by Tim Rayborn
The Fumeurs: avant-garde artists or medieval stoners?
Fourteenth-century music from Europe is known for sounding a bit strange to unfamiliar listeners. The period has been dubbed ars nova (“new art”). The name was drawn from the title of a 1322 book long attributed to a music theorist named Philippe de Vitry, though there has been recent debate over his authorship and how much, if at all, he was involved. Philippe did contribute a number of excellent pieces to the Roman de Fauvel, so he is important as a composer, at least. In any case, the name ars nova has stuck, and it refers to the many significant changes that began to take place in French and Italian music between the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Why did these changes happen? There are many reasons, but one important cause was the development of new, more precise methods of music notation that allowed for complex rhythms to be indicated clearly. Also, many new experiments began with the use of chromatic notes (those would be the black keys on a piano). The results led to the creation of a new music that sounds familiar but also rather strange, because the melodies and harmonies don’t quite go where we would expect. In order to really appreciate it, you simply have to hear some for yourself. Do an Internet search on composers such as Guillaume de Machaut or Francesco Landini, sit back, and take in the strange and wonderful sounds.
This music, odd though it may seem, was the prelude to Renaissance music and the more “modern” sounds that we are used to. It represents the dusk of one era and the dawn of another. The style lasted until the 1370s, when something even stranger replaced it. As sometimes occurs in artistic movements, they reach their logical conclusions and then go to extremes before burning themselves out and being discarded for simpler approaches. The ars nova did exactly that, tipping into a thirty- or forty-year period in France where things just got plain weird. This new form has come to be known as the ars subtilior (“the more subtle art”). Using notational systems that were ever more accurate in recording rhythms (including differently colored musical notes to represent different rhythmic values), composers were able to create exceedingly complex music: three-part vocal pieces, for example, where each line was in a different rhythm or time signature. And the harmonies took the ars nova sensibilities to the extreme. It’s some of the most difficult and complex music in Western history until the twentieth century, and it actually inspired some of the works of twentieth-century composers when it was rediscovered.
Contained in manuscripts such as the Chantilly Codex from the late fourteenth century, the music is often beautifully notated, some of it in artistic forms such as in the shape of a heart or a circle. While the topics of most of these songs hadn’t changed much from those of the last few centuries (such as the pain of love or social commentary), there were a handful of poems that seemed to be about something quite unusual, quite unusual indeed. Let’s have a look at the words to Fumeux fume, by a composer named Solage (and that’s pretty much all we know about him):
A smoker smokes through smoke
A smoky speculation.
Is, between puffs, his thought:
A smoker smokes through smoke.
For smoking suits him very well
As long as he keeps his intention.
A smoker smokes through smoke
A smoky speculation.
What? This strange text about “smoking” is one of a number that have similar content. It seems to be about a mysterious group known as the fumeurs who are mentioned in the poetry of Eustache Deschamps (1346–1406). Deschamps was an incredibly prolific poet and diplomatic messenger to King Charles V of France; he wrote eleven volumes’ worth of material. The songs that mention the fumeurs all have texts by Deschamps. But what was he talking about?
Once again, there have been many theories. The idea of anyone “smoking” anything in those times seems unlikely, since tobacco, a New World herb, was not introduced to Europe until the sixteenth century. The more exotic and amusing explanation was that there was a “society of smokers,” young poets who had gotten a hold of and were inhaling opium or hashish and then praising its effects in their works. The problem with this theory is that those substances were usually ingested rather than smoked. On the other hand, the idea of inhaling smoke could hardly be unknown, given that fire was the only source of heat and light, and there have been some archeological finds of medieval objects similar to pipes that have traces of burnt drugs in them. It may be that such substances had some limited use as medicines in a few places that were able to obtain them from the Middle East.
Further, the music of Solage’s Fumeux fume is just so weird that many have suggested that it might perhaps have been composed under the influence of something a little stronger than French wine. Written for three male voices in a low vocal register, it features very odd harmonies and passages that are extreme even by the standards of the ars nova and the ars subtilior. Look up the composer and this song online and see if you can find a recording of it. It’s one of the weirdest things that you will ever hear. It certainly could be medieval music under the influence of a controlled substance. So, was Solage stoned? Was there a medieval summer of love in 1367?
Well, another theory is that the fumeurs were trying to have a fifth humor added to the existing four. In medieval and Renaissance medicine, the humors were the four temperaments of human personality and behavior. Belief in them went back at least as far as Hippocrates in ancient Greece. These were the fluids in the human body that had to be in balance. If they were not, then illness could result; medical treatments were designed to restore these balances. The fumeurs may have been trying to add smoke as a new humor; smoke is ephemeral, momentary, and capricious—rather like artists themselves. This idea makes sense, though unlike the other humors, smoke is foreign to the human body unless it is inhaled, which brings us right back to that question! Another translation for the word is “fuming,” and perhaps it refers to attempts to release the other humors from the body. Finally, there may not have been a group at all. Deschamps may have been merely satirical (he was known to do that quite often) and meant nothing in particular.
So, while the actual smoking of something seems unlikely, we just don’t know. Whether drug-inspired or not, the music of the ars subtilior is strange and alien to the modern listener. It represents a very brief period that burned itself out (no pun intended; well, maybe a little) quickly and in so doing gave way to new, simpler styles that would evolve over the fifteenth century into the glorious and much-loved music of the Renaissance.
4
Blood and Guts
As we’ve seen with composers, there was more than a little violence disrupting the lives of some of the great masters. From Gesualdo’s murders to Liszt’s mutilated and bloated corpse, there are bloody tales aplenty behind the makers of the world’s great music. Violence has, unfortunately, always been a part of human nature, and scholars, philosophers, theologians, and anthropologists have kicked around (small pun intended) every idea imaginable as to what makes us do what we do. Did we inherit these tendencies from ape ancestors? Did the devil make us do it? How can some people commit such despicable acts, while others aspire to such noble ones? How can the same people do both? These are problems that can’t be solved in one book. If you were hoping for that, you might be disappointed.
Instead, in this chapter we will look at some shocking instances of violence, murder, bloodletting, and reverence for the dead bordering on morbid obsession. Here we will discover the history behind a sinister fairy tale, encounter the real-life Dracula, meet musicians hired to sing for a corpse, and learn something that might make you reconsider your next hair appointment.
The malevolent Pied Piper of Hamelin
You may wonder why there is a children’s fairy tale in a more or less grown-up book about doom and gloom in the music world. Is this an attempt at family-friendly respectability amid all the gruesomeness? Not at all.
In fact, if you’ve read some fairy tales in their original forms, like the Grimm stories, you’ll find th
at they are quite—well, grim. There are none of those happy Hollywood endings where everyone sings and the lovers are reunited amid cute animals, celebrating options for two sequels and a toy line. Quite often, the original stories are more like this: A sweet little boy with the face of an angel wandered into the forest, got lost, met an evil old troll who flung him in a cooking pot and ate him. The end.
If you’re wondering where the happy ending and the group sing-along are, there are none. The moral of such a tale was often quite different from a modern story. People in those times lived much closer to the edge of death than most of us in the Western world today—with our comfy homes and access to modern medicine and clean resources—would like to think about, or probably can even imagine. Infant mortality was high, diseases had no cures, and a small wound could easily become infected and deadly. Life might indeed be nasty, brutish, and short, as Hobbes would say (the philosopher, not the tiger), and such tales served instructional purposes. In the above example it would be “don’t go into the forest alone.” The innocence of childhood that we love and treasure now is more of a Victorian invention; prior to then, children were often treated as miniature adults and were expected to behave accordingly. The wisdom of such an approach is debatable, but the fact is worth noting. Some have theorized recently that many of the Grimm stories were not intended for children at all, but were adult versions of popular tales.
With that in mind, let’s get back to the story at hand: the Pied Piper of Hamelin. It is a familiar one. In 1284 a swarm of rats descended on the hapless residents of Hamelin, a town in northern Germany. In those days rats were frequent but unwelcome visitors, so the townsfolk offered a reward to anyone who could rid them of their rodent problem. Enter a colorfully dressed piper, whose music lured the rats away and into a river where they drowned. For whatever reason (bureaucratic issues?) the town officials didn’t pay him, so the piper had his revenge, playing his pipe again and luring all of the town’s children up a hill called Koppen, which swallowed them up. Neither they nor the piper were ever seen again.
The story calls to mind some of the fairy music tales (see the chapter “Magic in Music”), suggesting that the piper may have been one of the fey (fairies) luring mortals to their doom. Certain types of fey, such as goblins, were believed to take the form of rats, so this tale might be a reflection of a long-lost folk tale.
However, there may be more real history to the whole affair. Modern Hamelin still has a street called Bungelosen Straße, wherein the children were said to have run when following the piper’s deadly tune. Interestingly, it is against the law to play music there.
In the 1980s, two researchers discovered some interesting facts while researching the story behind the folk tale. The theory they developed was that in the late thirteenth century, there were a number of migrations toward Eastern Germanic territories (mostly in modern Poland) to settle new lands. Count Nicholas von Spiegelberg, a nobleman connected with the area, looked for potential colonists among the young. Apparently he convinced a number of teenagers to join him (probably against their parents’ wishes), and they set out on a ship. It was wrecked in July 1284 and sank near the coastal town of Kopahn (also in modern Poland), killing most of the people on board. The name of the town is obviously very similar to the hill of Koppen. That this happened in the same year as the tale may well be more than coincidence.
This would seem to offer an explanation for a group of young people leaving the town en masse, following one man and later disappearing. So what of the rats? Well, there were rat removal techniques that involved the playing of a high-pitched whistle, mostly in England but also on the continent. Perhaps there was a terrible rat infestation around that time. Perhaps von Spiegelberg had some hand in helping to remove the rodents, offering piping rat removers in exchange for letting a certain number of young people go with him to establish a new colony.
We’ll never know all the details, but this story illustrates how even the most outlandish folk tales and myths can have their origins in facts and real events. Trying to convince an exterminator that you have an infestation of goblins, however, may be a bit more difficult.
The historical Dracula
Dracula, the stuff of nightmares! Bram Stoker’s late nineteenth-century classic has thrilled generations and inspired countless imitators, from Anne Rice’s controversial works to Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Stephenie Meyer’s recent Twilight series. Vampires are big business, and every year new films, books, comics, music, and games are released on the theme, some still focusing on the old Transylvanian count himself.
Vampire legends seem intertwined with the Balkans, almost a part of the landscape. But who or what inspired the legendary Dracula, a name now synonymous with evil? In fact, there was a real, living man behind Stoker’s creation. Let’s begin the search with a fifteenth-century German poet and musician named Michel Beheim.
The son of a weaver, Beheim was born in 1416 in the German state of Württemberg (Germany at the time was a collection of smaller states rather than one unified nation). He was a soldier of fortune who studied music and became a Meistersinger. These “master singers” were lyric poets and musicians whose tradition had grown out of the earlier German Minnesang (“love song”) tradition. The Meistersingers flourished from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century and kept alive the medieval practice of solo singing long after it had been replaced by other forms in France, Italy, and Spain. These professional singers belonged to guilds—like members of other trades—and were ranked according to position, standing, and length of membership.
Beheim showed a talent for writing historical epics and ballads. He was in the employ of a number of wealthy patrons, including King Ladislas V of Hungary and eventually Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III. During this time, he composed epics recounting recent events, such as ongoing crusades against the Ottoman Turks who were pushing ever farther into Eastern Europe after taking the Byzantine city of Constantinople in 1453 (today’s Istanbul in Turkey). This event had shocked the Western world and caused many nations to call for new efforts to push back the Turkish military onslaught. Indeed, some Balkan leaders were prepared to do whatever it took to achieve this, as Beheim was about to discover.
In 1462 Beheim accompanied Frederick III to Wiener Neustadt, a town south of Vienna. There he met a monk, Brother Jacob, who had fled from the region of Wallachia in modern-day southern Romania. In various discussions and interviews in the spring and summer of 1463, Beheim learned an appalling story about a cruel and vicious tyrant who had ruled Wallachia with an iron fist, terrorizing and brutalizing his subjects. His name was Vlad Dracula, also known as Ţepeş, or “the Impaler.”
Beheim must have listened in revulsion and hastily scribbled down the gory details, already imagining in his mind an epic poem that would hold his audience spellbound. By late 1463 he had produced the work, the Story of a Bloodthirsty Madman Called Dracula of Wallachia. The poem was a hit, recited (and probably sung) to the emperor that winter; nothing like mass murder to add a little Christmas cheer! The emperor apparently liked it greatly and requested a repeat performance on a number of occasions over the next few years. Through Beheim’s work, the Austrian and German courts began to get a picture of the monster that lived not far from their borders.
So what had Brother Jacob told Beheim that was so shocking? Why did the story of Vlad disseminate and pass into legend? Well, it was aided by the new printing press, which published the lurid details in what was the first mass-market circulation of a horror story. And the details were simply so shocking—even by fifteenth-century standards—that soon everyone was talking about it. Who could resist a song that opened with these lines?
Here begins a very cruel and frightening story,
About a wild, bloodthirsty madman named Dracula of Wallachia,
Of how he impaled people on wooden stakes,
And boiled their heads in kettles and skinned them alive,
And hacked them to pieces, like cabbage.
Many other horrible things are written in this poem,
Of the dreadful land that he ruled.
Vlad’s complex biography is a mixture of known historical fact, folk legend, and political propaganda. Sorting through this mess is a challenge, but a picture of the man has emerged over the past few decades. Vlad III (1431–1476) was the ruler of the province of Wallachia, a state independent from the Hungarian territories to the north, which included the more famous Transylvania. His father, Vlad II, had been known as Dracul, meaning “dragon” in old Romanian. Vlad III adopted the title Dracula, or “son of the dragon.” One of Dracula’s chief preoccupations was fending off the very real and ever-present threat of a Turkish invasion. He was also fixated on restoring what he saw as morality and honesty to a nation that had grown lax and permissive. He set about achieving these goals in several terrible ways.
His nickname, the Impaler, was very appropriate. Vlad’s favorite method of torture and execution was to impale his victims on long wooden stakes, leaving the bodies on public display to serve as a warning; they could take hours or even days to die in unimaginable agony. This was not some periodic bit of sadism in which he indulged; it was a wholesale obsession. It is possible that tens of thousands perished under his harsh rule, most by impalement and some in equally repulsive ways. Beheim writes of a group of merchants who didn’t obey his trade laws:
He impaled some, and others he assembled in a huge cauldron,
With holes in the lid, so that they could peer out.
He ordered that boiling water be poured over them,
And boiled them alive.
Of course, not all of his courtiers approved, and Dracula had a response for them: