Week 1: Music and the Renaissance (1400-1600)

1. Stuff done this week

- Read chapter 7 of "A History of Western Music" (2014); notes are presented in this blog.
- I intend to write an essay on Afro-Punk. I am finding various interesting sources:
Reading "Right to Rock" by Prof. Maureen Mahon (New York University). It is a book about the ways African American rock musicians in the 1990s used music and activism to challenge prevailing ideas about black music and identity. I believe it may be useful as source for my essay on AfroPunk.
Watched the documentary "Afro-Punk (2003)" directed by James Spooner. The documentary explores the roles of African Americans within what was then an overwhelmingly white alternative music scene across the United States of America and abroad. The film focuses on the lives of four African Americans dedicated to the punk rock lifestyle, interspersed with interviews with African American punk rockers.

Afro-Punk (documentary), by James Spooner

- Found an article (thesis) by Aaron Lee Thompson (Cornell University), "From Bad Brains to Afro-Punk: An Analysis of Identity, Consciousness, and Liberation Through Punk Rock from 1977-2010", a critical study of African Americans in punk rock. It delves into the music and culture, providing an analysis of this movement in punk rock.
- Reading about the Renaisssance Period and its music in Burkholder et al. (2014).
- Studying music notation. I wrote out the C major scale in both treble and bass clef in my music note book, making sure all the stems are straight and I tried to space the notes out evenly.

Next, I worked out more scales and wrote out one octave, ascending, for the following scales: F major, D major, A major and B flat major.

- Also worked on some projects from the OCA Course Book:

Project 5

Indentifying intervals.

Project 6

I wrote out the above treble clef melody into notes of the same pitch in bass clef. I thought is was rather tricky (see my crossed out attempt: in the final line a accidentally wrote an extra 16th note).

Project 7

The next project I did involved the identification of time signatures for the examples A to E.

A = 3/4 time; 3 beats, which are crotchets
B = 6/4 time; 6 beats, which are crotchets
C = 4/4 time; 4 beats, which are crotchets
D = 3/8 time; 3 beats, which are quavers
E = 8/4 time; 8 beats, which are crotchets

2. Listening done this week

FEWS with their song called "The Zoo". They played as support act for the The Pixies, during their gig at the Heineken Music Hall in Amsterdam, 27th of November 2016. I like the paranoia of this edgy, energy filled alternative rock song. Makes you want to break free and run...where? Anywhere!

FEWS - The Zoo (official video)

Starting to discover some Afro-punk bands. I'm not much of a hardcore skate punk fan, but the sneering, manic sounding "cutting class! cutting class!" sort of stuck in my mind.

I might grow to like this, actually. It does not offer much melody-wise, but the rhythmic playing must be rather challenging...just listen to the bass lines. Also the guitar is highly overdriven, creating the characteristic "buzz-saw sound" so much heard in hardcore punk music.

What I have read about Afro-punk, it is not easy to be involved in the scene. Musicians are both outcasts to white and black music-scenes: white record labels telling them they are not "black enough" to sign, and the black community telling them "they are playing white people music". Both suggest that this music could never be "authentic". As a sociologist, I am aware that "authenticity" is often a social construct and becomes an stereotypical expectation.

So, for colored people to be involved in this music, it requires determination and a real love. I believe these bands are in fact more "authentic", meaning "natural" or "innately driven". They fit the "outcast" quality associated with punk rock.

Cerebral Ballzy - Cutting Class

And this proves that punk music was never just "white" or "black" to begin with. The Detroit black punk band "Death", started in 1971, was making proto-punk music, before punk started to become better known.

Death - Politician in my eyes

3. What I learned

Here are my first notes about the Renaissance from "A History of Western Music" (Burkholder et al., 2014).

Music and the Renaissance

The term Renaissance literally means "rebirth". The 15th and 16th centuries were a period of great change for European culture, literature, art and music. Many contemporary philosophers, scholars and artists viewed the classic Greek and Roman world as the pinnacle of culture. They regarded the Middle Ages as a dark period, that - because of the conservative, central authority of the church - was kept from civilization and innovation. With the rediscovery of the classic heritage, indeed some sort of rebirth took place.

Europe from 1400 to 1600

The 15th century saw the end of two long-standing conflicts:

• The Great Schism in the church was resolved in 1417 with the return of a single pope in Rome
• The Hundred Years' War concluded with the expulsion of the English from France in 1453.

That year Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks, ending the Byzantine Empire.

Most significant was the rise of Europe as a world power. Larger ships, better ships, better navigational aids, and more powerful artillery helped Europeans expand their influence. The Portuguese established colonies and trade routes extending around Africa to India and the East Indies.

Columbus discovered the new world in 1492, leading to Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Americas, to be followed by the Dutch, French and English. This lead to the expansion of European culture, including its music. After the turmoil of the 14th century, the European economy began to grow, laying the foundations for a flowering of the arts.

Ottoman attacks on Constantinople beginning in 1396, caused scholars to flee to Italy, taking numerous ancient Greek writings with them. The increased availability of ancient writings was complemented by a new way of approaching them.

The Renaissance in Culture and Art

The term Renaissance and what period denotes is debated by scholars. In music there were no ancient Greek practices to revive, at least not until the late 16th century.

But still, the term is useful as a metaphor for a spirit of discovery and invention between 1400 en 1600, from examining ancient writers, exploring other parts of the planet, dissecting the human body to discover how it works, inventing new manufacturing processes, devising a new way to paint realistically or to compose more compelling music.

Humanism (from studia humanitatis, study of human knowledge) was the strongest intellectual movement of the Renaissance. Humanists sought to revive ancient learning, emphasizing the study of grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy, and centering on classical Latin and Greek writings. They believed these subjects developed the mind, spirit and ethics of an individual, preparing students for a life of virtue and service. Alongside their belief in Christian doctorine, humanists had faith in the dignity and nobility of humans, in human reason, and in our capacity to understand reality through our senses and to improve our condition through our own efforts.

The role of the church was not diminished: it borrowed from and assimilated the classical sources. In music, the traditional mathematical view of music did not disappear, but the immediate perception of music, and the ways it resembled a language, became increasingly important. Composers sought to please the ear with beautiful sonorities, more pervasive consonance, greater control of dissonance, and seemingly natural rather than contorted melodies and rhythms.

In the visual arts, more naturalistic representations were possible through two innovations:

• perspective drawing, for instance the painting "The Ideal City"
• chiaroscuro, or the naturalistic treatment of light and shadow.

Città ideale, ca. 1480 (Wikipedia, 2017)

The many portraits painted in the Renaissance period testify to the desire of patrons to be memorialized in art and in the striving for artists to capture the essential "human" quality of their subject.

In architecture, there was a preference for clarity and classical models in architecture, contrasting with the ornate Gothic decoration, such as for instance on Notre Dame Cathedral.

There are parallels in music: Composers expanded the range of their pieces to include lower and higher pitches than before, and they employed contrasts between high and low registers and between thin and full textures that recall the contrasts of light and dark in paintings of the time. There is an increased focus on making the mode of a polyphonic work clear, by having all or most phrases cadence on the main note of the mode, especially its final and reciting tone.

Music in the Renaissance

Court chapels, groups of salaried musicians and clerics who were associated with a ruler rather than with a particular building, sprang up all over Europe in the late 14th and early 15th century. The first chapels were established in the 13th century by King Louis IX of France and King Edward I of England. After the mid-fourteenth century, the fashion spread to other aristocrats and church leaders. Members of the chapel served as performers, composers, and scribes, furnishing music for church services.

Composers were trained as choir boys. Choir schools taught not only singing and how to perform sacred music but also music theory, reading, writing, grammar, mathematics, basic theology, and other subjects.

Many rulers supported music and competed with each other for the best composers and performers. Like fine clothes and impressive pageantry, excellent music was both enjoyable in itself and valuable as a way to display wealth and power to audiences at home and abroad. Especially in Italy, the rulers brought talented musicians from France, Flanders and the Netherlands to their cities.

This lead to an exchange of national traditions, genres, and ideas, and an international style - comprised of English, French and Italian traditions - developed in the 15th century.

Counterpoint

Core of the international style was a new counterpoint, based on:

• a preference for consonance, including thirds and sixths as well as prefect fifths and octaves
• strict control of dissonance
• avoidance of parallel fifths and octaves.

It is this contrapunctual practice that binds the 15th and 16th centuries into a single period of music. The distinction between old and new counterpoint is expressed in "Liber de arte contrapuncti" by Flemish composer Johannes Tinctoris (ca. 1435-1511).

Equality of voices

In the way of compositional method and texture, the range of the musical compositions was expanded. The number of voices grew. During the 15th century, the prevailing three-voice texture was replaced by a four-voice texture, with a bass line added below the tenor. A striking change occurred during the second half of the 15th century when composers moved away counterpoint structured around the cantus (top line) and tenor and toward greater equality between voices. Previously, polyphonic music was about adding voices to a tenor. Now, composers increasingly worked out all the voices at the same time in relation to each other.

Associated with this new approach was the emergence of two kinds of musical texture:

• Imitative counterpoint: voices imitate or echo a motive or phrase in another voice, usually at different pitch level (5th, 4th or octave)
• Homophony: all the voices move together in essentially the same rhythm.

Both textures allowed the composer more freedom, than the old approach of layering voices.

Tuning and temperament

In the Middle Ages, musicians relied on Pythagorean intonation as tuning system. In this system all 4ths and 5ths were perfectly tuned, but 3rds and 6ths had complex ratios that made them dissonant by definition and out of tune to the ear.

In 1482, Bartolomé Ramis de Pareia, a Spanish mathematician and music theorist residing in Italy, proposed a tuning system that produced perfectly tuned 3rds and 6ths. This system became known as just intonation. The problem with this system was that, in order to get most thirds in tune, one fourth, one fifth and one third must be out of tune. As musicians started to use more notes outside the diatonic scale, this posed a problem, especially for keyboard players.

As a compromise, tuning systems known as temperaments were used, in which pitches were adjusted to make most or all intervals usable. Most keyboard players in the 16th century used mean-tone temperament, in which the 5ths were tuned small, so the major thirds could sound well. The equal temperament system, in which each semitone is exactly the same, was first described by theorists in the late 1500's. Its use became wide spread after the mid-nineteenth century.

The experimentation with new tuning systems reflects the Renaissance musician's reliance on what "sounded pleasant" instead of on theory. This parallels the humanists focus on human perception, rather than on deference to pas authority.

Words and music

Composers sought to dramatize the content, using musical devices to do so, such as a specific interval, melody or contrapuntal motion. Discussions of rhetoric by Quintillian and Cicero supported the goals of declaiming words naturalistically and with the appropriate feelings, in order to move and persuade the listeners. Music was to be a servant of the words and conveyor of feelings.

Reawakened interest in Greek theory

During the 15th century, Greeks emigrating from Byzantium and Italian manuscript hunters brought the principal Greek writings on music to the West. Franchino Gaffurio (1451-1522) read the Greek theorists and incorporated much of their thinking into his writings. Swiss theorist Heinrich Glareanus (1488-1563) in his book ''Dodekachordon'' added four new modes to the traditional eight, using names of ancient Greek tonoi.

New application of Greek ideas

Plato and Quintilian maintained that music should be part of every citizen's education. This idea was revitalized in the Renaissance. Gentlemen and ladies were expected to read music, to sing from notation at sight, and to play well enough to join in music - making as a form of entertainment.

Plato and Aristotle insisted that each of the Greek scales, conveyed a different ethos and that musicians could influence a listener's emotions by their choice of harmonia. Renaissance composers sometimes chose to set a text in a certain mode based on the emotions that ancient writers associated with them.

Another new idea, inspired by ancient Greek practice was chromaticism, the use of two or more successive semitones moving in the same direction. This is in contrast to the essentially diatonic character of the earlier music.

New Currents in the Sixteenth Century

There were some developements that set the 15th century apart from the 16th.

Music printing

The introduction of music printing brought revolutionary changes. It fostered the growth of musical literacy. It made it possible for amateur musicians to make music to entertain themselves or friends and family. Printing also provided a new way for composers to make money, either directly by sale of their works to a publisher, or indirectly by making their names and compositions better known and potentially attracting new patrons.

New repertories and genres

The 16th century saw a proliferation of regional and national secular styles. Among the new vocal genres were the Spanish villancio, the Italian frottola and madrigal, and the English lute song. Instrumental genres included variations, prelude, toccata, canzona and sonata.

Reformation

Applying humanist principles to study of the Bible led Martin Luther and others to challenge church doctorines. When much of northern Europe split from the Roman Church to become Lutheran, Calvinist, or Anglican, each branch of the church developed its own music fro services and fostered new genres, including chorale, metrical psalm, and anthem.

The Catholic response, known as the Counter-Reformation, produced some of the most glorious music of the century. Palestrina, became the model for 16th century counterpoint.

4. Sources

BURKHOLDER, J, GROUT, D. and PALISCA, C. (2014) A history of western music, 9th edition, New York: W.W. Norton. Pages 144 - 164.

WIKIPEDIA (2017) The Ideal City, Available from:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ideal_City_(painting) [Accessed 16th january 2017]