Thursday, December 24, 2009

Pre-req in "Pre-Music"

Bear, my fantastic sibling and supporter of all of my crazy pursuits, let the world know yesterday that #yearofclassical was born. To that FB post, I have received much guidance.

Thanks to Hanne Blank, my own personal oracle, I now have a primer on Monophony and "pre-music".
Pre-Music

Hanne Blank


In a long-ago music appreciation course I taught whilst a doctoral student, I had a young undergraduate, fumbling for vocabulary, refer to the music I’m about to talk about as “pre-music.” When pressed to clarify, she said “You know, the stuff from when they didn’t have chords yet.”

What she meant was monophony: “mono” meaning one, “phone” meaning sound or voice. The earliest notated music we possess in the Western tradition is monophonic Monophony was the primary type of musical composition we know of in the Western tradition until around 900 CE. Monophony means music that consists of a single musical line, a melody, whether for voice (most common) or for an instrument. Whistle a tune and you are performing monophony, creating a musical line that stands alone.

This does not mean that monophonies were always intended to be solos, or that they were necessarily intended to be unaccompanied. A monophonic piece might be intended to be sung by an entire choir of monks or nuns—as in the case of many pieces of plainchant, chants that were written to enable the singing of the daily Catholic liturgy. (It still counts as monophony if some singers or instrumentalists play the same pitches an octave higher or lower than the others.) Monophonic pieces could also be accompanied by instruments or voices. Historians agree that drones were a common type of accompaniment, long continuous pitches that would anchor the melody tonally. Percussion also had a definite place in accompanying monophonic pieces, especially in secular songs and dances.


Because accompaniments were not notated, we don’t really know what early musicians did or how it sounded. Early music specialists look at many sources to try to figure out how exactly monophonic music might have been performed. Letters and diaries, tapestries, paintings, illustrations in illuminated manuscripts and so on have given us some idea of some of the ways that monophonic music was played and enjoyed, but contemporary recreations will always consist to some degree of educated guesswork.

Monophony came in two major varieties, sacred and secular. Thanks to the infrastructure of the Roman Catholic Church, vastly more sacred monophony survives than secular. Probably the most familiar type of monophonic early music is plainchant, a form of which was later called Gregorian chant after the eighth-century Pope Gregory II. For a long time it was believed that Gregory was instrumental in standardizing plainchant… which is a bit of a stretch considering that it wasn’t actually standardized until the twelfth century and even then the standardization wasn’t all that complete. Even today, there are a number of often national traditions in terms of how to sing chant and which chant melodies to sing.
Plainchant consists of notated but unmeasured melodic lines used to sing elements of the Catholic liturgy. “Unmeasured” in this context means that the rhythmic values of the notes were not given, only the pitches. Singers would base the rhythm of their singing on the rhythms of the texts primarily, although chant composers could hint at duration by making a single syllable of text into a melisma, stretching it across multiple different pitches.
The liturgy of the Church being as vast as it is, there is an awful lot of plainchant: an enterprising grad student from Prague recently developed a plainchant database (http://www.globalchant.org/) if you have any interest in poking around and seeing a bit of the fairly dizzying array of what exists. Entering any single term that is common to the Catholic liturgy, for instance “Alleluia,” yields pages and pages of results. Two good places to go to listen to some plainchant: http://www.christusrex.org/www2/cantgreg/index_eng.html -- he has bunches of MP3s available, sung by the brothers of a working monastery in Brazil, and if you like you can listen all the way through the liturgical selections for an entire service for a given date in the liturgical calendar. (Some of the texts that are read or sung change depending on the particular service, the time of the year, and other factors. Other texts remain the same from service to service… but the chants may be different.) The monks of the Abbey of Solesmes, in France, have been among the most instrumental of organizations in terms of working on chant collections and keeping chant and chant practice alive in the Church, and you can hear a selection of Solesmes chant-singing here: http://www.abbayedesolesmes.fr/FR/gregorien/forme.php?js=1

For the most part, we do not know the names of the composers of plainchant or Gregorian chant. Humble anonymity was the name of the game for most liturgical composers. However, there is one remarkable composer of sacred monophony whom we know very well: the early 12th-century Hildegard von Bingen. Abbess of a convent, visionary, herbalist, mystic, poet, preacher (at a time when women were not permitted to preach, she got dispensations from the Pope to do so because she was so gifted), writer, and composer, Hildegarde was sufficiently unusual that her name stayed on her creations. Among her works is a remarkable drama called the Ordo Virtutum, the Order of Virtues: a musical drama about the journey of the soul, the difficulties of being embodied, the temptations of Satan, and ultimately, a victorious ending in which the Devil is bound and God is praised.


Secular monophony came in many flavors, and the vast majority of it never made it into notation -- the same is still true of most of today’s secular songs, which may be recorded but are mostly not transcribed or notated. Quite a lot of secular monophonic pieces exist only as poetic texts, without anything to tell us how they might’ve been set to music. Many more were never written down, but that we know existed because someone somewhere mentioned hearing them. From the same sources we also know there was a lot of dance music that didn’t have words, and thus even less chance of survival in written form. However, even though the number of things that have come down to us is small, we know that pretty much any kind of song you can imagine existed in the secular monophonic repertoire: love songs, laments, ballads, heroic tales, seduction attempts, you name it.

Some of my favorites of the early monophonic secular repertoire are the Spanish songs attributed to the thirteenth-century Galician composer Martin Codax – you can see an image of a copy of his “Cantigas de Amigo” here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Martim_Codax_Cantigas_de_Amigo.jpg
The Cantigas are a very early example of a song cycle: a series of songs that can each be performed separately, but that tell a longer story if they are performed in order. The recording by the group Sinfonye is particularly good, in my opinion, and are a great illustration as well of some of the different ways that secular monophony might’ve been accompanied. The CD also includes one of the most heartbreaking pieces of the early monophonic repertoire I know, the song “A chantar m’er de so qu’ieu non volria” – a wonderful, moving, lament for a lost love by a long-dead anonymous composer.

There were musical dramas in the secular world, too, just as there were in Hildegard’s abbey. One of the relatively few secular composers we know was Adam de la Halle, a thirteenth-century French troubadour. He was the composer of a musical play called “Le Jeu de Robin et Marion,” (The Play of Robin and Marion) from which a catchy little ditty called “Robins m’aime” is one of the highlights, although the entire work survives. An MP3 of this particular song can be listened to here: http://home.snu.edu/~bballweg/robins/robins.mp3
Listening Recommendations:
Gregorian chant – many recordings, take your pick of three or four and you’ll get a good taste
Hildegard von Bingen, “Ordo Virtutum” (Sequentia)
Martin Codax, “Cantigas de Amigo” (Sinfonye)
Adam de la Halle, “Le Jeu de Robin et Marion”


Wednesday, December 23, 2009

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Tuesday, December 22, 2009

The Beginning

I listen to a fair amount of pop music and jazz. I love music. I commute with it an hour in the morning and an hour at night...my iPod is my soundtrack daily. I listen to Pandora at work when its slow in the gallery and on my computer at home when I am working. In this way I am totally normal. My taste in music is all over the place. I love moody pop music and have been listening to Animal Collective, Grizzly Bear, Dirty Projectors and TV on the Radio in heavy rotation. I do love jazz, especially Miles Davis - the whole catalog.
I have always liked Classical music, but have never pursued it.
Today during my commute I decided that I would immerse myself in it for a year. I would learn it like a language. Composers first, mostly by chronological order then maybe conductors and eventually modern composers like Glass or Cage or Feldman.

So please feel free to offer suggestions and let me know what I should listen to and what I should learn.

Jeff

A disclaimer from 50% of the contributors


I'd just like to say that I cannot promise to only listen to classical music- I will try to listen to it on a daily basis though.

(Pictured: a young Glenn Gould takes lessons from his dog)