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

by Howard Goodall

  In 1676, Thomas Mace, who had been one of Oliver Cromwell’s favourite composers, outlined the possibility of measuring musical pulse against a pendulum in his ambitious, florid and comprehensive tome, Musick’s Monument (‘A remembrancer of the best practical musick, both divine, and civil, that has ever been known, to have been in the world’). Mace was probably aware of Galileo’s research, which included the design – not made in his lifetime – of a pendulum clock that pre-dates Huygens by fourteen years. Subsequent efforts to align musical pace with horological time, however, failed to ignite general enthusiasm; indeed, others were still attempting to match musical pulse with less scientific external sources. The Venetian theorist Ludovico Zacconi had proffered the idea of using the human pulse as a guide as early as 1592, in his essay Prattica di musica, and this notion was still popular in 1752, when Johann Joachim Quantz, flautist to Frederick the Great of Prussia, published his biblical guide to playing the flute. It is, however, worth mentioning Parisian composer Étienne Loulié’s startlingly forward-looking collaborative studies with the ‘father’ of the science of acoustics, Joseph Sauveur, in the 1690s. The two colleagues, who were funded by Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, and had certainly read Galileo’s findings on pendulums, developed not just a chronomètre for the semi-accurate setting of musical pulse, but also a mechanical tuning device, the sonomètre – this was a good decade before John Shore’s much less sophisticated invention of the tuning fork – and the échomètre, for calculating the duration of sounds. It is an extraordinary fact about Joseph Sauveur that, as the meticulous, indefatigable founder of acoustics, he should have been partially – later severely – deaf, with a lifelong, relentlessly lampooned speech impediment resulting from childhood mutism.

  The first practical, accurate musical chronometer was invented in 1814, over a hundred and fifty years after Galileo’s pendulum clock design, by Dutchman Dietrich Winkel, but his mechanism was shamelessly pirated, renamed and repatented by German engineer Johann Maelzel two years later, becoming Maelzel’s Metronome. Despite his losing a court battle to rectify the wrong, posterity rewarded the scoundrel Maelzel and it was his device that was embraced by composers from Beethoven onwards to give more accurate indications of their compositions’ ideal speeds.

  While Galileo Galilei’s calculations relating to the pendulum undoubtedly enabled composers to be more specific, for the first time, about the tempo of their music, what they composed was thanks in large part to Galileo’s father (and music teacher), Vincenzo. This composer, theorist and lutenist had been a leading member of the Florentine Camerata, the humanist group of the late-sixteenth century that had developed the earliest concept and idiom of opera, inspiring Jacopo Peri but more importantly Monteverdi. His published discourses on the physics of music and on the proper use of dissonance – deliberately clashing discords of various kinds – influenced many, if not all, Italian composers of the seventeenth century.

  Indeed, by the middle of the century Italian artistic pre-eminence was a phenomenon across Europe, especially in music. Anecdotal evidence of this lies in the quaint tale of English composer-lutenist John Cooper, who changed his name to Giovanni Coprario in the hope of it improving his career – which it did, judging from his subsequent patronage by the future Charles I. More compelling evidence still of the Italians’ dominion over music at this time is the legacy they left, for better or worse, in the descriptive language developed in this period. To this day the international musical lexicon includes the names of Italy’s newly invented forms: concerto, sonata, oratorio, sinfonia, opera; definitions of speed: tempo, presto, allegro, andante, largo; techniques for playing: legato, staccato, arpeggio, rubato, pizzicato, forte, piano, crescendo, diminuendo, and so on – and a host of other terms, from a capella (‘in the chapel style’, since appropriated – inaccurately – to mean unaccompanied voices) to segue (following swiftly on without pausing). Likewise opera, or dramma per musica as it was known in its first, Italian century, spread from its power base in Venice to Naples and Rome, and thence north into Germany. The first operas seen at the French court were Italian, including Orfeo (1647) by Luigi Rossi, and Xerse (1660) by the wildly successful Venetian Francesco Cavalli, which was brought to Paris for the wedding celebrations of Louis XIV. This was followed by the première two years later of Cavalli’s Ercole amante in the Salle des Machines in the Tuileries, but the French had by this time developed a preference for ballet. Ironically they saw ballet as more patriotic, even though the first formal ballets as developed in France, among them the Ballet Comique de la Reine of 1581, had been the brainchild of the Italian Catherine de Medici and her Italian choreographer. And the composer who was responsible for the spectacular popularity of ballet at the French court in the second half of the seventeenth century, Jean-Baptiste Lully, was none other than Giovanni Battista Lulli, an Italian.

  Florence-born Lully had been musical supervisor (and often composer) of the French court’s ballet productions since 1653, when Louis XIV himself, aged fifteen, had appeared in five different roles including Apollo, the Sun King, in Le Ballet de la nuit. Lully’s contribution to this event, held in the Salle du Petit Bourbon in the Louvre, was rewarded by his being offered a permanent post as one of the court’s resident composers; he was promoted to royal musical director in 1661, the year he became a naturalised French citizen.

  Both music and the colourful ritual of ballet thrived at the French court under Lully and Louis XIV, who built upon the musical patronage of his predecessors. His father, Louis XIII, had in 1626 established an innovative twenty-four-piece violin band, a string orchestra in all but name, called Les vingt-quatre violons du roy, which comprised six four-stringed violins, tuned as modern violins; twelve violas of three sizes, though tuned identically; and six cello-like instruments. In 1656 Louis XIV expanded the violin band further and renamed it La grande bande. By now Lully was in charge and for some ballet (and opera) performances, he supplemented the resident string band with the wind, brass and percussion instruments of the king’s so-called Grande Ecurie, a pool of about forty players attached to the ceremonial cavalry, who normally played for outdoor pageants and military events. This bringing together of string, wind, brass and percussion ensembles for the accompaniment of ballet can be seen as the prototype of the orchestra, whose birth, therefore, is intrinsically linked to the invention of the violin – the instrument for accompanying dance – in the early sixteenth century.

  Dancing at the French court, though, was not merely a way of passing a pleasant evening. It became under the Bourbons a highly political endeavour, and the ballet spectaculars put on at Versailles were above all thinly disguised allegories designed to give prestige, power and glory to le Roi Soleil, the Sun King. To emphasise the intended awe and majesty of the occasion, Louis XIV’s long, mythological ballets would begin with a self-contained instrumental introduction, or opening. Though it has a French name, this ouver-ture (or overture) was essentially, in its musical format, the sinfonia that had featured quite prominently in Italian music of the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries. The sinfonia (from the Greek syn, together or with, and phōnē, sound) was a mood-setting prelude that might consist of two short sections, one solemn and the other lively, and it was certainly popular by at least 1589, when it featured in a pageant mounted for the wedding of Ferdinando I de Medici to Christina of Lorraine at the recently completed Uffizi Palace theatre. Members of the Florentine Camerata, including opera pioneer Jacopo Peri, are known to have contributed to this festive occasion, which included a performance of the comic diversion La Pellegrina, with the sinfonia acting as a musical prelude to a recitation or dance, or to cover scene-changing. Around the same time, sinfonias had also started appearing as short instrumental introductions to more substantial choral works in a non-theatrical setting, and in the chamber works and dances for (usually two) violins, cello and harpsichord by composers such as Salamone Rossi, Jewish colleague of Monteverdi in Mantua. (Rossi is highly likely to have pla
yed or sung in the première in 1607 of the latter’s Orfeo.) Rossi’s publication of books of Sinfonie e gagliarde in 1607 and 1608 are among the earliest printed references to the sinfonia as a distinct form.

  For Lully, back in Paris, the idea of the overture or sinfonia was carried over from his court ballets into the operas he composed with playwright Molière in the 1670s and ’80s – a switch encouraged by Louis XIV, who was tiring of ballet as he aged. Very soon, in any case, a new Italian sound was to dominate European music once again, leaving both the French opera and ballet styles in its wake. For the next half-century, the concerto reigned supreme, and its godfather, or archangel perhaps, was composer-violinist Arcangelo Corelli.

  In 1672, aged nineteen, Arcangelo Corelli left his home in Fusignano, south of Venice, in order to visit Paris. As a violinist of some distinction it is inconceivable that he did not brush shoulders with Lully’s Grande bande, nor fail to take in the dance-orientated music it played, full of quick and sprightly rhythms and titillating switches of speed and metre. But he spent most of his life in his native Italy, becoming one of the foremost cultural figures of the century, dying rich and revered, and being honoured with a burial, in 1713, in the Pantheon in Rome. While this was partly due to his status as the first famous violin virtuoso in a country in love with the instrument, it was also a recognition of the fact that the style he perfected for stringed ensembles was the definitive sound of the time. Indeed, an otherwise unremarkable German composer called Georg Muffat travelled to Rome in the 1680s for a study break and wrote enthusiastically about some intriguing modern music he had heard: ‘concertos for violins and other instruments called sinfonie’ by Corelli. But what was it about Corelli’s ‘concerto’ style that so caught the imaginations of other musicians?

  Corelli’s instantly noticeable hallmark – heard, for example, in his delicately attractive Christmas concerto (opus 6, no. 8), which features prominently in the 2003 film Master and Commander – is, appropriately for the period, the regular ticking of a clock, the chugging, pulsating, perfectly calibrated whirring and spinning of cogs, and the pleasingly equal balancing of energies. Simple melodies are passed back and forth between the violins in playful repetition, rather like the push and pull of a pendulum. Part of the satisfaction of the Corelli style is that there is a predictability about its internal movement, and yet it is never tedious. In an age when the rich danced obsessively, you would be forgiven for assuming that Corelli’s clockwork rhythms were, like Lully’s ballets, destined for the stage or the courtly dance floor – but the surprising truth is that his chamber sonatas for just a few instruments, and in due course his concertos for a small string orchestra, were composed to be heard during church services.

  But what Corelli perfected, above all, was a form of musical contrast, an internal drama in the texture that was fresh, surprising and – for the time – highly original. To appreciate how radical his approach must have seemed, we should remind ourselves that the prevailing instrumental style of the first half of the seventeenth century had been consort music – that is, four- or five-strong ensembles playing gently soothing, mellifluous pieces, rather like an instrumental version of a choir, or what Shakespeare called ‘still musick.’ Indeed, consorts were generally made up of ‘choirs’ – soprano, alto, tenor and bass – of the same instrument, typically viols or recorders, or later the violin family. Occasionally these consorts were mixed, so that a lute might join in, or a recorder with some viols, but composers on the whole did not specify which instruments they expected to hear, or even whether the parts were vocal; they merely wrote generic consort music and whoever was around joined in. It was, in effect, a modular approach to music-making. Appealing though this laissez-faire undoubtedly was, especially for amateur musicians, it resulted in instrumental music that did not make great demands on players, their instruments, or indeed composers. There was no point in writing an exciting solo for a violin if the chances were that the part was going to be played on, say, a shawm, a wind instrument of sweet tone but dangerously limited range.

  Gradually this attitude changed. Prompted in part by the dexterity and showmanship of celebrated virginals and lute players, string and wind members of consorts began to liven up the texture of the music with ornaments, fast runs, trills, fast repeated notes and fancy rhythmic figures. The jaunty patterns of popular dances were put together into contrasting groups of three to provide variation – slow-fast-slow or fast-slow-fast – even when the consorts were not accompanying actual dancing. The graceful early-seventeenth-century ‘Consort Setts’ of Charles I’s in-house composer William Lawes, for example, create a triptych from the dances ‘Fantazy’, ‘Paven’ and an ‘Almaine’, where the first and last are jovial and the middle reflective and sad.

  One great shift in consort music made by Corelli and his imitators from the 1680s onwards was to strip back its traditionally contrapuntal texture. That is, to replace its interweaving but independent voices with a more unified, streamlined sound, with the keyboard and cello locked together supportively, underpinning the sparring interplay of the two violins above them. But arguably the greatest aspect of Corelli’s revolution was his approach to dynamics: the manipulation of loud and soft passages in music.

  In the seventeenth century, the concept of music gradually becoming softer or louder was technically difficult to achieve for many instruments, and in any case it was not a trick it had occurred to composers to incorporate in their scores. A seventeenth-century trumpet, for instance, was incapable of playing softly – it was more or less a case of ‘on’ or ‘off’ – whereas a pair of seventeenth-century virginals was all but inaudible to anyone standing six or more yards away. Keyboard instruments were quite unique in that they had soft and loud settings – but no way of moving smoothly between the two. You could jump from a loud sound on one organ keyboard (or ‘manual’) to a softer sound on another manual – to create the impression of an echo, for instance – but it was virtually impossible to do so gradually. What composers could impose instead of incremental change were more abrupt contrasts of loud and soft, like the juxtaposition of light and shade, chiaroscuro, in painting.

  What Corelli did was create a musical version of chiaroscuro by contrasting a big-sounding band of stringed instruments with a small group, switching between the big and the small throughout the piece. The larger ensemble was called the concerto grosso (and sometimes the ripieno, the Italian for ‘stuffing’) and the smaller group was the concertino (little consort). They would play phrases in succession, one after another, three players alternating with, say, twenty. The pieces in which Corelli developed this light-and-shade technique came to be known by the name of the larger group, concerto grosso, and subsequently the generic term ‘concerto’. Corelli’s typical concerto grosso was divided into three sections of contrasting speeds – slow-fast-slow or fast-slow-fast – after the fashion of the earlier consort suites or setts.

  Not fatigued by his radicalisation of both musical texture and technique, Corelli added another flourish to his work: a musical shorthand called figured bass, or thorough bass, inherited from Monteverdi and universally adopted after him. Though it was intended merely as a time-saving tool, its use began to change the way composers and keyboard players manipulated chords, changing the sound of harmony along the way. It was as if text-messaging shorthand as used on mobile phones were to shape the way language was written in books.

  Figured bass allowed composers to jot down a minimum of information on their scores, assuming that their players already knew what the jottings meant, and to dash off their compositions much more quickly and succinctly than ever before. Music copyists, printers and engravers had much less to squeeze on to each expensive page and, as an added bonus, it gave the players quite a lot of artistic freedom to do a bit of on-the-spot improvisation.

  In this ten-note example from Corelli, all the keyboard player has in front of him or her is the bass line notes, borrowed from the cello player, and those extra numbers above it
. That’s all. And yet this shorthand translates into a fully realised, harmonised (that is, with chords for every note) keyboard part for both hands.

  When I, the keyboard player, read the first note, G, I know I am meant to play the straightforward chord of G: the notes G-B-D. If the G had had a ‘6’ written above it, though, I would shift the top note, D (known as the fifth note due to the distance between it and our starting point, G), up one step of the keyboard scale to the so-called sixth note: E. Thus I would play a slightly different chord: G-B-E rather than G-B-D. The third and fourth notes have two numbers above them: ‘76’. This means that on each I would replace the fifth note, first with a seventh then with a sixth, making two different chords, one after another. In the next bar, the figure ‘7’ is accompanied by what has been known for centuries in music as the ‘sharp’ sign. This tells me that, of the two possible chords allowed on this note, B – B major and B minor – I should choose the one with a sharp (B major) rather than the one without. (The ‘#’ here clears up any ambiguity between the two: the distinction is offered wherever the default option for the chord might be unclear, according to the key of the piece.)

  This system of figures, which prevailed until the music of Haydn and Mozart in the late eighteenth century, when composers began specifying the exact notes they wanted played, allowed composers to give their players a string of chords, out of hundreds of possible combinations, in quick succession. How the players chose to play those chords could alter from performance to performance; it is a rather non-prescriptive, jazz-like system in that respect. Indeed, figured bass was a style that every trained musician in Europe and the colonised New World understood and imitated, rather as every modern-day guitarist knows what is meant by ‘G7’ or ‘Blues in E’.