Kitabı oku: «Music in the History of the Western Church», sayfa 8

CHAPTER V
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MEDIAEVAL CHORUS MUSIC

It has already been noted that the music of the Catholic Church has passed through three typical phases or styles, each complete in itself, bounded by clearly marked lines, corresponding quite closely in respect to time divisions with the three major epochs into which the history of the Western Church may be divided. These phases or schools of ecclesiastical song are so far from being mutually exclusive that both the first and second persisted after the introduction of the third, so that at the present day at least two of the three forms are in use in almost every Catholic congregation, the Gregorian chant being employed in the song of the priest and in the antiphonal psalms and responses, and either the second or third form being adopted in the remaining offices.⁶³

Since harmony was unknown during the first one thousand years or more of the Christian era, and instrumental music had no independent existence, the whole vast system of chant melodies was purely unison and unaccompanied, its rhythm usually subordinated to that of the text. Melody, unsupported by harmony, soon runs its course, and if no new principle had been added to this antique melodic method, European music would have become petrified or else have gone on copying itself indefinitely. But about the eleventh century a new conception made its appearance, in which lay the assurance of the whole magnificent art of modern music. This new principle was that of harmony, the combination of two or more simultaneous and mutually dependent parts. The importance of this discovery needs no emphasis. It not only introduced an artistic agency that is practically unlimited in scope and variety, but it made music for the first time a free art, with its laws of rhythm and structure no longer identical with those of language, but drawn from the powers that lie inherent in its own nature. Out of the impulse to combine two or more parts together in complete freedom from the constraints of verbal accent and prosody sprang the second great school of church music, which, likewise independent of instrumental accompaniment, developed along purely vocal lines, and issued in the contrapuntal chorus music which attained its maturity in the last half of the sixteenth century.

This mediaeval school of a capella polyphonic music is in many respects more attractive to the student of ecclesiastical art than even the far more elaborate and brilliant style which prevails to-day. Modern church music, by virtue of its variety, splendor, and dramatic pathos, seems to be tinged with the hues of earthliness which belie the strictest conception of ecclesiastical art. It partakes of the doubt and turmoil of a skeptical and rebellious age, it is the music of impassioned longing in which are mingled echoes of worldly allurements, it is not the chastened tone of pious assurance and self-abnegation. The choral song developed in the ages of faith is pervaded by the accents of that calm ecstasy of trust and celestial anticipation which give to mediaeval art that exquisite charm of naïveté and sincerity never again to be realized through the same medium, because it is the unconscious expression of an unquestioning simplicity of conviction which seems to have passed away forever from the higher manifestations of the human creative intellect.

Such pathetic suggestion clings to the religious music of the Middle Age no less palpably than to the sculpture, painting, and hymnody of the same era, and combines with its singular artistic perfection and loftiness of tone to render it perhaps the most typical and lovely of all the forms of Catholic art. And yet to the generality of students of church and art history it is of all the products of the Middle Age the least familiar. Any intellectual man whom we might select would call himself but scantily educated if he had no acquaintance with mediaeval architecture and plastic art; yet he would probably not feel at all ashamed to confess total ignorance of that vast store of liturgic music which in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries filled the incense-laden air of those very cathedrals and chapels in which his reverent feet so love to wander. The miracles of mediaeval architecture, the achievements of the Gothic sculptors and the religious painters of Florence, Cologne, and Flanders are familiar to him, but the musical craftsmen of the Low Countries, Paris, Rome, and Venice, who clothed every prayer, hymn, and Scripture lesson with strains of unique beauty and tenderness, are only names, if indeed their names are known to him at all. Yet in sheer bulk their works would doubtless be found to equal the whole amount of the music of every kind that has been written in the three centuries following their era; while in technical mastery and adaptation to its special end this school is not unworthy of comparison with the more brilliant and versatile art of the present day.

The period from the twelfth century to the close of the sixteenth was one of extraordinary musical activity. The thousands of cathedrals, chapels, parish churches, and convents were unceasing in their demands for new settings of the Mass and offices. Until the art of printing was applied to musical notes about the year 1500, followed by the foundation of musical publishing houses, there was but little duplication or exchange of musical compositions, and thus every important ecclesiastical establishment must be provided with its own corps of composers and copyists. The religious enthusiasm and the vigorous intellectual activity of the Middle Age found as free a channel of discharge in song as in any other means of embellishment of the church ceremonial. These conditions, together with the absence of an operatic stage, a concert system, or a musical public, turned the fertile musical impulses of the period to the benefit of the Church. The ecclesiastical musicians also set to music vast numbers of madrigals, chansons, villanellas, and the like, for the entertainment of aristocratic patrons, but this was only an incidental deflection from their more serious duties as ritual composers. In quality as well as quantity the mediaeval chorus music was not unworthy of comparison with the architectural, sculptural, pictorial, and textile products which were created in the same epoch and under the same auspices. The world has never witnessed a more absorbed devotion to a single artistic idea, neither has there existed since the golden age of Greek sculpture another art form so lofty in expression and so perfect in workmanship as the polyphonic church chorus in the years of its maturity. That style of musical art which was brought to fruition by such men as Josquin des Prés, Orlandus Lassus, Willaert, Palestrina, Vittoria, the Anerios, the Gabrielis, and Lotti is not unworthy to be compared with the Gothic cathedrals in whose epoch it arose and with the later triumphs of Renaissance painting with which it culminated.

Of this remarkable achievement of genius the educated man above mentioned knows little or nothing. How is it possible, he might ask, that a school of art so opulent in results, capable of arousing so much admiration among the initiated, could have dominated all Europe for five such brilliant centuries, and yet have left so little impress upon the consciousness of the modern world, if it really possessed the high artistic merits that are claimed for it? The answer is not difficult. For the world at large music exists only as it is performed, and the difficulty and expense of musical performance insure, as a general rule, the neglect of compositions that do not arouse a public demand. Church music is less susceptible than secular to the tyranny of fashion, but even in this department changing tastes and the politic compromising spirit tend to pay court to novelty and to neglect the antiquated. The revolution in musical taste and practice which occurred early in the seventeenth century – a revolution so complete that it metamorphosed the whole conception of the nature and purpose of music – swept all musical production off into new directions, and the complex austere art of the mediaeval Church was forgotten under the fascination of the new Italian melody and the vivid rhythm and tone-color of the orchestra. Since then the tide of invention has never paused long enough to enable the world at large to turn its thought to the forsaken treasures of the past. Moreover, only a comparatively minute part of this multitude of old works has ever been printed, much of it has been lost, the greater portion lies buried in the dust of libraries; whatever is accessible must be released from an abstruse and obsolete system of notation, and the methods of performance, which conditioned a large measure of its effect, must be restored under the uncertain guidance of tradition. The usages of chorus singing in the present era do not prepare singers to cope with the peculiar difficulties of the a capella style; a special education and an unwonted mode of feeling are required for an appreciation of its appropriateness and beauty. Nevertheless, such is its inherent vitality, so magical is its attraction to one who has come into complete harmony with its spirit, so true is it as an exponent of the mystical submissive type of piety which always tends to reassert itself in a rationalistic age like the present, that the minds of churchmen are gradually returning to it, and scholars and musical directors are tempting it forth from its seclusion. Societies are founded for its study, choirs in some of the most influential church centres are adding mediaeval works to their repertories, journals and schools are laboring in its interest, and its influence is insinuating itself into the modern mass and anthem, lending to the modern forms a more elevated and spiritual quality. Little by little the world of culture is becoming enlightened in respect to the unique beauty and refinement of this form of art; and the more intelligent study of the Middle Age, which has now taken the place of the former prejudiced misinterpretation, is forming an attitude of mind that is capable of a sympathetic response to this most exquisite and characteristic of all the products of mediaeval genius.

In order to seize the full significance of this school of Catholic music in its mature stage in the sixteenth century, it will be necessary to trace its origin and growth. The constructive criticism of the present day rests on the principle that we cannot comprehend works and schools of art unless we know their causes and environment. We shall find as we examine the history of mediaeval choral song, that it arose in response to an instinctive demand for a more expansive form of music than the unison chant. Liturgic necessities can in no wise account for the invention of part singing, for even today the Gregorian Plain Song remains the one officially recognized form of ritual music in the Catholic Church. It was an unconscious impulse, prophesying a richer musical expression which could not at once be realized, – a blind revolt of the European mind against bondage to an antique and restrictive form of expression. For the Gregorian chant by its very nature as unaccompanied melody, rhythmically controlled by prose accent and measure, was incapable of further development, and it was impossible that music should remain at a stand-still while all the other arts were undergoing the pains of growth. The movement which elicited the art of choral song from the latent powers of the liturgic chant was identical with the tendency which evolved Gothic and Renaissance architecture, sculpture, and painting out of Roman and Byzantine art. Melody unsupported soon runs its course; harmony, music in parts, with contrast of consonance and dissonance, dynamics, and light and shade, must supplement melody, adding more opulent resources to the simple charm of tone and rhythm. The science of harmony, at least in the modern sense, was unknown in antiquity, and the Gregorian chant was but the projection of the antique usage into the modern world. The history of modern European music, therefore, begins with the first authentic instances of singing in two or more semi-independent parts, these parts being subjected to a definite proportional notation.

A century or so before the science of part writing had taken root in musical practice, a strange barbaric form of music meets our eyes. A manuscript of the tenth century, formerly ascribed to Hucbald of St. Armand, who lived, however, a century earlier, gives the first distinct account, with rules for performance, of a divergence from the custom of unison singing, by which the voices of the choir, instead of all singing the same notes, move along together separated by octaves and fourths or octaves and fifths; or else a second voice accompanies the first by a movement sometimes direct, sometimes oblique, and sometimes contrary. The author of this manuscript makes no claim to the invention of this manner of singing, but alludes to it as something already well known. Much speculation has been expended upon the question of the origin and purpose of the first form of this barbarous orgunum or diaphony, as it was called. Some conjecture that it was suggested by the sound of the ancient Keltic stringed instrument crowth or crotta, which was tuned in fifths and had a flat finger-board; others find in it an imitation of the early organ with its several rows of pipes sounding fifths like a modern mixture stop; while others suppose, with some reason, that it was a survival of a fashion practised among the Greeks and Rornans. The importance of the organum in music history has, however, been greatly overrated, for properly speaking it was not harmony or part singing at all, but only another kind of unison. Even the second form of organum was but little nearer the final goal, for the attendant note series was not free enough to be called an organic element in a harmonic structure. As soon, however, as the accompanying part was allowed ever so little unconstrained life of its own, the first steps in genuine part writing were taken, and a new epoch in musical history had begun.

Example of Organum or Diaphony, First Species

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Example of Organum or Diaphony, Second Species

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The freer and more promising style which issued from the treadmill of the organum was called in its initial stages discant (Lat. discantus), and was at first wholly confined to an irregular mixture of octaves, unisons, fifths and fourths, with an occasional third as a sort of concession to the criticism of the natural ear upon antique theory. At first two parts only were employed. Occasional successions of parallel fifths and fourths, the heritage of the organum, long survived, but they were gradually eliminated as hollow and unsatisfying, and the principle of contrary motion, which is the very soul of all modern harmony and counterpoint, was slowly established. It must be borne in mind, as the clue to all mediaeval music, that the practice of tone combination involved no idea whatever of chords, as modern theory conceives them. The characteristic principle of the vastly preponderating portion of the music of the last three centuries is harmony, technically so called, i. e., chords, solid or distributed, out of which melody is primarily evolved. Homophony, monody – one part sustaining the tune while all others serve as the support and, so to speak, the coloring material also – is now the ruling postulate. The chorus music of Europe down to the seventeenth century was, on the other hand, based on melody; the composer never thought of his combination as chords, but worked, we might say, horizontally, weaving together several semi-independent melodies into a flexible and accordant tissue.⁶⁴

The transition from organum to discant was effected about the year 1100. There was for a time no thought of the invention of the component melodies. Not only the cantus firmus (the principal theme), but also the counterpoint (the melodic “running mate”), was borrowed, the second factor being frequently a folk-tune altered to fit the chant melody, according to the simple laws of euphony then admitted. In respect to the words the discant may be divided into two classes: the words might be the same in both parts; or one voice would sing the text of the office of the Church, and the other the words of the secular song from which the accompanying tune was taken. In the twelfth century the monkish musicians, stirred to bolder flights by the satisfactory results of their two-part discant, essayed three parts, with results at first childishly awkward, but with growing ease and smoothness. Free invention of the accompanying parts took the place of the custom of borrowing the entire melodic framework, for while two borrowed themes might fit each other, it was practically impossible to find three that would do so without almost complete alteration. As a scientific method of writing developed, with the combination of parallel and contrary motion, the term discant gave way to counterpoint (Lat. punctus contra punctum). But there was never any thought of inventing the cantus firmus; this was invariably taken from a ritual book or a popular tune, and the whole art of composition consisted in fabricating melodic figures that would unite with it in an agreeable synthesis. These contrapuntal devices, at first simple and often harsh, under the inevitable law of evolution became more free and mellifluous at the same time that they became more complex. The primitive discant was one note against one note; later the accompanying part was allowed to sing several notes against one of the cantus firmus. Another early form consisted of notes interrupted by rests. In the twelfth century such progress had been made that thirds and sixths were abundantly admitted, dissonant intervals were made to resolve upon consonances, consecutive fifths were avoided, passing notes and embellishments were used in the accompanying voices, and the beginnings of double counterpoint and imitation appeared. Little advance was made in the thirteenth century; music was still chiefly a matter of scholastic theory, a mechanical handicraft. Considerable dexterity had been attained in the handling of three simultaneous, independent parts. Contrary and parallel motion alternating for variety’s sake, contrast of consonance and dissonance, a system of notation by which time values as well as differences of pitch could be indicated, together with a recognition of the importance of rhythm as an ingredient in musical effect, – all this foreshadowed the time when the material of tonal art would be plastic in the composer’s hand, and he would be able to mould it into forms of fluent grace, pregnant with meaning. This final goal was still far away; the dull, plodding round of apprenticeship must go on through the fourteenth century also, and the whole conscious aim of effort must be directed to the invention of scientific combinations which might ultimately provide a vehicle for the freer action of the imagination.

Example of Discant in Three Parts with Different Words (Twelfth Century)

From Coussemaker, Histoire de l’harmonie au moyen age. Translated into modern notation.

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The period from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries was, therefore, not one of expressive art work, but rather of slow and arduous experiment. The problem was so to adjust the semi-independent melodious parts that an unimpeded life might be preserved in all the voices, and yet the combined effect be at any instant pure and beautiful. The larger the number of parts, the greater the skill required to weave them together into a varied, rich, and euphonious pattern. Any one of these parts might for the moment hold the place of the leading part which the others were constrained to follow through the mazes of the design. Hence the term polyphonic, i. e., many-voiced. Although each voice part was as important as any other in this living musical texture, yet each section took its cue from a single melody – a fragment of a Gregorian chant or a folk-tune and called the cantus firmus, and also known as the tenor, from teneo, to hold – and the voice that gave out this melody came to be called the tenor voice. In the later phases of this art the first utterance of the theme was assigned indifferently to any one of the voice parts.

After confidence had been gained in devising two or more parts to be sung simultaneously, the next step was to bring in one part after another. Some method of securing unity amid variety was now necessary, and this was found in the contrivance known as “imitation,” by which one voice follows another through the same or approximate intervals, the part first sounded acting as a model for a short distance, then perhaps another taking up the leadership with a new melodic figure, the intricate network of parts thus revealing itself as a coherent organism rather than a fortuitous conjunction of notes, the composer’s invention and the hearers’ impression controlled by a conscious plan to which each melodic part is tributary.

When a number of parts came to be used together, the need of fixing the pitch and length of notes with precision became imperative. So out of the antique mnemonic signs, which had done useful service during the exclusive régime of the unison chant, there was gradually developed a system of square-headed notes, together with a staff of lines and spaces. But instead of simplicity a bewildering complexity reigned for centuries. Many clefs were used, shifting their place on the staff in order to keep the notes within the lines; subtleties, many and deep, were introduced, and the matter of rhythm, key relations, contrapuntal structure, and method of singing became a thing abstruse and recondite. Composition was more like algebraic calculation than free art; symbolisms of trinity and unity, of perfect and imperfect, were entangled in the notation, to the delight of the ingenious monkish intellect and the despair of the neophyte and the modern student of mediaeval manuscripts. Progress was slowest at the beginning. It seemed an interminable task to learn to put a number of parts together with any degree of ease, and for many generations after it was first attempted the results were harsh and uncouth.

Even taking into account the obstacles to rapid development which exist in the very nature of music as the most abstract of the arts, it seems difficult to understand why it should have been so long in acquiring beauty and expression. There was a shorter way to both, but the church musicians would not take it. All around them bloomed a rich verdure of graceful expressive melody in the song and instrumental play of the common people. But the monkish musicians and choristers scorned to follow the lead of anything so artless and obvious. In a scholastic age they were musical scholastics; subtilty and fine pedantic distinctions were their pride. They had become infatuated with the formal and technical, and they seemed indifferent to the claims of the natural and simple while carried away by a passion for intricate structural problems.

The growth of such an art as this, without models, must necessarily be painfully slow. Many of the cloistered experimenters passed their lives in nursing an infant art without seeing enough progress to justify any very strong faith in the bantling’s future. Their floundering helplessness is often pathetic, but not enough so to overcome a smile at the futility of their devices. Practice and theory did not always work amiably together. In studying the chorus music of the Middle Age, we must observe that, as in the case of the liturgic chant, the singers did not deem it necessary to confine themselves to the notes actually written. In this formative period of which we are speaking it was the privilege of the singers to vary and decorate the written phrases according to their good pleasure. These adornments were sometimes carefully thought out, incorporated into the stated method of delivery, and handed down as traditions.⁶⁵ But it is evident that in the earlier days of counterpoint these variations were often extemporized on the spur of the moment. The result of this habit on the part of singers who were ignorant of the laws of musical consonance and proportion, and whose ears were as dull as their understandings, could easily be conceived even if we did not have before us the indignant testimony of many musicians and churchmen of the period. Jean Cotton, in the eleventh century, says that he could only compare the singers with drunken men, who indeed find their way home, but do not know how they get there. The learned theorist, Jean de Muris, of the fourteenth century, exclaims: “How can men have the face to sing discant who know nothing of the combination of sounds! Their voices roam around the cantus firmus without regard to any rule; they throw their tones out by luck, just as an unskilful thrower hurls a stone, hitting the mark once in a hundred casts.” As he broods over the abuse his wrath increases. “O roughness, O bestiality! taking an ass for a man, a kid for a lion, a sheep for a fish. They cannot tell a consonance from a dissonance. They are like a blind man trying to strike a dog.” Another censor apostrophizes the singers thus: “Does such oxen bellowing belong in the Church? Is it believed that God can be graciously inclined by such an uproar?” Oelred, the Scottish abbot of Riverby in the twelfth century, rails at the singers for jumbling the tones together in every kind of distortion, for imitating the whinnying of horses, or (worst of all in his eyes) sharpening their voices like those of women. He tells how the singers bring in the aid of absurd gestures to enhance the effect of their preposterous strains, swaying their bodies, twisting their lips, rolling their eyes, and bending their fingers, with each note. A number of popes, notably John XXII., tried to suppress these offences, but the extemporized discant was too fascinating a plaything to be dropped, and ridicule and pontifical rebuke were alike powerless.

Such abuses were, of course, not universal, perhaps not general, – as to that we cannot tell; but they illustrate the chaotic condition of church music in the three or four centuries following the first adoption of part singing. The struggle for light was persistent, and music, however crude and halting, received abundant measure of the reverence which, in the age that saw the building of the Gothic cathedrals, was accorded to everything that was identified with the Catholic religion. There were no forms of music that could rival the song of the Church, – secular music at the best was a plaything, not an art. The whole endeavor of the learned musicians was addressed to the enrichment of the church service, and the wealthy and powerful princes of France, Italy, Austria, Spain, and England turned the patronage of music at their courts in the same channel with the patronage of the Church. It was in the princely chapels of Northern France and the schools attached to them that the new art of counterpoint was first cultivated. So far as the line of progress can be traced, the art originated in Paris or its vicinity, and slowly spread over the adjacent country. The home of Gothic architecture was the home of mediaeval chorus music, and the date of the appearance of these two products is the same. The princes of France and Flanders (the term France at that period meaning the dominions of the Capetian dynasty) faithfully guarded the interests of religious music, and the theorists and composers of this time were officers of the secular government as well as of the Church. We should naturally suppose that church music would be actively supported by a king so pious as Robert of France (eleventh century), who discarded his well-beloved wife at the command of Pope Gregory V. because she was his second cousin, who held himself pure and magnanimous in the midst of a fierce and corrupt age, and who composed many beautiful hymns, including (as is generally agreed) the exquisite Sequence, Veni Sancte Spiritus. He was accustomed to lead the choir in his chapel by voice and gesture. He carried on all his journeys a little prayer chamber in the form of a tent, in which he sang at the stated daily hours to the praise of God. Louis IX. also, worthily canonized for the holiness of his life, made the cultivation of church song one of the most urgent of his duties. Every day he heard two Masses, sometimes three or four. At the canonical hours hymns and prayers were chanted by his chapel choir, and even on his crusades his choristers went before him on the march, singing the office for the day, and the king, a priest by his side, sang in a low voice after them. Rulers of a precisely opposite character, the craftiest and most violent in a guileful and brutal age, were zealous patrons of church music. Even during that era of slaughter and misery when the French kingship was striding to supremacy over the bodies of the great vassals, and struggling with England for very existence in the One Hundred Years’ War, the art of music steadily advanced, and the royal and ducal chapels flourished. Amid such conditions and under such patronage accomplished musicians were nurtured in France and the Low Countries, and thence they went forth to teach all Europe the noble art of counterpoint.

About the year 1350 church music had cast off its swaddling bands and had entered upon the stage that was soon to lead up to maturity. With the opening of the fifteenth century compositions worthy to be called artistic were produced. These were hardly yet beautiful according to modern standards, certainly they had little or no characteristic expression, but they had begun to be pliable and smooth sounding, showing that the notes had come under the composer’s control, and that he was no longer an awkward apprentice. From the early part of the fifteenth century we date the epoch of artistic polyphony, which advanced in purity and dignity until it culminated in the perfected art of the sixteenth century. So large a proportion of the fathers and high priests of mediaeval counterpoint belonged to the districts now included in Northern France, Belgium, and Holland that the period bounded by the years 1400 and 1550 is known in music history as “the age of the Netherlanders.” With limitless patience and cunning, the French and Netherland musical artificers applied themselves to the problems of counterpoint, producing works enormous in quantity and often of bewildering intricacy. Great numbers of pupils were trained in the convents and chapel schools, becoming masters in their turn, and exercising commanding influence in the churches and cloisters of all Europe. Complexity in part writing steadily increased, not only in combinations of notes, but also in the means of indicating their employment. It often happened that each voice must sing to a measure sign that was different from that provided for the other voices. Double and triple rhythm alternated, the value of notes of the same character varied in different circumstances; a highly sophisticated symbolism was invented, known as “riddle canons,” by which adepts were enabled to improvise accompanying parts to the cantus firmus; and counterpoint, single and double, augmented and diminished, direct, inverted, and retrograde, became at once the end and the means of musical endeavor. Rhythm was obscured and the words almost hopelessly lost in the web of crossing parts. The cantus firmus, often extended into notes of portentous length, lost all expressive quality, and was treated only as a thread upon which this closely woven fabric was strung. Composers occupied themselves by preference with the mechanical side of music; quite unimaginative, they were absorbed in solving technical problems; and so they went on piling up difficulties for their fellow-craftsmen to match, making music for the eye rather than for the ear, for the logical faculty rather than for the fancy or the emotion.