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.