trobairitz were the first known female composers of secular music; the only known female composers prior to them were writers of sacred music.

Unfortunately, out of the 2,600 troubadour poems that have been preserved, only around ten per cent have notated melodies, however, many more of the surviving 2,100 trouvère poems have retained their melodies. These songs were contained in anthologies called chansonniers although it is often unclear whether the melody and poem have been written by the same person. Often new words were written to fit existing melodies and this was known as contrafactum. 

One of the best known trobairitz is the Comtessa de Dia (fl. c. 1175) who wrote the only known remaining notated work by a female trobairitz.

(Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatritz_de_Dia.)

Here is a short YouTube clip of how it is thought to have sounded. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5P71gzdJTs 

It is written in Occitan and you can hear the Eastern influences that were prevalent at the time. The YouTube clip has a scrolling commentary on the piece which describes the lyrics as being realistic as opposed to the idealistic style often used by male troubadours. It also comments on the way the lyrics show a frankness and confidence of her own worth which are equally as relevant to women in modern times. As a modern woman I find it quite heartening to realise that we haven’t changed that significantly in several hundred years.

Overall, my view now of life and music during the middle ages is very different to the one I started out with. Listening to the music and viewing related works of art has given me a real thirst for more knowledge of this period.

What would life have been like living alongside the Comtessa de Dia? I can imagine sitting down with her for a good conversation about music but more importantly, a good gossip about the goings on in court.