Week 47 - Worldly song and dance music to 1300

1. Stuff done this week

I am still struggling to stick to my regimen. I have requested extra time of from work, so I can spend more time on studying. I now have a part time day on monday and wednesday for managing my study and duty as a father.

2. Listening done this week

Canciones de trovadoes occitanos.

3. What I learned

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

Song and Dance Music to 1300

By the 9th century 3 successors to the Roman Empire emerged:

1. The Byzantine Empire (comprised of Asia Minor and S.E. Europe)
2. The Arab world (a mighty empire extending form Pakistan, through the Middle East to Northern Africa and Spain)
3. Western Europe (the poorest, most fragmented and weakest of the three)

In 800 Charlemagne was coronated in Rome as Emperor. European culture owes much to all three empires. Charlemagne promoted learning and artistic achievement, improved education, by promoting primary schools in monasteries and sponsoring scholarships and arts.

He and his son Louis the Pious (r. 814-43) held court at centers for intellectual and cultural life. After Louis's death, his empire was divided. Over the next few centuries the countries of Europe as we know them today began to emerge, although their boundaries changed frequently.

Europe saw remarkable economic progress. Technological advances in agriculture and an expansion of lands under cultivation led to great growth in production. Indcreasing food supplies raised the standard of living and allowed the population to triple in size between 1000-1300.

By 1300 Europe had surpassed the Byzantine and Arab empires in economic strength.

Europe in 1050 (Worldology, 2009)

The Medieval economy was largely based on agriculture, and the population was mostly rural.

Society was organized into three main classes:

1. Nobility and knights (fought wars and controlled the lands)
2. Priests, monks and nuns (religious services, education)
3. Peasants (in service of the nobility)

By the 12th century trade in food and other products promoted growth of markets, towns and cities. Artisans organized themselves into guilds. With doctors, lawyers and merchants these artisans constituted a new middle class between nobles and peasants.

From 1050 to 1300, cathedral schools were established throughout Western and central Europe, teaching Latin grammar, rhetoric and music.

After 1200, independent schools for laymen spread rapidly as well, fostering a more secular culture and rise in literacy. This was mainly under men; women would have received schooling in reading and writing at home. This was also the time in which universities were founded, for instance in Bologna, Paris, Oxford, etc., teaching Law, Theology, Liberal Arts and Medicine.

Writers in Latin and vernacular languages wrote epic , lyric and narrative poems. Much of this poetry was sung.

Latin and Vernacular Song

One type of Latin song, called versus, was normally sacred and sometimes attached to liturgy. Monophonic versus were composed through the 11th and 13th century, particularly in Acquitaine (southern region of France). It influenced troubadour song.

Conductus was a related type of song, originating from the 12th century.

Many secular songs were written in Latin, such as goliard songs (10th-13th century), which were songs associated with wandering students/clerics called goliards. The topics these songs addressed were religious, moral, satire, love, spring, eating and drinking and other earthly pleasures.

Many vernacular songs were composed in Medieval French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, etc..Many pieces hve been lost. A few street cries and folk songs are preserved, because they were quoted in polyphonic music written for educated audiences.

One type of vernacular song that survived is the epic, a long heroic narrative. The chanson de geste was an epic in the Northern Frenc vernacular, recounting heroic deeds. The "Song of Roland" (ca. 1100) about Charlemagne's battle against the Muslims in Spain is an example. Epics in other lands are: Beowulf (8th century), the Norse Eddas (ca. 800-1200) and the Song of the Nibelungs (13th century). The music has not survived; only the poetry.

Minstrels and other professional musicians

Poet-singers called bards in Celtic lands sang epics at banquets and other social occasions (playing a harp, fiddle or other stringed instrument).

Jongleurs were lower-class itinerant musicians who travelled alone or in groups, earning a precarious living by performing tricks, telling stories, and singing or playing instruments.

By the 13th century the term minstrel was used for more specialized musicians, many of whom were employed at a court or city for periods of the year.

Unlike jongleurs, minstrels came from varied backgrounds, ranging from former clerics to children of merchants, craftsmen or knights.

Around the 12th century these musicians organized in guilds. Formerly viewed as outcasts, musicians gained greater social acceptance through such guilds.

Troubadour and trouvère song

The most significant body of song in the Middle Ages was the lyric tradition cultivated in the courts and cities under aristocratic sponsorship.

In the 12th century the troubadours (poet-composers in Southern France whose language was Occitan) and trouvères (poet-composers whose language was Old French) emerged. The many castles and courts throughout France supported the troubadours and trouvères. Their lives are recounted in biographics called vidas (lives), often our only source of information about them. Some were nobles, like Guillaume IX, and some were born to servants at court, like Bernard de Ventadorn.

Other troubadours and trouvères came from families of merchants, craftsmen, or even jongleurs, accepted into aristocratic circles because of their accomplishments in poetry and music and their adoption of the court etiquette.

The songs were preserved in chansonniers (song books). About 2600 troubadour poems have survived, a tenths with melodies. By contrast 2/3 rds of the 2100 extant trouvère poems have music.

The songs of the troubadours and trouvères were the fountainhead of all Western vernacular poetry. Notable for their refinement, elegance, and intricacy, the poems vary in subject, form and treatment. Love songs predominate, joined by songs on political , moral and literary topics, dramatic ballads and dialogues, and dance songs.

Troubadour and trouvère songs are strophic, setting each stanza to the same melody. The melody can take many forms, but the most common pattern is AAB, either alone or with refrain.

The songs were written as unaccompanied melodies, but pictures and accounts of performance suggest that at least sometimes and perhaps most of the time singers were accompanied by instruments, especially plucked or bowed string instruments. The instrumentalists may have played the melody in unison, variations of the melody (heterophony), drones or improvised counterpoints.

Musical plays were built around narrative pastoral songs (songs in idealized rural setting), for example "Jeu de Robin et de Marion" by Adam de la Halle (ca. 1240-?1288). Adam was the first vernacular poet-composer whose complete works were collected in a manuscript, showing the great esteem in which he was held.

Dissemination

The origin of the troubadour tradition is unclear. Possible sources or influences include Arabic songs and secular Latin songs.

In 1208 pope Innocent III declared war on a heretic Christian sect called the Albigensions, centered in Southern France. The Northern French joined the crusade. The war lasted two decades, until the aristocracy, courts and wealth that supported the troubadours collapsed. The troubadours dispersed, spreading their influence into neighbouring lands and remaining active in Italy until the 14th century.

The trouvères in Northern France continued through the 13th century. They admired the troubadours and preserved their art.

Song in Other Lands

England

After the Norman Conquest of 1066, French was the language of the kings and nobility in England. The English king, as duke of Normandy and later also duke of Aquitaine, held lands in France, and he participated in French politics and culture. The royal house sponsored troubadours/trouvères, such as Bernard de Ventadorn, and King Richard I, the Lionheart (1157-1199) who was a trouvère himself. Few melodies survive for some songs in Middle English, the language of the lower- and middle classes.

Germany: Minnesinger

Troubadours were the model for the German Minnesinger, knightly poet-musicians who flourished between the 12th and 14th centuries and who wrote in Middle High German.

Italy: Laude

Few secular songs in Italian survive from before 13400 with music, but we do have melodies for several dozen laude, sacred Italian monophonic songs.

Spain/Portugal: Cantigas

Cantigas de Santa Maria are a collection of over 400 cantigas (songs) in Galician-Portuguese in honor of the Virgin Mary. The collection was prepared about 1270-90 under the direction of King Alfonso el Sabio (the Wise) of Castile and León (northwest Spain) and preserved in beautifully illustrated manuscripts.

Medieval instruments

I covered some instruments in greater detail in earlier posts.

But the important instruments are:

• vielle (fiddle)
• hurdy-gurdy (mechanical wheel fiddle)
• psaltery (strings attaced to a frame over a wooden sounding board)
• transverse flute (flute made of ivory or wood and without keys)
• pipe and tabor
• bagpipes
• portative organ
• positive organ

Most of these instruments came into Europe from Asia, through the Byzantine Empire or the Arab World (via North Africa and Spain).

Dance Music

Dancing in the Middle Ages was accompanied by songs or instrumental music, usually not written down but played from memory. So few melodies survived. The most popular dance in France (12th-14th century) was the carole (circle dance). Of instrumental dances the most common form is the estampie.

The Lover's Complaint

Lyric songs of the troubadours and their successors share traits typical of European songs ever since. Medieval songs are strophic (all verses are sung to the same music), diatonic (5 whole and 2 half step sequences) and mostly syllabic (poetry that has certain number of syllables per line) moving around stepwise in a range of around an octave usually with a clear pitch center.

The most common subject is a pure usually unattainable love.

4. Sources

BURKHOLDER, J, GROUT, D. and PALISCA, C. (2014) A history of western music, 9th edition, New York: W.W. Norton. Pages: 67-83.

WORLDOLOGY(2009) Interactive Maps: High Middle Ages (967 - 1050), Available from: http://www.worldology.com/Europe/high_middle_ages.htm [Accessed 21st november 2016]