The Story of Music: From Babylon to the Beatles: How Music Has Shaped Civilization

by Howard Goodall

  In late 1539, Henry VIII’s representative in the Venetian Republic, Edmond Harvel, engaged four members of the same family, the Bassanos, to travel to England to establish a royal consort there on the instructions of chief minister Thomas Cromwell. The brothers duly took up their posts the following spring (on 2s.4d. each a day), joined by another brother already resident. The experiment was clearly successful enough to encourage Henry to invite a second group from Venice (or possibly Milan) to add to the ensemble later in 1540. These multi-instrumentalist musicians are likely to have had sets of both violins and viols with them even at the outset of their lifelong careers at the Tudor court, but certainly by 1545 official documents record them as having violins. Henry’s Venetian immigrants are noteworthy for the influence they brought to bear on the home-grown composers Thomas Tallis and William Byrd – of whom more shortly – but their invigorating effect on English music is nothing compared to the long-term consequences of the arrival, in the same period, of Italian violinists at the French court.

  Italian fashion dominated the reign of King Henry II of France, thanks to his wife, Catherine de Medici, whose role in the arts of sixteenth-century France is hard to exaggerate. Crowned queen a year after purchasing the 1546 Amati violins, she introduced to the French court what amounted to a complete lifestyle after the Italian fashion. She imported Italian furniture, artefacts, couture, jewellery, paintings, sculpture and architecture. She wore some of the world’s earlier high-heeled shoes, the first ‘designer’ perfumes, and owned the first side-saddle to allow women to ride as adeptly as men. Her personal library contained thousands of rare manuscripts. Unusually for a woman of the period, she was as knowledgeable about the sciences as she was the arts: she was the patron of Nostradamus, had observatories constructed to read the stars, and one of her closest confidants was the Florentine astrologer Cosimo Ruggeri. She more or less invented the concept of table etiquette and manners; her Italian chefs gave the French a taste for complicated, fine cuisine, presenting them with hundreds of new dishes, sauces and delicacies: veal, guinea fowl, truffles, artichokes, broccoli, green beans, peas, melons, macaroons, sorbet, zabaglione and ice cream. Most important for our purposes, she staged spectacular pageants at Fontainebleau, Chenonceau and other grand châteaux she had had constructed along Italian lines.

  The aim of Catherine de Medici’s pageants was undoubtedly political: to impress upon the warring nobility the God-granted power of the Valois monarchy, to distract them from scheming, and to use them as platforms for her relentless diplomacy. The ‘magnificences’ she oversaw at the French court had many components, from jousting tournaments and firework displays to water fêtes and mock battles. Above all, though, she adored dance, believing it would teach her courtiers elegance, decorum and a respect for order. To this end she recruited Italian dancers, choreographers and a band of violinists, playing on the very instruments she had ordered for her son from Cremona. The director of her violin band was the Italian-born choreographer, composer, conductor and violinist Balthasar de Beaujoyeulx. With Beaujoyeulx, Catherine conceived what have come to be accepted as the world’s first formal ballets. The most famous of these, the Ballet Comique de la Reine, staged in Paris in September 1581 as part of royal wedding festivities, lasted from ten in the evening till three the next morning and interwove geometric dance patterns involving representations of Mercury, Pan, Minerva, Jupiter and the evil sorceress Circe from Homer’s Odyssey, an ensemble of water and wood nymphs, recited verse, singing and instrumental music by Lambert de Beaulieu, and sensational scenic effects and transformations.

  The choreographed steps themselves were adapted versions of the social court dances of the sixteenth century, typically grouped in pairs such as the French pavane and galliard or the Italian passamezzo and saltarello, as well as the popular allemandes and courantes. Such grouping together of dance movements, accompanied by a string ensemble, was to play an important part in the evolution of the Suite and its successors the Sonata, the Concerto and even the Symphony, as we shall see in the next chapter. Thus the Ballet Comique de la Reine can be viewed as a significant landmark not just in the history of ballet, but also in that of instrumental music.

  Around the same time that the violin began its conquest of Europe, keyboard technology was also undergoing rapid advancement. This is no coincidence: keyboard instruments of this period used a keyboard layout borrowed from the organ to pluck the strings of, ideally, some kind of lute or a harp lying on its side in a box. This kind of mechanism, known as a harpsichord by the sixteenth century, was first mentioned in a court document from Padua in 1397 and first depicted in a 1425 altarpiece in Minden, Germany, but the oldest surviving example of an actual instrument – lacking its important inner workings – is in the Royal College of Music in London and dates from the late fifteenth century. The harpsichord’s heyday lasted from this period until the piano gained popularity in the mid-eighteenth century. The oldest surviving complete harpsichord dates from 1521 and is Italian, the sophistication of its mechanism suggesting that the techniques for making harpsichords were already extremely well advanced by then.

  At home, in England, Holland or France, those of considerable means might own a smaller relative of the harpsichord, a virginal – or, rather, a pair of virginals, since it was played with two hands, even if it clearly looked like one piece of furniture. Henry VIII, who knew an exciting new gadget when he saw one, ordered five in 1530. As with the many-stringed lute – which is so challenging to play that it developed its own unique musical notation, tablature, a graphic representation of the strings and frets that is still in use today – the beauty of this keyboard instrument was that, with practice, you could play relatively complex interweaving lines of music at the same time. But the harpsichord allowed greater flexibility and ease of movement than the lute, so it should not surprise us that the sixteenth century saw the emergence of bespoke music intended just for instruments, rather than for instruments as an accompaniment to voices. Likewise the keyboard music of sixteenth-century English composers Thomas Tallis, William Byrd and John Redford, which was originally intended to be sung, was soon adapted, by them and others, into music tailor-made for the virginals. Instrument-specific music seems commonplace to us now, but it was a real novelty during this period, and one which was rapidly taken up by composers on mainland Europe. This new style of music was often wilfully difficult so as to show off the dexterous virtuosity of the player – a habit that became an epidemic in the following centuries, especially when the composer and player were one and the same awe-inspiring artist.

  For sheer technological complexity, though, no sixteenth-century instrument comes near the organ. As we have already seen, the earliest organs were invented by the Ancient Greeks, but it is nonetheless often (rightly) claimed that, before the Industrial Revolution, the clock and the organ were mankind’s two most complicated machines. The world’s oldest playable organ, in the basilica of Valère in the canton of Valais in Switzerland, was built some time between 1390 and 1435. To put that in context, this ultra-sophisticated mechanism was up and running two hundred years before the invention of the thermometer, a hundred and fifty years before the invention of the pencil, and a hundred years before the invention of the first watch.

  There is no doubt that the presence of these extraordinary musical machines in most cathedrals and large churches since around the thirteenth century encouraged the composing of keyboard music targeted at the unique qualities and capabilities of the organ. Very little survives of what may have been written especially for the organ before the widespread availability of printing, but the evidence we do have provides us with precious clues as to how this repertoire was developing. Of particular interest is a collection of some two hundred and fifty pieces for organ, compiled between 1450 and 1470 – possibly with the help of Conrad Paumann, a well-known blind organist of the time – and found in the library of the small Bavarian town of Buxheim.

  Something very significant can be found b
oth in the Buxheim organ book and on the instrument at the basilica of Valère: the indication to play a line of music on the pedals, with the feet. Why is this so important? It’s important because the organ, with its lower, deeper pedal notes, led the way in the innovation of a bass line in music.

  We have already witnessed the early-sixteenth-century shift in the position occupied by the principal melody in a piece of four-or three-part vocal music, moving from the middle of the texture to the top. Gradually the performing range of the tune-carrying top line was extended upwards and higher, a process accelerated by the use of boys with high voices and even – heaven forfend! – women in some vocal groups. Around the same time, the lowest line started to take on greater responsibility for the foundation of the harmony: it became more substantial, and instruments started to adapt to give it more depth – such as the introduction of deeper-pitched stringed instruments and indeed organ pedals.

  While musicians and instrument-makers were finding ways of expanding the expressive range of what they could play, historical destiny was going to hand the bass line an unexpected boost. Destiny, that is, in the shape of Martin Luther.

  The early sixteenth century was a bad time for the Roman Catholic Church and its allied heads of state in Europe. On its eastern doorstep the Muslim Ottoman Empire was expanding in size and military ambition – between 1500 and 1520 it tripled in size and by 1529 controlled the Mediterranean and all of south-east Europe, and had begun its first siege of Vienna with an avowed aim of replacing Catholicism with Islam. As if that weren’t enough, Martin Luther’s challenge to the Vatican, begun in Wittenberg in Saxony in October 1517 with the publication of his ‘95 Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences’, tore into the heart of the Catholic Church’s authority. He didn’t mean to start a breakaway church, but within a few decades swathes of Europe had switched to one form of Protestantism or another.

  What has all this to do with bass lines in music?

  Luther, as well as being a theologian, scholar, writer and preacher, was a composer. He believed that the congregations in his churches should be able to join in hymn-singing with confidence and enthusiasm, and this meant having easy-to-pick-up tunes to sing. Luther accordingly had collected numerous popular contemporary folk tunes, given them holy words, and encouraged these hymns, or chorales, to be sung in Lutheran churches. One of his own compositions was ‘Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott’ (A Mighty Fortress is our God), but he also inspired other composers to provide new tunes for the purpose.

  What is immediately noticeable about ‘Ein’ feste Burg’ and the other Lutheran chorales of the sixteenth century is that they move along, syllable by syllable, with the words: the tune is clearly sitting on top of the sound, and the bottom line, the bass, is now in a dedicated supporting role, underpinning the movement of chords. This is what hymns were to sound like until around the mid-twentieth century. And the newly defined role of the bass line altered how composers viewed the shape of harmony for hundreds of years, too. It is as fundamental a structural change to the way music sounded as was the contemporaneous decision to start using timber frames and bricks in the building of houses.

  Lutheranism encouraged the growth of church music and its effect was infectious, despite the more radical branches of Protestantism viewing music – like saints, relics, incense, statues, stained-glass windows – as a superfluous distraction from the proper job of communal worship: reading, analysing and drawing conclusions from the Bible. Even Catholic composers were affected by Luther’s emphasis on congregational participation, as the Catholic Church’s reaction to the spread of Protestantism was to instigate a series of reforms known as the Counter-Reformation, as part of which it largely followed Luther’s lead on music. (If you were being mischievous, you might say the Counter-Reformation was the Vatican’s way of rebranding Lutheranism as its own idea.)

  What Protestant and Counter-Reformation reforms meant, more or less whoever you were, was a simplifying of church music so that the words could be heard more clearly. It meant a retreat from the very florid and ornate polyphony that had obsessed composers for a hundred years. The interweaving, flowing lines of equal voices began to make way for a new and fashionable triumvirate in music: tune, accompanying chords, and supporting bass. The dramatic effect of this simplification can be seen particularly starkly in the work of the Rome-based composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525?–94), who was forced into a switch of style mid-career. A distinctly non-ornate style is introduced to his music after the Catholic Church’s Council of Trent (sitting from 1545 to 1563) laid down strict new rules on the simplification of music.

  But it is in non-Catholic countries that a mid-sixteenth-century change in style, according to the mood of the ruling religious elite, is most clearly demonstrated. In England, notably, Catholic composers who had been working for the Catholic Church at the start of the century had to change their style to comply with the country’s gradual adoption of Protestantism during the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI. These religious reforms were put into reverse under Mary Tudor in the 1550s, but Elizabeth I’s resumption of Protestantism, albeit in a watered-down form compared to the Calvinism of Scotland or Holland, confirmed the general trend towards a simpler, clearer, text-dominated choral style.

  As a result, the contrast between musical styles in around 1500 and those of fifty years later, at the height of the European religious reforms, is dramatic. At the turn of the century, Thomas Ashwell was writing the kind of sacred polyphony you’d have heard anywhere in Europe: his Missa Jesu Christe of around 1500 has the voice parts running all over the place, in and out of each other, and long phrases run on and on with just one open syllable – the ‘melismatic’ style that Josquin notably rebelled against just a few years later with his Miserere mei, Deus. It is a lovely sound, but it is practically impossible to make out where the individual words begin and end, even if you are fluent in Latin. The purpose of this music is to create a sense of glorious beauty and ethereal godliness, to show off how rich the blending of choral voices could be. In sharp contrast, take ‘If ye love me’, composed by Thomas Tallis for the Chapel Royal of Edward VI when Protestant reforms were in the ascendancy. It is immediately apparent that Latin has been replaced with English, that the voices are singing together so that the words are clearly audible, and that meandering, interweaving voices have turned into blocks of sound that move as one. The process that Josquin had prophetically anticipated, namely the change of musical texture to make the meaning of the text clear and transparent, had by mid-century turned – in effect – into state law throughout Europe.

  Although English music outwardly toed the religious line, it is important to stress its one great anomaly during the Reformation period. Elsewhere on the continent, bloody wars, the threat of torture and the clampdown of liberties that accompanied the Counter-Reformation were making the choices composers made a matter of life and death. (One example is the fate of Portuguese composer Damião de Góis, who in 1545 was denounced, interrogated, tried and imprisoned by the Inquisition for, among other things, ‘playing unfamiliar music in his house on the Sabbath’.) In England, however, after Henry VIII’s split with Rome and especially under his daughter Elizabeth I, a blind eye was turned to the fact that Thomas Tallis and William Byrd, the two most celebrated and revered composers of the day, were privately still Catholic – and indeed that they continued secretly to write sacred music in Latin, in the older style, alongside what they provided for the reformed Church of England. Elizabeth even granted them a monopoly on the printing of sheet music, such was the favour she showed towards them.

  It is one of the exquisite ironies of that acrimonious century, stained with the blood of religious conflict, that some of the most beautiful and heartfelt sacred music for the Catholic rite was composed in Elizabeth’s Protestant kingdom.

  Byrd’s 1591 setting of Infelix ego, the prison-cell prayer of Girolamo Savonarola, originally set by Josquin over eighty years earlier, catches the
mood – through stripped-back, imitative, mournful phrases – that pervades both the sacred and secular music of so much of the sixteenth century: penitence and remorse. It sounds as if artists like Byrd are being crushed by the weight of the world around them; their music is a cry of anguish, a lamentation. Byrd’s published collection of 1588, the year of the Spanish Armada, was entitled Psalms & Sonets of Sadnes and Pietie, which is as good a description as any of most of the music of the previous hundred years. Never before had humanity so badly needed its music to share the burden of anxiety, and composers everywhere answered this plaint. Settings of the Lamentations of Jeremiah, the Penitential Psalms, the agony of the Crucifixion and the Mass for the Dead abound, from Thomas Tallis in England, Tomás Luis de Victoria in Spain, Giovanni da Palestrina in Italy and Orlande de Lassus in Flanders and Germany.

  But although great church music continued to be written, and religious wars continued to rage, the 1570s and ’80s saw a new wave of music sweep up like a warm summer wind from Italy through France to England, which seemed to provide an alternative way of looking at the world. While the Catholic Church continued to see menace and conspiracy on every corner, from Jews and Protestants to the scientific challenges of Galilei Galileo, and to oppress its followers by taking so much of the joy out of art and music, it was as if ordinary people sensed that any improvement in the quality of their lives on earth would have to be homemade. This new, irrepressible sound was the still, small voice of secular humanism.