Week 37 - Medieval music listening and Medieval Instruments: The Organetto

1. Stuff done this week:

- Further practicing the Irish reel"The Star of Munster". My sight reading is still slow and I feel tempted to study by ear again.

- Notes on the Portative organ.
- Finished writing a song called "Lay me down" for my band Crimson Inc..
- Thinking about a music timeline. I like this example.
- Performed with Crimson Inc. at the Backroads Roots Festival in Utrecht last sunday. Here some footage:

2. Listening done this week:

2.1 Chant in honour of anglo saxon saints

It is a series of religious chants praising Saints like Gregory the Great; Augustine of Canterbury; Kyneburga; Cuthbert of Lindisfarne; Edmund, King of East Anglia; Dunstan of Glastonbury; Ethelwold, Bishop of Winchester;Wulfstan of Worchester.

The chants are sung unaccompanied by any musical instrument; it is the pure sound of consonant voices. One sometimes hears a male tenor or baritone voice chanting a single line, followed by a chorus of voices singing unison in a call response pattern.The singing becomes diminuendo towards the end of the line, settling on the final note, then a short rest. This music does not convey haste or urgency, just peace and serenity. The notes slowly climb and fall, rarely jumping across a large interval.The music is adagio and largamente, giving it a meditative quality. It is peaceful and calming, soothing. When you listen to it, there is nothing else... the music is designed to draw the listener in.The individual pieces are hard for me to distinguish from one another. How different from Hildegard von Bingen's composition Maria, Auctrix Vite. Listening to this I feel like I am in a bubble of like sounds, the music lines go up and down, but the compositions themselves don't seem to move to a conclusion. It's like floating in a salt water tank or space...there are no picket lines. It could be sung endlessly, like eternity.As the song moves around a central tonic note, one could have a drone behind it. It sounds like the hurdy-gurdy drones I have heard on Lejeune's compilation.

2.2 Adam de la Halle - Le jeu de Robin et Marion

Le jeu de Robin et de Marion (c. 675 à 688), a sort of secular "musical" sung in old Picardian dialect narrating how young shepherdess Marion remained faithful to her betrothed Robin, resisting a knight who showed more interest in her than in the falcon he was chasing.
How spirited this music is; totally different from the Roman chant.
Lovely how the simple melodic line, consisting virtually of two main notes is augmented by building layers of each instrument. I suppose this is an interpretation of the music or could it actually have been arranged as such by De la Halle?

This music is performed by the Magnificat Ensemble from Durham Cathedral.

This short, energetic piece starting with a lute or mandolin playing a rubato, going into a simple driving line (0:09) later supported by driving fiddle and harp. A playful counter melody comes from two recorders (0:32). A tenor voice sings a frivolous line, which is answered by the instruments. 

The music is happy and driving; it is nearly impossible to not move to this.

3. What I learned:

Here my notes on the portative organ.

3.1 The Portative Organ

One would consider keyboard instruments to be rather sophisticated instruments for them to have roots in the Middle Ages, or even further back. The instruments require quite a bit of mechanical action and a lot of pipes of various lengths. To my surprise, the organ, as a ancient Greek invention, no less, was actually extensively developed during the Middle Ages.

The Hydraulis (Wikipedia, 2016)

Of all the keyboard instruments, the organ is the oldest. In ancient Greek times, during the third century B.C., a Greek engineer from Alexandria named Ktesibios built the first prototype (Munrow, 1986: page 15). It was called the "hydraulis" (hydor = water, aulos = pipe) or "water-organ". A running water source was used to provide the air pressure for the pipes, as apposed to bellows. For the Greeks and the Romans, the hydraulis was an instrument of private, rather than public entertainment.

This instrument established the principle of the keyboard as a series of levers, equipped with a return mechanism, which were pressed down by the fingers to obtain the required sets of notes.

In the 4th century the hydraulic mechanism was superseded by the introduction of bellows and the hydraulis gave way to the pneumatic organ (Munrow, 1986). How did it sound? Apel (1972: page 13) cites some early accounts of large organs from England. In his poem "De virginitate", Aldhelm (c 640 - 709) wrote that anyone for whom music for strings and voice is not enough may enjoy "the great organ with a thousand air streams out of wind-filled bellows". Then there is the account of the monk Wulstan (d. 983), describing the gigantic organ erected at Winchester under bishop Aelfheah (or Elphegus d. 951). This behemoth had 26 bellows, which were operated by 70 strong men drive out the wind "with all their strength". It featured four hundred pipes with forty sliders with ten openings each to direct the air streams. Two brothers would play the console. Wulstan commented, as quoted by Apel (1972: page 13): "It sounds so loud that everybody covers their ears with his hands, unable when close by to stand the noise that the various tones give out." Rather a terrifying musical experience, it would seem!

During the 13th and 14th centuries, the trend in organ building went towards the development of increasingly smaller organs, resulting in the organetto of portative organ. All the important developments took place on these much smaller types of instruments. It was for these that the earliest surviving examples of keyboard music were designed.

Initially sliders with letters were used for each note of the scale, leading to alphabetical organ tablature. The sliders were rather clumsy and crude, leading to the development of the keyboard. This permitted an infinitely more sensitive finger technique. The keyboard was well established by the 13th century, as was the practice of playing with two hands. Proof for this is found in the period's Belvoir Castle Psalter (Munrow, 1986).

Munrow (1986) states that as the image of the church became more mercenary and corrupt, its authority was on the wane, and the process of decline culminated in the rivalry of the Papal Schism (1378 - 1417), during which two popes vied for the position of God's highest representative on earth. As a consequence music composers turned their attention to the courts, rather than the church, leading to a surge in interest in secular music. The early keyboard music therefore contains a high proportion of secular pieces.

Composer Francesco Landini (c. 1325 - 97)
playing the organetto (Wikipedia, 2016)

So crude and large as the organ was at the beginning of the Middle Ages, so versatile and virtuoso it became by the 14th century. The organ music required dexterity of the fingers. Organ playing became competitive with contests being held and prizes awarded. The notable Italian composer Landini (c. 1325 - 97) was renowned for his virtuoso playing on the organetto (Munrow, 1986: page 15; Lejeune, 2009: page 155).

The organetto became one of the most popular instruments. It is regularly illustrated from the 13th to 16th century. The instrument usually had two rows of pipes, giving it a two octave range (one pipe to a note). Judging by the size of the pipes, the lowest note must have been around a middle C, according to Munrow (1986: page 16). In some illustrations, like the above picture of Landini, a couple of longer pipes at the end can be observed. Munrow (1986) deduces from this, that it may have been used for drone sounds.

Its construction was light and could therefore easily have been played in procession when supported with a sling. The right hand played the melody on the keyboard, while the left hand operates the bellows at the back of the instrument. A skilled player could also manage to sing over the music. it produced.

Unlike other types of organ, the portative organ was a monophonic instrument, suited for playing instrumental pieces. Its keyboard was diatonic to start with, but by the end of the 14th century it had probably become more or less fully chromatic (Munrow, 1986: page 16).

4. Sources

APEL, W. (1972) The History of Keyboard Music to 1700, 2nd edition, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

LEJEUNE, J. & VARIOUS ARTISTS (2009) A Guide to Period Instruments [CD + Book] Belgium: Ricercar (pages 5, 45-47, 55-57, 83, 155)

MUNROW, D. (1986) Instruments of the Middle Ages and Reneaissance, 10th edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

WIKIPEDIA (2016) Water organ. Wikipedia [Online Image] Available from - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_organ [Accessed: 15th September 2016].

WIKIPEDIA (2016) Francesco Landini. Wikipedia [Online Image] Available from - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesco_Landini [Accessed: 15th September 2016].