“Hymns,” songs of praise of God, had often been mentioned in the Bible. Jesus and his companions had sung a hymn before going to Gethsemane. Bishop Ambrose of Milan was credited with introducing hymns into the service. At first these were new Latin poems, such as “Deus creator omnium,” which lived on as religious folk song. But the Council of Laodicea (A.D. 363), which established the canon of the Scriptures, decreed that in the Church service only the words of the Bible should be admitted. As a result, although Saint Augustine himself and others wrote Ambrosian hymns, these were not introduced in the divine service until the twelfth century. Centuries later the Reformation churches of France and Switzerland would purify their service, too, by excluding anything but the Bible.
The psalmody of the Christian churches naturally adapted the Jewish styles of antiphony (the dialogue of a double chorus) or responsorial (the response of a chorus to a solo singer). Augustine had tried to justify the wordless alleluia singing of the Jewish service because “one who is jubilant does not utter words but sounds of joy without words … a joy so excessive that he cannot find words for it.” Still, the tradition that prevailed was the singing of psalms. The fear of “wordless” music, the “lascivious” music against which Plato had warned and which had once misled Augustine himself, was so great that the early Church forbade instruments.
The human voice was something else. “Song awakens the soul to a glowing longing for what the song contains;” urged a fourth-century author, “song soothes the lusts of the flesh; it banishes wicked thoughts, aroused by invisible foes; it acts like dew to the soul, making it fertile for accomplishing good acts; it makes the pious warrior noble and strong in suffering terrible pain; it is a healing ointment for the wounds suffered in the battle of life … for ‘the Word of God’ if sung in emotion has the power to expel demons.” And Thomas Aquinas explained, “Instrumental music as well as singing is mentioned in the Old Testament, but the Church has accepted only singing on account of its ethical value: instruments were rejected because they have a bodily shape and keep the mind too busy, induce it even to carnal pleasure. Therefore their use is unwise, and consequently the Church refrains from musical instruments in order that by the praise of God the congregation may be distracted from concern with bodily matters.”
When Gregory set about reforming the Church, he made music one of his targets. Wary of wordless music, he set about establishing a uniform liturgy to inspire the faithful and unite them in the Word. Suspicious of secular learning, he saw music only as a devotional art. When he found the clergy wasting time cultivating their singing voices, he condemned in his decree of 595 the “singing deacons” “who enrage God, while they delight the people with their accents.” To leave the higher clergy free to administer the sacraments, to visit the sick and distribute alms, he ordered deacons to sing only the Gospel. The musical part of the services would be performed by the lower clergy. To supply professional singers he fostered the Roman Schola Cantorum. By the ninth century there was a uniform body of chant in the Western Church, for which Gregory was given credit and which bore his name.
The chastening of Church music would produce some surprising consequences in the next centuries. While Gregory’s aim was not aesthetic, the chanted liturgy offered fantastic opportunities for creation and variation. These would be richly explored in the Mass, the sacred daily reenactment of the Last Supper and in the Divine Office, which consisted of eight daily prayer services for assigned hours of the day. Every day of the ecclesiastical year acquired its own Mass and Office, which varied according to two cycles, one celebrating the fixed feasts (Proper of the Saints) and another celebrating the movable feasts (Proper of the Time). And if there was a conflict between two designated festivals, a table indicated which took precedence. The chants repeated every day were set to many different melodies. For example, some 267 settings have been found for the Agnus Dei.
Then textual and musical accretions called “tropes” offered opportunity for personal or even whimsical embellishment of the Mass. While textual tropes served as a gloss interpreting the ancient text, musical tropes elaborated the music. But the reforming Council of Trent (1545–63) would cut out the tropes, which had long delighted the faithful.
We would make a great mistake, then, to think of the Gregorian chant (plainsong or plainchant) as monotonous or simply repetitive. More than eleven thousand tunes or texts of medieval chants survive in manuscript form, “graduals” for the Mass, and antiphonaries for the Office, along with notated missals and breviaries. While the Gregorian chants are monophonic music with a single melodic line, their words invited countless variations. Parts of the liturgy became chants in which each syllable was pronounced to a single musical note. Others became “neumatic” chants, with clusters of notes in series, sometimes as many as a dozen accompanying a single syllable. And then the subtly florid “melismatic” chants would set a single vowel to two hundred or more notes.
The misnamed “plainsong” has thus mystified students of music for a millennium. While the Gregorian chant in its afterlife has flourished as the authentic music of the Roman Church, its original character still remains in doubt. Not until the twentieth century did the Gregorian chant come back into its own. The old melodies had been mutilated into a monotonous plainchant to facilitate organ accompaniment. In 1889 the scholarly Benedictine monks of Solesmes in France undertook to rediscover the medieval practice. Their product was numerous volumes of “Gregorian chants” in a free-flowing nonrhythmic style. By 1903 they had recaptured the Gregorian chant to the satisfaction of Pope Pius X, himself a scholar of musical history, who established their versions of the Gregorian melodies by his encyclical motu proprio. But the rhythms still remain a puzzle. Pius X’s purified Gregorian chant banned the “theatrical style” of recitation, forbade the use of instruments, replaced women by boys in the church choir, and restricted the use of the organ. A Vatican Edition provided an authorized corpus of plainchant, which would prevail in the modern Catholic world. Even a Pius X lacked the power to dam up musical creations, as he gave bishops some latitude to vary the music of the liturgy within his guidelines.
While music was preserved through the liturgy, and the Church had a near monopoly of literacy, the Church of course had no monopoly on music in the Middle Ages. By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in southern France the troubadours, composers who performed their own works, were producing a rich music to accompany their singing of the first vernacular lyric poetry in a European tongue, in the Provençal language. Eleanor of Aquitaine brought this art to the north, where the trouvères flourished. About twenty-five hundred troubadour poems and many more of the trouvère songs survive, some with their music. These monophonic songs, though sung by men of all classes, were part of the ritual of courtly love. Their counterparts in Germany were the minnesinger (from minne, Middle Dutch for love) of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries whose work was perpetuated by the meistersinger (members of city singing guilds) after the fourteenth century. Chivalry and courtly love produced thousands of love lyrics, which are echoed by Wagner in Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, Tristan and Isolde, and Parsifal.
For the Church, music remained a devotional art, and for centuries Church music remained an empire of the Word. Since it made no sense to recite different words simultaneously, Church music remained monophony. This “single-voice” music was a counterpart of Romanesque architecture, the architecture of the basilica, of simple clear lines. And in Gregorian chant, a music of unison, one voice without the resonance of instrumental accompaniment followed the line of the Word.
But the future of Western music lay in polyphony. Without a music of many voices, many simultaneous parts, Bach, Beethoven, or Chopin would have been inconceivable. How did Western music come to this basic revolutionary idea, which we commonly know as harmony? It seems to have emerged somehow out of the Gregorian chant, and the infant idea must have been nourished by the wealth of Gregorian melody. Perhaps polyphony came naturally when different singers
sang the same words simultaneously, each at the level at which he was most at ease. Which would make the origins of polyphony, “many-voiced music,” another example of the Vanguard Word.
The birth of polyphony was recorded in the Carolingian renaissance, about 900, in a book called Musica enchiriadis (Handbook of Music), perhaps by Hucbald (840?–930?), a Benedictine monk of northern France. But the polyphony it describes already in use is not yet free composition. Instead a melody is taken from the repertoire of Gregorian chant to which another melody is added. The Gregorian plainchant melody, the cantus firmus, or “fixed song,” would thus remain the basis of the new polyphony for three hundred years. At first it was made polyphonic by having a second singer repeat the melody at the lower fifth or fourth. Others could join by repeating either of these parts at the octave.
“Organum” was the name for this primitive polyphony. Perhaps it came from the Greek, describing the interval for the second voice because the second “voice” was being played on the organ. When Pope John XXII in 1332 forbade polyphony in the Church, he still allowed this simple form called “parallel organum.” Musica enchiriadis had already described “converging organum,” in which two singers of parallel organum started and ended in unison. When free organum appeared in the late eleventh century the intervals between the voices varied. Sometimes the parts moved in contrary directions, with the cantus firmus going down, the other voice up. Sometimes the parts crossed, putting the Gregorian melody above or below the other part. Here was an appealing new freedom for musical ingenuity, still not abandoning the basic Gregorian melody of the Word.
When the dreaded millennial year, 1000, had come and gone without the end of the world, Western Christians took heart. More than 160 organa have survived from the eleventh century. And the twelfth century saw the elaboration of polyphonic music in the monastery of St.-Martial at Limoges, in southern France. This St.-Martial style, “melismatic organum,” filigreed the additional part with groups of notes set against a single note of the Gregorian melody. Then the singer of the cantus firmus would have to sustain his note until the other singer had completed his group of notes, sometimes as many as twenty. Having to hold his single note, he became known (from the Latin tenere, to hold) as the tenor, the singer of long-held notes. He was also “holding” the Gregorian melody. Enticing variations were opened when the cantus firmus could move from the upper position to the lower, with the upper part developing its own melodies. Though at first improvised, the added voice began to follow rules of its own.
Even before the first Gothic church was built, we have seen the music of the Word beginning to show a playful Gothic spirit. In polyphony, simultaneous voices were traveling different melodic paths. Like the Gothic architecture, this would first come in northern France. In the richly varied motet of the thirteenth century, it developed at the singing school of Notre-Dame in Paris. Church leaders remained suspicious of polyphony in any form, “disorganized music” corrupting the simple Gregorian line with a lascivious secular spirit. But the Gothic spirit, on the way to rebuilding Western music in melodies of unheard complexity, was destined to rebuild the churches of Christendom.
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An Architecture of Light
FROM the ancient Greeks came an architecture of outdoor monuments. From the Romans came an architecture of interior spaces. In the late Middle Ages in western Europe there appeared the first new style in a thousand years. Its special element would be light. Those who first saw it in the early twelfth century at St.-Denis, outside Paris, simply called it modern architecture (opus modernum). Then Vasari and other architects of the Renaissance in Italy who were disciples of Vitruvius christened it Gothic after the local workmen who were not Romans and to denote modern in the worst sense. “Gothic” had become a term of contempt for the barbarians who, centuries before, had invaded western Europe and destroyed the great monuments of the Roman Empire. In the great age of Gothic art no one thought of himself as Gothic.
Still the name has stuck indelibly for the arts of western and northern Europe from the twelfth to the sixteenth century. And now it paradoxically reminds us of a creative liberating spirit. But it obscures the dramatic uses that the new style made of its special element, light. “Gothic” conjures up images of gloomy darkness that would make it the name for a literature of forbidding mystery. To understand the uniqueness of the architecture that broke the European mold and opened a new era in Western architecture we must see what its creators thought and made of light. And why and how they chose this elusive unsubstantial element for their architecture.
What could be more obvious than that light is the source of all visual beauty? Dionysius the Areopagite, whom Saint Paul himself had converted, and who was the founder of the church of St.-Denis, had elaborated this obvious fact into a principle of theology. In his Celestial Hierarchy Dionysius had described God as absolute light and light as the creative force in the universe. And Dante would put him at the summit of his “Paradiso” because in that book Dionysius had shown the way of rising to God. Theologians called this the anagogic (upward-leading) approach. The beauties of a church, then, should be mere aids “from the material to the immaterial,” transparencies between us and God the “Father of the lights” and Christ “the first radiance” revealing the Father to the world.
The Gothic architecture of light would leave its mark on modern public architecture of the West—on our palaces and parliaments and universities. We can trace the first great work in the architecture of light to the shaping imagination of the French statesman-architect Suger (1081?–1151), abbot of St.-Denis. He would embody the “upward-leading” theology of Dionysius in a building. And he would reveal the opportunities in the Church for men of splendid talents to rise from humble station to shine across Western Christendom.
Born to a peasant family near Paris, at the age of ten Suger was deposited by his parents as an oblate, to be dedicated to the monastic life, in the nearby monastery of St.-Denis. In due course he became a monk, then was elected the abbot in 1122. The abbey remained his home until he died in 1151. He seems to have thought of the king of France as his father and he frequently called the abbey of St.-Denis his mother. He gloried in his lowly origins, “I, the beggar, whom the strong hand of the Lord has lifted up from the dunghill.” The adopted child of St.-Denis, he felt that as he belonged to the Church, so the Church belonged to him. This helps explain, too, his unabashed taste for the gorgeous and the ornate in his church in an age of militant ascetics. His noticeably short stature, like that of Erasmus, Mozart, and Napoleon, was said to reinforce his ambition. As a friend noted in Suger’s epitaph:
Small of body and family, constrained by twofold smallness,
He refused, in his smallness, to be a small man.
Luckily, his classmate at the school of St.-Denis was Louis Capet, who became King Louis VI. Suger remained this king’s confidant, and his patriotic devotion to the French monarchy was warmed by personal affection.
Saint Denis had brought Christianity to France in the third century and become the first bishop of Paris. Reputedly martyred, he was buried in the place that later became the suburb of Paris named after him. Charlemagne attended the dedication of a new church there in 775, and as Saint Denis became recognized as the patron saint of the French monarchy, the abbey acquired the profitable privilege of holding fairs under the saint’s protecting name. On a legendary journey to the Holy Land, Charlemagne had acquired the sacred relics that were finally deposited at St.-Denis. By the eleventh century the Benedictine monastery there was preeminent in France and perhaps in all Europe.
Meanwhile the Capetian dynasty, founded in 987 by the ambitious Hugh Capet (940–996), laid the basis of the modern French monarchy with institutions that lasted until 1789. Hugh the Great was buried in the abbey church and it remained the burial place of French monarchs, the sanctuary of the monarchy. Only three French kings—Philip I, Louis VII, and Louis XI—would be buried elsewhere. The abbey church became a symbol of d
ivine sanction for French kings, and of continuing royal support for the Church. After it became a “royal” abbey, it was exempt from feudal dues and subject only to the king.
But grand traditions of crown and scepter could not themselves create a new style in architecture. This required an inspired builder. Fortunately for the arts in the West the talented Abbot Suger was such a person and the church to which he was called needed to be rebuilt and expanded. Lucky for us too that, in an age of bitter theological controversy, Suger steered a prudent middle course between the mystic and the rationalist. These diverging paths remain vividly defined for us by his two famous contemporaries Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) and Peter Abelard (1079–1142). For Saint Bernard, fervent mystic and “purifier” of monasteries, known as the Thaumaturgus of the West, a church bedizened by gold and silver and stained glass was a Synagogue of Satan. The clergy, he said, should be models of charity and simplicity, avoiding the path of “scandalous curiosity.” Which was the very direction of Bernard’s archenemy, Abelard, prophet of rationalism and a founder of scholastic theology. Yet Abelard’s path would also lead him to St.-Denis, where he attracted scores of students, among them Héloïse. The love affair of Abelard and Héloïse produced a son, after whose arrival they secretly married. Her outraged protector wreaked revenge by hiring ruffians to castrate Abelard. After this public humiliation, Abelard retired to the Benedictine monastery of St.-Denis, where he compiled his book entitled Yes and No (Sic et Non). Following his risky maxim “By doubting we come to questioning, and by questioning we learn truth,” he answered the 158 key questions in Christian theology.
The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination Page 34