Composer Biography: Nicola Vicentino (1511-c.1576)
Nicola Vicentino is probably one of the most interesting composers that you’ve never heard of. During a time of great experimentation partly caused by the Reformation and the creation of new religious orders, science expanded and came to the attention of much less academic people than usual. Science and studies were funded by patrons much as the arts were. Science took its first step away from the control of religious leaders.
Here are several impressive scientists who came to the fore during this period. You’ve probably heard of these fellows even if you didn’t study science or philosophy.
- Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543, Poland, and Germany) was a mathematician and astronomer who said that the sun was at the center of the universe rather than the earth.
- Galileo Galilei (1564-1642, Italy) was a polymath (astronomer, physicist, engineer, philosopher, and mathematician) who championed Copernicus’ ideas. This got him into trouble with the Spanish Inquisition. He is largely responsible for the change in scientific thinking from inexplicable quirks of nature to something that could be proved, often through the application of mathematics, and he laid the foundation for and applied what we now call inductive reasoning.
- Johannes Kepler (1571-1630, Germany) was a mathematician, astronomer, and astrologer. He’s best known for his laws of planetary motion, and many later scientists (such as Isaac Newton, 1642-1727, England) based their theories on his work.
- René Descartes (1596-1650, France and the Netherlands), was a philosopher, mathematician, and scientist. He’s the father of the Cartesian coordinate system (measurable places along a two-plane axis) and why we “solve for X” today. He conceived of superscripts for exponents and powers in the notation of math, and changed the focus from geometry to algebra as the foundation for all forms of mathematics.
The list could go on and on, but this is a blog about music, so I’ll control myself. My point is that a new and scientific approach to music was a natural development, very much a part of the times.
Nicola Vicentino (or Vicento) was an Italian composer and theorist who proposed reviving the chromatic and enharmonic scales of Greek music in his 1555 treatise L’antica musica ridotta alla moderna prattica (“Ancient Music Adapted to Modern Practice”), which tried to revive the three genera of classical antiquity (diatonic, chromatic, and enharmonic). Many of his contemporaries scoffed, but a number of his madrigals attained a high level of artistry. He might not have been understood in his own time, but we can understand him today.
He was born in Vicenza (about an hour west of Venice) in 1511. Nothing else is known about his family or early years.
He trained with Adrian Willaert (ca.1490-1562, Belgium and Italy) in Venice. He was the court music director and teacher for Cardinal Ippolito d’Este III (1509-1572, Italy) in Ferrara before 1539, and later served the cardinal in Rome and Siena.
With Vicente Lusitano (d. after 1561, Spain and Portugal), Vicentino debated the interpretation of chromatic genera, in 1551 and wrote his own theories into his L’antica musica ridotta alla moderna prattica of 1555. The judges declared Vicentino the winner in the debate, by the way.
Also in 1555, Vicentino described his arcicembalo (also arcigravicembalo), which was a modified harpsichord with many extra keys and strings. He was interested in microtonality (the notes between the notes), and in 1561, he made an organ version, called an arciorgano.
He built himself an arcicembalo in 1560. It had 53 (or 31, depending on your sources) different pitches within a single octave. His theory was that with so many pitches in an octave, he could experiment in search of the miracles of ethos (emotional contagion and moral influence) that the ancient Greeks reported achieving with their music (which was microtonal).
In 1561, Vicentino built an arciorgano with six manuals and containing thirty-one keys to the octave. Luzzasco Luzzaschi (c1545-1607, Italy) claimed to have mastered both instruments, and the cities of both Rome and Milan each boasted that they housed an arciorgano.
It didn’t catch on.
In 1563-1565, Vicentino was maestro di cappella at Vicenza Cathedral. He became a priest in Milan in 1570. Little else is known about him.
Vincentino’s Theory
Because of his focus on chromaticism, Vicentino helped to free music from its adherence to the church modes that had been the rage for a thousand years, and he also experimented with early forms of harmony. His work contributed toward the development of the 17th century secunda prattica (also called the stile moderno, which is everything that came after Palestrina, basically) and to the equal temperament of more modern times.
The dim views held by his peers notwithstanding, a number of Vicentino’s madrigals reach a high level of artistry. And he wasn’t entirely alone. In the madrigals of Cipriano Rore (c1515-1565, Belgium and Italy) and Carlo Gesualdo (1566-1613, Italy), chromaticism creates a special effect, startling because of its strangeness. By the end of the 16th century, as other composers adopted it for a wide range of uses, chromaticism had become part of the common musical language.
Vicentino’s teacher Adrian Willaert (1490-1562, Belgium and Italy) explored accidentals, and Vicentino’s title page on Book I of his madrigals (1546) declares that he’s written in the style of his teacher. Although they’re common in the 1546 book, most of Vicentino’s accidentals are quite “normal” by modern standards—such as raising the 7th degree in cadences. Book V (1572—the intervening books are lost) shows his more extreme side. He often uses rarely employed accidentals such as D-sharp, D-flat, and A-sharp. Even a melodic augmented third, E-flat to G-sharp, occurs. He goes even further from the old tonal system, represented by cadences based on triads built on D-sharp, F-sharp, B, D-flat, and A-flat.
He based his 1572 work L’aura ch’el verde lauro on a Petrarch sonnet and in it, he incorporated the Greek chromatic tetrachord, descending a minor third and two semi-tones, as a motive for imitation.
Dolce mio ben, published in Vicentino’s L’antica musica treatise shows his special notation for the microtones—a dot over a note raises it by a small interval. You have to be aware of what came before and what follows as well as the members of a chord to be able to do this. Microtones are indicated:
- When notes appear to be written a half-step apart but the lower one is raised by a dot
- When a note repeats but one is sharpened or flattened and the other one is natural
- When a note repeats and one is sharpened and the other flattened, an ordinary whole step is indicated.
- When the notes are adjacent on the scale, a large half-step is indicated
- When the notes are a half-step apart and the higher note is raised by a dot, a small whole-step is indicated
Essentially, there are five steps between the notes of a major second. In the illustration, there’s a G, there’s a G raised by a microtone, and then there’s a G-sharp. In our times, a G-sharp and an A-flat are the same note; to Vicentino, an A-flat is a microtone higher than a G-sharp. Next, there’s the A-flat raised by a microtone, and finally, there’s an A. (In our times, there would be G, G-sharp, and A. Three steps. There are six steps in Vicentino’s world.)
Vicentino says that a piece noted in this fashion may also be performed in other ways, such as by suppressing both the chromatic and enharmonic accidentals or only the enharmonic ones.
His theories met considerable opposition, in his own time and afterward, from theorists such as Gioseffo Zarlino (1517-1590, Italy), Giovanni Maria Artusi (c1540-1613, Italy), and Giovanni Battista Doni (c1593-1647, Italy). He was charged with ignorance even with regard to the true nature of the Greek genera, his special area of expertise. But he got the last laugh. His chromaticism pointed the way to the liberation of music from the diatonic restrictions of the modal system that had been in use for over a thousand years.
A handful of 16th century composers experimented with incomplete circles of fifths as another way of addressing chromatic issues. This required a radical change to the tuning systems, and produced some curious little pieces, in particular a motet-like piece by Matthias Greiter (c1495-1550, Germany and France) that transposed the beginning of a song called Fortuna desperata (“hopeless fortune”) twelve times by fifths in order to symbolize the rotation of Dame Fortune’s wheel.
The chromaticism of the madrigalists had a purpose: They were trying to communicate feelings. Vicentino and Greiter, on the other hand, may have been limiting themselves to pure research. After all, using the technology available to them, only unaccompanied voices, adjusting tuning in minute measures by ear, could perform these pieces.
Vicentino’s Compositions
Vicentino wrote mostly motets and madrigals and his madrigals exploit the microtones. Although the musical establishment was fairly unanimous in their opposition to his ideas, he was asked by the progressive fathers of the Council of Trent (1545-1563) to write a chromatic Mass as a sample of liturgically acceptable polyphony.
One musical form of the time was a canzone da sonar, a type of madrigal especially favored by instrumental ensembles. One of the first to write instrumental ensemble canzones was Fiorenzo Maschera (1540-1584, Italy), which he put into a collection along with the works of others, including an imitative five-part canzone de sonar by Vicentino called La Bella (1572). Before Maschera’s collection of 1584, there few works of this type that have survived.
Vicentino was the earliest to write about the problem of double counterpoint, dealing with pairings of voices and setting up major and minor passages. Next up was Gioseffo Zarlino (1517-1590, Italy), a fairly famous theorist.
In addition to his theories, Vicentino wrote at least two volumes of madrigals and one of motets. He draws an exact parallel between speaking in public and singing, with tempo and dynamics changing to suit the text. His remarks on tempo are essential reading if you want to understand pre-Romantic singing, when strict tempos were essentially alien to the proper expression of the words. This attitude predominated throughout Europe, and some of the most interesting descriptions of Italian singing is by foreigners. Theorists like Michael Praetorius (1571-1621, Germany) wrote about the styles of Giulio Romolo Caccini (1551-1618, Italy) and Giovanni Battista Bovicelli (1550-1594, Italy) and referred to oratory and the expression of the sung text. Praetorius was convinced that a good natural voice was a basic requirement.
Vicentino died in Milan around 1576.
Sources:
“A History of Western Music,” by J. Peter Burkholder, Donald Jay Grout, and Claude V. Palisca. W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 2010.
“Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century,” by Richard Taruskin. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010.
“The Concise Oxford History of Music,” by Gerald Abraham. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1979.
“Harvard Concise Dictionary of Music,” by Don Michael Randel. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1979.
“The Pelican History of Music, Book 2: Renaissance and Baroque,” by Alec Robertson and Denis Stevens. Penguin Books, London, 1973.
“A Dictionary of Early Music, from the Troubadours to Monteverdi,” by Jerome and Elizabeth Roche. Oxford University Press, New York, 1981.
“Companion to Medieval & Renaissance Music,” edited by Tess Knighton and David Fallows. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1997.
“Music in the Renaissance,” by Gustave Reese. W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 1959.
The History of the Bow
Bows are used to make strings sing and they come in many forms. I like to think that the bow that’s used on the vielle and the violin was inspired by the wheel on the hurdy-gurdy. You see, what they have in common is friction.
In a hurdy-gurdy, rosin (ground tree sap) is rubbed on the wheel, so that when the wheel pushes into the strings and turns against them, the strings respond by making a sound. Using rosined horse hair stretched out along the length of a stick to keep the tension up, you can achieve quite a lot of control over the quality of the sound that comes from a string as you draw the prepared bow across it.
Bows aren’t a new thing, but they didn’t develop from the musical instrument itself into the tool used on the musical instrument until fairly recently. A cave painting in the Trois Freres cave of southern France shows a bow, like the bow you’d shoot an arrow with, being used like a musical instrument in 13,000 BCE, a sort of jaw harp. The wooden bow could be flexed to varying degrees, which made the string along the open edge sound different notes when struck by a stick or twanged with the lips, teeth, or a finger.
This kind of bow seems to have crossed cultures, and there are still some folk cultures who use them. You can find them all over Africa, Asia, South America. The jaw harp qualifies as this sort of bow, although it’s been bent and stylized and even made from metal nowadays, depending on whether it was invented in China, the Appalachian US, or Europe.
But that’s not what this article is about. This is about a hair-strung bow used to scrape across at least one string in order to cause a sound. You have to imagine that one thing came from the other, though, based on the shape and the materials—and even the same name.
History
There are paintings and sculptures depicting plucked string instruments from ancient Egypt, India, Greece, and Turkey. The Arab world may have been the first to use a bow on those instruments in around the 10th century CE, but it’s more likely that they got the idea from traveling in Central Asia.
Sources are consistent in asserting that bows originated from the nomadic warriors of Central Asia (like the Huns and the Mongols) because they rode horses, so horsehair was plentiful. These warriors also excelled at the weapon that’s a bow, so how to hold the hair at high tension would have been obvious to them.
In the 10th century, a bow was applied to a lute, and that’s the oldest ancestor of the modern violin. As early as the 12th century. Fiddles developed a waist to allow greater access to the strings with the bow.
The crwth (pronounced “krooth”) is a bowed harp that looks a lot like a lyre with a central support bar. It’s Welsh. (They’re funny about vowels.) The simple crwth goes back to the Roman invasion of Celtic lands, and the bowed version to about the 11th century CE.
The vielle came into being in the 9th century and made the bow a prominent part of music-making in Europe ever after. They didn’t get it right at first, so a little engineering had to take place.
An essential step in bow development was the change from using rattan to using wood in Asia. By the time bows got to Europe, wood was the only material under consideration. Wood isn’t as easily bent as rattan so using wood created a structure that kept the hair from tangling with the stick or snapping it.
Some scholars ascribe the invention of the bow to Scandinavia and others to India—neither is correct. According to musicologist Curt Sachs (1881-1959, Germany, USA), the first mention is in 9th century Persia. In China, there was a bowed zither in the 9th or 10th century. In Europe, there were fiddles by the 10th century. Sachs estimates that the bow developed between 800-900 CE.
European fiddles are distinctly related to the fiddles of Kurdistan and Turkestan, and it appears that the Indian fiddles are too.
There’s a bowed lute in China called the hu ch’in. “Hu” is what the Chinese called the Turkish Uighurs (a Turkish ethnic group living in a place that’s now part of China), so perhaps the Turks brought it with them to Europe before the 9th century. The hu ch’in was a small snakeskin-covered drum with a long stick attached and two strings stretched down the length of it, like the neck of a fiddle. It used a bow that was woven between the two strings so that it rubbed the underside of one string and the top of the other. The stings didn’t have a fret or soundboard. They were tuned to an open fifth and the notes were changed by shortening the strings with finger pressure. The bow was held underhand.
Quite some time and experimentation later, around 1700, the modern violin bow was pioneered by Arcangelo Corelli (1653-1713, Italy). It was short and not very flexible. Fifty years later, Giuseppi Tartini (1692-1770, Slovenia, Italy) made a longer and more flexible bow. Both held the hairs parallel to the bow with an angled end to the stick.
The Tourte bow was developed in the 19th century and is still used (by François Tourte, 1747-1835, France). In this bow, the hair and stick are parallel until the very end, but the stick has a slight inward bend to it. It’s definitely the most elastic and balanced bow so far.
Structure
The stick provides the rigid structure or backbone of the bow. Older bows curved slightly outward. Modern bows curve inward, allowing greater flexibility, speed, and expression. All different lengths were tried, and by 1700, the stick was lengthened, and fluted or cut into an octagon to facilitate flexibility. Modern violin bows are 29.5-inches long, with 25.5-inches of hair. Bows for the modern cello and double bass are shorter.
Until 1650 or so, the head of the bow was made of a bone carving that curved toward the hair with the tip pointing upward, like a spear, which is why it’s called a pike’s head. After 1650, the head became part of the stick, and was also often curved like a pike’s head. In the 18th century, the head continued its curve until it was at right angles to the stick.
Horse hair is firmly attached at the far end of the stick by a wedge that spreads the hair into a flat bundle. The hair is wrapped around a small block of wood and then wedged into place with a flat piece of material, such as wood, plastic (20th century or later only, of course), pearl, ivory, or metal. The whole arrangement is called the head or pike’s head.
In India, the hair was held in place at the head by a wedge of wood wrapped by a strip of cloth. There’s evidence of a similar device in Europe by the 12th century. In Italy, the hair was knotted at both ends of the stick as late as the 16th century. Then they made a groove in the frog—the bulkier end of the bow where it’s held—to wedge the hair into.
In the 17th century, the frog contained a piece of wire that extended down the stick. It adjusted the tension of the hair by means of a wire loop that hooked onto a series of iron teeth. This “dentated” bow didn’t last, although Swedish folk instruments still use the system. In the early 18th century, the teeth were replaced by the 4.5-inch screw that’s still used today. The head of the screw is turned to adjust the hair’s tension. The hair is held together at the frog by a little wedge.
The frog (and screw) end of the stick is held in the player’s hand. There are as many ways to hold the bow as there are instrument types, historical periods, and nationalities. I’ll discuss that in a minute.
The archetier (the name for a bow-maker) uses between 150 and two-hundred hairs per violin bow. Wider bows use more hairs.
Variations
One of the hardest parts about learning to play a stringed instrument is getting the bowing right. If the pressure is too light, it sounds like a goose is being murdered slowly. If it’s too heavy, the bow doesn’t glide across the strings and it’s like an audio-only version of a traffic jam. But don’t think that there’s only one way to play with a bow. There are numerous effects available in modern bowing (in order of popularity):
- Plain: For legato (or connected) notes
- Detaché: For notes of equal value that are bowed singly
- Martelé: For a hammered effect, where the stroke is given unusual pressure and released suddenly
- Sautillé: A short rapid stroke in the middle of the bow that bounces off the strings
- Jeté or ricochet: “Throwing” the top third of the bow so that it bounces a series of rapid notes on the down-bow
- Louré: A slow stroke with slight separation between slurred notes
- Staccato: A series of martelé notes made in the same stroke
- Viotti-stroke: Two detached and strongly marked notes, the first of which is unaccented on very little of the bow, and the second is accented and gets much more bow. Attributed to Giovanni Battista Viotti (1755-1824, Italy).
- Arpeggio, arpeggiando, arpeggiato: A bouncing stroke played on broken chords so that each bounce is on a different string and sounds a different note of the chord
- Tremolo: Moving the bow rapidly back and forth on a single note
- Sul ponticello: A nasal, brittle effect produced by bowing close to the bridge (a block or ridge that holds the strings away from the body of the instrument) instead of in the space between the bridge and the fingerboard
- Sul tasto: A wispy effect produced by bowing lightly over the fingerboard instead of in the space between the fingerboard and the bridge
- Col legno: Striking the strings with the stick instead of the hair
- Ondulé: A form of tremulo, but between two strings instead of on one
There are more styles than this—too many to list—depending on what sort of instrument and music you’re playing.
Hand Positions
In the 12th century, the viol/vielle/rebec was held on one knee. The bow was held with the hand in a natural extension of the arm, palm outward, with the thumb on the frog. The forefinger rested on the stick and the third finger damped the hairs.
Folk fiddles, like the 12th century rebec, can be played on the knee or tucked under the chin like a modern violin. There are three types of folk bows: one that’s arched into a semi-circle, one that’s more like a crescent moon, and one that has the hairs parallel to the stick, like a modern violin’s bow.
Bows from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance were either the semi-circle or parallel types.
The rebab from Mali is played with the instrument across the lap. It has a short bow in the crescent moon shape, and is held with the back of the hand outward and the thumb between the hair and the stick.
Modern bows are held with the thumb between the hair and the stick and the remaining fingers on the other side of the stick. The fourth and third fingers can apply pressure on the frog to help direct the bow.
Names
The bow is called the archet in French, the Bogen in German, the arco or archetto in Italian, and the arco in Spanish.
Sources
“A Performer’s Guide to Medieval Music,” edited by Ross W. Duffin. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2000
“The Interpretation of Early Music,” by Robert Donington. W.W.Norton & Co., New York, 1985
“A History of Western Music,” by J. Peter Burkholder, Donald Jay Grout, and Claude V. Palisca. W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2010
“The Norton/Grove Concise Encyclopedia of Music,” edited by Stanley Sadie. W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 1994
“Harvard Concise Dictionary of Music,” compiled by Don Michael Randel. Bellknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1978.
“Companion to Medieval & Renaissance Music,” edited by Tess Knighton and David Fallows. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1992.
“Musical Instruments; Their History in Western Culture from the Stone Age to the Present Day,” by Karl Geiringer, translated by Bernard Miall. George Allen & Unwin LTD, London, 1949.
“The History of Musical Instruments,” by Curt Sachs. Dover Publications, Inc., Mineola, 2006.
“Musical Instruments of the World,” by the Diagram Group. Sterling Publishing Co., Inc., New York, 1997.
Red Notes
There’s a quirky little thing in Medieval and Renaissance music: Some of the notes were red instead of black. It’s possible that there were only two colors because the only inks that didn’t fade between then and now were red and black and that the colors have even less significance than historians have given them. It could be that the red notes (there are far fewer of the red notes than the black ones) were how ink faded when corrections were made at some later date. It could even be that there were lots of colors, and they all degenerated to red and black over the years.
Or it could be that they made the notes red on purpose. Here’s what the experts think.
In an early form of notation called heightened neumes because the little squiggles were placed on a staff defining the intervals between the notes, some manuscripts used red ink to draw the staff line that represented the C. (C is a relative term. Modern musicologists might think of it as the tonic, rather than the actual note C as tuned to A=440.) As music evolved into a melody and a drone, and then into a faux bourdon (a harmonizing line that ran parallel to the melody), composers needed a way for the performers to see—from a distance—that something special was happening.
So they used red notes for descants, for a signal that something interesting was happening rhythmically, that something should be sung or played up an octave, and to point out a special case, such as a ficta (sharp or flat note outside of the mode or key signature) or a repeat. It’s one of many good ideas that got dropped with the modern printing press.
When red notes weren’t available, “hollow” notes—white with black outlines—replaced them, and soon red notes weren’t used at all because the white notes were more convenient. Even so, red notes survived well into the 15th century in more elaborate manuscripts, especially in England.
Guido D’Arezzo (991/992-after 1033, Italy), who is credited with putting unheightened neumes on a series of staff lines, suggested that one staff line be made red to mark out the F notes and another made yellow for C. (If you play the harp, you’ll know that this system is still used on the strings—red for C and blue for F.)
Philippe de Vitry (1291-1361, France) used red notes to indicate a change in rhythm in the manuscripts collected in Roman de Fauvel (14th century allegorical verse with a collection of music in it).
The “mannered” style of notation attributed to Philippus de Caserta (1350-1420, Italy) intermingled black and red notes as part of a more artistic presentation of the notes on the written page.
Sometimes composers used red ink to indicate that a certain passage was the opposite of whatever the prevailing notes were doing. This could have the effect of a hemiola, or a four-against-three kind of rhythm. (Go ahead, mark out threes in one hand and fours in the other. It’s a lot like patting your head and rubbing your belly, but it has an interesting pulling effect, if you can manage it.) In other works, the colored notes indicate triplet effects (three short notes against a single beat).
In the 14th and 15th centuries, chromatic music, musica ficta, and dividing intervals less than equally (called “imperfect” division and led to the discussion of “just” versus “mean” tuning) were called “color.” Sometimes these special notes indicated optional ornamentation. All of these types of notes were marked in red.
White notes (not filled in—hollow heads) were used for special purposes in the Italian trecento. In the first part of the 15th century, white notes replaced black ones for all the values, and in the latter half of that century, the semi-minim (a medium-length note of one beat) lost its tail and became black, and notes of shorter value—also black—appeared with increasing numbers of tails until the same divisions we have today (white for everything from a half note—minim—and longer, and black for the quarter note—semi-minim—and shorter).
In the 14th through the 16th century, coloring a note red meant that the performer lopped a third of the length right off: Red notes were quicker than black notes. Late in the 16th century, the formerly red notes were colored black and filled in and meant half rather than a third of the duration, and the longer notes were left open—they were “hollow.” We’re still using this system today (hollow notes are still longer than filled-in notes).
In isorhythmic music (repeating rhythmic patterns), the red notes indicated a series of repeated notes in the cantus firmus line. That’s the one called the “tenor,” where the chant is sung slowly while the other lines (usually higher in pitch) prance around, only lining up with the cantus firmus occasionally.
Through the 18th century, the red notes indicated wild ornamentation, either written or improvised. The improvised sections were dubbed “coloratura” in the 19th century to indicate the wildness and the notation. Now, there’s a whole singing voice named after it.
And that’s the story of red notes. If you have more—or differing—research. I’d love to hear about it.
Sources:
“The Norton/Grove Concise Encyclopedia of Music,” edited by Stanley Sadie. W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1994
“Early Medieval Music up to 1300,” edited by Dom Anselm Hughes. Oxford University Press, London, 1954
“Music in the Middle Ages,” by Gustave Reese. W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1940
“The Notation of Polyphonic Music 900-1600,” by Willi Apel. The Mediaeval Academy of America, Cambridge, 1961
“Music in the Medieval World,” by Albert Seay. Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, 1965
“Medieval Music,” by Richard Hoppin. W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1998
“The Pelican History of Music, Volume 1: Ancient Forms to Polyphony,” edited by Denis Stevens and Alec Robertson. Penguin Books, Baltimore, 1960
Music Notation Explorations: The Dasia System
I’m obsessed with the history of music notation. I’ve got a whole shelf of books on the subject, and I’m always boring anyone whole listen and sketching on random scraps of paper and paper napkins.
Recently, I tripped over a form I hadn’t seen before, and on closer inspection, I find that it had been quietly hiding in the dark recesses of several of my own books! I’m determined to make it a secret no more, so here it is. The story of the Dasia system.
Guido D’Arezzo (990/991-after 1033) was a scholarly monk credited with creating Do-Re-Mi and putting the neumes that were being used to represent musical gestures on the staff. He’s kind of a big deal, in his own quiet way. In his Micrologia, Guido attributed the system of Daseia (that’s the plural form of Dasia) to Odo of Cluny (c878-942). Odo is credited for naming the notes after the letters in the alphabet, although he used ALL the letters, first the capitals and then the lower cases, and only found 52 notes in the scale, which was admittedly more than they thought they’d ever need at the time. Most instruments, even the organs of the time, didn’t go much further than the two octaves (or so) of a human singing voice.
The reason Guido attributed Dasia to Odo was that Dasia notation was discussed in the 9th century treatise Musica enchiriadis (occasionally attributed to French Odo of Cluny, and sometimes to Frankish Hucbald, c840-930, and also sometimes to German Abbot Hoger, d. 906). This treatise illustrated the earliest known forms of polyphony (multiple lines of melody meant to be sung simultaneously).
Unlike the systems for notating chant, which is monody (one line of melody, sung or played by all involved), Dasia was based on the tetrachord principle of Greek music theory (in its most basic form, two tetrachords—four notes each—plus a whole tone, equals an octave), and Greek symbols were used. The Dasia system is only a little bit different. (Mostly, it seems that the whole tones were piled at the top of the tetrachords. So two tetrachords plus a whole tone is an octave, but four tetrachords in a row plus two whole tones in a row at the top end are two octaves.)
The system covers a two-octave range of notes in a series of tetrachords (a tetrachord is four step-wise notes of a scale), each of which is granted one of four signs to represent the specific note. Three of the signs are based on the letter F (I didn’t find any explanation for why an F was used). The fourth sign is like the accent sign of Greek grammarians, called an acutus, and it signifies the half-step between it and the sign below it. This is just like the two pairs of white notes on the piano that don’t have black notes between them.
Here’s what it looks like on a modern five-line staff.
In this image, modern-shaped notes are on a modern staff to give you a point of reference. I used this image (from Wikipedia) so you can understand the principles.
In the first and lowest tetrachord, the signs are turned backward; in the second tetrachord, the most commonly used notes, the signs are forward; in the third tetrachord, the signs are upside-down; and in the fourth and highest, they’re turned both upside-down and backward. A different accent sign is used in each of the tetrachords so that you knew where you were in the scale—remember, they didn’t have a staff yet. The N stood for inclinum, the I for iota, the V (it looks like a lower-case N) for versum, and the cross for iota transfixum.
This is what the music written using this system looked like.
This is a bit of polyphony, in roughly parallel movement. Both lines (the clumps of symbols connected by lines on the right), were meant to be sung at the same time. You can see that the gesture of “up” and “down” was understood in terms of the notes relationship to each other, but marking off how great or small the interval was took the Dasia.
The words—lyrics—are all piled up neatly on the left. The Dasian tetrachords involved are in that nice vertical dividing box, and the melody is on the right, with certain syllables at relevant points pinned to their relevant places. You had to already know the words, pretty much, in order to read this, and the two singers sang different words from each other. It’s rather probable that it took a few tries for the singers to shape it into something they liked.
It’s like a new secret language, isn’t it?
The use of Dasia symbols was brief—less than 50 years and not widespread, mostly in Italy. By Guido’s time, neumes were in common usage, and that’s what evolved into modern notation.
Sources
- “The Notation of Polyphonic Music, 900-1600,” by Willi Apel, The Mediaeval Academy of America, 1953
- “Music in the Middle Ages,” by Gustave Reese, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1940
- “Temperament, The Idea the Solved Music’s Greatest Riddle,” Stuart Isacoff, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2001
- “Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture, from Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer,” by Bruce W. Holsinger, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2001
- “The Notation of Medieval Music,” by Carl Parrish. Pendragon Press, New York, 1978
- “Music in Medieval Manuscripts” by Nicolas Bell. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2001
- “A History of Western Music,” by J. Peter Burkholder, Donald Jay Grout, and Claude V. Palisca. W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 2010.
- “Medieval Music,” by Richard Hoppin. W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1998.
Birdsong in My Stride
I was housesitting, and the homeowners had a collection of daily reflections sitting on the tank of the toilet. I flipped through and decided that I liked the collection well enough to get one for myself (Mark Nepo’s “The Book of Awakening”). I don’t always remember to look in the book, and when I do, I often find the comments and discussion to be sufficient and think no more about it. This time was different.
The koan was: Of all the things that exist, we breathe and wake, and turn it into song.
The discussion was about being born a human and to think about what gifts that brings. It would be nice to be a bird or a tree or even a rock. They can do marvelous things. Or maybe their lack of human thought would be a nice respite. But think, for a moment, what it means to be a human rather than something else—and think what it means to be YOU, specifically. There are things you can do, and DO do, every single day, that no other being can do.
It’s kind of like counting blessings. When you list all the positive things that happen in a day, you start feeling better about your day, every day. In a while, it becomes a habit, to see all the golden sunsets, the birds soaring on a thermal, the well-crafted quilt or pie or computer, the way the laundry smells when it’s fresh out of the dryer.
I have several friends who suffer from depression. This koan made me think of them—how special each was, how much I love them for their strength, their humor, their tolerance of me and all my peculiarities. Could someone else be or do all those things? I doubt it.
Think for a minute about the many great gifts that you have and that you give every day. I often reflect on one friend’s ability to be part of a family. In her case, it’s not an easy thing—that’s why it’s so remarkable. It’s not just that her husband is indifferent to her much of the time, or that she has disabled children, or that her live-in sister is often difficult to be around. It’s that she has the fortitude to stay in the relationships. She could have scarpered. She could have refused the sister’s presence in her home. She could have demanded a divorce and buckets of money. She could have institutionalized the kids. But she stayed. And because she stayed, those four other humans have a decent life. Can’t she see how amazing that is? I couldn’t have done half of that.
Another friend has married a very nice fellow. Oh, some of her family doesn’t understand because he’s so different from how they are. But he adores her. He grows all cow-eyed and mushy when she walks into the room. He thinks she can do no wrong and boasts, all shy and embarrassed, about her many skills, gifts, and beauties. I know her because we share a hobby. She’s always prepared, she always arrives on time, she never asks for anything special, and she always does her best, and her best is pretty darned good. Everyone who knows her can find many things to appreciate. Her hugs and her big soft eyes that look at you with wit and humor are the best things, of course, but I suppose she can’t see those. Even her job is about helping others. Yet she suffers with thinking that she’s not enough.
Still another friend has a wonderful and heroic husband, the kind we all think of as the prototype for Prince Charming. And he chose HER. He chose her because she’s lovely, witty, clever, kind, and patient. She can’t see any of that. Sometimes her cheerfulness seems a bit false or her unwillingness to talk about herself or her current projects reveals her depression, but most of the time, she gets away with her secret. She’s another person whose job is all about helping other people.
One more friend, probably the most intelligent human I have ever met, suffers with this same kind of overwhelming sadness. She’s beautiful, wonderfully well-educated, has a great job that interests her, great friends, many hobbies, and a very quick wit. She’s the first to point out the beauty in something, the symmetry or similarity to some other thing (often pop- or movie-culture), and she makes you laugh so hard that the orange juice you drank yesterday comes out your nose. I admire her more than nearly everyone I’ve ever met (my parents and some of their friends are the only ones who can top her). And she thinks she’s nothing most of the time. She thinks that no one sees her because there have been a few blind fools crossing her path.
All of these women exhibit extreme cleverness, marvelous outside-of-the-box artsy-fartsy-ness. They make and maintain friendships, even with people like me, who tend to withdraw for no good reason (other than being introverted).
I’m not a sad person. I think I understand what my friends go through, but my times of sadness have been caused by something specific (like my mother’s death, or the end of a romance, job, or friendship), and in time, the darkness lifted or changed. I have a tendency to look for and find the silver linings in things. When I can’t find one, I feel desperate and keep looking until I do.
Thinking about this contrast makes me return to the koan. Is it uniquely human to suffer depression or to be permanently—or determinedly—happy?
On my walk this morning, I watched myself put one foot in front of the other. Do I choose to walk like this, the same pattern over and over? Why not put a foot to the side? Why not behind? What is it about that forward motion that’s so mesmerizing? I took a step to the side. I walked with my feet wide apart. I took some steps backward. I turned sideways and walked by crossing my feet grapevine-wise. (This is San Francisco. It wasn’t even REMOTELY a weird thing to do here. No one noticed.)
I thought about the uniquely human act of going for a walk that has nothing to do with getting food or shelter. My walks feel like they have purpose because they’re about health and meditation and writing scenes in my head, but what other animal sets aside an hour of every day for such self-indulgence?
Today, when I reached the bay, I came upon a goose couple with three little goslings, I stopped to watch. They were going for a walk too. They walked to the other side of the path and onto the berm. Then they turned around and walked back, just as I do every day. I walk to the ballpark, walk around the ballpark, walk back home up the hill. What I saw was just like that, those little goslings and their parents putting one foot in front of the other, coming to the turn-around, and heading home, one foot in front of the other.
I walked on and was about to warn a woman walking toward me to give the geese a wide berth (they can be aggressive, especially with the little ones around) when she cried out—”oh! The little ones! And I just saw a seal and her baby! What a beautiful day!”
Her joy made me think about that little koan again. Humans share those little happy moments, even with strangers. We share little triumphs, even little annoyances. Even when the news is bad, it makes my day a bit brighter to know that my friends or a stranger has shared in this uniquely human way, and that I can be counted on for sympathy, advice, indignation, or happiness, as appropriate. We are most human in our responses to the things life brings our way.
Today, I honor the uniquely human part of us all, and I especially honor those people who suffer from depression, especially the ones who suffer who haven’t yet told their friends. Tell them. Tell us. We will love you because that is what humans do in times of trouble. It’s also what we do in the happy times. We might not understand, but we will listen.
Of all the things that exist, we breathe and wake, and turn it into song.
The Faenza Codex (c1400)
The Faenza Codex, or the Codex Bonadies as it’s sometimes called, is an Italian manuscript of the 15th century. It contains some of the oldest known keyboard music and some vocal pieces. It’s thought to contain some of the earliest pieces arranged for keyboard instruments (not composed for them).
The codex that was at the Biblioteca Comunale in Faenza (near Ravenna) until the middle of the 20th century was possibly an Italian copy from the early 15th century. There are facsimiles elsewhere in Italy and a few other places (described as “overseas” in one of my sources, which I don’t find terribly informative).
The Faenza Codex contains repertory from the papal court at Avignon and of the Aragonese and Navarese courts, including motets, ballades, rondeaux, and virelais, some in the complex Ars subtilior style.
The original collection contained keyboard intabulations (not notation, but numbers and letters expressing the locations of notes), and was copied in northern Italy in the first decades of the century. It may have been prepared by or for a church organist because the codex contains a lot of liturgical church music, including an arrangement of the Kyrie Cunctipotens genitor. The organ arrangement of the Kyrie is in a score, with the lower staff (for the left hand) confined to the plainsong melody—the tenor part—and the upper part (for the right hand) in florid counterpoint.
The codex is comprised of 96 pages of parchment in 10 fascicles of irregular structure (usually, after the pages are folded together, they’re trimmed to be even). Some of the pages contain keyboard arrangements of vocal works and liturgical cantus firmus settings (where the chant is sung slowly, usually in the tenor voice). There are also 22 pieces in white mensural notation (for more about notation, see The History of Music Notation) in the Bonadies copies, which include sections from the Mass Ordinary (the Kyrie Gloria, etc.), Magnificats, and some motets.
The collection was prepared within a single scriptorium by four scribes and copied between 1400 and 1420. In 1473 or 1474, part of the manuscript was erased (scraped clean) and rewritten by musician and music theorist, Johannes Bonadies (dates unavailable), who was a monk at the Carmalite monastery of San Paolo Ferrar. Bonadies added 22 polyphonic compositions from around 1467-1473, perhaps from Lucca, including Mass movements, Magnificat settings, motets, and a few secular works.
Music
The Faenza Codex includes keyboard versions of Flemish composer Guillaume Machaut’s (c1300-1377) ballades and Italian organist and composer Francesco Landini’s (c1325-1397) madrigal and ballade, which provide some evidence that French and Italian styles were mingling by the end of the 14th century. There are also pieces by Jacopo da Bologna (fl.1340-c1386), and Bartolino da Padova (fl.c1345-c1405). The famous theorist Johannes Tinctoris (c1435-1511) has two pieces in there too, along with many compositions by the ever-prolific Anonymous. Most of those are secular pieces.
In many cases, the original voice parts are lost and all that remains is the keyboard version of the songs. Some of the keyboard versions are (presumably) similar to the original voice parts, but in others, only the tenor (cantus firmus) is the same. This variation can make the songs seem like a new piece.
Keyboard music was written on two six-line staves with bar lines. The lower staff was for the left-hand and provides the tenor of the original polyphony, occasionally transposed to suit the composition. The upper staff, for the right-hand, provides florid melodies, either completely free or in a highly decorated form of the original cantus, often with repeating motifs. If the polyphonic piece had a second and third part, they’re often ignored in favor of a new version.
It’s clear from the way the figuration is “broken” that much of the music was intended for the virginal (a limited keyboard compared to an organ). The codex also contains organ music for liturgical use—two Kyrie-Gloria pairs and a separate Kyrie, all on Mass IV plainchants (the Mass that contains the Kyrie Cunctipotens Genitor Deus).
In the 20th century, the manuscript was taken from Ferrara to Faenze, where it’s preserved in the library today. In 1958, it was rebound with a new cover. The original was lost and was replaced with a copy in 1959. The codex has recently been studied by recording artist Pedro Memelsdorff in his doctoral thesis of 2011, and a publication of that work (I didn’t find a date for publication) will include a facsimile of the manuscript.
Sources:
“The History of Western Music,” by J. Peter Burkholder, Donald Jay Grout, and Claude V. Palisca. W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2010.
“The Norton/Grove Concise Encyclopedia of Music,” edited by Stanley Sadie. W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1994.
“Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century,” by Richard Turuskin. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010.
“The Concise Oxford History of Music,” by Gerald Abraham. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1979.
“Companion to Medieval & Renaissance Music,” edited by Tess Knighton and David Fallows. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1997.
“Music in the Medieval West; Western Music in Context,” by Margot Fassler. W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2014.
“Music in the Renaissance,” by Gustave Reese. W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 1959.
The Robertsbridge Codex (c1325)
The Robertsbridge Codex is a rare little thing. It’s only a few pages in an otherwise obscure manuscript, but it’s noteworthy because it’s the first known collection of music meant specifically for keyboard instruments.
Here’s a page from the Codex. This is a photograph of a page in Carl Parrish’s book, so you might want to look online to get an image with better resolution.
The treasure currently resides in the British Library, in London and the tale of how such an important piece of music came to be in this obscure little place is a good one.
Robertsbridge is a village in East Sussex, England, about 10 miles north of Hastings (made famous in the Battle of Hastings in 1066). The Rother River passes through it. The town is thought to have developed around a 12th century Cistercian abbey, named by Richard I (1157-1199) in 1198 for his steward, one Robert de St. Martin (dates unavailable). It was settled by monks from the mother abbey in Boxley, in Kent, about an hour’s drive north, and was probably built roughly on the site of a war memorial and a spring known as St. Catherine’s well. The monks at Robertsbridge were known as the “white monks” because they wore tunics of undyed wool.
The site was probably originally a small chapel, but it received many gifts and endowments from such families as the Bodiams (who later had a castle nearby) and the Etchinghams (nearby landowners since before the Norman Conquest). As a result, they were able to build a new abbey about a mile east of the original site in about 1210.
The Robertsbridge abbot was sent, along with the abbot from nearby Boxley, to search for King Richard I (1157-1199), who was being held hostage in Bavaria after his return from the Crusades in 1192, and when they found him, they went back to England to raise his ransom. Later, these same two abbots were sent as agents for the Archbishop of Canterbury to see the pope about a quarrel with the monks at Canterbury. In 1212, 1221, and 1225, the abbot of Robertsbridge was again sent as the king’s emissary to Europe (first John then and Henry III twice), and the Henry III also paid the abbey a visit in 1225. The abbey had faded in fame by the 1400s and escaped the first suppression of the monasteries.
It survived until 1538, when it was dissolved under Henry VIII (1491-1597). It was surrendered by the abbot and eight monks—everyone else had long gone. After the dissolution, the abbey buildings were acquired by Sir William Sidney of Penshurst (1482?-1554), and it stayed in that family until 1720. The remains of the abbey survived for most of the 18th century but were then destroyed. All that remains today is the former abbot’s house, now a private residence.
The town flourished without the abbey, with some fine castles and good schools and such. Today, it’s the home of Heather Mills (b.1968), former wife of Beatle Sir Paul McCartney.
Robertsbridge came to fame when the eponymous codex was discovered among other records at Penshurst Place in Tonbridge, Kent (about half an hour’s drive south of London) in the mid-19th century. It was found in a bundle with an old register from the Robertsbridge Abbey. Originally, it was thought to be from as early as 1325, but later scholars determined that 1360 was more likely.
It’s an important document because it’s the earliest known collection of music written specifically for keyboards. It’s also the earliest preserved example of German organ tablature. It’s called “German” because it appears later only in Germany, slightly more developed, where it’s also known as the Ludolf Wilkin tablature, from 1432. This tablature was adopted exclusively for writing down organ music and was used until Samuel Scheidt’s (1587-1654) Tablatura Nova and Johann Ulrich Steigleder’s (1593-1635) Ricercar Tablaturen, replaced it in 1624. After this date, particularly in Northern Germany, many important sources of keyboard music are written in this notation.
It’s a little off topic, but Old German tablature, from the early 15th century to mid-16th century, used letters to identify the notes to be played, rather than neumes or mensural notation on the staff, in all the voices except the highest, which was in neumes that we would recognize as notation today. These highest parts were usually red in color and provided decorative musical figuration; it’s also where we get the term that survives until today in the modern word “coloratura.” Cool, eh?
This tablature also included the squared lower-case B, which resembles a lower-case H that represented B-natural (which nomenclature survived well past Johann Sebastian Bach’s time, where he called things H-moll for B-minor, as in the B Minor Mass) and an S for “sine,” which is Latin for “without,” and meant a rest, or silence.
Another cool thing is that the keyboard selections offered required all twelve keys of the modern octave. It’s the first evidence of this—things were modal and only contained eight notes to an octave before. (You can learn more about modes here: Musical Modes, Part 1: Church Modes.)
The Codex contains other things than music, although I didn’t find a source that said what exactly those other things are. There are only two musical sections, containing six pieces. Three are estampies, which is an Italian dance from the trecento, and had scholars convinced that the music came from Italy originally. Three songs are arrangements of motets, two of which are from the Roman de Fauvel. You can learn more about that in my post, Composer Biography: Philippe de Vitry (1291-1361). The Codex contains instrumental transcriptions of two of Vitry’s Fauvel motets (Firmissime/Adesto and Tribum, quem non abhorriuit), and another motet from Roman de Fauvel with organ accompaniment. There are also three Italian-style dances (estampies).
Now then. On to the music itself.
The Codex contains the end of a purely instrumental piece in the estampie form. There are two complete pieces in this form, the second of which is marked “Retroue.” There’s also an incomplete transcription of the hymn Flos vernalis. These may have been meant to be played on an organ, and a little later, Edward III (1312-1377) presented his captive, John II of France (1319-1364) with an eschiquier (an instrument that was the predecessor to the harpsichord) and a copy of the piece.
The Robertsbridge transcriber went a little heavy on ficta (accidentals, more often sharps than flats), to the point of inserting naturals to return the note to its original state rather than assuming the natural as the default. He also transposed one piece from the Fauvel motet up a step, forcing a single sharp into the key signature of the right hand. (The left hand had its own key signature and stayed as it was.) He also occasionally added notes where he thought the harmony was too thin.
It’s possible that the motets were included in the Robertsbridge Codex for political reasons as allegories for political events of the period, such as the public hanging of Philip the Fair’s (France, 1268-1314) unpopular chancellor Enguerrand de Marigny (1250-1315), or about some enemy of Robert of Anjou, King of Naples (1277-1343), or perhaps a celebration of the new Pope Clement IV (1190-1268).
All of the music is unattributed (late scholars have identified de Vitry as one source), and all is written in tablature. The estampies are written for two voices, often in parallel fifths and using the hocket technique (where one voice has artful rests that are filled in by another voice, like an exchange of hiccups).
It’s important to note that at this time (the 14th century), organ keys became narrower so that more could fit onto a keyboard table, and also accommodating a wider range of pitches (such as 12 notes to an octave) and sustained chords. This made it possible for a rhythmically fluid and complex decorative voice to unfold beyond the earlier isorhythmic pieces. Robertsbridge features an isorhythmic motet with a patterned scaffolding in the left hand as a foundation for a dramatic instrumental display played by the right hand. This became a pattern that we’re still using today.
The Rupertsbridge Codex marks the beginning of our modern sense of a slower or chordal left hand with a busy and ornamental right hand. Despite its quiet lack of fame, it’s really a very important document.
Sources:
“The Norton/Grove Concise Encyclopedia of Music,” edited by Stanley Sadie. W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1994.
“The History of Western Music,” by J. Peter Burkholder, Donald Jay Grout, and Claude V. Palisca. W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2010.
“The Concise Oxford History of Music,” by Gerald Abraham. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1979.
“The Notation of Polyphonic Music, 900-1600,” by Willi Apel. The Mediaeval Academy of America, Cambridge, 1961.
“The Notation of Medieval Music,” by Carl Parrish. Pendragon Press, New York, 1978.
“Early Medieval Music up to 1300,” edited by Dom Anselm Hughes. Oxford University Press, London, 1954.
“Music in Medieval Manuscripts,” by Nicolas Bell. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2001.
“Companion to Medieval & Renaissance Music,” edited by Tess Knighton and David Fallows. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1997.
“Music in the Medieval West; Western Music in Context,” by Margot Fassler. W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2014.
“Music in the Renaissance,” by Gustave Reese. W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 1959.
The Montpellier Codex (c1270)
The Montpellier Codex is a French manuscript, possibly from Paris from c1270-1310. It’s the largest surviving collection of medieval motets in Europe and is kept at the Faculté de Médicine, at the Montpellier University library. Montpellier is a couple of hours drive north of the Spanish border near the Mediterranean Sea, halfway between Toulouse and Marseille.
The Codex is one of the most lavish and comprehensive motet books to survive from the 13th century. It was unearthed among other treasures at Notre Dame by Felix Danjou (1812-1866), the organist of Notre Dame. In 1865 in Paris, Edmond de Coussemaker (1805-1876), was the first to draw attention to it in his L’Art harmonique au xiie et xiiie siecles (Paris 1865). He would go on to reproduce and transcribe 50 of the pieces. It was also the subject of a pioneering study of isorhythms (where all parts share a rhythmic pattern) by the man who coined the word, German medievalist Friedrich Ludwig (1872-1930), in 1904.
It isn’t completely clear how the collection came into being. The most charming story is the one about Marie of Brabant (c1254-1321). Marie was a great patron of the arts and a relative of and friend to several trouvères. She and Philip III (the Bold, 1245-1285). were married in 1274 and she was crowned at Sainte Chapelle in Paris in 1275. Her coronation was heralded by women and maidens singing chansons and motets, possibly a carole or two (a carole, or carol, was a circle dance performed outside. Yup, the whole flowing tresses and ribbons and gauzy dresses thing).
Marie was estranged from Philip III early in their marriage through the machinations of the powerful chamberlain Pierre de la Broce (d. 1278). Pierre accused her of poisoning Philip’s oldest son from a previous marriage. It wasn’t long before a friend of the king’s implicated Pierre in the deed and Pierre was summarily hanged.
It’s possible that the Codex was a gift as part of Marie’s reconciliation with the king, as it contains a celebration of love and courtly pleasures, as well as of hunting, Philip’s favorite pastime. Another interesting twist is that if Marie was either patroness or recipient of the book, it’s evidence of women’s influence on composition, copying, and the design of beautiful books and music.
Most of the music contained within the Codex is anonymous, but a number of pieces can be matched with their composer either because they appear in other collections or by using stylistic similarity and some sleuth work. Identifiable composers include Perotin (c1160-c1220), Petrus de Cruce (c1260-c1300), Adam de la Halle (c1237-c1286), Guillaume d’Auvergne (c1180-1249), and Philippe le Chancelier (c1160-1236). One motet was copied from a polyphonic work by Willelmus de Winchecumbe (an Englishman, fl. 1270s). Most of the rest are presumed to be French.
Music of this period, if it wasn’t chant (monody, or a single line of music performed in unison), used a device called the cantus firmus. This was a version of a known chant, usually sung in one of the lower lines, in a slow and drawn-out way. The other line (usually just one, but sometimes two) was melodically more intricate, intersecting with the cantus firmus only occasionally. The singer of the cantus firmus was called the tenor, which in our times means a specific range of voice, usually the higher male voice, but in medieval times, “tenor” meant the voice everything else depended upon. Most of the cantus firmus parts in the Montpellier Codex are taken from the chants of Notre Dame. (There’s a whole other blog coming on that one.)
Few of the Codex’s motets are considered isorhythmic, as it was felt that Philippe de Vitry was the first to compose those in the early 14th century. Some theorists disagree based on elements contained in isorhythms. You can read the Philippe de Vitry blog for more about isorhythms.
The Montpellier Codex isn’t a small collection. It contains 400 folios (large pages folded to make four—or eight—smaller pages), gathered into eight fascicles (separately sewn sections), and containing 345 compositions, almost all of which are motets (religious polyphonic songs in Latin). The first six fascicles were gathered around 1280.
The music is gathered by type.
- Fascicle I contains organa and conductus from the Notre Dame period. Sacred polyphony.
- Fascicle II contains 17 four-voice motets.
- Fascicle III contains 11 three-voice motets with Latin motetus (the voice above the cantus firmus) and French triplum (the third voice, the highest above the cantus firmus), as well as 4 two-voice Latin motets.
- Fascicle IV contains 22 three-voice Latin motets.
- Fascicle V contains 9 hockets (rhythmic technique unique to the medieval period) and 104 three-voice motets, which have, with few exceptions, French texts in both upper parts and Latin in the cantus firmus.
- Fascicle VI contains 75 two-voice French motets.
- Fascicle VII contains 39 three-voice motets of various kinds.
- Fascicle VIII contains a conductus (two voices of a particular type) and 42 three-part motets.
Fascicle I’s organa (a particular type of two-voice music) are written in modal notation, which was peculiar to rhythmic notation (see my blog on Musical Modes, Part 2: Rhythmic Modes, for more on this), with ligatures (a type of two-note neume; you can read more about neumes in my blog The History of Music Notation) in the upper voices. Fascicles II to VI contain the most extensive collection of motets of the mid-13th century, written in pre-Franconian notation (an obscure kind of notation that I’ll talk about in a minute). The last two fascicles are clearly later additions: the handwriting is different and more decorative; the systematic arrangement found in the first four fascicles isn’t carried out; and the Franconian notation is used exclusively, along with some even later notation forms, such as those from Petrus de Cruce (c1260-1300).
Fascicle I contains six organa, two of which are by Perotin, a conductus, and three pieces in the hocket style (where one part spits out notes separated by rests and the other part supplies complementary notes or rests. Hockets were sometimes introduced near the end of Notre Dame clausulae—wiggly bits—but it was used here throughout the whole piece. It was a fashion that didn’t last more than 50 years, which is too bad, because it’s kind of fun). Fascicle I was written out as a score, with the parts aligned above one another. The remaining fascicles are written out with the upper parts in parallel columns and the instrumental tenor across the bottom of the page, a Notre Dame style of notation (see photo). This music was clearly for soloists, and other skilled musicians, such as clerics and scholars at the University of Paris.
Figure 1: This example shows the cantus firmus across the bottom and two higher voices side-by-side.
The rest of the codex consists mostly of motets, more than 200 in Fascicles II-VI alone.
The Fascicle VII and VIII are from the turn of the 14th century, when Johannes de Grocheio (c1255-c1320) was around. Grocheio put interesting bits into all voices, not limiting the flights of fancy to the higher voices and keeping the stodgy chant in the lower voice. On one piece (El mois de mai), the tenor line sings the cries of fruitsellers, and the other two voices embark on a somewhat Bacchanalian frat party. A song like this has some connection to the songs of the trouvère chansons, but more for content than style.
The Fascicle VII, which dates to c1300, is opened by a motet pair, probably by Petrus de Cruce (c1260-1300 and also called Pierre de la Croix). The motets take on such a unique style that another six are attributed to him because of similar features. They, like the Franconian pieces mentioned, take strong advantage of the stratification of rhythmic voices, to the limit that the notation of the period would allow. Petrus modified notation, in fact, to exaggerate the layering affect. Petrus invented the use of a dot (punctum) to mark off rhythmic sections, like modern measure lines. There can between two and seven “beats” between the dots. It’s not clear whether the music marched militarily on at a set pace or if it accommodated the more natural speech-like pattern, and the other parts would slow down if someone had a few extra beats or words between punctum. It’s at this point that rhythmic modes begin to fade in popularity and the repeating patterns are less important than the natural rhythms originating in the text.
The eighth fascicle dates from c1310.
Franconian notation doesn’t appear until Fascicle VII and VIII, forty years after Franco of Cologne (fl. mid-13th century) wrote his treatise on the subject, Ars cantus mensurabilis. The Montpellier Codex contains a wide repertory of notational styles, crossing a greater time span than other codices of the same period (such as the Codex Las Huelgas de Compostela, blog to come). The early fascicles (II-VI) have “uncertain ligature” styles, and later ones are Franconian (VII and VIII).
I want to point out how different part songs were in the 13th century from today. Modern notation lines everything up vertically. Every voice-line has five lines on the staff, is written in the same key signature as the other voices, and places one voice part above another with the highest voice at the top and the lowest voice at the bottom all on the same page, with measure lines helping to keep everyone together. In the 12th and 13th century, there were sometimes separate pages for each part, the staff had anywhere from four lines to a dozen, clefs moved depending on how the notes needed to be arranged so that there was minimal need for ledger lines, there not only weren’t measure lines, but sometimes the notes were all scrunched together to save space. Parts could be on separate pages, side-by-side in columns, or have the cantus firmus running across the bottom.
Figure 2: These are examples of a four-voice piece, with the highest voice on the left and the lowest on the right and “scrunched together.”
Known for its Franconian motets, where the voices are strictly stratified rhythmically according to pitch range, with the higher voices singing fastest and the lowest voices singing slowest. This is a refinement on the discoridia concors idea. For instance, in one example, Pucelete, the triplum is a merry frolic describing a loving woman, the tenor keeps an even tempo, and the lower voice is droopy and complains of lovesickness in slow notes. Franconian notation died out at the onset of the ars nova period.
The three-voice pieces in Fascicles VII and VIII have the triplum and motetus on facing pages with the tenor (cantus firmus) running along the bottom across both pages. Those in four voices have the two upper voices in two columns on one page and the lower voices in two columns on the facing page. It looks odd to our eyes—the cantus firmus part has just a sprinkling of notes across a staff with no bars, and the frequency of notes increases as the voices get higher. There are no bar lines in the modern sense, but you can see bars meant to indicate breaths. There’s no obvious way that the various parts would have stayed together, and even the clefs are not the same.
As I mentioned, most of the music is unattributed. The few that were acknowledged have only one or two facts associated with them.
- Tassin (dates unknown): He provided the tenor of a motet and is mentioned in 1288 as a minister in the Court Chapel of Philip IV (1268-1314)
- Jehannot de L’Escurel (d.1303), composer of monadic ballades, rondeaux, and virelais preserved in the Fauvel manuscript (14th century allegorical poem, covered in some detail in my blog post about Philip de Vitry). He was hanged in Paris in 1303 for the murders of pregnant women, rape, and etc. Yikes!
Many of the texts are in French rather than Latin, showing a new trend for writing in the vernacular. This includes a piece by Adam de la Halle (De ma dame vient). Some pieces, like de la Halle’s, harken to the loftiest class of trouvère chanson, with its tenor of the traditional type (cantus firmus), and borrowed from the Notre Dame organum.
The Montpellier Codex is one of only two locations for the motet Super te Ierusalem. In the Montpellier version, it’s in three voices. The other occurrence is in the Worcester fragments (blog post to come) and has a fourth voice without text, possibly meant for an instrument.
(All photos are of the pages in the Parrish book.)
Sources:
“The Norton/Grove Concise Encyclopedia of Music,” edited by Stanley Sadie. W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 1994.
“The History of Western Music,” by J. Peter Burkholder, Donald Jay Grout, and Claude V. Palisca. W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2010.
“Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century,” by Richard Turuskin. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010.
“The Concise Oxford History of Music,” by Gerald Abraham. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1979.
“The Notation of Polyphonic Music, 900-1600,” by Willi Apel. The Mediaeval Academy of America, Cambridge, 1961.
“The Notation of Medieval Music,” by Carl Parrish. Pendragon Press, New York, 1978.
“Early Medieval Music up to 1300,” edited by Dom Anselm Hughes. Oxford University Press, London, 1954.
“Music in the Medieval World,” by Albert Seay. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, 1965.
“Companion to Medieval & Renaissance Music,” edited by Tess Knighton and David Fallows. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1997.
“Music in the Medieval West; Western Music in Context,” by Margot Fassler. W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2014.
“Music in the Renaissance,” by Gustave Reese. W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 1959.
