Let’s start with C again. We’ll count up three steps and find ourselves at E, a major third. But if we carry on up another three steps, from E to G, we have created a minor third. If we play all three notes together we hear both a major and a minor chord at the same time. This combination of major and minor thirds is called a triad, and triads are the bread and butter of all music with harmony. Triads are what create the logic and the power of the harmony in ‘Amazing Grace’, and in pretty much every other tune you’ve ever heard. Triads are the chords around which every harmonic, or chordal, journey is structured, in virtually all the Western music written between the early fifteenth century and our own time.
Discovering the power of triads was like discovering a chemical reaction or a miracle cure. Composers immediately sensed that something transformative had happened; all of a sudden their harmony started obeying laws of attraction and repulsion, whether they liked it or not. The most popular triad progressions have been used over and over again, century after century.
John Dunstaple used triads abundantly in his music, and his fame spread rapidly across Europe after he travelled to France with Henry V’s army. Dunstaple was a composer with a new and enchanting style that everyone wanted to emulate, and musicians fell over themselves praising the startling new sound of English triads. Dunstaple was dubbed the forts et origo of the triadic craze, the ‘fount and origin’ of what the French called ‘the English countenance’. Just as we might call Dunstaple’s contemporary Geoffrey Chaucer the father of English literature, so we should call John Dunstaple the father of the triad, and therefore of the Western harmonic system.
As the fifteenth century drew on, the various Franco-Flemish courts of the Dukes of Burgundy became the artistic powerhouses of northern Europe, and it was here that Dunstaple’s new cocktail of chords really took off. Its best-known champion was Guillaume Dufay (c. 1397–1474), by far the most celebrated composer of the fifteenth century – more so than the pioneer Dunstaple – in both sacred and secular music. It is in Dufay’s body of work, from his rabble-rousing Crusader song and spin-off Mass, L’Homme armé (The Armed Man), to his humblest, most heart-melting ballads such as ‘Se la face ay pale’, that we see laid out the essential ingredients that characterise the great sweep of Western music that followed. Dufay builds an identifiable melody, nestled among harmonious chords that lead along the arc of a phrase towards a satisfying cadence. He has a metrically organised rhythmic structure, able to support the shape of the words of a poem, successfully allowing important stress syllables or rhymes to fall at the appropriate point in the music.
Most of all, Dufay’s music sounds, at last, familiar to us. It doesn’t sound distant, antique, exotically quirky, with strange tuning and asymmetrical, jerky rhythms. It doesn’t sound as if someone’s making it up on the spot. It is carefully designed and proportioned, and yet it flows with graceful ease. It aspires to be both a work of art and something instantly accessible to anyone’s ear, for the sheer pleasure of it. Unsurprisingly, Dufay’s songs spread from city to city even before the ready availability of printing; although he composed for noblemen and the Church, his work suggested a more democratic, accessible future for music than had ever been envisaged before.
By the mid-fifteenth century, Western music was a dynamic, confident art form. Armed with harmony, rhythm, a large palette of chords, and most importantly the ability to write all of these down, its most innovative sounds expanded rapidly throughout Europe. But this period of hectic experiment was under threat: a religious storm was whipping up across the continent and music was in its path. In the century following the death of Dufay, life for composers whose livelihoods depended on the Church was to become both dangerous and unpredictable.
2
The Age of Penitence
1450–1650
WHEN WE CONSIDER EUROPE in the period 1450 to 1650 from the distance of our own century, it looks like an age of rampant intolerance – of religious bigotry, state-sponsored terror, continuous war and bloodshed, famine, slavery, population displacement and, for most people, unrelenting misery. Even the discovery of new worlds, to the east and to the west, which one would imagine to be both positive and mind-broadening, was accompanied by genocide of the most sickening kind. Cortés’s arrival in Mexico in 1519 with a few boatloads of priests and soldiers, for instance, was the cue for the deaths of between ten and twenty million Aztecs within fifty years, thanks to religion-endorsed slaughter, and the unwitting introduction of African smallpox and European influenza.
All that stands in the way of our assessment of our sixteenth-and seventeenth-century ancestors as cruel, barbaric monsters is what they produced in art, poetry, architecture and music. And the beauty and delicacy of the cultural riches of those bloodthirsty centuries are nothing short of miraculous.
In music, composers tried to come to terms with their times by imagining a compassionate and suffering God, despite precious little evidence for his presence in their world, by aspiring to capture the elation and sadness of human love, and by trying to create in their music a sanctuary of beauty and sensitivity. Perhaps more than ever, musicians felt compelled to offer humanity a better vision of itself. The music we have inherited from the years 1450 to 1650, therefore, gives us an emotional subtext to a period of history that otherwise looks rather like the high-water mark of Europe’s deadly experiment with religious fundamentalism.
The year 1450 is best remembered for one of the most important technological breakthroughs of human civilisation: Johannes Gutenberg’s development of a moveable-type printing press in the German town of Mainz. Without it, it is inconceivable that the next most important event of the period, Martin Luther’s reforming challenge to the Roman Catholic Church in 1517, would have taken off with quite the same dramatic speed and effect. Both these epoch-changing events were to have huge implications for the dissemination and transformation of music.
Gutenberg’s printing press coincided with and gave impetus to the general artistic, literary and scientific movement called the Renaissance, which had its origins in the fourteenth century but which blossomed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is best to use the term very cautiously when applying it to music, however. There are several reasons for this. One is that music followed its own timetable, a timetable that does not fit neatly with developments in art, architecture, design, philosophy and science. Another is that, whereas in those other fields, the balmy political hotchpotch of Italy was without doubt the epicentre and dynamo of the renewed interest in antiquity, especially the culture of Ancient Greece, it was the Franco-Flemish and English spheres of influence in the chilly north of Europe that dominated fifteenth-century music. While the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 had a major impact on literature and architecture, as Christian Greek scholars laden with Ancient Greek manuscripts and artefacts fled their Ottoman conquerors and arrived in Italy, this cultural relocation seems to have had very little effect on music. More important to Italy’s musical enrichment than the cultural salvage from Constantinople was the importing, at vast expense, of skilled and celebrated Flemish composers.
One such well-paid immigrant was Josquin des Prez, born in Burgundy in 1450 on what is now the Franco-Belgian border, who was tempted away to the Italian city of Ferrara, where he spent most of his adult life. In terms of pure sound, Josquin could not be described as a radical. He simply carried on where Dufay left off, thickening and embellishing the polyphonic choral style that you would have heard almost anywhere across Europe in the later fifteenth century. But in one vital respect Josquin made a departure, and one that was to become a hallmark of the music of the age.
Josquin was the first composer in history for whom the meaning of the words being sung was paramount. He was the first to bring out and express that meaning in the way in which he set words to music. Small wonder that the majority of pieces he composed for the Church were called ‘motets’, a word derived from the French mot (word). Small wonder, too, that this period saw a new
found interest in words: thanks to the invention of the printing press, books of all kinds were appearing everywhere, stimulating an appetite both for poetry and for greater personal analysis and understanding of the Bible.
Josquin’s motet Miserere mei, Deus composed in about 1503, shows us how far the musical treatment of texts had come since the death of Dufay. The motet had been commissioned by the Duke of Ferrara, Josquin’s employer, who was grieving the recent loss of a man close to him. Josquin was asked to compose something in this friend’s memory, to be performed by the Ferrara Chapel Choir and quite possibly the duke himself in the role of tenor. It might have been a straightforward job if the deceased had been anyone else, but he was in fact an incredibly controversial character named Girolamo Savonarola. This Dominican friar from Ferrara had sought to challenge what he saw as the moral bankruptcy of the Catholic Church, launching a bloody crusade in Florence – where he was for a while the city’s self-proclaimed spiritual and political leader – in opposition to its supposed decadence. It was Savonarola who instigated the Bonfire of the Vanities in Florence in 1497, in which books, pictures, cosmetics, sculptures, mirrors, and indeed anything encouraging or depicting sensuous pleasure, were thrown on to a huge fire. His uncompromising crusade brought him into direct confrontation with the Vatican. He was arrested and tortured on the order of Pope Alexander VI and finally burnt alive in May 1498, on the very same site in Florence where he had lit his infamous Bonfire.
During his imprisonment and lengthy torture he wrote a prayer of contrition to God, Infelix ego (I am desolate), the text of which spread rapidly, and subversively, across Europe. This prayer, which asks God’s forgiveness for having confessed under torture to crimes he did not commit, was based on Psalm 51, Miserere mei, Deus. Its tone of both remorse and defiance was to be an inspiration to the Humanist theologian and scholar Erasmus and the soon-to-be founder of Protestantism, Martin Luther.
This was the politically sensitive text Josquin was asked to set to music, in tribute to the Duke of Ferrara’s friend. There would be no way of disguising its meaning. Setting aside the fact that Pope Alexander VI was his former employer, Josquin threw himself into the commission. His first task was to make sure that the words were always clearly audible. This meant abandoning the centuries-old trend of writing whimsically long stretches of melody attached to just one syllable of text, the so-called ‘melismatic’ style (from the Greek melos, melody) that underpins most plainsong and indeed much soulful singing of the modern era, as exemplified by Mariah Carey.
In the first few bars of Josquin’s motet, therefore, each voice utters the simple phrase, Miserere mei, Deus, (Have mercy on me, Lord), one by one, a note for each syllable. Josquin repeats this phrase throughout the piece in two equally effective ways, either as a cascading figure, like falling tears, voice overlapping voice as they descend, or by stopping all individual activity (counterpoint) and having the voices sing in block chords together.
Slowing down the movement or arresting the vocal parts were not the only ways in which Josquin manipulated his motet to draw attention to its meaning. There was another process at work in the block-chord sections that would have sounded attractively new to people of the day. He was beginning to use harmony as a way of ‘locking down’ the music’s centre of gravity, creating a sense of ‘home’ in the music via a method we nowadays call a system of keys.
The term ‘key’ in music is a misleading one. The best way of describing musical keys is as families of notes.
All the world’s music systems have gradually grouped notes into families, finding (or possibly imagining) that certain associations of notes, if used as the basis for melodies, evoked different moods. In Indian Classical music, for example, this process resulted in the establishing of ragas, of which there are different kinds for different times of day, for different seasons, for special occasions or for particular emotional states. In Western music, the grouping of notes into families began with the Ancient Greeks, who gave each of the note-families, which they called tonoi or harmoniai, the name of a certain tribe or locality. Thus, the Phrygian tonos was named after the Phrygian area of Anatolia, in modern Turkey. (Ironically, even the greatest Greek theorists could not agree on how the Phrygians’ character was reflected in the mood, sound or effect of this tonos. Aristotle associated it with excitement, enthusiasm and hedonism, whereas Plato proposed that the ethos of the Phrygian tonos might help soldiers make wise, sober decisions.)
The medieval Church sought to bring order to the great body of plainchant across Christendom in around the eighth century by borrowing from the Greek idea of tonoi, laying down ‘modes’ that confusingly appropriated the outdated Greek regional names but applied them to new note-families – so the Ancient Greek Phrygian tonoi and the medieval Church Phrygian tonus (mode) are made up of different notes. One possible explanation for this may be that the Western branch of Christianity took certain elements of its note-family system from the Eastern Byzantine system of modes, called Oktōēchos. The church modes, like their Greek forerunners, were ascribed certain moods, and a great deal of theoretical energy was expended over hundreds of years describing their effect and their best possible application.
Modes persisted as a system of organising notes into families well beyond the medieval period, only yielding to the newer definition of ‘keys’ in the late seventeenth century, as we shall see when we get there. For now, it is enough to know that modes in Western sacred music, for all their supposed characteristics, were far more ambiguous than the modern key system; the sense of ‘home’ in a piece of chant was not particularly reinforced. Sixteenth-century composers like Josquin were the agents of change, as they began to weaken the modal system. The introduction of harmony also played a vital role here, since the modes of the Ancient Greeks, the Indian ragas, the Byzantine Church and the Roman Church had primarily been designed for solo, unaccompanied melodies; harmony invited notes from outside the family group to infiltrate the texture of a piece.
But for Josquin, chordal harmony was too useful a tool in illuminating the text to worry about its effect on the modes. As he started to emphasise the feeling of stability and home in his harmony, he was (albeit unwittingly) ushering in their replacement: keys. In Miserere mei he repeatedly causes the flow of the music to come to rest on cadences, affirming its centre of gravity. This motet is a reasonably long one for the period, and so he also moves the ‘home’ of the music to new places during the piece, returning at the very end to where he started. But despite its hints at the shift from modes to keys, Miserere mei is still framed within the medieval Phrygian mode, often noted for its air of melancholy. It would fall to later composers to take more daring liberties with harmony.
The pervading atmosphere of sorrowfulness in much of Josquin’s music, whether applied to sacred music or secular songs of unhappy love, is typical of his strife-filled time. His best-known secular song was ‘Mille regretz’ (A thousand regrets), which is full of self-pity at having abandoned his beloved. Similarly mournful love songs were cropping up all over Europe during this period, their woeful lyrics gaining popularity in courts, noble houses, and other places where a sheet of printed music could be afforded. (The first printed music we know about had appeared in 1476 – a piece of plainsong printed by the Roman Ulrich Han – but in around 1500 a Venetian printer named Ottaviano Petrucci began publishing songbooks using moveable type, which accelerated the dissemination of printed music throughout the continent, expensive though it was.)
Meanwhile, in the England of Henrys VII and VIII, both the songs of the nobility and those of ordinary lads and lasses shared many of the same preoccupations: courting (the great difficulties of); and nature (how best used to describe the great difficulties of courting). A list of the most popular English songs of the Tudor period reads like a litany of love-gone-wrong plaints:
‘That was my woe’
‘Woefully arrayed’
‘Absent I am’
‘Adew, adew, my harti
s lust’
‘I love unloved’
‘I love, loved, and loved wolde I be’
But it was not all misery and heartbreak at the turn of the sixteenth century. Henry VIII’s own composition ‘Pastyme with good companye’ was a favourite, and there were other jaunty numbers to enjoy alongside it, such as ‘Hey Trolly Lolly Lo!’ ‘Hoyda Hoyda’, ‘Jolly Rutterkin’, ‘Mannerly Margery’, ‘Milk and Ale’ and ‘Be Peace! Ye Make Me Spill My Ale!’ (a prelude to violence, I fear). Despite the popular story, however, ‘Greensleeves’ was definitely not written by Henry, serial wife-dispatcher and part-time musician; indeed, it is likely to have become well known in England long after his death. A more likely candidate for its authorship is composer-poet William Cornysh (1465–1523), who wrote regularly for Henry’s court and for state occasions, including the strange mix of fashion and politics that was the Field of the Cloth of Gold (1520). Cornysh’s other songs make remarkably similar use of chords and exude the same plaintive air as ‘Greensleeves’, his most famous being ‘Ah, Robyn, Gentle Robyn’, in which the forlorn singer asks an unusually intelligent and communicative robin for advice on the constancy of women.
Unsurprisingly, church music was a rather more sombre affair, and the ordinary churchgoer prior to the Protestant Reformation is likely to have found singing in church a miserable, largely non-participatory activity. To ask forgiveness, repeatedly, was what congregations were mostly expected to do, all the while listening to choirs and priests singing at great length about the same sentiment.
The only time in the year when the religious misery lifted was Christmas, whose relatively frivolous-seeming contribution to Western music – the Christmas carol – was to have a transformative effect on the development of both melody and communal music-making.
The Story of Music: From Babylon to the Beatles: How Music Has Shaped Civilization Page 5