A Musicological Detective Story

First of all, let's define musicology as not everyone might know what it means. Musicology is all study of music that does not involve either performance or composition. When I learn how to play a new piece, or compose a new piece, this is not musicology. But if I research the composer of the piece, that is. Musicology includes everything from an analysis of Webern's tone rows to the double plagal cadence in the Beatles to Wagner's opinions on Jewish music. Now to the detective story.

I don't think most of us know just how much and at the same time, how little, we know about music in the Middle Ages. For example, we have many manuscripts of early music, but it is not generally realized that up until the 12th century and beyond, almost all of them lack the name of the composer. Nearly all Gregorian chant, for example, is anonymous. The first important polyphonic repertoire was composed at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris and the story of how we know who wrote at least some of it, is a musicological detective story. The cathedral was closely associated with the University of Paris, that was being created at about the same time. It is because of this association that scholars were able to learn something about the composers of the Notre Dame repertoire. The extant musical documents, three great books of music for services in not only Notre Dame, but all the churches of Western Christendom, were compiled a bit later, in the mid-to-late 13th century. The kind of music they contained was an enormous advance over the very simple part-writing previously as they contained music for three and even four independent voices. But who wrote this music? The people who copied and sang this music for generations did not know the authors' names as they were not given in the manuscripts.

There had been at the University of Paris a contingent of English theologians who went there for doctoral training. One of these, studying there around 1270 or 80, wrote a treatise called De mensuris et discantu (On Rhythmic Notation and Discant). We don't know his name either! One of the earliest scholars of Medieval music, Charles Coussemaker, published a collection of anonymous theoretical writings in 1864 and the fourth item was this treatise. Ever since, the author has been known as "Anonymous IV". The treatise begins with praise of "Leoninus magister" or Master Leonin who was said to be the best composer of organum (the term used for this kind of polyphony) and who made a great book of organa. That's all we are told. He also mentions someone named Perotin who was the best composer of discant and "better than Leonin." Then Anonymous IV lists Perotin's original works including Viderunt omnes fines terrae.

There is another small piece of evidence: in 1198 and 1199 the Bishop of Paris, Eudes de Sully, issued in letters, instructions about holiday celebrations in the cathedral. Keep the mummers and maskers out of the sanctuary and no processions of fools! Also, let there be good music and he names the feasts at which the music by Perotin listed by Anonymous IV would have been performed and even states the payment for organum quadruplum or four-part polyphony. We know it had to be by Perotin, because he is the only composer of such at this point in time.

The amazing thing is that the ONLY place where the names of the first two important composers in western music history are named is a passing mention in a treatise by an anonymous Englishman several decades later. Let's hear a little of this music, which still has an impressive effect to this day:

If you go to YouTube to watch/listen you will see that the date 1198 is cited. Now you know where that date came from: it is the first letter from the Bishop of Paris and of course is no indication of when the music might have been composed.

Hocket

I put up a piece the other day by Anthony Genge called "New Hockets" and a friend of mine commented that it  

"made me remember one very hot summer day when I had to walk barefoot over black pavement scattered with sharp bits of gravel."

Now the thing is that my friend is very knowledgeable about all things medieval and hocket, called 'hoquetus' in Latin, is a very medieval technique. Here are some great examples:

These hockets are from the Bamberg Codex, a manuscript containing 13th century French polyphony, including these seven pieces. So what is hocket exactly? It is a technique used in both vocal and instrumental music where a single line may be divided up between two or more voices or instruments. Early examples occur in the organum of Perotinus of Notre Dame in Paris who flourished around 1200. The seven examples heard in the clip above are from the second half of the 13th century and show the delightful effects you get when you speed up the process.

Here is how to hocket: take a single line, as in the first two measures of the example, and divide it between two voices, as in the second two measures.

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Here is how the beginning of the third hocket in the clip above starts. It's a lot more fun when you are in triple time. This piece starts around the 2:18 mark in the clip.

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And that is what is interesting about these hockets: they reveal to us musicians of a remote time, having a lot of fun. Now let's have a listen again to what a modern composer did with this idea:

Masterpieces of Music: Guillaume de Machaut

It has been pointed out by philosopher of music Peter Kivy that musical masterpieces seem to have a different status than artworks in other fields. Some knowledge of the plays of Shakespeare, the sculptures and paintings of Michelangelo, the novels of Tolstoy and the poetry of Dante and Homer is assumed for every well-educated person. On hearing Hamlet's soliloquy "to be or not to be" or seeing a reproduction of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling and even perhaps hearing the words "In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost" many people would recognize the reference. But the same seems not to be true of music. Most people would probably not recognize the opening of Beethoven's Symphony No. 3 or Bach's B minor Mass or Berlioz' Symphonie Fantastique. Without trying to identify exactly why this is the case, why music seems to be regarded as being more mysterious, on a different level, than other artworks (perhaps it is because music is written down in a notation that relatively few learn to read), I would like to try and offer introductions to some masterpieces of music. Twenty or thirty years ago people were saying that there were no more masterpieces. I don't think that is true, but what I am sure about is that there have been a great number of musical masterpieces, easily powerful enough to stand beside Hamlet or Michaelangelo's David or Tolstoy's War and Peace. Looking around on the web, if you search for "masterpieces of classical music" you end up with a list that includes Carmina Burana, the Four Seasons and Claire de lune. I don't really want to talk about the current "top ten" of classical music. I would rather go back and pick out one or two great composers from each period and talk a little about one or two of their best compositions. So let me start with perhaps the greatest Medieval composer, Guillaume de Machaut.

Guillaume de Machaut was born in Reims in northern France around 1300 AD and died in 1377. He was as admired as a poet as he was as a composer, something almost unique in music history. Perhaps you might compare him to Bob Dylan. Machaut was part of the late Medieval movement in music known as ars nova. His secular songs dealing with courtly love are highly regarded and he was the first composer to set the whole Catholic mass as a single composition. Machaut was one of the best-known composers of the isorhythmic motet in which a repeating rhythmic pattern, called the talea, is used independently of the melody, called the color. Using a repeated rhythmic pattern unifies the composition--something composers are always striving for. Here, for example, is the tenor part to the Kyrie of Machaut's mass:

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As you can see there is a brief, four note rhythmic pattern that keeps repeating even though the pitches are always changing. This unusual to our ears way of unifying a piece was re-discovered in the 20th century by the Second Viennese School. Here is the secular motet Quant en moy which uses a more complex isorhythm:

We tend to think of history as being progressive: one of the tenets of modernism in music was progress. The new music was a technical advance over the old music with greater complexity and, supposedly, interest. But looking at this music by Machaut we can see that this model of history is naive. A motet by Machaut is very complex rhythmically, far more so than the Renaissance compositions which followed it, far more so than the Baroque and Classical ones as well. If you want to know a whole lot more about Machaut, here is an excellent, very recent essay on a piece by Machaut by Elizabeth Leach, a musicologist at Oxford. Here is her blog.

I love music like this for a number of reasons: the harmonic clarity, the openness of the texture, the feeling of almost being able to get a sense of the inner lives of people living seven hundred years ago. Enjoy!