Week 44 - Medieval Music in the First Millenium

1. Stuff done this week

I read chapters on Medieval music from Burkholder et al. (2014).
For mandolin parctice, I practiced tremolo. This is a fundamental skill on the instrument, and a characteristic part of the sound of the mandolin in almost every kind of music that people play on the instrument. You hear it in "The Godfather" (Italian style) and you hear it in "Kentucky Waltz" (bluegrass style). Something I should be practicing much more; a sweet, smooth tremolo is rather pleasant to listen to. Also it is the only way to sustain notes on this instrument, for it does not have a great sustain.

2. Listening done this week

Listened to a lot of tunes from Bradlee Scott's Postmodern Jukebox. Usually I dislike cover songs "in the style of..". We have had enough bluegrass versions of acdc songs and it is becoming a cheap trick to get a laugh from audiences.

Scott Bradlee to some extent does this too, but there are some incredible gems.

These two songs, for instance, really are amazing and better than the original (at least to my opinion):

Mykal Kilgore's tenor vocals are just superb! Then this song absolutely moves me.

Maiya Sykes transformed a decent song by Green Day into something much greater. It is the sound of loneliness. It is a first take of the song, and Maiya radiates both power and vulnerability through her incredible strong voice. Just listen...

3. What I learned

Below are my music history notes from reading Burkholder et al. (2014):

The Christian Church in the First Millenium

History of Western music is intertwined with the history of the Christian Church. Religious services were mostly sung or intoned rather than spoken. Church music is also the medieval music that was best preserved.

The Diffusion of Christianity

Christians in Roman times were often persecuted. They had to gather in secret, and some were martyred. Christianity gained adherents, though, even among leading Roman families. Emperor Constantine I (r. 310 - 37) was introduced to Christianity by his mother Helena. In 313 he issued the Edict of Milan. This legalized Christianity and allowed churches to own property.

In 392 Emperor Theodosius I (r. 374 - 95) made Christianity the official religion and suppressed others, such as its origin Judaïsm. The church organized itself on the model of the Roman Empire, in geographical districts called "dioceses" and created a hierarchy of local churches. By 600, virtually the entire area controlled by Rome was Christian.

Spread of Christianity to AD 600 (Wikimedia Commons, 2016)

The Judaic Heritage

Christianity has its roots in the Jewish synagogical tradition and ancient Greek music theory. In Christian church song two important elements stem from Jewish music: the chanting of scripture and singing Psalms (the chanting by a singer and a choir) and responsorial song (in which a soloist alternates with the choir or congregation).

Jewish synagogues were centers for readings and omilies rather than worship. Public reading from the Scripture was done using "cantillation" based on melodic formulas. This practice is paralleled in the Christian faith, including symbolic sacrifice (sharing of bread and wine), singing Psalms and gathering in meeting houses to hear readings.

Music in the early church

Singing Psalms was seen as a practice that used the pleasures of music to discipline the soul, and turn the mind to spiritual things and build the Christian community. It became a central focus of monastic life.

By the late 4th century Christian observances began to become standardized, and singing the Psalms became a regular feature.

For early church leaders, music was the servant of religion, and only music that openend the mind to Christian teachings and holy thoughts was worthy of hearing in church. Believing that music without words cannot do this, most church fathers condemned instrumental music. For this reason, the entire tradition of Christian music for over a thousand years was one of unaccompanied singing, or chant. Chant (or plainsong) is a monophonic sacred form and is the earliest known music of the Christian church.

Divisions in the Church and Dialects of Chant

Disputes about theology and governance led to several divisions among Christians during the first millenium. For instance, in 395 the Roman Empire split in two parts: The Western Empire, governed from Rome or Milan, and The Eastern Empire, centered at Constantinople (now Instanbul).

The Eastern or Byzantine Empire was under control of the Emperor. As the Western empire declined due to invasions by Germanic tribes and even collapsed in 476, the Bishop of Rome gradually asserted control of the church in the west.

The Western church became the Roman Catholic church and the bishop of Rome became known as the pope (from papa, "father"). The Byzantine Church is the ancestor of the present-day (Greek) Orthodox churches.

As Christianity diversified, each branch or region evolved its own rites, consisting of:

• A church calendar, commemorating special events, individuals or times of the year (Easter, Christmas, Advent, etc)
• A liturgy, or a body of texts and rituals assigned to each service
• A repertory of plainchant, a unison form of song with melodies for the prescribed texts.

Chant developed separately in several European centres. This lead to different so called "chant dialects" or regional repertories:

• Byzantine Chant

In Byzantine chant, scriptural readings were chanted using formulas that reflected the phrasing of the texts. Melodies were classed into eight "Echoi" or modes. Hymn melodies ere notated in books from the 10th century onward, and are still sung in Greek Orthodox services.

• Western Dialects

Besides the tradition of Rome, some local dialects developed in Gaul (Galician chant), Ireland and parts of Britain (Celtic chant), Spain (Mozarabic chant), Italy (Beneventan chant) and in particular Milan (Ambrosian chant).

Milan was, after Rome, the most important center for the Western Church. Its Ambrosian chant was named after St. Ambrose, the bishop of Milan (r. 374 - 397). This dialect has survived to the present day. Many chants are similar to that of Rome, indicating a common source.

From the 8th century popes and secular rulers attempted to consolidate their leadership by standardizing what was said and sung in churches. These local dialects disappeared or were assimilated. Some have survived to the present day, though.

• Gregorian Chant

The codification of the liturgy and music under Roman leaders, helped by the Frankish kings, led to the repertory known as Gregorian chant.

Between 752 and 754, Pope Stephen II travelled to Frankish kingdoms with the Schola Cantorum (the pope's personal choir). As a result of this visit, Pippin the Short (r. 751 -68), who had become king of the Franks with support of the previous pope, sought to import the Roman liturgy and chant. His son Charlemagne (Charles the Great, r. 768 - 814) continued this policy and sentsingers to Rome to be taught this repertory.

Books of liturgical texts from around 800 (showing no musical notation) attributed this repertory to Pope Gregory I (r. 590 - 604) leading to the name Gregorian chant.

It gradually spread across almost all of Western Europe, ultimately serving as the common music of a more unified church.

By the 12th and 13th centuries, Gregorian chant had superseded all the other Western chant traditions, with the exception of the Ambrosian chant in Milan and the Mozarabic chant in a few specially designated Spanish chapels.

Old Roman chant was another body of chant, written down in the 11th and 12th century. It uses the same texts as Gregorian chant, but the melodies are more ornate, suggesting a common source.

LISTEN: Plainchant:   Chant in honour of Anglo Saxon Saints (6th - 11th century)

The Development of Notation

Oral Transmission

The earliest Medieval music did not have any kind of notational system. The tunes were primarily monophonic (a single melody without accompaniment). Melodies were learned by hearing others sing them (oral transmission) leaving no written traces. A chant was learned by rote and sung from memory, requiring memorization of hundreds of melodies. Many of those were only sung once a year(!).

Stages of notation

Rome tried to centralize the various liturgies and establish the Roman rite as the primary church tradition. There was a need to transmit these chant melodies across vast distances effectively, which was , of course, very challenging. 

As music could only be taught to people "by ear", it limited the ability of the church to get different regions to sing the same melodies, since each new person would have to spend time with a person who could teach him the song.

The first step to fix this problem came with the introduction of various signs written above the chant texts to indicate direction of pitch movement, called neumes (Latin neuma, meaning "gesture"). They signified mostly intonations, upward or downward slides of the voice, and not absolute pitch (Matthews, 2007).

Below is an example (Matthews, 2007):

Neume notation of the 10th century (Mathews, 2007)

In the 10th & 11th centuries, scribes placed neumes at varying heights above the text to indicate relative size as well as direction. These are called "heighted neumes".

The 11th century monk Guido of Arezzo (ca 991 - after 1033) suggested an arrangement of lines and spaces, using a line of red ink for F and yellow ink for C and scratching other lines into parchment.

Portrait of Guido d'arezzo (Mathews, 2007)

Neume noation of Guido of Arezzo (Mathews, 2007)

Use of lines and letters, culminating in the staff and clefs enabled scribes to notate pitches and intervals precisely. In practice, pitch was still relative, but the notes relative to each other would form the same intervals. This invention was crucial for the history of Western music.

The new notation allowed a singer to learn pieces completely unknown to him in a much shorter amount of time.

The neumatic notation system conveyed pitch, but did not clearly define any kind of rhythm or duration for the singing of notes.

Music Theory and Practice

The transmission of Greek music theory

Church musicians drew much from the music theory and philosophy of ancient Greece. During the early Christian era, Martianus Capella and Boethius gathered, summarized, modified and transmitted this body of knowledge.

In the early 5th century, Martianus Capella presented the idea of 7 liberal arts, in his treatise The Marriage of Mercury and Philology: grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy and harmonics (music).

Boethius (ca 480 - ca 524) was a most revered authority on music in the Middle Ages. He wrote De Institutione Musica ("The Fundamentals of Music"). Music is to Boethius a science of numbers, ratios, consonances, scales, and tuning; rather like a form of mathematics or physics. He divided music into three categories:

1. Musica Mundana (music of the universe)

The numerical relations that controlled movements of stars and planets, sthe changing of the seasons, and the elements.

2. Musica Humana (human music)
Music that harmonizes and unifies body and soul and their parts.

3. Musica Instrumentalis

Audible music produced by voices or instruments.

Boethius emphasized the influence of music on character and he believed music was important in educating the young.

He valued music primarily as an object of knowledge, not as a practical pursuit.

Practical theory

Treatises from the 9th century through the Middle Ages were more oriented towards music practice than earlier writings. The mathematical analyses of music by Boethius did not help church musicians notate, read classify and sing plainchant or improvise.

The most important treatises that tackled these topics were the 9th century Musica enchiriadis (Music Handbook) and the Scolica enchiriadis (Comments on the Handbook).
The Musica enchiriadis describes 8 modes.

The church modes

Ech chant was assigned a particular mode. Learning the modes and classifying chants by mode made them easier to memorize.
By the 10th century the system encompassed 8 modes.

Modes are differentiated by arrangements of whole and half steps in relation to the final, the main note in the mode and usually the last note in the melody. There are 4 finals, each with a unique combination of tones and semitones surrounding it.

Another characteristic note or pitch in a modal melody is the reciting tone. This tone is often the most frequent or prominent note in the chant, or a center of gravity around which a phrase is oriented, and phrases rarely begin or end above the reciting tone.

Each mode is paired with another that shares the same final, like so:

The Church Modes (Wikipedia, 2016)

Only one chromatic alteration was normally allowed: Bb often appears in place of B in chants that give prominence to F, as chant melodies in mode 1, 2, 4, 5 and 6 frequently do.

Beginning in the 9th century, some writers applied the names of Greek scales to the church modes. But the Medieval modal system does, in fact, have no fit with the Greek tetrachord system devised by Cleonides. It does indicate, however, how important it was to medieval scholars to ground their work in the authoritative and prestigious Greek tradition.

Solmization

To facilitate sight-singing, Guido of Arezzo introduced a set of syllables corresponding to the pattern of tones and semitones in the succession C-D-E-F-G-A. Based on the hymn Ut queant laxis he used syllables from the hymn for the names of the steps: ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la. These solmization syllables are still used today. The mnemonic by Arezzo helped in locating the semitones in chant.

The Hexachord System

Guido's followers developed the 6-step solmization pattern into a system of hexachords. Melodies with a range wider than a major sixth required the device of mutation to a new hexachord. For example, the hexachord beginning on C and rising to A, named hexachordum naturale, has its only semitone between the notes E and F, and stops short of the note B or B♭. A melody moving a semitone higher than la (namely, from A to the B♭ above) required changing the la to mi, so that the required B♭ becomes fa. Because B♭ was named by the "soft" or rounded letter B, the hexachord with this note in it was called the hexachordum molle (soft hexachord). Similarly, the hexachord with mi and fa expressed by the notes B♮ and C was called the hexachordum durum (hard hexachord), because the B♮ was represented by a squared-off, or "hard" B. Starting in the 14th century, these three hexachords were extended in order to accommodate the increasing use of signed accidentals on other notes (Wikipedia, 2016).


Followers of Guido of Arezzo also developed the pedagogical aid "Guidonian Hand". Pupils were taught to sing intervals as the teacher pointed to different joints of the open hand. Each joint stood for one of the twenty notes of the system. Pupils were taught to sing intervals as the teacher pointed to different joints of the open hand.

The Guidonian Hand (Wikipedia, 2016)

Echoes of History

Early church leaders drew on Greek views of music and rejected pagan customs, elevated worship over entertainment and singing over instrumental music. These attitudes held sway over centuries and still persist today.

Liturgies were standardized as church popes and secular rulers tried to consolidate control and unify the realms.

Invention of notation was decisive in Western music history.

Codification of Gregorian chant and diffusion in notation made it the basis of new music from the 9th to the 16th centuries.

These events took place under Frankish rule; Charlemagne's empire was the political and cultural center of Western Europe. From this day through the fourteenth century, the most important developments in European music took place in the area he once ruled.

4. Sources

BURKHOLDER, J, GROUT, D. and PALISCA, C. (2014) A history of western music, 9th edition, New York: W.W. Norton. Pages: 22-45.

MATHEWS, W.S.B. (2007) A Popular History of the Art of Music From the Earliest Times Until the Present. Available from: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/20293/20293-h/20293-h.htm [Accessed 8th November 2016]

WIKIPEDIA (2016) Guidonian hand, Available from:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guidonian_hand [Accessed 21st november 2016]

WIKIPEDIA (2016) Mode (music), Available from:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_(music) [Accessed 21st november 2016]

WIKIPEDIA (2016) Hexachord, Available from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexachord [Accessed 21st november 2016]