Matthew Franke's Music History Course Notes

The second practice and new approaches to dramatic music

In the 1590s, a new musical style emerged. This style is often called the “second practice,” in reference to an acrimonious debate between the composer Claudio Monteverdi and the music theorist Giovanni Maria Artusi. In a book subtitled “the imperfections of modern music” (1600), Artusi criticized Monteverdi’s free use of dissonance in his madrigals (unresolved 7ths! minor 9ths between the soprano and bass parts!). Monteverdi and his supporters responded by claiming that in all such cases, his music was justified by the words of the song—so that in one case, the madrigal “Cruda Amarilli” (Cruel Amaryllis), the music reaches its most painful moments while describing pain and suffering.

Although there are precedents for Monteverdi’s music in the work of composers such as Marenzio, scholars traditionally have seen Monteverdi’s spat with Artusi as the beginning of the Baroque style. The Baroque, like every other style label, is an amorphous concept: many scholars would describe Monteverdi and JS Bach as being Baroque musicians, despite the differences in their work. While we can find musical differences between Monteverdi’s music and that of his predecessors—his adoption of basso continuo, his increasing interest in recitative, and his exploration of new dramatic forms, such as opera—the real difference between the Baroque and earlier styles is aesthetic.

Baroque musicians generally believed that any musical technique was valid as long as it served to depict human emotion. Consequently, Baroque musicians were interested in exploring a broad variety of emotional states and did so while loosening the rules by which musical composition in Europe had been governed. This musical approach was validated by a contemporary philosophical and scientific attempt to categorize and explain human emotion, sorting it into what were called “affections.” In a clear revival of Greek thought, music’s goal was now to “move the affections,” or inspire an emotional response.

The role of Greek thought in the start of the new movement has been long known. The Camerata, a group of intellectuals in Florence, discussed the role of music in Greek drama, and developed the idea of monody partly from their readings of ancient texts. Vincenzo Galilei, the father of the famous scientist Galileo Galilei, was a leading figure in this group, and influenced the music of Caccini, which we already encountered in earlier lessons. The group was obsessed with Greek accounts of music’s power over the human soul, and consequently devoted themselves to developing the most emotionally powerful music they could. Part of this exploration led toward a kind of poetic recitation delivered in music over a simple accompaniment, which came to be called recitative.

These musicians believed that ancient Greek drama was sung from beginning to end (something that is no longer believed by experts); consequently, it was only logical for them to try to develop a modern equivalent. This lead to the first operas in the modern sense—by which I mean dramatic entertainments, with acting, costumes, and props, which tell a story and are provided with continuous instrumental and vocal music. The earliest operas were based on topics from Greek mythology, as one might expect: thus early operas include the myth of Dafne (set by Jacopo Peri in 1598), L’Euridice (a version of the Orpheus myth, set by Peri and Caccini 1600), and Orfeo (Monteverdi’s version of the same myth, 1607), and Arianna (set by Monteverdi, 1608). Of these, only L’Euridice and Orfeo, and one song from Arianna, survive. Orfeo remains the best known of these works today.

Composers of dramatic music faced a major problem: how could they create a coherent musical experience that would sustain an entire narrative? Monteverdi’s solution was to draw on a number of existing and new musical styles, such as the madrigal, instrumental dance tunes and ground basses, and the new recitative and monody styles. For example, Orfeo remembers his earlier sorrows to a cheerful dance tune which harmonizes with a standard ground bass (“Vi ricorda, o boschi ombrosi” at 25:47)—note how the instruments play regularly instrumental refrains. The shepherd replies to Orfeo’s song (28:21) with a simple tune, and the messenger appears (29:00) to bring some very bad news. Her speech-like singing (complete with a musical scream on the words “Ahi, casa acerbo” [“oh how awful”]) is a good example of recitative—an unmelodic, yet deeply affecting marriage between vocal music, supporting harmonies, and a dramatically meaningful text. Note, too, how her message is met with confusion—the shepherds, who don’t know what the messenger knows, continue singing in their original style until her message becomes clear. On receiving her news, Monteverdi’s Orfeo is moved to sing an aria (song) in monody style, with a simple bass line, one which I’ve given you a score for, so you can appreciate the raw dissonances (marked it the video with red arrows)—this is typical of his “second practice” style. His friends react in a short, madrigal-like passage (2:27 in the video).

These early operas were largely designed as court entertainments and sponsored by rich princes; later, by the 1640s, they moved from the courts to the public theaters. Opera’s move to the theater changed the genre in many ways, including more provocative content and the more regular appearance of female singers (some of the early productions featured men performing the female roles). More significantly, it marked a change in the way that musical concerts were marketed to the general public—we have relatively little documentation of musicians mounting performances for a general, paying public before this time.

Roughly around the same time that opera emerged, there were experiments in adapting musical drama to sacred music. Emilio Cavalieri’s Rappresentatione di Anima et di Corpo (Representation of the Soul and Body) (1600) was an early example of what is now called an oratorio, or a sacred musical drama (monophonic sacred musical dramas are documented from at least the Middle Ages). With opera’s eventual move from royal courts into public theaters, clear distinctions in performance style emerged between opera and oratorio: the latter was rarely staged or performed in costume, as it was considered inappropriate for actors—never very socially acceptable people in Europe at the time—to enact sacred stories.

A well-known composer of oratorios was Giacomo Carissimi (1605 – 1674), whose Historia di Jephthe is adapted from a gruesome Bible story found in the book of Judges. The ending of the work includes both an impressive lament for Jephthe’s daughter in recitative style, and a choral lament over a descending tetrachord bass—a clear example of a ground bass being used as a structural element in vocal music, not just instrumental music.

Ground basses and monody

As we have seen from the previous lessons, the rise of printing created a vibrant market for music that amateurs could sing at home. Instrumental music also benefited, as printing seems to have opened a new market for amateurs who were interested in playing or learning how to play instrumental music. Despite this new market, instrumental music remained relatively low in cultural prestige; many of the most prestigious musicians were still vocalists.

Instrumental music is interesting because of its unique structure. Although there was a thriving market for intabulations (transcriptions) of vocal music for instruments, much instrumental music was based on dance tunes and chord progressions. Thus Renaissance instrumental music contrasts heavily with vocal music, much of which had traditionally been based on complex polyphony derived from the traditions of the Catholic church. Many of these dance tunes are short, with repeated sections; enough descriptions of contemporary performance survive that we know that instrumentalists could improvise during repeated sections. Some surviving pieces of music notate these improvisations (called “divisions”), perhaps to guide amateur players or to preserve an especially fine improvisation. Divisions usually maintain the basic chord progression of a piece, while providing melodic variations (usually in smaller note values).

The improvisational roots of instrumental music are apparent in the large number of notated pieces which are based on pre-existing chord progressions; many of these progressions are derived from popular dance forms. These ground basses don’t seem to have been the invention of individual people, but were instead a set of commonly-used musical devices which were shared by a wide range of musicians. The notated pieces in which these progressions survive are not necessarily the best evidence of live improvisational practice; modern scholars are still trying to clarify some aspects of how these ground basses were used.

Three popular types of ground bass were the romanesca, passamezzo, and folia. All of these had relatively fixed bass lines and implied harmonies; some of them probably came with standardized melodic patterns. These patterns developed over time; some have multiple versions. All of them rely on a relatively stable harmonic rhythm, in which chords arrive at regular intervals; often there is an implied two-phrase structure, with the first phrase being open-ended and the second ending decisively. The similarities between the romanesca and the passamezzo suggest that the bass line itself might not have been the distinguishing factor between the two. Some of these patterns, such as the late folia, had common melodic patterns in addition to bass lines. In the example, I have standardized all the progression to the modern key of A minor and added anachronistic tonal chord names, to help us think about these progressions in modern terms. The rhythmic values are also rather interpretative—some pieces might extend the short rhythms I’ve assigned to the end of the progressions, or employ them in other meters.

Probably the best-known tune today which uses these ground basses is “Greensleeves” (here played in Francis Cutting’s version), which is based on the passamezzo antico. Another example is Luis de Narváez’s variations on the tune “Guardame las vacas” (Watch the Cows), which follows a romanesca (in this video, the performer plays the vihuela, a Spanish instrument in the guitar family). Some of these progressions are peculiar if you analyze them (anachronistically) in modern tonal terms, as I have done in the accompanying graphic: the romanesca seems to start off-tonic, while the passamezzo and the folia show a marked fondness for the VII chord. Musicians at this time still thought of music through modal theory, even though that was getting increasingly hard to do. The passamezzo moderno, on the other hand, sounds much more like modern common-practice tonality: it consists entirely of the I, IV, and V chords.

Given the increasing interest in instrumental music during the 16^th century, it makes sense that vocalists eventually took note. The rise of the lute song, and the madrigal with instrumental accompaniment, suggest that instrumental music was increasingly accepted. Monody, a new style which emerged in Italy around the 1590s, was one of the first to treat instrumental and vocal music as being of relatively equal importance.

Monody, as presented in Giulio Caccini’s bold book Le nuove musiche (The New Musics) from 1601, employed a new system of instrumental notation—basso continuo (sometimes called “figured bass”). This system, which consists of a simple bass line and attached numeric figures, allowed composers of monody to indicate the specific chords that musicians should play, but left the rhythmic and melodic details up to the performers.

The basic rule is that a bass note, on its own, should be played as a chord with that bass note as its root; while a bass note with a figure must include the intervals indicated by the figure. The chord based on a G with a “6” below it therefore must include the note E—a sixth above G—this implies that the chord should consist of G, B, and E. This type of thinking—in which we label chords by their intervals—lingers today when we describe 7^th chords, 6/5 chords, sus4 chords—modern chord names which effectively transcribe figured bass into regular speech.

Figured bass left room for the kind of improvisational work that instrumentalists had long been doing, but within the realm of a newly-composed song. It also meant that musicians no longer had to rely on stock chord progressions. It’s unclear whether continuo was a revolution in actual musical practice, or merely in the notation of music.

Monody is a natural outgrowth of the madrigal, but it differs in that it is usually sung by only one singer, so the complex polyphonic effects that mark the late madrigal must be discarded. Instead, the emphasis is on the singer, and their improvisational instrumental accompaniment. The singer’s goal is not the picturesque description of each line of the text, in madrigal style, but rather the depiction of the core emotional content—the goal is text expression over text painting. “Vedro ‘l mio sol” (I will see my sun) is a good example of Caccini’s innovative solo madrigal style, designed to illustrate an emotional text, with elaborate, improvisational accompaniment underneath it.

Some sixteenth-century musicians

The previous post outlined some important genres of Renaissance vocal music—genres which sold well and seem to have been consumed by a relatively large group of people. What’s missing, though, is a sense of musicians’ lives, so I wanted to pick a few well-known musicians and give you a sense of the shape of their careers. These are just snapshots; however, I think their stories reveal some interesting aspects of musical life in the 16^th century–elements that are obscured by an intense focus on the music. It’s also worth noting that these biographical accounts are possible because of the great amount of surviving documentation regarding musicians’ lives from this era.

Orlande de Lassus (c. 1530 – 1594)

He was gifted singer and talented composer who wrote in many genres. Born in Mons (modern Belgium), his talent as a child singer led him to be employed by a visiting Italian nobleman, whom he followed to Italy. In 1556, he started working in Bavaria, a powerful autonomous state in modern Germany. He remained at the Bavarian court for the rest of his life, and enjoyed a friendly relationship with his employers. Widely admired, Lassus was granted a knighthood by the Pope. Lassus’s travels across Europe were reflected in his compositions in multiple languages, including Italian madrigals, French chansons, German lieder, and Latin motets and masses. Unlike any other musician in this post, an authentic portrait of him survives.

Vicente Lusitano (birth unknown; died sometime after 1561)

Born in Portugal, Lusitano was of mixed African and European descent (“pardo” in Portuguese), as was shown by Robert Stevenson’s research. His last name simply means “man from Portugal” (Lusitania was an old name for Portugal), and is perhaps a nickname. Much of his biography is poorly documented, although he is known to have been a Catholic priest, and to have worked in Portugal, Italy, and Germany. His publications reveal that he was a composer (a book of motets, 1551) and a theorist (a treatise dates from 1553). He engaged in a famous debate with the Italian theorist Nicola Vicentino in 1555, which he won, although Vicentino pretended otherwise. He eventually left the priesthood, converted to Protestantism, and married. Hardly anything is known of his later life. Because little of his music has been recorded today, the motet Heu me domine is probably his best-known piece; while it is a testament to the richness of his imagination, it’s hard to know whether it is unique or if it is typical of his work.

Vocal genres in the Renaissance

Musical printing’s chief legacy was the creation of a middle-class market for sheet music. Printing made music accessible to those who lacked the time to copy a large amount of music or the money to pay a copyist. Printed books soon became affordable for those who disposable income. Consequently, the music that is documented in the historical record reflects the interests and tastes of this market.

Vocal music still remained dominant in the printed record; increasingly this music was secular. Instrumental music also emerges more vividly in the historical record with the rise of printing. Petrucci’s example is instructive here: although he produced many volumes of masses, he also published nine volumes of secular songs from 1504 to 1509, and four volumes of lute music from 1507 to 1508. Thus one of the first major printers saw a market for sacred vocal, secular vocal, and instrumental music.

This lesson provides quick introductions to four of the most popular vocal genres of the 16^th century: the motet, the chanson, the madrigal, and the lute song. (There were others we’re not discussing in detail here, such as the lied, frottola, the air de cour, the villancico, etc.) Much of this music has survived today because a significant amount of paying customers purchased printed copies of it, creating a demand for new pieces in these styles.

The motet, which we have met in the Middle Ages, had developed into a rather different genre by the 1500s. Although not always used in church, it retained sacred and formal associations. Usually set for four to six vocal parts without instrumental accompaniment, it usually emphasized a clear setting of a serious text. Josquin’s motets, which alternated points of imitation with chordal textures, were popular and were widely imitated. His “Ave Maria…gratia plena” (Hail Mary, full of grace) is an adaptation of a medieval sequence (a chant for the mass proper) which illustrates these features nicely. Orlande de Lassus’s “Audite Nova” (Hear the news), on the other hand, is a parody of the motet’s formal style: after a solemn opening in Latin, it switches to German to explain that “the farmer from the Church of the Jackass” has a fine goose, which goes very well with either wine or beer.

Although the motet remained stylistically stable throughout the 1500s, the chanson was modified to reach an amateur audience. The strict forms of the Ars Nova had already begun to disappear by the late 1400s, in favor of freer forms and more intricate polyphony. Josquin’s “Mille regretz” (a thousand regrets) sets a tune so well-known that it was even adapted as a mass tenor. Josquin’s setting contains a number of overlapping lines with contrasting rhythms: to bring this piece off, the singers have to be coordinated and well-rehearsed. In contrast, Claude de Sermisy’s “Tant que vivray” (as long as I live) uses similar rhythms in all parts for its opening section: this music is definitely easier to perform and to sight-read. Unlike Josquin’s thick, complex texture, in which each part might be melodically important, Sermisy’s music places the melody on the top of a set of simple accompanying parts. Similarly, Josquin’s music features numerous elided cadences, so that the music rarely comes to a complete stop; Sermisy’s is divided into short four-measure phrases. Sermisy includes a short imitative section (“son alliance” – at 0:48) which is just complicated enough to provide a change in texture but simple enough that amateurs could perform it with a bit of practice.

If the French chanson tradition allows to us to trace the genre’s adaptation toward amateurs, the Italian madrigal reflects the opposite trend. Early madrigals such as “Il bianco e dolce cigno” by Arcadelt (1538) are loosely similar to the chanson in their balancing of simple rhythms, clear chordal textures, and imitative passages, suggesting that they were probably designed for casual performance. The madrigal seems to have become more complex over time, and was increasingly associated with professional or semi-professional performing ensembles which performed at the courts of nobles—such as the Concerto delle donne (Ladies’ Consort) in Ferrara. By 1600, madrigals such as “ ‘Io parto’ e più non dissi” (“I’m leaving” and I said nothing more) by Carlo Gesualdo could employ an ambiguous, fully chromatic tonal palette. The general independence of the lines and raw skill needed to navigate this tricky piece suggest that it might have posed difficulties for any but the most dedicated amateurs.

While some modern performers occasionally perform madrigals and chansons with instrumental accompaniment, the English lute song was designed for performance by voice(s) and lute. John Dowland was one of the most famous composers of lute-songs; his songs usually came with optional vocal parts (alto, tenor, and bass) to allow the performance of the song as an accompanied madrigal. You can hear one of his catchiest songs, “Fine Knacks for Ladies” (published 1597) in a solo performance (voice, with a guitar playing the lute part) and in a chamber choir performance.

Unlike modern choral pieces, which are published in full score, with one part printed above another, madrigals and chansons were generally published in partbooks only—so that each singer could only see their own part, and no-one else’s. Lute songs were often published in table format, so that a group of singers could cluster around the book and read all the parts off the same page. The lute music was never written down in staff notation, but instead used tablature, which indicated exactly where one should put one’s fingers on the neck of the lute.

Chansons, madrigals, and lute songs were all determinedly secular genres, with lyrics usually devoted to love and romance. The courtly poetry of the Middle Ages was generally replaced by illusions to classical myth and to allegory. Arcadian settings loosely drawn from Greek myth, in which human shepherds sexually pursue nymphs, were popular. Italian madrigals regularly relied on apparently nonsensical puns about death, which only make sense when one realizes that death is a metaphor for orgasm: thus in Arcadelt’s madrigal above, the speaker describes his willingness to “die 1000 times a day”—which is certainly ambitious, no matter how you think you about it. English lute songs sometimes indulged in melancholy, depressing lyrics which seem to express despair. However, lute songs could also be bluntly sexual in ways that madrigals, with their metaphorical poetry, never were. For example, this song is about a “wanton” woman who “never will say no.”

Some of this music, particularly the madrigal, was closely associated with text-painting, meaning that the music is designed to directly mimic the meaning of the words. For linguistic reasons, this is easiest for us to hear in English songs, such as the English madrigals which became popular in the late 1500s. John Farmer’s “Fair Phyllis I saw sitting all alone” is an excellent example. The word alone is sung by a single voice, while all the voices join together when they describe a flock of sheep. Similarly, when the shepherds say they don’t know where Phyllis is, their echoing voices form a short point of imitation, as if a crowd of people are all talking at once. The melodic lines chase each other up and down just as the characters in the song do. This little madrigal ends with a hidden (yet painfully obvious) erotic pun, as the characters wind up kissing each other “up and down” at the end of the song.

The Reformation

The Catholic mass in the Renaissance was often a monument of complexity, structured through techniques (isorhythm, cantus firmi, points of imitation) which created an impressive musical experience, but which are hard to understand theoretically or to perform accurately. As such, it was well-designed for worship in a Catholic service, as the people who came to worship were not expected to sing at church (just as, for many years, Catholics were not encouraged to read the Bible for themselves). Catholic worship music was so complicated precisely because it was not designed to be participatory.

The Reformation of the early 1500s was an attempt to transform Christian worship practices, and among them their music. Early Reformation leaders such as Martin Luther imagined that their views might be accepted by the Catholic Church, leading to a reformed and improved church. Instead, Luther was expelled from the Catholic Church, and the reformers were called Protestants (in reference to their protest against church norms). Protestantism split into several branches; the Lutherans and Calvinists had the greatest impact on musical practice. In music history, the Reformation is significant both for its assault on the established practices of the Catholic Church, and the development of a participatory culture for Christian music.

The core feature of the Protestant faiths was the idea that ordinary people should be able to read and understand sacred texts. Not only were people encouraged to read the Bible in their own language, but also worship music was generally sung in local languages. Music for worship was also generally designed to be easy to sing, even for untrained audience members. (The only exception was the Anglican tradition in England, which retained the elaborate musical style associated with the Catholic Church, but in English translation, so that the sacred words would be understandable to the general public).

Martin Luther (1483–1546), the leader of the new Lutheran Church, was a skillful musician and songwriter. He freely adapted existing Catholic Chants and folk songs to serve as worship music, and even wrote some original tunes himself. He is said to have explained his adaptation of secular music with the joke “Why should the devil have all the good music?” He created monophonic hymn tunes (chorales) with lyrics in local languages such as German—these were to be sung in unison or octaves. An example is “Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott” (A Might Fortress Is our God”), which is still a well-known hymn today. Despite his interest in creating music that was simple for his congregation to sing, Luther appreciated complexity (he enjoyed Josquin’s music, in particular), and allowed polyphony to return to Lutheran services in guise of chorale lieder (essentially, Lutheran motets for church services). This is an example of a chorale lied by Johann Walther which uses the melody of “Ein feste Burg” in its tenor.

The Calvinists (named after the preacher Jean Calvin (1509 – 1564)) were far more austere in their musical practices, relying on simple monophonic hymns with clearly marked rhythms, and intentionally simple melodies. Some of these hymns remain in use today, such as Bourgeois’ “Or sus serviteurs du Seigneur,” which in English is known as “Old Hundredth” or “All People that on Earth do Dwell,” and is often today provided with the kind of harmonies that the Calvinists avoided.

The Catholic Church eventually reacted to the crisis that led to Reformation through its own Counter-Reformation. In musical terms, this led to a partial shortening of the Catholic liturgy (including the removal of sequences, some of the longest and most elaborate monophonic chants in the Proper of the Mass), and a general emphasis on clear setting of texts, so that the sacred words (in Latin) would not be overly obscured by complex polyphony. (The Catholic Church only allowed the performance of the mass in local languages starting after the Vatican II reforms of 1962–1965). The composers Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525–1594) and Tomás Luis de Victoria (1548–1611) are both associated with this new, slightly simpler style—Victoria’s motet “O magnum mysterium” (“O great mystery”) is a good example of the clarity of line and clear text-setting associated with the new style. Palestrina, a singer in the Papal Choir in Rome and a prolific composer, was the subject of a legend claiming he single-handedly prevented the Pope from banning polyphony outright. While that story is an exaggeration, his involvement in revising the Catholic liturgy is well-documented. Today, his music forms an essential part of the modern study of counterpoint in university campuses across the United States.

The Renaissance Mass

During the historical period known as the Renaissance, European musicians increasingly produced settings of the Catholic Mass Ordinary. These settings are significant for several reasons. First of all, as the words were always the same, the music of these masses was what set them apart. Thus while the mass remained, at its heart, religious music designed for worship, it was also a way for musicians to demonstrate their ability to write complex polyphony. Second, because of its great length, the Mass became a central genre for musicians who wanted to write unified pieces in multiple sections or movements. Finally, the emergence of printed music allowed the mass to be widely distributed outside the confines of a single church. Unlike Machaut, who wrote a single mass for a specific use, Renaissance composers could publish Masses and have them distributed across a wide geographic area. Thus later composers were able to be internationally renowned through their masses.

The printing revolution in music began around the 1470s. While printing had been known in China for hundreds of years, Europeans only began to print books (as opposed to copying them by hand) in the middle of the 15^th century. The first printed books of monophonic music appeared in the 1470s; by 1501, the Italian publisher Ottavio Petrucci issued the first book of printed polyphony (a volume of chansons called Harmonice musices odhecaton A). By 1508, Petrucci had published eight volumes of masses by well-known musicians.

Printing’s benefits were clear from the beginning. It allowed the mass production of music, and allowed musicians to reach audiences outside the church and the court. With the development of single-impression printing, it became possible to produce books more quickly, which changed the function of books. Handwritten books of music took a lot of time and labor to produce; therefore books were typically used to preserve ideas of great importance. A mass-produced, printed book was relatively easy to produce, given the right machinery. Consequently, a printed book served as an economic object, designed to be bought and sold. As the price of books fell, music books started reflecting the demands of the contemporary market. The great popularity of printed masses presumably indicates that church leaders, choir directors, and educated musicians across Europe were ready to buy music for performance or study.

The increasing importance of the mass during the 15^th and 16^th centuries probably reflects the popularity of printing to some degree. Du Fay (d. 1474) and Ockeghem (c. 1497) wrote 7 and 15 masses apiece (none of which were printed in their lifetimes). Josquin (d. 1521), who was one of the first composers to be published in print, wrote 18. Fast forward to end of the 16^th century, and we find that Lassus (d. 1594) wrote at least 60, while Palestrina (d 1594) wrote 104.

Renaissance masses shared some basic conventions. They typically set only the Ordinary sections of the mass (Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei). They increasingly used four independent voice parts in ranges corresponding to the modern soprano – alto – tenor – bass; featured harmonies based on thirds and sixths in the English style; and had increasingly sophisticated methods of treating dissonance. By the 1450s, a new type of cadence, in which one voice fell a fifth or rose a fourth, emerged, creating something very similar to a modern V-I cadence (such as a G chord moving to a C chord).

Because the mass was still used in a lengthy worship service with multiple sections occurring between each movement, composers became concerned with unifying devices that would create some kind of connection between the parts of the Ordinary. For example, there was the idea of using the same tune in the tenor of every movement—this was called a “cantus firmus” mass (cantus firmus is Latin for “fixed song”). Some cantus firmus masses used chant excerpts—such as the “Caput” masses—and others used popular songs, such as the “L’homme armé” (Armed Man) masses. Other masses opened every movement with the same music—this is called a “motto” mass. One could also use the same tune in all vocal parts (not just the tenor), in each section of the mass—this allowed composers to rework existing motets or chansons into religious music. Finally, one could use the cantus firmus in every voice, not just the tenor.

There is a vast repertoire of mass music, so I’ll only highlight a few examples which illustrate unique ways of creating religious music from pre-existing tunes. Du Fay’s Missa “Se la face ay pale” (If my face is pale), c. 1450, uses one of his own chansons as a cantus firmus. The tune is hidden in the tenor, and the music is structured in an isorhythmic pattern, so that the chanson tune is sung at increasingly faster speeds. Still, it is surrounded by other voices which harmonize above and below it, thus making it somewhat hard to hear. Josquin’s Missa Pangue lingua (c. 1515) is derived from an Easter hymn, and Josquin uses points of imitation to make the tune appear in every voice. (A point of imitation is a series of short, echoing statements of the tune in each voice in turn, arranged so that the new voices always harmonize with the voices who are already singing).

The idea of the “Renaissance”

One of the great problems in music history is dealing with periodization, or the division of history into named eras that reflect important changes in society. Essentially, historical eras are named after the fact by historians. Consider: none of us know what future generations will call our present era! Consequently, historians’ division of the past into eras necessarily reflects their agendas and perspectives. This means that historical eras—such as Antiquity—are not objective factual labels, but are interpretations of the past. When used well, historical eras imply a narrative of some sort and allow us to generalize safely about the past.

So far, we have discussed “Antiquity” and the “Middle Ages.” I’ve used these terms for historical eras both because they are commonly used and widely understood. Yet they carry deep assumptions about important events in history. The Middle Ages are commonly described as beginning with the fall of Rome to “barbarian” invaders c. 476 CE. But why call it the “Middle” Ages? The traditional implication is that the “Middle Ages” are a placeholder between the decline of Rome’s power in Western Europe, and the “Renaissance” (literally, rebirth) which is supposed to have sparked a major period of economic and cultural renewal. So the very name “Middle Ages” indirectly implies that this period is relatively unimportant (a point underscored by earlier historians’ habit of calling it the “Dark Ages”)—something that is factually untrue for music, as it is the period which holds the roots of the modern Western notation system.

The problem for us, in our telling of music history, is that there is no really satisfactory way of linking music to the Renaissance described by historians, literary scholars, and visual artists. Historians often date the start of the Renaissance to 1453 CE, the year that the Turks captured Constantinople and brought an end to the Byzantine or East Roman empire. However, many of the features linked to the Renaissance—such as a new interest in understanding the human experience (humanism), the rise of an economically powerful middle class, a new interest in the learning of ancient Greece and Rome, etc.—had already been appeared, some as early as the 1100s. In music, there is no particular reason to describe music of the 1450s as exhibiting a marked difference from earlier styles.

The most important new style in European music in the 15^th century appeared in the 1420s—a date which doesn’t match the “Renaissance” in any other field of inquiry. Nor does this style owe anything to a revival of ancient knowledge—rather, it is linked to the sudden popularity of English musical styles across much of continental Europe. (There actually is a European musical style that is linked to a renewed interest in the heritage of ancient Greece—yet we don’t call this “Renaissance” music at all, but “Baroque,” and it appeared much later than the historians’ Renaissance—around 1600. Such is the legacy of importing eras from other fields of study.) Still, music historians have buckled to the pressure to identify a “Renaissance” musical style that can be related to the “Renaissance” in the visual arts, literature, and in history. So the new style of the 1420s is often what is meant when people discuss “Renaissance music,” even though it does not represent a very radical break with the past or directly correspond to the Renaissance as a concept in any meaningful way.

The new “Renaissance” style is what contemporary authors called the “contenance angloise” (“English style”), typified by the songs of musicians such as John Dunstable (c. 1390–1453), and adopted by continental musicians such as Guillaume Du Fay (1397–1474), who spent part of his career singing in the Papal Chapel in Rome, and Gilles Binchois (d. 1460), who worked for the powerful Duke of Burgundy (a region in modern France). This style employed thirds and sixths as a default, preferred harmony—something documented in English traditions long before the 1400s. It also featured regular cadences, allowing the melody to be divided into relatively short singable phrases, and employed careful treatment of dissonance (including some of the first documented cases of suspensions). These features can be heard in pieces such as Dunstable’s motet “Quam pulchra es” (a setting of one of the most openly erotic passages in the Bible) and Binchois’ chanson “De plus en plus.”

At the same time, the new style had a lot in common with Ars Nova music. Cadences were still approached in contrary motion (usually a sixth expanding to an octave); similar lyrical topics remained current; and Ars Nova notation remained in use. Some of the music employed old-fashioned isorhythmic structures (as in Du Fay’s motet “Nuper rosarum flores,” written for the dedication of the famous cathedral in Florence, Italy). The metric complexity and chromaticism that began to emerge in the Ars Nova reached new levels of sophistication in this era.

Because of its careful treatment of dissonance and its heavy reliance on thirds and sixths as preferred intervals, the music of the English style is relatively easy for modern listeners to understand and enjoy. The exciting fifths and fourths of earlier, medieval styles are replaced by sounds that resemble modern chords. However, these “Renaissance” musicians did not think in modern theoretical terms. As we will see later, their interest in chromaticism and dissonance treatment led them to stretch the medieval modal system to its limits. Still, by the 1500s, a good deal of European music used a music dialect that is intelligible to people used to modern tonality, even though it was not tonal in the modern sense.

Music in the Ars Nova

This lesson provides a quick overview of the style described as the “Ars Nova” (new art), which saw the emergence of a new style of rhythmic notation and new musical practices. European notation, as we have seen, was closely tied to the music of the Catholic Church and to the development of polyphony (which had led to the emergence of rhythmic notation in the first place). Yet the innovations of the Ars Nova don’t seem to have the same intricate connection with Church music or liturgical practice: The style is named after theory treatises, including Johannes de Muris’ Ars novae musicae (c. 1320) and Philippe de Vitry’s Ars Nova (c. 1322). The motets preserved in the allegorical story Roman de Fauvel (c. 1316) also reflect the new style.

Ars Nova notation was the first wide-spread style to use meter signatures in the modern sense. The system allowed musicians to write down four basic meters, equivalent to 9/8 (three beats divided in three), 3/4 (three beats divided in two), 6/8 (two beats divided in three), and 2/4 (two beats divided in two). Thus Ars Nova notation is at the root of modern concepts of simple and compound meter. It also provides a coherent, if complex system for notating beats, divisions, subdivisions, tuplets (such as the triplet), meter changes, and syncopations.

Ars Nova notation also includes a far greater use of sharp and flat notes, as you can see from this score of Guillame de Machaut’s song “Rose, liz, printemps, verdure.” While such notes had probably been in use for centuries (remember musica ficta), they seem to occur more frequently and to be more clearly notated in Ars Nova pieces. There was also, per the theoretical treatises, a greater use of thirds and sixths as acceptable harmonies—the musicians of the time called them “imperfect consonances,” language that is indirectly echoed in modern descriptions of the fourth, fifth, and octave as “perfect intervals” and the third and sixth as consonances which are not in the perfect category.

As one might imagine, some of these early musicians clearly enjoyed the opportunity to notate highly complex rhythms. One particularly confusing style has been nicknamed the Ars subtilior (loosely, “the complicated art”), which often uses confusing and elaborate rhythms that require tremendous skill to execute accurately. Phillipe de Caserta’s “Par le grant senz,” for example, has simultaneous lines in 2/4 and 6/8, triplets, and frequent meter changes. (score here, recording here: try to follow along!) Some of these pieces also experimented with chromatic notes, undermining much of the sense of traditional modal structure: see for example Solage’s “Fumeux fume par fumée” (A smoker smokes smokily). (Note: this was before Europeans had access to tobacco, which is an American plant…but the smoker is probably smoking some type of hallucinogen, such as hashish).

The music of the Ars Nova style is associated with large body of secular songs with French lyrics (chansons), many of them in polyphony. These songs could have elaborate poetic and musical structures, such as the rondeau, a song form which repeated two melodies but with varying sets of words. Its form is often summarized as A B a A a b A B, in which capital letters reflect the return of both the same melody and lyrics, while lower case lyrics reflect the return of the melody with new lyrics. Other common chanson forms include the virelai, with its refrain format (A bb a A…), and the ballade, which was divided into two or three long parts of relatively equal length.

The chansons are one of the first documented cases of polyphony which is not directly derived from Catholic chant. There isn’t much available evidence about the ways that 14^th-century songwriters went about their business. What there is suggests that chansons were composed around a central melody, rather than being composed to harmonize with an excerpt of a piece of sacred chant (Ars Nova chansons do not always include chant tenors). Many of the lyrics of these songs directly continue the themes of the courtly song, such as idealized or unattainable love. At the same time, the polyphonic techniques used certainly grow out of earlier religious traditions.

Some Ars Nova music is freely composed, but other pieces rely on a unique structural feature called isorhythm, which is based on repeating rhythmic patterns. As these patterns often happen in a polyphonic context, they’re often hard to hear, as the other parts can contradict or push against them. For example, in the first Kyrie of Machaut’s Messe de Notre Dame, the tenor part always follows the rhythmic pattern: dotted whole | half – whole | dotted whole| dotted whole rest. This pattern is repeated seven times, with varying pitches. To further complicate matters, the contratenor voice follows a longer, more complicated pattern which fills the gaps of the tenor’s pattern. These patterns aren’t always terribly audible, but they’re quite visible on the page (this link uses a highlighted, animated score to illustrate the isorhythmic cycles). The popularity of isorhythm suggests that Ars Nova composers were thinking creatively about interlocking rhythmic patterns as a structural element of their music.

The musician Guillaume de Machaut (1300–1377) has already been mentioned in this post. One of the most prolific and influential musicians of his day, he won equal renown as a poet and a musician—and his works are still studied today by literary historians as well as musicians. Unlike the relatively modest composers of earlier generations, he was clearly proud of his work and created an illustrated manuscript of his collected music. Contemporary portraits from his own lifetime also survive.

In addition to his songs, Machaut is also remembered for his Messe de Notre Dame, which is the first surviving setting of the Mass by a single person. Machaut only set the Ordinary movements of the Mass—the Kyrie, Credo, Gloria, Sanctus, and Agnus dei—establishing a pattern that would be imitated by musicians in later generations. His motives were both practical and spiritual; Machaut intended the Mass as an act of prayer for himself and his brother. (As a Catholic, Machaut believed that prayers on his behalf would hasten the forgiveness of his sins and allow him and his brother to enter heaven more quickly.) At his death, he left a sum of money to pay for the regular performance of his Mass. By only setting the Ordinary movements, he ensured that his music could be performed at any Mass, regardless of the occasion.

The development of the motet, or how polyphony stopped being exclusively religious

The European polyphonic tradition was largely restricted to the Catholic Church for much of the early Middle Ages (if it was practiced outside the church, it left few traces). Yet after 1200 CE, polyphony began escaping the strict confines of church services, through an emerging genre called the motet. The motet, which began as a type of supplement to Catholic liturgical music, was used in religious as well as secular contexts, and became one of the dominant genres in European vocal music for the next four hundred years. Along the way, motets provides exemplars for writing music in multiple parts and were vehicles for the development of new forms of rhythm notation.

A number of different types of songs were called motets. One of the earlier types was created by adding words to a piece of discant organum (one in which the tenor and the upper voice both moved at a decent pace, with about one to four notes of the upper voice against one note of the tenor). Given that organum tended to make listeners lose track of the words, the early motets simply added words (in French, mot) to these long vocal passages. This type of motet was commonly used in religious services, as a way of retaining the sacred message.

A related technique, which was eventually more popular, was to write a new upper voice (with words) over an existing tenor from chant. This technique could still be used for devotional purposes, but lent itself to other purposes as well, as the upper voice in could be in any language and address any topic, including courtly love lyrics of the type popularized by the troubadours and trouvères. While early motets were usually in Latin, local vernacular languages became increasingly common over time. This technique reflects the spread of the motet outside of religious contexts, and its increasing acceptance among the growing class of educated and wealthy people.

Regardless of the form that a medieval motet took, therefore, it was always derived from a chant excerpt (a tenor, sung or played in the lowest part of the texture) and was increasingly written in a form of rhythmic notation which allowed the parts to be coordinated. A general rule seems to have emerged that the new melodies should harmonize with each note of the chant tenor. Because the preferred intervals for harmony were the unison, fourth, fifth, and octave, this effectively meant that there were a limited number of acceptable ways to harmonize any given tenor, based on these intervals.

The earliest motets simply added one new melody part above the tenor—this was often called the motetus or duplum (second voice). By the 1250s, it was becoming common to add more than one melody above the tenor, each with its own unique character; the second new melody was increasingly called the triplum (third voice). The triplum often had different words from the duplum, creating a polytextual motet in which two different sets of lyrics were sung at the same time. This is of course rather difficult to understand in any language, never mind in Latin or medieval French. Some modern musicians perform the voice pairs in turn so that the listener can hear each text and melody separately, and then combine the parts together:

Cycle 1: tenor + duplum

Cycle 2: tenor + triplum

Cycle 3: tenor + duplum + triplum

You can hear an example of such a performance here. In this recording, the tenor is played by a lute rather than being sung. The duplum enters with its melody around 0:18; the triplum comes in around 1:00. The duplum and triplum are combined over the tenor at 1:45. Note that the tenor part is the same throughout the song.

At this point, there was nothing comparable to the modern theory of harmony or chord progressions, but these chant tenors had definite harmonic implications for medieval musicians. This is quite audible when a chant tenor is repeated multiple times in the course of a single song. For example, Adam de la Halle’s motet “De ma dame vient/Dieus, comment porroie/Omnes” (from no later than the 1280s) repeats the same four-measure chant excerpt (a melisma on the word “omnes”) twelve times. The frequent recurrence of the tenor, harmonized by similar intervals on every recurrence, certainly creates an effect similar to a chord progression. However, unlike modern music which is composed around chord progressions, each of the upper melody lines has its own unique contour and shape—the parts are not simply filling out harmonies.

Secular music in the European traditions

So far, most of the early music documented in the European tradition has had direct ties to the Catholic Church. Even when we have encountered music from outside the church—such as the Cantigas de Santa Maria—the music has still had religious lyrics. Yet around the 1100s, a body of secular songs, with lyrics focused on love and longing, began to be recorded in the European tradition. (Perhaps such songs had been sung for many years, but no-one had thought them worth preserving). The notation of these songs was definitely a new idea, although we know that Moorish musicians had been singing about similar topics for some time.

As one might expect, the new interest in preserving secular songs was probably the result of royal and noble patronage. Many of the early secular musicians we know about lived in or visited Aquitaine, a semi-autonomous region in southern France directly bordering Spain. William IX, the Duke of Aquitaine (d. 1127 CE) and his later successor Eleanor of Aquitaine (sometime queen of England) (d. 1204 CE) were major patrons of secular music, and their example created an environment in which secular songs seemed worthy of preservation.

The musicians who sang these songs came in several categories. Most of the music we know about comes from the noble poets (called troubadours in Aquitaine, trouvères in northern France), but much of the actual music that people listened to was created by lower-class musicians—the jongleurs, who were called minstrels in English (note: this is the original meaning of “minstrel”; modern American references to “minstrelsy,” on the other hand, refer to the blackface genre of the 1830s and 1840s). While the troubadours sang about love, the minstrels are best remembered for songs about famous warriors—which in French were called chansons de geste (songs of great deeds). Thus the medieval European minstrel was roughly equivalent to the West African jali or griot, who sang songs in praise of princes and to remind their hearers of historic events.

As the minstrels were not themselves noble, almost none of their music has been preserved (although the words to some of their songs has survived). We do know that they often performed duties aside from music, including juggling. For example, the chronicles describing the Battle of Hastings (in 1066 CE) describe a minstrel named Taillefer, who juggled weapons to entertain the armies (according to Gaimar’s chronicle), and was probably killed in the battle:

“Then Taillefer who sang right well, rode mounted on a swift horse before the duke, singing of Karle maine [Charlemagne, King of France], and of Rollant, of Oliver and the vassals who died in Renchevals. And when they drew nigh [came near] to the English, “A boon, sire!” cried Taillefer; “I have long served you, and you owe me for all such service…allow me to strike the first blow in the battle!”

…Then Taillefer put his horse to the gallop, charging before all the rest, and struck an Englishman dead…At the second blow he struck, the English rushed forward and surrounded him…” – the Roman de Rou, c. 1160, translated by Edgar Taylor.

The music that Taillefer sang is the now-lost Song of Roland, an epic poem whose words alone survive. A great favorite among the minstrels, it recounts the Frankish emperor Charlemagne’s defeat by the Moors and their allies during his Spanish campaign in the late eighth or early ninth centuries.

The troubadours’ music is better documented, although their lyrics were often preserved without any musical notation. As in the Cantigas de Santa Maria, their music is only preserved as a single melodic line—any instrumental accompaniment was apparently not considered worth writing down—so there are a variety of performance options for their music. Given the troubadours’ proximity to Iberia, some modern performers (such as Thomas Binkley) have experimented with including Moorish or Arabic elements in modern performances. Others restrict themselves to following the notated score, and others treat the score as a basis for improvisation and creative arrangements. The notation itself does not suggest any element of Moorish influence, but then again, it couldn’t: European notation wasn’t designed to record the scales used in Moorish music.

The troubadours, like the Moorish singers, sang about unattainable love—a condition often called “courtly love” in Christian Europe because of its popularity at noble courts. One gets a sense of the basic topic of their songs in the biography of Beatrix, Comtessa de Dia:

The countess of Dia was the wife of En Guillem de Poitiers, a lady beautiful and good. And she fell in love with Raimbault d’Orange, and wrote many good chansons in his honor. Her “vida” or biography

The scenario shown here—a married woman writing songs about her lover—is more common if one flips the genders (most surviving troubadour songs are by men). Yet the basic pattern, in which a lover is unattainable because of prior commitment or lack of interest, holds true. Whether these songs actually address illicit and uncontrollable desires, or whether they were a kind of emotional outlet for otherwise forbidden thoughts, is unclear. Certainly forbidden love is a major thread in the Arthurian legends, which became popular across Europe around the same time as courtly love songs. Perhaps one of the best known of these songs is Bernard of Ventadorn’s “Can vai la lauzeta mover,” which sketches a portrait of a man rejected by a virtuous woman (lyrics here, audio here). The courtly singers were also capable of nuanced and frankly sensual songs, such as this song of Walther’s about a secret meeting in the forest (the melody is not his, but was adapted by the performers to fit his poem).

These courtly singers are notable for asserting their authorship and creativity in a culture which had previously shown little interest in recording the names of musicians or ascribing authorship to them. They are some of the first musicians in the European tradition to have their biographies and even their portraits preserved. Like Beatrix’s work, many of their surviving songs were openly autobiographical, with direct connections between their lyrics and their personal lives. One striking example is Walther von der Vogelweide, who wrote a song about visiting Palestine (presumably while on the Sixth Crusade).