Week 8: Instrumental Music in the Renaissance

1. Stuff done this week

- Practicing the Sycamore Rag by Scott Joplin on mandolin; it contains lots of syncopation....given me a headache figuring out upstroke - downstroke pattern. Catchy theme!

- Studying another chapter from Burkholder et al. (2014). Notes are presented below.

- Listening to Giovanni Gabrieli, Renaissance composer from the Venetian School.

- Finishing recording of Crimson Inc's murder ballad Cold Black Ground. The final mix sounds alright. Found my harmonica wails to dominating in the tune, but rest of the band does not seem to mind it.

2. Listening done

I was curious to listen to some compositions by Giovanni Gabrieli (ca. 1555-1612).

This instrumental piece Canzon septimi toni a 8 features such a delightful and cheerful melody. This 2012 performance is by the Green Mountain Project. The ensemble features three violins, two cornettos, five sackbuts and continuo, split into two groups. The continuo consists of a chamber organ and two theorbos, which are the enormous plucked lute-family instruments.

Apparently, the two groups are postioned in traditional manner on either side of the organ to approximate the spatial effects for which San Marco and its composers were known.

The sound is so smoothly textured and well blended....beautiful.

Here, a beautiful example of what is called polychoral composition. These are works for two or more choirs. This works beautifully in the responsorial setting starting from 1.50; the female and male voices sing "Halleluja" back and forth and then it blends in a beautiful texture. This performance is conducted by Jean Tubéry (1964-), a french player of the cornett and conductor.

https://gloria.tv/video/ou

3. What I have learned

The 16th century saw the rise of instrumental music that was cultivated for its own sake. It is evident in the cultivation of new instruments, new roles for instrumental music, new genres, and new styles, as well as in the growing supply of written music for instruments allone, including many published collections. New genres include variations, prelude, fantasia, toccata, ricercare, canzona and sonata. These developments set the stage forlater periods, when instrumental music became more important.

3.1 Instruments

Renaissance musicians played a great variety of instruments; professional musicians were expected to be adept at several. In the 16th century, many books were published describing musical instruments and instructing how they should be played.

The first published book was Sebastian Virdung's Musica Getutscht (Music Explained, 1511). Others followed in increasing numbers.One of the richest sources is the second volume of Syntagma Musicum (1618-1620) by Michael Praetorius, containing descriptions/illustrations of instruments then in use.

Wind and string instruments were often built in sets or instrumental families, so that one uniform timbre was available throughout the entire range from soprano to bass.An instrumental ensemble, consisting of four to seven instruments, became known in England as a consort.

Most of the principal Renaissance wind instruments were already in use by the Middle Ages: recorders, transverse flutes, shawms, cornetts,and trumpets. New instruments in the Renaissance were the sackbut (an early trombone) and the crumhorn (find my blog entry of week 3 about this instrument).

Percussion instruments also continued from the Middle Ages: tabor,side drum, kettle drums, cymbals, triangles, and bells. The most popular instrument was the lute (I wrote about the lute in this Blog (week 35, 2016). Lutenists performed solos,accompanied singing, and played in ensembles. Closely related to the lute was the Spanish vihuela, which had a flat back and guitar shaped body.

The viol or viola da gamba (leg viol) was developed in Spain in the mid 15th century, and quickly became the leading bowed string instrument of the 16th century. A distant cousin of the viol was the violin, gradually displaced the viol, because of its brighter tone.

Aside from the organ, there were two main types of keyboard instrument: the clavichord (operated by a brass blade striking a string to make it vibrate) and the harpsichord (operated by a quill that plucks the string). The latter came in various sizes and was known by various names: virginal (England), clavecin (France) and clavicembalo (Italy).

3.2 Types of Instrumental Music

Instrumental music had various roles in the Renaissance: accompaniment to dancing, part of a public ceremony or religious ritual, background to other activities or entertainment of a small group of listeners or players. Renaissance instrumental music can be divided into 5 broad categories:

•  dance music
• arrangements of vocal music
• setting ofexisting melodies
• variations
• abstract instrumental works

Dance Music

Social dancing was widespread and highly valued in the Renaissance, and people of breeding were expected to be expert dancers. Musicians and composers played and composed a great deal of dance music. Performers frequently improvised dance music or played dance tunes from memory, as in earlier times. 16th Century performers often improvised by ornamenting a given melody or by adding one or more contrapuntal parts to a given melody in the bass line.

Published dances show that dance music served two very different purposes in the Renaissance. Most dances for ensemble were functional music, suitable for accompanying dancers, although they were also marketed to amateur performers.  The principal melody was typically in the uppermost part,which would be embellished. The other parts would be left homophonic, with little or no contrapuntal interplay. Most dance pieces for solo lute or keyboard, on the other hand, are stylized or abstracted, intended for the enjoyment of the player or listeners, rather than for dancing.These included more elaborate counterpoint or written-out decoration.

Each dance follows a particular meter, tempo, rhythmic pattern, and form, all of which are reflected in pieces composed for it. The particularity of rhythm and form distinguished each typeof dance from the other. The favorite courtly dance of the 15th and early 16th century was the basse dance (low dance), a stately couple dance marked by gracefully raising and lowering the body.

Renaissance musicians often grouped dances in pairs or threes. A fovorite combination was a slow dance in duple meter followed by a fast one in triple meter on the same tune.One pair was the pavane and galliard. By the 16th century, dances were a core part of the instrumental repertoire for soloists and ensembles alike.

Arrangements of Vocal Music

Instruments were frequently used to double or replace voices in polyphonic compositions. Lutenists and keyboard players  made arrangements  of vocalpieces, either improvised or written down.These arrangements (intabulations) were often written in tablature, and the were very popular during the 16th century; great numbers were published.

Settings of Existing Melodies

Instrumental music, liek vocal music, sometimes incorporated existing melodies. Composers of the late 15th/early 16th century wrote many settings for instrumental ensembles of chanson melodies; these pieces could be played as background music for other activities or by amateurs for their own pleasure. In Catholic churches, chants traditionally performed by two and a half choirs alternating segments or verses, such as Kyries and hymns,could instead alternate between the choir singing chants and the organ playing a cantus-firmus setting or paraphrase.Such settings of short segments of chant were called organ verses or versets.

By composers imitating eachother, new musical genres developed, for instance the In Nomine. English composers wrote hundreds of settings of the melody from John Taverner's Sanctus from Missa Gloria tibi trinitas.

Variations

Improvising on a tune to accompany dancing is old, but a particular form known as variations or variation formes is a 16th century invention used for independent instrumental pieces, rather than accompaniment. Variations combine change with repetition, by presenting an uninterupted series of variants on a theme (an existing or newly composed tune, bass line, harmonic plan, melody with accompaniment, or other musical subject).

Variations served to entertain the listener with fresh and interesting ideas and to demonstrate the skill of the composer or performer. Written variations on pavane tunes first appeared in 1508 in the lute tablatures of Joan Ambrosio Dalza, showing for instance a varied repetition of each strain (AA'BB'CC'). Composers and performers wrote and improvised variations on ostinatos, short bass lines repeated over and over.

In the late 16th/early 17th century, the variations were flourishing among the English Virginalists (a group of English keyboard composers). Its exponents were William Byrd, John Bull (ca. 1562-1628) and Orlando Gibbons (1583-1625). They typically used dances or familiar songs of the time as themes for variations.

Abstract Instrumental Works

Beginning in the late 15th and early 16th century, composers - for the first time - started to write several types of instrumental music that was truly independent of dance rhythms or borrowed tunes.

Performers on keyboard and lute often had reason to improvise: to introduce a song, to fill the time during a church service, to establish the mode of a subsequent chant or hymn, to test the tuning of a lute,or to entertain themselves or an audience. Compositions that resemble such improvisations appeared in early in the 16th century, especially in Spain and Italy. Such pieces were given names such as: prelude, fantasia, or ricercare. Not based on any pre existing melody, they unfold freely, with varying textures and musical ideas.

The toccata was the chief form of keyboard music in improvisory styleduring the second half of the 16th century. The work of Claudio Merulo (1533-1604)  exemplified the genre.

The italian canzona became one of the leading genres of contrapuntal instrumental music in the late 16th century. The earliest pieces were intabulations of French chansons . They were light, fast-moving and strongly rhythmic, with a fairly simple contrapuntal texture.

3.3 Music in Venice

Music in Venice exemplifies traits of the late Renaissance and also of the early Baroque period.It is regarded as the point of transistion between the two eras.

Venice, the second most important Italian city after Rome, was an independent state. It was an oligarchy run by severalimportant families, with an elected leader called the doge. As the chief port for European trade with the East, Venice accumulated enormous wealth and power. The government spent lavishly on the arts.

Centre of Venetian musical culture was the great 11th century Church of St.Mark. It served as a private chapel of the doge. Religious rituals were celebrated with great pomp and elaborate music. Music in St.Mark's was supervised by officials of the state, sparing no expense. The position of choirmaster, the most coveted musical post in all of Italy, was held by, amongst others, Monteverdi in the 17th century.



Portrait of Giovanni Gabrieli, Wikipedia (2016)



Giovanni Gabrieli (ca. 1532-1585) served St. Mark's for almost three decades as organist, composer, and supervisor of the instrumentalists.His compositions used all the resources available at the church, resulting in works formultiple choirs and the earliest collections of pieces for large instrumental ensemble.

The glory of Venetian church music is manifest in its polychoral motets, meaning compositions for two or more choirs. Andrea Gabrieli wrote numerous of such motets for important state and church ceremonies, and the medium reached new heights in the polychoral work of his nephew Giovanni. Gabrieli'smusic was a major influence on Baroque church music, especially in Germany.

Gabrieli and other Venetian composers applied the idea of divided choirs also to instruments in ensemble canzonas,for instance using two groups of four instruments accompanied by an organ.



The sonata was a close relative of the canzona, consisting of a series of sections each based on a different subject or on variants of a single subject. Both canzonas and sonatas were used to accompany church rituals.

3.4 Instrumental Music Gains Independence

The sixteenth century saw the rise of instrumental music as a genre in its own right. It would gain more and more independence, until by the 19th century it reached a level of prestige higher than most vocal music. Moreover, the tradition of playing instrumental music for one's own pleasure, alone or with friends, was well established by the end of the 16th century and endures to this day.

The oldest isntrumental works are Gabrieli's canzonas and sonatas, which were rediscovered in the early 19th century.

4. Sources

BURKHOLDER, J, GROUT, D. and PALISCA, C. (2014) A history of western music, 9th edition, New York: W.W. Norton. Pages: 264-285.

Gloria.tv (2013) "Giovanni Gabrieli Music for Christmas in St Mark of Venice Jean Tubery", [Online] Available from:<https://gloria.tv/video/a8cGcNn2Rnog3Nz9uwbSRnG1U> [Accessed: 1-7-2017]

TENET (2012), "Canzon septimi toni (Giovanni Gabrieli, 1597)", Youtube, viewed 27th of March 2017, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yB96NymHfLQ>

WIKIPEDIA (2016) Giovanni Gabrieli. [Online] Available from: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Gabrieli [Accessed: 27/03/2017].