Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564

one of the oldest books on one of the oldest arts, "is practiced in

order to see whether lovers are healthy and suitable for one

another; at the end of a dance the gentleman is permitted to kiss

his mistress, in order that he may ascertain if she has agreeable

breath. In this manner... dancing becomes necessary for the good

government of society." `063388 It was through its accompaniment of

the dance that music developed from its vocal and choral forms into

the instrumental compositions that have made it the dominating art

of our time.

CHAPTER XXXIV: Music: 1300-1564

I. THE INSTRUMENTS

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THE popularity of music in these centuries corrects the somber

note that history tends to give them; every now and then, through

the excitement and bitterness of the religious revolution, we hear

people singing. "I care nothing for the pleasures of food, gaming, and

love," wrote the passionate printer Etienne Dolet; "music alone...

takes me prisoner, holds me fast, dissolves me in ecstasy." `06341

From the pure note of a girl's voice or a perfect flute to the

polyphonic counterpoint of Depres or Palestrina, every nation and

class redeemed with music the commercialism and theology of the age.

Not only did everyone sing; Francesco Landino complained that everyone

composed. `06342 Between the merry or plaintive folk songs of the

village and the solemn High Masses of the Church a hundred forms of

music lent their harmony to dances, ballets, banquets, courtships,

courts, processions, pageants, plays, and prayers. The world sang.

The merchants of Antwerp were escorted daily to the Bourse by a

band. Kings studied music as no feminine or mechanical prerogative but

as a mark and fount of civilization. Alfonso X of Spain sedulously and

lovingly collected songs to the Virgin- Cantigas de Santa Maria.

James IV of Scotland wooed Margaret Tudor with clavichord and lute;

Charles VIII of France took the royal choir with him on his

campaigns in Italy; Louis XII sang tenor in the court choir; Leo X

composed French chansons; `06343 Henry VIII and Francis I courted

and challenged each other with rival choirs on the Field of the

Cloth of Gold. Luis Milan described Portugal in 1540 as "a veritable

sea of music." `06344 The court of Matthias Corvinus at Buda had a

choir rated equal to the pope's, and there was a good school of

music under Sigismund II in Cracow. Germany was bursting with song

in Luther's youth. "We have singers here in Heidelberg," wrote

Alexander Agricola in 1484, "whose leader composes for eight or twelve

voices." `06345 At Mainz, Nuremberg, Augsburg, and elsewhere the

Meistersinger continued to adorn popular songs and Biblical passages

with the pomp of pedantry and the jewelry of counterpoint. The

German folk songs were probably the best in Europe. Everywhere music

was the prod of piety and the lure of love.

Although nearly all music in this age was vocal, the accompanying

instruments were as diverse as in a modern orchestra. There were

string instruments like psalteries, harps, dulcimers, shawms, lutes,

and viols; wind instruments like flutes, oboes, bassoons, trumpets,

trombones, cornets, and bagpipes; percussion instruments like drums,

bells, clappers, cymbals, and castanets; keyboard instruments like

organs, clavichords, harpsichords, spinets, virginals; there were many

more; and of many there were fascinating variants in place and time.

Every educated home had one or more musical instruments, and some

homes had special cabinets to hold them. Often they were works of art,

fondly carved or fancifully formed, and they were handed down as

treasures and memories from generation to generation. Some organs were

as elaborately designed as Gothic cathedral fronts; so the men who

built the organs for the Sebalduskirche and the Lorenzkirche in

Nuremberg became "immortal" for a century. The organ was the chief but

not the only instrument used in churches; flutes, pipes, drums,

trombones, even kettledrums might add their incongruous summons to

adoration.

The favorite accompaniment for the single voice was the lute. Like

all string instruments, it had an Asiatic origin. It came into Spain

with the Moors, and there, as the vihuela, it rose to the dignity of a

solo instrument, for which the earliest known purely instrumental

music was composed. Usually its body was made of wood and ivory, and

shaped like a pear; its belly was pierced with holes in the pattern of

a rose; it had six- sometimes twelve- pairs of strings, which were

plucked by the fingers; its neck was divided by frets of brass into

a measured scale, and its pegbox was turned back from the neck. When a

pretty girl held a lute in her lap, strummed its strings, and added

her voice to its tones, Cupid could save an arrow. However, it was

difficult to keep the lute in tune, for the constant pull of the

strings tended to warp the frame, and one wit said of an old

lutanist that sixty of his eighty years had been spent in tuning his

instrument. `06346

The viol differed from the lute in having its strings stretched over

a bridge and played by a bow, but the principle was the same- the

vibration of taut struck strings over a box perforated to deepen

sound. Viols came in three sizes: the large bass viola da gamba,

held between the legs like its modern replacement, the violoncello;

the small tenor viola da braccio, held on the arm; and a treble

viol. During the sixteenth century the viola da braccio evolved into

the violin, and in the eighteenth the viol passed out of use.

The only European invention in musical instruments was the keyboard,

by which the strings were indirectly struck instead of being

directly plucked or bowed. The oldest known form, the clavichord, made

its debut in the twelfth century and survived to be "well tempered" by

Johann Sebastian Bach; the oldest extant example (1537) is in the

Metropolitan Museum in New York. In the fifteenth century a sturdier

variant took form in the harpsichord; this allowed modifications of

tone through differences of pressure; sometimes a second keyboard

extended the gamut, and stops and couplers offered new marvels of

sound. The spinet and virginal were Italian and English variants of

the harpsichord. These keyboard instruments, like the viol and the

lute, were prized for their beauty as well as their tone, and formed a

graceful element of decoration in well-to-do homes.

As instruments improved in range and quality of tone and in

complexity of operation, more and more training and skill were

required to play them successfully; an audience grew for

performances of one or more instruments without voices, and

virtuosos appeared for the organ and the lute. Conrad Paumann (d.

1473), the blind organist of Nuremberg, traveled from court to court

giving recitals whose excellence knighted him. Such developments

encouraged the composition of music for instruments alone. Till the

fifteenth century nearly all instrumental music had apparently been

intended to accompany voices or dances, but in that century several

paintings show musicians playing with no visible singing or dancing.

The oldest surviving music for instruments alone is the Fundamentum

organisandi (1452) of Conrad Paumann, which was composed primarily as

a guide to organ playing, but contained also a number of pieces for

solo performance. Ottaviano dei Petrucci's application of movable

metal types to the printing of music (1501) lowered the cost of

publishing instrumental and other compositions. Music written for

dances lent itself to independent presentation; hence the influence of

dance forms on instrumental music; the suite of "movements" composed

for a succession of dances led to the symphony and the chamber music

quartet, whose parts sometimes retained dance names. The lute, viol,

organ, and harpsichord were favored for solo or orchestral

performances. Alberto da Ripa achieved such fame as a lutanist at

the court of Francis I and Henry II that when he died (1551) the poets

of France warbled dirges to his remains.

II. THE FLEMISH ASCENDANCY: 1430-1590

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The songs and dances of the people were the perennial fountain

from which nonecclesiastical forms of music took their origin,

moods, and themes, and even Masses might stem from such ditties as

Adieu mes amours. The chansons of France ranged from the lilting

lays of street singers and the ballads of troubadours to the intricate

polyphonic chants of Guillaume de Machaut and Josquin Depres.

Machaut (c. 1300-77) was the lord of that ars nova which

Philippe de Vitry had expounded in 1325- music using binary rhythms in

addition to the triple rhythms sanctioned by the ars antiqua and the

Church. Machaut was a poet, a scholar, a musician, a canon of Reims

Cathedral, probably also a man of ardor, for he wrote some amorous

lyrics whose warmth has not yet cooled. He excelled in a dozen musical

forms- ballads, roundels, virelays, motets, Masses; to him we trace

the oldest polyphonic Mass composed by one man. Though an

ecclesiastic, he shared in the movement to secularize polyphonic

music, to lead it from the orthodox rhythms of the motet and the

High Mass to the freer, more flexible cantilena of secular song.

In those centuries the English were musical. They did not rival

the Italians in melody (who has?), nor the Flemings in polyphony,

but their songs now and then touched a strain of tenderness and

delicacy equaled only in the profoundest French chansons. English

singers were acclaimed at the Council of Constance, and in that

generation Henry V, hero of Agincourt, composed a Mass whose

Gloria and Sanctus are still preserved. The compositions of John

Dunstable (c. 1370-1453) were sung from Scotland to Rome, and played a

part in forming the style of the Flemish school.

As Flanders had set the pace in painting in the fifteenth century,

so it was there, in a milieu of prosperous and art-loving nobles and

burghers, that music had one of its most exuberant periods. "Today,"

wrote Johannes Verwere about 1490, "we have blossoming forth, quite

apart from a large number of famous singers... an almost unlimited

number of composers" whose works "excel in pleasant sound; I never

hear or look at their compositions without rejoicing in

them." `06347 Contemporaries would probably have ranked Dufay,

Okeghem, and Depres quite on a par with Jan van Eyck, Claus Sluter,

and Rogier van der Weyden in the hierarchy of genius and

beneficence. Here, in Flemish polyphony, Western Europe lived the last

phase of the Gothic spirit in art- religious devotion tempered with

secular gaiety, forms firm in base and structure, fragile and delicate

in development and ornament. Even Italy, so hostile to Gothic,

joined Western Europe in acknowledging the supremacy of Flemish music,

and in seeking maestri from Flanders for episcopal choirs and

princely courts. Emperor Maximilian I, enchanted by the music of

Brussels, formed a choir in Vienna on Flemish models. Charles V took

Flemish musicians to Spain; Archduke Ferdinand took some to Austria,

Christian II others to Denmark; "the fountain of music," said the

Venetian Cavallo, "is in the Netherlands." `06348 Through this Flemish

ascendancy professional music escaped the narrowing nationalism of the

age.

Guillaume Dufay led the way. Born in Hainaut (c. 1399), trained as a

boy chorister in the cathedral of Cambrai, he was called to Rome to

sing in the Sistine Chapel; then, back in Cambrai, he raised its choir

to international renown; the Masses that he composed there were sung

in all the musical centers of Latin Christendom. Those that survive

sound heavy and slow to ears alert to the light celerity of modern

life, yet they may have fitted well in stately cathedrals or solemn

papal choirs. More to our mood is a polyphonic song of mellifluous

melancholy, Le jour s'endort - "The day is going to sleep." We

picture a robed chorus singing such a chant in the Gothic halls of

Cambrai, Ypres, Brussels, Bruges, Ghent, or Dijon, and we perceive

that the architecture, painting, costumes, music, and manners of

that warm and colorful and pompous age made a harmonious artistic

whole, being themselves variations on one pervasive theme.

Dufay's methods were developed, and were broadcast through Europe,

by the most influential musical teacher of perhaps any time.

Johannes Okeghem, born in Flanders (c. 1430), spent most of his

years providing music, and musical education, at the court of

France. His special passion was for the "canon"- a form of fugue in

which the words and melody sung by the first voice were repeated,

several bars later, by a second voice, later by a third, and so on, in

a flowing counterpoint whose laborious complexity challenged the

singers and charmed the composers. These ran to him from every Roman

Catholic land to learn and carry off his skill. "Through his

pupils," wrote an old historian, "the art" of contrapuntal and

"canonical" polyphony "was transplanted into all countries; and he

must be regarded- for it can be proved by [stylistic] genealogy- as

the founder of all schools from his own to the present age"; `06349

but since this was written in 1833, Okeghem cannot be held responsible

for twentieth-century music. At his death (1495) the musicians of

Europe wrote motets to his memory, and Erasmus a "Lamentation." The

names of even the "immortals" are writ in water.

His pupils became the musical leaders of the next generation. Coming

from Hainaut to Paris, Josquin Depres spent years studying with

Okeghem, then served as maestro di capella - "master of the chapel"

choir- in Florence, Milan, and Ferrara. For Duke Ercole I he wrote a

Miserere that soon resounded throughout Western Europe. After six

years in the Sistine Chapel Choir he returned to Paris (1494) to serve

as maitre de chapelle for Louis XII. One of his noblest works was

his Deploration de Jehan Okeghem, a dirge for his dead teacher.

For a time he followed him in composing Masses and motets in canonic

style, piling voice upon voice in almost mathematical problems of

sequence and harmony. When his skill was complete, and his supremacy

in "art music" was unquestioned, he tired of technique, and wrote

motets, hymns, and secular songs in a simpler harmonic style, in which

the music followed and illuminated the words instead of torturing them

on a Protean canon, or stretching a syllable into a song. When both

teacher and pupil were gone it became customary to call Okeghem the

Donatello, Depres the Michelangelo, of musical art.

The French court cultivated music as the finest flower of wealth and

power. A lovely tapestry dated about 1500, and now in the Musee des

Gobelins at Paris, pictures four women, three youths, and a bald

monk grouped in a garden around a fountain; one lad is playing a lute,

a girl plays a viol, a staid lady plays a portable organ. French poets

intended their lyrics to be sung; an Academie du Palais devoted itself

to promoting the union between music and poetry; and even now one

without the other seems incomplete. Clement Jannequin, a pupil of

Depres', excelled in descriptive chansons; his Chant de

l'alouette, or "Song of the Lark" (1521), still warbles over

several continents.

Spanish music reflected the piety and gallantry of the people.

Cross-fertilized by Arabic, Italian, Provencal, French, and Flemish

influences, this art ranged from melancholy Morisco monodies to

stately polyphonic Masses in the Flemish style. One of the greatest

composers of the sixteenth century Cristobal Morales, carried

polyphony to high excellence, and transmitted his art to his more

famous pupil, Tomas Luis de Victoria. By contrast the Arabic

heritage produced just the strains to fit the lute. Luis de Milan

and Miguel de Fuenllana composed for the vihuela- and performed on it-

songs that rivaled the German Lieder in range and power.

The conquest of Italy by Flemish musicians continued to the rise

of Palestrina. Heinrich Ysaac, after absorbing the contrapuntal art in

Flanders, was brought to Florence by Lorenzo de' Medici to teach Il

Magnifico's children; he stayed there fourteen years, and composed

music for Lorenzo's songs. Disturbed by the French invasion of

Italy, he passed into the service of Maximilian I at Innsbruck,

where he shared in giving form to the Lieder. In 1502 he returned to

Italy, pensioned by the Emperor and his former pupil, Leo X. His

Masses, motets, and songs- above all his Choralis Constantinus,

fifty-eight four-part settings for the Offices of the Mass

throughout the religious year- were ranked with the highest music of

the age.

Orlando di Lasso brought the Flemish school to its culmination,

and illustrated, in his triumphant career, the geographical range

and rising social status of Renaissance musicians. As a boy

chorister in his native Hainaut, he so fascinated his hearers that

he was twice abducted by those who hoped to profit from his voice;

finally in his fifteenth year (1545?) his parents allowed Ferdinand

Gonzaga to take him to Italy. At the age of twenty-three he became

choirmaster in the church of St. John Lateran in Rome. In 1555 he

settled in Antwerp, and published his First Book of Italian

Madrigals, secular lyrics dressed in all the frills of Flemish

counterpoint. In the same year he issued a miscellany of villanelles

(songs of Neapolitan origin), French chansons, and four religious

motets; this collection well reflected the judicious oscillation of Di

Lasso's life between profane enjoyment and melodious penitence. We get

a glimpse of his environment at Antwerp in the dedication of a motet

to Cardinal Pole, and another to Cardinal Granvelle, minister to

Philip II in the Netherlands. Probably it was Granvelle who arranged

the young composer's engagement to assist in directing the ducal choir

at Munich (1556). Orlando came to like Bavaria as much as Italy,

took his wife from one as he had taken his name from the other, and

served the Bavarian dukes till his death.

This happy Mozart of the sixteenth century doubled the 626

compositions of his counterpart. He traversed the whole gamut of

current musical forms, and in each won European renown. He seemed

equally at home in madrigals of refined love, chansons of amorous

levity, and Masses of mystic piety. In 1563 he was made

Kapellmeister. Now he composed for Albert V a musical setting of the

seven Penitential Psalms. The Duke so admired these compositions

that he engaged artists to transcribe them on parchment, adorn them

with miniatures, and bind them in red morocco in two folio volumes

which are today among the most prized possessions of the state library

in art-loving Munich.

All Europe solicited the new star. When Di Lasso visited Paris

(1571), Charles IX offered him 1,200 livres ($30,000?) per year to

stay; he refused, but presented Charles and Catherine de Medicis

with a book of French chansons, the most melodious, said Brantome,

that Paris had ever heard. One song chanted the praises of the

French capital for its love of justice and peace- a year before the

Massacre of St. Bartholomew. Returning to Munich, Di Lasso dedicated

to the Fuggers a collection of Latin motets, Italian madrigals, German

Lieder, and French chansons; this composer was no romantic

starveling but a man adept in the ways of the world. In 1574 he

traveled to Rome at Duke Albert's expense, gave Gregory XIII a

volume of Masses, and received the Order of the Golden Spur. Even

God appreciated Orlando's dedications; for when, on Corpus Christi day

(1584), a severe storm threatened to cancel the usual religious

procession through the streets of Munich, the rain stopped and the sun

came out as Orlando's motet, Gustate et videte - "Taste and see how

gracious the Lord is"- was sung by his choir; and every year

thereafter, on Corpus Christi, the same music was sung to ensure

propitious skies.

In 1585 Di Lasso, aging and repentant, published his Fifth Book of

Madrigals, in which he applied the form to spiritual themes; these

are among his most moving compositions. Five years later his mind

began to fail; he could no longer recognize his wife, and talked of

almost nothing but death, the Last Judgment, and an increase in

salary. He received the increase, and died triumphant and

insane (1594).

III. MUSIC AND THE REFORMATION

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The Reformation was a revolution in music as well as in theology,

ritual ethics, and art. Catholic liturgy was aristocratic, a stately

ceremonial rooted in inviolable tradition and standing frankly above

the people in language, vestments, symbols, and music. In that

spirit the clergy defined itself as the Church, and thought of the

people as a flock to be shepherded into morality and salvation by

myth, legend, sermon, drama, and all the arts. In that spirit the Mass

was an esoteric mystery, a miraculous intercourse of the priest with

God, and the music of the Mass was sung by the priest and a male choir

set apart from the worshipers. But in the Reformation the middle

classes asserted themselves; the people became the Church, the

clergy became their ministers, the language of the service was to be

the vernacular of the nation, the music was to be intelligible, and in

it the congregation would take an active, finally a leading, role.

Luther loved music, appreciated polyphony and counterpoint, and

wrote enthusiastically in 1538:

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When natural music is sharpened and polished by art, then one begins

to see with amazement the great and perfect wisdom of God in His

wonderful work of music, where one voice takes a simple part and

around it sing three, four, or five other voices, leaping, springing

round about, marvelously gracing the simple part, like a square

dance in heaven.... He who does not find this an inexpressible miracle

of the Lord is truly a clod, and is not worthy to be considered a

man. `063410

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At the same time he aspired to a religious music that would move the

people by its fusion of faith with song. In 1524 he collaborated

with Johann Walther, Kapellmeister to the Elector Frederick the

Wise, to produce the first Protestant hymnal, which was expanded and

improved through many editions. The words were taken partly from

Catholic hymns, partly from the songs of the Meistersinger, partly

from Luther's own roughly poetic pen, partly from folk songs

transformed to religious themes; "the Devil," said Luther, "has no

right to all the good tunes." `063411 Some of the music was composed

by Luther, some by Walther, some was adapted from current Catholic

settings. Lutheran churches continued for almost a century to

include polyphonic Masses in their ritual; but gradually Latin was

replaced by the vernacular, the role of the Mass was reduced,

singing by the congregation was extended, and the chants of the

choir moved away from counterpoint to an easier harmonic form in which

the music sought to follow and interpret the words. From the choir

music composed by Luther and his aides to accompany the recitation

of Gospel narratives came the noble Protestant church music of the

eighteenth century, culminating in the oratorios of Handel and the

Masses, oratorios, and chorales of Johann Sebastian Bach.

Not all the founders of Protestantism were so favorable to music

as Luther. Zwingli, though himself a musician, excluded music

Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564

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