by Will Durant
Of all pastimes the best beloved was the dance. “After dinner,” says Rabelais, “they all went tag-rag together to the willowy grove, where, on the green grass, to the sound of merry flutes and pleasant bagpipes, they danced so gallantly that it was a sweet and heavenly sport to see.”85 So in England, on May Day, villagers gathered round a gaily decorated Maypole, danced their lusty rustic measures, and then, it appears, indulged in intimacies reminiscent of the Roman festival of Flora, goddess of flowers. Under Henry VIII the May games usually included the morris (i.e., Moorish) dance, which had come from the Spanish Moors via the Spanish fandango with castanets. Students danced so boisterously at Oxford and Cambridge that William of Wykeham had to forbid the ecstasy near chapel statuary. Luther approved of dancing, and relished especially the “square dance, with friendly bows, embracings, and hearty swinging of the partners.” 86 The grave Melanchthon danced; and at Leipzig, in the sixteenth century, the city fathers regularly held a ball to permit students to become acquainted with the “most honorable and elegant daughters of magnates, senators, and citizens.”87 Charles VI often led (balait) the ballet or dance at the French court; Catherine de Médicis brought Italian dancers to France, and there, in the later days of that unhappy queen mother, dancing developed new aristocratic forms. “Dancing,” said Jean Tabourot, in one of the oldest books on one of the oldest arts, “is practiced in order to see whether lovers are healthy and suitable for one another; at the end of a dance the gentleman is permitted to kiss his mistress, in order that he may ascertain if she has agreeable breath. In this manner... dancing becomes necessary for the good government of society.”88 It was through its accompaniment of the dance that music developed from its vocal and choral forms into the instrumental compositions that have made it the dominating art of our time.
CHAPTER XXXIV
Music
1300–1564
I. THE INSTRUMENTS
THE popularity of music in these centuries corrects the somber note that history tends to give them; every now and then, through the excitement and bitterness of the religious revolution, we hear people singing. “I care nothing for the pleasures of food, gaming, and love,” wrote the passionate printer Étienne Dolet; “music alone... takes me prisoner, holds me fast, dissolves me in ecstasy.”1 From the pure note of a girl’s voice or a perfect flute to the polyphonic counterpoint of Deprès or Palestrina, every nation and class redeemed with music the commercialism and theology of the age. Not only did everyone sing; Francesco Landino complained that everyone composed.2 Between the merry or plaintive folk songs of the village and the solemn High Masses of the Church a hundred forms of music lent their harmony to dances, ballets, banquets, courtships, courts, processions, pageants, plays, and prayers. The world sang.
The merchants of Antwerp were escorted daily to the Bourse by a band. Kings studied music as no feminine or mechanical prerogative but as a mark and fount of civilization. Alfonso X of Spain sedulously and lovingly collected songs to the Virgin—Cantigas de Santa Maria. James IV of Scotland wooed Margaret Tudor with clavichord and lute; Charles VIII of France took the royal choir with him on his campaigns in Italy; Louis XII sang tenor in the court choir; Leo X composed French chansons;3 Henry VIII and Francis I courted and challenged each other with rival choirs on the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Luis Milan described Portugal in 1540 as “a veritable sea of music.”4 The court of Matthias Corvinus at Buda had a choir rated equal to the pope’s, and there was a good school of music under Sigismund II in Cracow. Germany was bursting with song in Luther’s youth. “We have singers here in Heidelberg,” wrote Alexander Agricola in 1484, “whose leader composes for eight or twelve voices.”5 At Mainz, Nuremberg, Augsburg, and elsewhere the Meistersinger continued to adorn popular songs and Biblical passages with the pomp of pedantry and the jewelry of counterpoint. The German folk songs were probably the best in Europe. Everywhere music was the prod of piety and the lure of love.
Although nearly all music in this age was vocal, the accompanying instruments were as diverse as in a modern orchestra. There were string instruments like psalteries, harps, dulcimers, shawms, lutes, and viols; wind instruments like flutes, oboes, bassoons, trumpets, trombones, cornets, and bagpipes; percussion instruments like drums, bells, clappers, cymbals, and castanets; keyboard instruments like organs, clavichords, harpsichords, spinets, virginals; there were many more; and of many there were fascinating variants in place and time. Every educated home had one or more musical instruments, and some homes had special cabinets to hold them. Often they were works of art, fondly carved or fancifully formed, and they were handed down as treasures and memories from generation to generation. Some organs were as elaborately designed as Gothic cathedral fronts; so the men who built the organs for the Sebalduskirche and the Lorenzkirche in Nuremberg became “immortal” for a century. The organ was the chief but not the only instrument used in churches; flutes, pipes, drums, trombones, even kettledrums might add their incongruous summons to adoration.
The favorite accompaniment for the single voice was the lute. Like all string instruments, it had an Asiatic origin. It came into Spain with the Moors, and there, as the vihuela, it rose to the dignity of a solo instrument, for which the earliest known purely instrumental music was composed. Usually its body was made of wood and ivory, and shaped like a pear; its belly was pierced with holes in the pattern of a rose; it had six—sometimes twelve—pairs of strings, which were plucked by the fingers; its neck was divided by frets of brass into a measured scale, and its pegbox was turned back from the neck. When a pretty girl held a lute in her lap, strummed its strings, and added her voice to its tones, Cupid could save an arrow. However, it was difficult to keep the lute in tune, for the constant pull of the strings tended to warp the frame, and one wit said of an old lutanist that sixty of his eighty years had been spent in tuning his instrument.6
The viol differed from the lute in having its strings stretched over a bridge and played by a bow, but the principle was the same—the vibration of taut struck strings over a box perforated to deepen sound. Viols came in three sizes: the large bass viola da gamba, held between the legs like its modern replacement, the violoncello; the small tenor viola da braccio, held on the arm; and a treble viol. During the sixteenth century the viola da braccio evolved into the violin, and in the eighteenth the viol passed out of use.
The only European invention in musical instruments was the keyboard, by which the strings were indirectly struck instead of being directly plucked or bowed. The oldest known form, the clavichord, made its debut in the twelfth century and survived to be “well tempered” by Johann Sebastian Bach; the oldest extant example (1537) is in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. In the fifteenth century a sturdier variant took form in the harpsichord; this allowed modifications of tone through differences of pressure; sometimes a second keyboard extended the gamut, and stops and couplers offered new marvels of sound. The spinet and virginal were Italian and English variants of the harpsichord. These keyboard instruments, like the viol and the lute, were prized for their beauty as well as their tone, and formed a graceful element of decoration in well-to-do homes.
As instruments improved in range and quality of tone and in complexity of operation, more and more training and skill were required to play them successfully; an audience grew for performances of one or more instruments without voices, and virtuosos appeared for the organ and the lute. Conrad Paumann (d. 1473), the blind organist of Nuremberg, traveled from court to court giving recitals whose excellence knighted him. Such developments encouraged the composition of music for instruments alone. Till the fifteenth century nearly all instrumental music had apparently been intended to accompany voices or dances, but in that century several paintings show musicians playing with no visible singing or dancing. The oldest surviving music for instruments alone is the Fundamentum organisandi (1452) of Conrad Paumann, which was composed primarily as a guide to organ playing, but contained also a number of pieces for solo performance. Ottavia
no dei Petrucci’s application of movable metal types to the printing of music (1501) lowered the cost of publishing instrumental and other compositions. Music written for dances lent itself to independent presentation; hence the influence of dance forms on instrumental music; the suite of “movements” composed for a succession of dances led to the symphony and the chamber music quartet, whose parts sometimes retained dance names. The lute, viol, organ, and harpsichord were favored for solo or orchestral performances. Alberto da Ripa achieved such fame as a lutanist at the court of Francis I and Henry II that when he died (1551) the poets of France warbled dirges to his remains.
II. THE FLEMISH ASCENDANCY: 1430-1590
The songs and dances of the people were the perennial fountain from which nonecclesiastical forms of music took their origin, moods, and themes, and even Masses might stem from such ditties as Adieu mes amours. The chansons of France ranged from the lilting lays of street singers and the ballads of troubadours to the intricate polyphonic chants of Guillaume de Machaut and Josquin Deprès.
Machaut (c. 1300–77) was the lord of that ars nova which Philippe de Vitry had expounded in 13 2 5—music using binary rhythms in addition to the triple rhythms sanctioned by the ars antiqua and the Church. Machaut was poet, a scholar, a musician, a canon of Reims Cathedral, probably also a man of ardor, for he wrote some amorous lyrics whose warmth has not yet cooled. He excelled in a dozen musical forms—ballads, roundels, virelays, motets, Masses; to him we trace the oldest polyphonic Mass composed by one man. Though an ecclesiastic, he shared in the movement to secularize polyphonic music, to lead it from the orthodox rhythms of the motet and the High Mass to the freer, more flexible cantilena of secular song.
In those centuries the English were musical. They did not rival the Italians in melody (who has?), nor the Flemings in polyphony, but their songs now and then touched a strain of tenderness and delicacy equaled only in the profoundest French chansons. English singers were acclaimed at the Council of Constance, and in that generation Henry V, hero of Agincourt, composed a Mass whose Gloria and Sanctus are still preserved. The compositions of John Dunstable (c. 1370–1453) were sung from Scotland to Rome, and played a part in forming the style of the Flemish school.
As Flanders had set the pace in painting in the fifteenth century, so it was there, in a milieu of prosperous and art-loving nobles and burghers, that music had one of its most exuberant periods. “Today,” wrote Johannes Verwere about 1490, “we have blossoming forth, quite apart from a large number of famous singers... an almost unlimited number of composers” whose works “excel in pleasant sound; I never hear or look at their compositions without rejoicing in them.”7 Contemporaries would probably have ranked Dufay, Okeghem, and Deprès quite on a par with Jan van Eyck, Claus Sluter, and Rogier van der Weyden in the hierarchy of genius and beneficence. Here, in Flemish polyphony, Western Europe lived the last phase of the Gothic spirit in art—religious devotion tempered with secular gaiety, forms firm in base and structure, fragile and delicate in development and ornament. Even Italy, so hostile to Gothic, joined Western Europe in acknowledging the supremacy of Flemish music, and in seeking maestri from Flanders for episcopal choirs and princely courts. Emperor Maximilian I, enchanted by the music of Brussels, formed a choir in Vienna on Flemish models. Charles V took Flemish musicians to Spain; Archduke Ferdinand took some to Austria, Christian II others to Denmark; “the fountain of music,” said the Venetian Cavallo, “is in the Netherlands.”8 Through this Flemish ascendancy professional music escaped the narrowing nationalism of the age.
Guillaume Dufay led the way. Born in Hainaut (c. 1399), trained as a boy chorister in the cathedral of Cambrai, he was called to Rome to sing in the Sistine Chapel; then, back in Cambrai, he raised its choir to international renown; the Masses that he composed there were sung in all the musical centers of Latin Christendom. Those that survive sound heavy and slow to ears alert to the light celerity of modern life, yet they may have fitted well in stately cathedrals or solemn papal choirs. More to our mood is a polyphonic song of mellifluous melancholy, Le jour s’endort—“The day is going to sleep.” We picture a robed chorus singing such a chant in the Gothic halls of Cambrai, Ypres, Brussels, Bruges, Ghent, or Dijon, and we perceive that the architecture, painting, costumes, music, and manners of that warm and colorful and pompous age made a harmonious artistic whole, being themselves variations on one pervasive theme.
Dufay’s methods were developed, and were broadcast through Europe, by the most influential musical teacher of perhaps any time. Johannes Okeghem, born in Flanders (c. 1430), spent most of his years providing music, and musical education, at the court of France. His special passion was for the “canon”—a form of fugue in which the words and melody sung by the first voice were repeated, several bars later, by a second voice, later by a third, and so on, in a flowing counterpoint whose laborious complexity challenged the singers and charmed the composers. These ran to him from every Roman Catholic land to learn and carry off his skill. “Through his pupils,” wrote an old historian, “the art” of contrapuntal and “canonical” polyphony “was transplanted into all countries; and he must be regarded—for it can be proved by [stylistic] genealogy—as the founder of all schools from his own to the present age”;9 but since this was written in 1833, Okeghem cannot be held responsible for twentieth-century music. At his death (1495) the musicians of Europe wrote motets to his memory, and Erasmus a “Lamentation.” The names of even the “immortals” are writ in water.
His pupils became the musical leaders of the next generation. Coming from Hainaut to Paris, Josquin Deprès spent years studying with Okeghem, then served as maestro di capella—“master of the chapel” choir—in Florence, Milan, and Ferrara. For Duke Ercole I he wrote a Miserere that soon resounded throughout Western Europe. After six years in the Sistine Chapel Choir he returned to Paris (1494) to serve as maître de chapelle for Louis XII. One of his noblest works was his Déploration de Jehan Okeghem, a dirge for his dead teacher. For a time he followed him in composing Masses and motets in canonic style, piling voice upon voice in almost mathematical problems of sequence and harmony. When his skill was complete, and his supremacy in “art music” was unquestioned, he tired of technique, and wrote motets, hymns, and secular songs in a simpler harmonic style, in which the music followed and illuminated the words instead of torturing them on a Protean canon, or stretching a syllable into a song. When both teacher and pupil were gone it became customary to call Okeghem the Donatello, Deprès the Michelangelo, of musical art.
The French court cultivated music as the finest flower of wealth and power. A lovely tapestry dated about 1500, and now in the Musée des Gobelins at Paris, pictures four women, three vouths, and a bald monk grouped in a garden around a fountain; one lad is playing a lute, a girl plays a viol, a staid lady plays a portable organ. French poets intended their lyrics to be sung; an Académie du Palais devoted itself to promoting the union between music and poetry; and even now one without the other seems incomplete. Clément Jannequin, a pupil of Deprès’, excelled in descriptive chansons; his Chant de l’alouette, or “Song of the Lark” (1521), still warbles over several continents.
Spanish music reflected the piety and gallantry of the people. Cross-fertilized by Arabic, Italian, Provençal, French, and Flemish influences, this art ranged from melancholy Morisco monodies to stately polyphonic Masses in the Flemish style. One of the greatest composers of the sixteenth century, Cristóbal Morales, carried polyphony to high excellence, and transmitted his art to his more famous pupil, Tomás Luis de Victoria. By contrast the Arabic heritage produced just the strains to fit the lute. Luis de Milan and Miguel de Fuenllana composed for the vihuela—and performed on it—songs that rivaled the German Lieder in range and power.
The conquest of Italy by Flemish musicians continued to the rise of Palestrina. Heinrich Ysaac, after absorbing the contrapuntal art in Flanders, was brought to Florence by Lorenzo de’ Medici to teach II Magnifico’s children; he stayed there f
ourteen years, and composed music for Lorenzo’s songs. Disturbed by the French invasion of Italy, he passed into the service of Maximilian I at Innsbruck, where he shared in giving form to the Lieder. In 1502 he returned to Italy, pensioned by the Emperor and his former pupil, Leo X. His Masses, motets, and songs—above all his Choralis Constantinus, fifty-eight four-part settings for the Offices of the Mass throughout the religious year—were ranked with the highest music of the age.
Orlando di Lasso brought the Flemish school to its culmination, and illustrated, in his triumphant career, the geographical range and rising social status of Renaissance musicians. As a boy chorister in his native Hainaut, he so fascinated his hearers that he was twice abducted by those who hoped to profit from his voice; finally, in his fifteenth year (1545?) his parents allowed Ferdinand Gonzaga to take him to Italy. At the age of twenty-three he became choirmaster in the church of St. John Lateran in Rome. In 1555 he settled in Antwerp, and published his First Book of Italian Madrigals, secular lyrics dressed in all the frills of Flemish counterpoint. In the same year he issued a miscellany of villanelles (songs of Neapolitan origin), French chansons, and four religious motets; this collection well reflected the judicious oscillation of Di Lasso’s life between profane enjoyment and melodious penitence. We get a glimpse of his environment at Antwerp in the dedication of a motet to Cardinal Pole, and another to Cardinal Granvelle, minister to Philip II in the Netherlands. Probably it was Granvelle who arranged the young composer’s engagement to assist in directing the ducal choir at Munich (1556). Orlando came to like Bavaria as much as Italy, took his wife from one as he had taken his name from the other, and served the Bavarian dukes till his death.