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

by Howard Goodall

  Reflected in the work of Cervantes in Spain, and of John Donne, Francis Bacon and William Shakespeare in England – music lovers all – humanism began a fightback for reason and compassion, qualities in short supply during the preceding century of religious strife. Summed up in one perfect sentence by Donne –‘ Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde’ – the movement was a ray of sunshine peeping out from behind storm clouds. And not for the last time in musical history, ‘art music’, the music of the wealthy, educated and privileged, was to be saved from itself by popular, or folk song, traditions.

  Caravaggio’s 1596 painting The Lute Player shows a musician playing from a score by a Franco-Flemish composer called Jacques Arcadelt, who spent the first half of his life in Italy, where he was a contemporary of and sometime collaborator with Michelangelo, and the second half of his life in France. Arcadelt’s great gift to music during one of its darkest hours was his unashamedly life-affirming madrigals – published in Venice in 1539, and probably the music shown in Caravaggio’s painting – and his cheerful chanson collections, published in Paris in the 1560s.

  Arcadelt’s first book of madrigals was the most widely reprinted songbook in Europe in the second half of the sixteenth century. Every professional and amateur musician of the age would have known the songs in this bestseller, especially the erotic ‘Il bianco e dolce cigno’ (The white and gentle swan), which, like the other madrigals in the collection, is concerned with human pleasures and full of sensuous imagery and sexual allusion: dying, in the case of ‘The white and gentle swan’, for example, is code for orgasm.

  When Arcadelt moved to France he did the same for the chanson as he had done for the Italian madrigal, publishing nine books of sweet, uplifting songs that anyone who could sing or play a guitar, lute or theorbo – a sort of oversized lute – could easily learn and enjoy. Typical of the chansons was the jolly, catchy ‘Margot, labourez les vignes’, though its lyrics spin an odd yarn: Margot, tend the vines, it exhorts repeatedly, going on to recount that the singer of the song met three captains on the road home from Lorraine ‘to whom I was the pox’. No further information is given.

  Unusually for their time, Arcadelt’s madrigals and chansons were intended for performance by men and women, and their success inspired many other composers. Chief among these were an Englishman and an Italian whose experiments with the form as the new century unfolded were to give to music what Shakespeare gave poetry and drama: a compassionate eloquence that, in place of intimidation, sought to dignify humanity.

  The Englishman was John Dowland, a Londoner and exact contemporary of Shakespeare who spent some of his most fruitfully creative years as the extravagantly paid official lutenist to King Christian IV of Denmark. Quite apart from their haunting beauty, Dowland’s hugely influential First Book of Songs, published in 1597, are the first outstanding examples of the kind of solo song that – structurally and stylistically – has since thrived more or less continuously in Western music. While a four-part chanson by Arcadelt still sounds to us like music from another epoch, almost any composer from 1600 to the present day would have been proud to come up with Dowland’s ‘Flow, my tears’; if, for example, Sting were to release it on CD, it wouldn’t sound out of place in our own time. Which is exactly what he did in 2006, as it happens.

  This makes Dowland’s contribution, like Shakespeare’s, something very different from what had gone before: his work has a universal appeal that transcends its age. It is an overused word, but this is what makes him a genius.

  Although Dowland used ‘Flow, my tears’ as the basis for a set of purely instrumental pieces called Lachrimae, or Seaven Teares for strings and lute, songs remained, by and large, his format of choice. Meanwhile, over in Italy, one of Dowland’s masterful contemporaries – one of the most influential musicians of all time – was taking the concept of song in the most extraordinary new direction. The composer was Claudio Monteverdi and the new style of singing gave birth to opera.

  Born in Cremona, adopted home of the violin, Monteverdi worked for a time at the court of Duke Vincenzo of Gonzaga in Mantua before taking Europe’s most prestigious musical post in 1613: director of music at St Mark’s basilica in Venice. He published nine volumes of madrigals between 1587 and 1651, which were themselves so revolutionary that – even forgetting for a moment the issue of opera – we would still be ranking him as among the most experimental and daring composers of all time.

  What Monteverdi did in his madrigals was to take the idea of triads and chords, and start to mess with their chemistry. Like all sixteenth-century composers, he knew that some chords felt especially close and comfortable next to one another: the C major triad, for example, contains two of the same notes as the E minor triad and is therefore closely related to it; likewise the E minor triad shares two of its notes with the G major triad and they too are closely related. Monteverdi knew that blending these related chords in one piece of music would create something tranquil, reassuring and ethereal. A prime example of this technique is the Missa Papae Marcelli by Giovanni Palestrina, probably composed in 1562 and considered one of the most treasured masterpieces of all sacred music. Palestrina uses closely related chords throughout, moving from one to another slowly and gradually, and the overall impression is one of stability. But it is this sense of stability that Monteverdi wanted to undermine. He was the Galilei Galileo of music, challenging the status quo.

  In his madrigals, Monteverdi dips in and out of all kinds of chords, many of them startlingly unrelated, in order to create ear-catching effects. He wants his listener to feel disorientated, or surprised, or intrigued, especially if it fits or enhances the words of the poem. So in his 1605 madrigal, ‘O Mirtillo, Mirtillo anima mia’ (O Myrtle, Myrtle my soul), for instance, on the words, ‘che chiami crudelissima Amarilli’ (the one you call cruellest Amaryllis), he creates a series of deliberate clashes of chord, called a ‘dissonance’ or ‘suspension’. These discords, though relatively tame by modern standards, would have sounded shocking to Monteverdi’s contemporaries. Dissonance was just one of the effects he employed to ‘paint’ the lyrics in sound. As his career progressed, his music became more and more about aural effect and emotional manipulation.

  Nor was it just in his madrigals that Monteverdi started shifting chords around for the sheer surprise and delight of it. By a strange quirk of fate, this ambitious choral composer found himself working in the one building in the world which, by dint of its architecture, was responsible for a new style of choral music. St Mark’s basilica revealed to Monteverdi a new world of possibility; as far as I know, this is the only example in Western music of a building changing the course of history.

  The basilica is a vast, cavernous, echoing space, with all sorts of alcoves, balconies, domes, cupolas and arches affecting its acoustics. Any sound you make ricochets around, bouncing against all these different-shaped stone, mosaic and tiled surfaces. But what you cannot do in the basilica is speak or sing quickly: it would come out as gobbledegook. The composers who worked at St Mark’s in the late sixteenth century – particularly uncle and nephew Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli – recognised this, and they pioneered a form of choral music in which huge blocks of sound, chord after chord, were sung in short, dramatic bursts, accompanied by bands of instruments, particularly brass – and then there’d be a pause to let the sound reverberate awe-inspiringly around the space. The Gabrielis also experimented with placing clusters of singers and instrumentalists in different pockets of the building, a technique known as antiphony, meaning ‘voices against each other’, or polychoral, ‘many choirs’. An anthem like Giovanni Gabrieli’s ‘Omnes Gentes plaudite manibus’, a setting of Psalm 46, ‘All people clap your hands’, published in 1597, is the kind of polychoral work that would have sounded spectacular in St Mark’s when it was first heard. It may be church music but it is also theatrical and grandiose, and when Monteverdi applied for the music director’s post at St Mark’s in 1610 he attempted to out-Gabri
eli Gabrieli in one fell swoop: his audition composition was an epic setting of the Vespers, the Catholic Evening Service, rightly considered one of the landmarks of choral music.

  It was only a matter of time before all these ingredients – the daring chord progressions and intimacy of the madrigals, and the polychoral grandeur of the St Mark’s style – were put together into an extraordinary, unforgettable cocktail: opera. It had all started when a group of humanist Florentine intellectuals known as the Florentine Camerata came up with the notion that they would try to recreate or reimagine what they claimed was Ancient Greek sung drama. In 1597, their first semi-collaborative attempt at this new form, which they called ‘drama through music’, was a piece called Dafne, with music by one of their number, Jacopo Peri. He followed with another offering, Euridice, in 1600. The manuscript of Dafne has not survived, although a fair amount was written about its preparation and performance, making Euridice the world’s oldest surviving opera. If you launch a new musical form, though, what you need is a composer of such stature and brilliance that there is a decent chance of someone taking your new art form seriously. Peri was not such a man. Luckily, fate handed that baton to Monteverdi, whose ‘musical fable’ for the Mantuan court, Orfeo, premièred in 1607.

  Monteverdi brought all the tricks he was learning composing madrigals and sacred choral music into his telling of Orpheus’s descent into the Underworld to rescue his recently lost lover, Euridice. He was aiming for maximum emotional effect, maximum narrative clarity, maximum impact, even shock, and wasn’t going to obey anyone’s rules about what he could or could not do. The result – to people of the time – was stunning. He invented an orchestra for the occasion, a combination of instruments never before gathered under one roof. It included brass and wind instruments, percussion, and a whole gallimaufry of types of strings: plucked, stroked, strummed, keyed and bowed. He had instrumental fanfares, solos, duets, choruses. He borrowed old and new styles wherever he felt it appropriate and requisitioned the St Mark’s-style choral music for the big moments. (Indeed, the exciting opening phrase of Orfeo was recycled for his 1610 Vespers, so interchangeable was the style.) He told the story through characters directly expressing themselves and their feelings to the audience, always and only singing, something that had never been tried before. Almost everything about it was a novelty. It was – by the standards of the day – loud, long, and modern.

  Orfeo played twice at the palace in Mantua to an audience of fewer than a hundred invited guests. It was quite a different sight a year later when Monteverdi’s new opera, Arianna, premièred. Mantua, celebrating a royal wedding, laid on an open-air stadium into which were crammed several thousand people a night. He subsequently moved to Venice, which soon became as obsessed with opera as it had traditionally been with carnivals, and the world’s first public opera house, San Cassiano, opened there in 1637. While in Venice Monteverdi composed at least half a dozen other operas, all but two of which are now lost.

  Incredibly, it is Monteverdi’s last opera, The Coronation of Poppea, composed in 1642, his seventy-fourth and final year, that has gone down as one of the most radical dramas, never mind musical dramas, in history. What makes Poppea so radical is that, to put it simply, it is about real people and their complicated, messy emotions. Monteverdi’s music explores the real-life passions of two real historical figures: the emperor Nero and his mistress, Poppea; there is no sign here of the usual allegorical characters from myth or ancient legend, and the only gods we meet are merely symbolic. Crucially, Poppea shows how far music’s social function had come since Guido of Arezzo put notation on the map. Music was still used for great occasions of state and it was still central to religious ritual – but now it was also addressing people’s intimate emotional exchanges. It was adopting the role that it plays for us, in the twenty-first century: it was becoming the soundtrack to the affairs of our hearts.

  On the surface of it, Poppea is about lust and ambition conquering all, with poor old virtue, decency and good governance being jettisoned in the process. Nero and Poppea fall for each other and the consequences for everyone around them are catastrophic. The pursuit of carnal pleasure sweeps all before it. We are as far from the ideals and arguments of the previous century as it is possible to be. The religious disputes of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation have all been abandoned – issues of moral authority, piety, remorse, sacrifice, obedience to God, spirituality and the afterlife are all swept aside as Poppea’s lovers seek and find physical gratification above all else. The opera’s climax, and I choose that word deliberately, appears to reward them for their selfishness.

  It ends with a duet for Nero and Poppea of unabashed sensuality – probably composed or revised by one of Monteverdi’s assistants, Francesco Sacrati – called ‘Pur ti miro, pur ti godo’. The passion that oozes out of this duet, ‘I adore you, I embrace you, I desire you, I enchain you’, is so frank and sensual it almost turns its audience – remember they are in the room too – into voyeurs, awkwardly witnessing the private interchange of two weirdly uninhibited strangers. This was new territory indeed.

  But beware of first impressions. The Venetians of 1642 to whom The Coronation of Poppea was directed knew this historical story, and they knew what happened next, after the curtain fell – that is, after the apparently triumphant ending of the opera. Nero killed his new empress Poppea, their unborn child, then himself, and his regime collapsed disastrously, with Rome in flames. What Monteverdi’s Venetian audience understood was that this was a satire. They would have seen the opera’s ending for what it was: a savage attack on Venice’s arch-rival state: Rome. In the light of this, The Coronation of Poppea can be seen as a damning, deliberately shocking critique on corruption and the excesses of Roman power, and the pressing need for self-restraint.

  It was a cry that fell on deaf ears as far as Rome was concerned – or, for that matter, in France, where Louis XIV was about to embark on a reign that would give new meaning to the word ‘excess’. For sure, the age of penitence, remorse and piety was well and truly over.

  3

  The Age of Invention

  1650–1750

  THE SPIRIT OF MUSICAL invention heralded by Monteverdi was enthusiastically taken up by his successors over the following century. While the first half of this new musical age, from around 1650 to 1700, was totally dominated by Italians – both at home and working across Europe – the irrepressible urge to create, improve and challenge gradually spread further north to Germany, France and especially, in the genius of George Frideric Handel, England. Above all, the music of this period was characterised – as were the contemporary sciences – by a powerful marriage of imagination and ambition.

  This was an era in which the Church’s unquestioned supremacy truly began to crumble and mere mortals took on the responsibility of creating the world around them. From Pascal’s mechanical calculator (1642), Otto von Guericke’s machine-generation of electricity (1672) and Leibniz’s calculating wheel (1673) to Newton’s Principia (1687), Hadley’s octant (1730) and Harrison’s marine chronometer (1736), restless ingenuity was directed at a myriad ways of measuring, understanding and exploiting the dimensions of the natural world. Little wonder, then, that this period is sometimes called the Scientific Revolution – although advances in science would also offer the artistic community a series of technological breakthroughs. Indeed, as we shall shortly see, every note of music subsequently written and played would be shaped by the spirit of the age.

  The link between science and music had never been far from composers’ minds – from the Ancient Greek belief in the ‘music of the spheres’ to Monteverdi’s exploitation of the echoing architecture of St Mark’s basilica – but in the seventeenth century this relationship took on a less celestial nature. One of the great leaps forward was the invention of the world’s first pendulum clock in 1656, which finally transformed Galileo Galilei’s groundbreaking research into the physics of pendulums in the 1580s into a practical tool. The clock was
designed by Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens – who incidentally had published essays on the physics of music – and built by clockmaker Salomon Coster. It goes without saying that the development of a totally accurate timekeeping device was an enormous breakthrough in an age of feverish navigation and exploration, but Huygens’s beautiful pendulum clock also neatly epitomised the central obsessions of the era: the intricate workings of machines, the interplay of cog and wheel, the laws of motion and gravity, and the dimension of time itself.

  It should not surprise us, then, that the notion of keeping time in music became a subject of some debate during this same clock-making epoch – nor indeed that its music has a mechanical regularity about it that delights in repetition, jaunty imitation and an unwavering, foot-tapping pulse, all characteristics shared by the other great motivator of seventeenth-century musical style: dance music.

  Yet there is a great irony to the relationship between horological time and musical time, since music is the only art form that follows its own, independent time scheme, obeying its own internal clock and seemingly suspending the normal division of seconds, minutes and hours, according to the whims of the composer. As if to underline this ambivalent relationship, the technical term in music for ‘speed’ is the Italian word tempo, meaning, literally, time – not, as would be logical, velocità (velocity). It was not until the arrival of electrical metronomes in the twentieth century that musical speeds obeyed absolute relationships with seconds and minutes; earlier definitions of musical speeds were always relative, subjective instructions that differed from place to place, composer to composer, decade to decade. Modern-day attempts to estimate what a composer of a previous era meant by the terms allegro (quickly), andante (moderately) or largo (very slowly) have been hampered by this lack of an absolute relationship with everyday measurements of time. (One deceptively simple method of establishing the lower limit of musical speed has been to use reproduction seventeenth- or eighteenth-century wind instruments and measure how long a player could hold his breath while holding a single note. By comparing this to the longest-lasting written notes of the period, researchers have painstakingly teased out what composers might have expected from slower directions such as largo and adagio. These kinds of experiments are somewhat approximate, as you would imagine, but before them there was no way of knowing what, say, Monteverdi’s speeds sounded like to him.)