Music appreciation week 3

Notation

-Europeans came up with the idea of putting sound to paper

Saint Hildegard's Alleluia

-Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) was an abbess who spent most of her life in the church and founded her own convent in Germany. She was famous for having visions, making prophecies, writing, and composing music. Hildegard was recently officially named a saint. -She wrote the text for this Alleluia; the Alleluia is part of the Mass Proper and this particular text is written for a feast day for the Virgin Mary. Chant titles are often the first word(s) of the text. The Alleluia text is in ABA form; the word "Alleluia" is followed by a verse, closing with the word "Alleluia" again. The music for an Alleluia often reflects this form by using the same music for the opening and closing statements of the word "Alleluia." In this case, the music is also responsorial, meaning a soloist is answered by a chorus.

Chant Characteristics

-Monophonic texture. -Sacred Latin text. Chant was part of the church service, which was performed in Latin. -Conjunct motion. Chants move mostly by conjunct motion, but can also have disjunct motion. -Very little rhythmic variety. Each note lasts the same length; every once in a while a note is twice as long as the others. Since chants were not originally written down, this made them easier to remember. -Syllabic, neumatic, or mellismatic settings of the text. --Text setting refers to the number of notes per syllable of the text. In a syllabic setting, there is one note per syllable (Mary Had a Little Lamb is an example). In a mellismatic setting, there are several notes per syllable (vowel sounds are often set mellismatically). Neumatic setting is in between, with about 5 or 6 notes per syllable. -Anonymous. We don't know composers' names for -most chants. Church officials were expected to be able to write music and to sing. In the early Catholic Church, there was no special distinction for being a musician, so composers did not take credit for their chants. -Modal. Chants are based on the Church modes rather than on major and minor scales.

Polyphony

Although the music of the Church began as monophony, composers eventually began to experiment with polyphony. The earliest examples of polyphony come from a group of composers working at the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris in the 12th and 13th centuries; these composers are known as the Notre Dame School. As they modified the texture of their music, they recognized the importance of basing their new music in old traditions. Instead of creating completely new polyphonic music, they used preexisting chants as the foundation for new pieces. They would take a chant, slow it down, and compose a new melody to go along with it. This preexisting chant is called a cantus firmus; the new genre they created is called organum. Composers then began to compose two new melodic lines to go along with a cantus firmus, creating another genre called a motet. A motet can have three to six voices, each with a different text. Many motets had different languages in each of the voices, and could even have different subjects in each voice. A three-voice motet could have a love song in French and a political statement in German, along with a sacred Latin text in the cantus firmus.

Theory music influences actions

Around the year 500, a Roman scholar named Boethius wrote a book on the history of music in Greek society, from about 1000 years earlier. He observed that the ancient Greeks thought that music could actually influence a person's actions and mood. They thought that music in a certain mode (using a certain set of notes) would influence young boys to grow into strong soldiers, while music in another mode would cause people to act violently, while still another might influence girls to be good mothers. This theme, that people are in some way influenced by the music they listen to, is one we'll see throughout music history.

Rhythm

As polyphonic music developed, composers began to use more rhythmic variation than they had used in monophony. They didn't have complete rhythmic freedom yet; there were six rhythmic modes (patterns) that composers could choose from. When the same rhythmic mode was used throughout a piece, it was called isorhythm. Rhythmic notation developed along with the rhythmic modes. Philippe de Vitry was a musician who wrote about these developments in rhythm. He called the new style Ars Nova; we now use the term Ars Antiqua to refer to music written before these rhythmic developments took place.

Farmer's Fair Phyllis

By the time madrigals were introduced in England, they were even more informal than they had been to begin with, and were called English madrigals. English madrigals tend to be light and are of course in English. John Farmer (c. 1570-1601) was a composer from Dublin. His madrigal Fair Phyllis was published in 1599, so this is an example of a very late Renaissance piece. This madrigal is for four voices and includes two examples of text painting: when the text refers to Phyllis sitting all alone, a single female is singing, and when the text refers to her lover wandering up and down the mountainside, the melody changes direction to move up and down.

Palestrina

Giovanni Palestrina (1525-1594) was an Italian musician who had spent his career working in the various churches in and around the Vatican, including the Sistine Chapel. He was an influential composer of sacred music who wrote over 100 Masses (meaning that he wrote music for each of the parts of the Mass ordinary, like Machaut had done in the Medieval Period). He was alarmed at the prospect of the Council of Trent deciding to eliminate polyphonic music from the church service. He appeared before the council and made a deal with them. He said that he believed polyphonic music could be written within the boundaries set up by the council. They agreed that if he could write a Mass using polyphony in such a way that the text could still be understood, then polyphony could stay. Palestrina composed the Pope Marcellus Mass in 1562, just before the conclusion of the Council of Trent, and was able to please the council. This is how the story has been told for years, starting perhaps during the Council of Trent. In reality, historians don't think that Palestrina actually appeared before the council to make this deal with them; his involvement was more subtle than that. Regardless, Palestrina is known as the "Savior of Church Music."

Protestant Reformation

In 1517, Martin Luther (1483-1546), a German monk, posted a list of complaints against the Catholic Church. This list is called the 95 Theses and included issues such as abuse of power by church officials and the way the church was raising and spending money. This led to the Reformation, which was the breaking away from the Catholic Church to form various Protestant churches. (One of these was the Church of England, headed by King Henry VIII; this is referenced in the popular novel The Other Boleyn Girl.) When people formed new churches, they changed some of the things they thought were problematic in the Catholic Church. One of these changes was to use the local language for the church service instead of Latin. When composers wrote sacred music for Protestant church services, they no longer used Latin texts. This is an important development in the history of sacred music

Palestrina's Gloria

In his Pope Marcellus Mass, Palestrina does not assume that the listener has prior knowledge of the text, even though the congregation would have heard the text of the ordinary in every church service in their life. In the Gloria, each phrase of the text begins monophonically or homophonically, so the text is easy to understand, and then it moves into polyphony. Just at the point when the listener might lose track of the text, Palestrina uses monophony or homophony again. He uses relatively little repetition, so that the voices move straight through the text as if speaking it.

Josquin

Josquin des Prez (1455-1521) was an important North-European composer in the early Renaissance. He had a reputation for being egotistical and temperamental, he demanded high salaries, and he did not like having to compose music on his employers' schedules. He still had to work under the patronage system (the patronage system becomes less important but doesn't disappear for musicians until the 1800s) and he worked for both the court and the church during his career. He was highly admired by Martin Luther, among others, and was compared to the genius of Michelangelo.

Josquin's Ave Maria

Josquin wrote about 70 motets; the Ave Maria in your text is one of them. Josquin uses a cantus firmus to begin the motet, but quickly moves on to newly composed music. Notice the extensive use of imitation in the beginning. Each voice enters with the text "Ave Maria" by imitating the previous voice.

Social activity

Music allows individuals to feel closely connected to a group and to express their feelings both recreationally and spiritually

straying away from sacred

Musicians continued to develop polyphonic music and began to use intervals that they had not used in the Medieval Period. These other intervals began to sound like chords, giving the music a fuller sound, and paved the way for the eventual development of tonality. Musicians also began to use duple meters (2 or 4 beats per measure) in addition to triple meter (3 beats per measure). Musicians had favored triple meter in the Medieval Period because it symbolized the Trinity, one of the foundations of the Catholic Church. This development in meter shows that musicians were not as closely tied to the church as before.

Plato

Musicians were influenced by ancient Greece and Rome, specifically by the philosophies of Plato. They believed that music can strongly influence the emotional state of the listener and that music should intensify the meaning of the text. Composers began to use a technique called text painting or word painting, where the music is supposed to reflect the literal meaning of the text. For example, if a sacred text included the phrase "ascended to heaven," the melody would ascend to a high note.

Commodity

Notation allows us to think of a song or other musical work as a product

Anonymous: Sumer is icumen in

One example of polyphonic secular music is a round. In a round, each voice enters in succession with the same melody and the same text. You probably sang Row, Row, Row Your Boat as a round when you were a kid. Sumer is icumen in is a round that was written anonymously around 1250 (Medieval Period) in England. The text is in English, but it is an older form of English than we are familiar with today, so it still seems as if it needs to be translated. The song actually has two musical ideas, both of which get repeated. One idea is labeled as Tenor Pattern and the other as Round Voice. The tenor pattern is repeated, offset, in two voices while the round voice is the melody sung in a round. The tenor voice is an ostinato (a short pattern that repeats many times is called an ostinato) that acts as a bass line for the melody. Because there are no recordings from this time period, today's performers can use the tenor and round voices in many different ways. I found recordings with combinations of instruments and voices, with the tenor and one round voice only (which means it's not actually a round), and with the tenor and several round voices. The recording in the Naxos playlist does not follow all of the details in the listening guide from the text. During the Renaissance, there was a growing audience for secular music, not only among professional musicians, but among amateurs as well. Most people owned a musical instrument, perhaps a stringed instrument like the lute or some sort of keyboard instrument, and learning to sing was considered to be a normal part of education. The middle class was growing and was interested in creating music, so composers began to compose for this new audience. The printing press first appeared around the very beginning of the Renaissance, and the first printed music was published in Venice in 1501. Publishers found that printing music for the amateur audience was very lucrative.

humanism

One source of inspiration for the Renaissance was a new philosophy called humanism. Humanism is the philosophy that mankind can understand and influence the world around him. Instead of turning to the church first for answers, people were turning to science. There was a shift toward the importance of the individual rather than the group, usually the church. Artists were taking credit for their work, which they typically did not do in the Medieval Period. Art was starting to be judged by the pleasure it gives its audience, and artists such as Michelangelo were demanding larger salaries. Secular music was becoming more important, but the church was still an important patron during the Renaissance.

Motet

Originally, the motet is a polyphonic work for at least three voices (three musical lines, not necessarily three individual singers), using a cantus firmus in addition to other texts. In the Renaissance, the motet is not always based on a cantus firmus, and usually has a single sacred text (still in Latin) that is used in each of the voices. Each voice moves through its own melody with its own rhythm, which means that the words may not line up in all of the voices. Characteristic of Renaissance sacred music, the text is often repeated, either by syllable, word, or phrase. There is a strong relationship between the text and the music. Composers chose the most vivid passages of the bible for their motets, so that they could write equally vivid music.

Secular Music

Secular music is the nonreligious music being created outside of the church. Most secular music happened in the court, under the patronage of the nobility. Troubadours or trouveres were poet-musicians who wrote their own music and texts, and performed them as well (like singer-songwriters today). Some troubadours were members of the nobility and would perform for their own entertainment or for their friends. A lower class musician was called a minstrel; minstrels were wandering musicians who traveled from town to town bringing news and gossip in the form of song.

Secular music

Social music-making for entertainment and personal expression

Sacred purpose

Sound to inspire the faithful to worship

Counter-Reformation

The Catholic Church's response to the Reformation is known as the Counter-Reformation. The Catholic Church formed the Council of Trent to do a self-study to determine what changes needed to take place, in hopes of bringing people back to the Church. This council met from 1545 to 1563, and one of the items they discussed was music. They decided that since the text was often obscured in polyphonic music, it was no longer a suitable form of prayer. They thought that if the music was complicated enough, then the congregation would start paying closer attention to the music than to the text. They also had concerns about instrumental music. Musicians would often double one of the vocal lines on an instrument, and the council thought that the congregation might pay attention to the instrumental music, and completely ignore the words. The council came up with two possible solutions: prohibit the use of polyphonic music during the church service, or prohibit the use of music entirely. They felt that using only monophonic music, in the form of Gregorian chant, would bring the focus back to the meaning of the text; if that wasn't enough, they were willing to take music out of the church service completely, and speak the text. Neither of these solutions appealed to the church musicians, since they would either be out of work, or they would have to ignore all of the musical developments that had taken place in the last 400 years.

Medieval Period

The Middle Ages, or the Medieval Period, were from 400-1450. The music of the Medieval Period is largely the result of the patronage system. Musicians worked for the church or for the nobility; they did not create music to be consumed by the general public like today. Music for the church was sacred, while music for the court was typically secular. Secular music would have included dance music, love songs (often using poetry expressing love for the queen), and political songs. Most secular music was improvised and not written down, so we have limited examples of secular music from this period. We know much more about sacred music from this time, so study of music from the Middle Ages focuses on sacred music.

Renaissance Period

The Renaissance Period (1450-1600) began in Italy and spread throughout Europe, reaching England last. The Renaissance affected all aspects of culture, such as science, religion, art, and of course, music. This is the time period when Columbus was exploring the world, da Vinci and Michelangelo were both creating famous works of art, Shakespeare was writing his plays, and the Protestant Church broke away from the Catholic Church.

The music of the early Catholic Church is called chant, plainchant, or Gregorian chant.

The entire church service was sung, so musicians and church officials were responsible for knowing a large number of chants and for choosing which ones to use in each church service. Pope Gregory the Great decided that since some chants were appropriate for Christmas, and some were appropriate for Easter, and others were appropriate for various feast days, the chants should be tied to the church calendar. This meant that all 3,000 or so chants had to be written down and organized. Because Pope Gregory is credited with starting this project, chant is often referred to as Gregorian chant. The written notation of many of these chants survived so that we can study them today.

Instrumental Dance Music

The instruments used in the Medieval and Renaissance Periods were different from today's instruments. The performers had little control over the dynamics of the instrument, so there were loud/outdoor instruments and soft/indoor instruments. Most instrumental music was improvised and was often based on vocal melodies. Instrumental dance music was still being improvised in the Renaissance Period as it had been in the Medieval Period. With the new audience of amateurs interested in performing their own music, however, composers began to notate some of their instrumental music. They would write the main melody line without specifying an instrument, so that it could be published and made available to anyone who owned any instrument. Some performers would play the published melody while others would embellish it. Some performers were able to improvise additional melodies to be performed along with the published melody. Composers start to be more specific about the instrumentation in the Baroque Period, but don't always specify the instrumentation until the Classical Period.

Madrigal

The madrigal is a genre that originated in Italy in 1530 and spread throughout Europe, reaching England last. A madrigal is a piece for 4 or 5 solo voices that served as musical recreation for amateurs. Madrigals are musical settings of poetry in the vernacular, which is the everyday spoken language as opposed to the more formal language used in other genres. Madrigals were very popular (there were about 20,000 published by 1620) and composers kept their audience in mind by using catchy rhythms that were easy to remember and melodies that were in comfortable singing ranges. Composers tried to represent the text as vividly as possible and often used text painting. The characteristic techniques used in madrigals are called madrigalisms; one example of a madrigalism is the use of nonsense syllables (La, la, la, etc.) to leave parts of the story to the imagination. Madrigals would have been sung in mixed company, with children nearby, so the more mature parts of the story would have to be implied.

mass

The main ceremony in the Catholic Church is the Mass; like many types of ceremonies, the events in a Mass happen in a prescribed order. The events in a Mass are divided into two categories: the Ordinary and the Proper. The Ordinary of the Mass consists of all of the parts of the Mass with unchanging text (for example, there are certain prayers that are recited in exactly the same way in every single Mass); the Proper of the Mass consists of all of the parts of the Mass with texts that change according to the season (for example, a priest will give a sermon in each Mass, but the actual words are different every time). Many church musicians chose to focus on composing music for the Mass Ordinary, because that music could be used over and over again.