medieval.org
LP, 1976: EMI Reflexe 1C 069 46 401
CD, 2000: EMI Classics 8 26523 2
medieval.org
LP, 1976: EMI Reflexe 1C 069 46 401
CD, 2000: EMI Classics 8 26523 2
Seite 1
ANONYMUS
1. Iste est Iohannes [3:37]
2. Sol sub nube latuit [2:19] text: Walter von Chatillon
3. Crimina tollis [1:49]
4. O nobilis nativitas [1:52]
5. Opem nobis [1:23]
PEROTIN um 1200
6. Salvatoris hodie [3:26]
ANONYMUS
7. Dic Christi veritas [5:37]
PEROTIN
8. Alleluya, posui adiutorium [9:35]
Seite 2
Arnaut DANIEL 2. Hälfte d.12.Jh.
9. Lo ferm voler [4:25]
Raimbaut d'AURENGA 2. Hälfte d.12.Jh.
10. Pos tals saber [7:22]
Petrus de CRUCE 2. Hälfte d.12.Jh.
11. Aucun ont trouvé ~ Lonc tans ~ ANNUNTIANTES [2:18]
12. Mout m'a fait cruieus assaut [0:58]
13. A vous douce debonnaire [2:33]
Meister ALEXANDER 2. Hälfte d.13.Jh.
14. Hie vor do wir kinder wäeren (Erdbeerlied) [4:38]
STUDIO DER FRÜHEN MUSIK
Thomas Binkley
Andrea von Ramm—Sängerin
Richard Levitt—Sänger
Sterling Jones—Streichinstrumente
Thomas Binkley—Zupfinstrumente
unter Mitworking von:
Candy Smith—Sängerin
Barbara Thornton—Sängerin (#1-8)
Benjamin Bagby—Sänger (#1-8)
Harlan B. Hokin—Sänger (#1-8)
Alice Robbins—Streichinstrumente
Verwendete Musikinstrumente:
Laute, Chitarra saracenica, Lira, Rabel morisco, Vielle
Musikalische Einrichtung: Thomas Binkley
Aufgenommen: 24.5-2.VI.1976, Séon, Kirche
Produzent: Gerd Berg
Tonmeister: Johann-Nikolaus Matches
Verlag: Manuskript (9, 10, 14)
Cover-Design: Patelli
Litho: Repro Schmitz KG, Cologne
Ⓟ 1976 EMI Electrola GmbH
Digital reamastering Ⓟ 2000 by EMI Electrola GmbH
© 2000 by EMI Electrola GmbH
VOX HUMANA
Vocal Music of the Middle Ages
The
human voice, vox humana, in the music of the 12th and 13th centuries is
the focal point of this recording. The period offers the earliest
widespread display of professional singing within both the church and
courtly circles, it offers the earliest discussions of learned singing,
and it offers responsible critical comment on the preferred singing
styles of different regions. The sources include both the secular
literature and works of scholars.
In the secular sphere the
professional singer was a purveyor of poetry, often — though not always —
poet and singer in one. In the homeland of the troubadours, Occitania,
the social structure provided for a winter spent in writing and
composition of a repertory to be employed during a summer season of
aristocratic social encounters, at which songs were but one of the
entertainments. The French ‘trouvères’ to the north cultivated a similar
entertainment structure involving the participation of both paid and
amateur singers. The parallel literature from the Germanic lands is
called ‘Minnesang’, and here as in the others repertories, love is one
theme among many. Poetry, not music, was the moving force behind this
song, and the documents do not communicate the authorship of the
melodies, only that of the texts. Often a melody served for more than a
single text, a text for more than a single melody. New texts patterned
after existing ones became a form of homage to a distinguished poet.
The
entire repertory is monophonic, meaning that the original creative
musical impulse is confined to the generation of melody. Latin, the
international language of the educated, was employed in a distinguished
but very different body of song. With a few exceptions, the large body
of this Latin repertory is serious stuff — philosophical observation,
admonition to poverty, etc — and while there is a body of Latin erotic
poetry, drinking songs and the like (Golliards), it was seldom set to
music. This Latin repertory was conceived for the limited consumption of
the educated and probably seldom involved professional singers.
Song
in the secular world had two clear aims: to persuade and to be
self-preserving. The performance determined the first, the poetic
quality the latter. The persuasiveness of a performance depended upon
skills of musical performance, gesture, language ability and related
attributes. The mode of performance was unlike anything in the church,
although we have evidence of the great care with which the liturgy was
designed to persuade. Secular song was shaped for each performance, and
few songs were performed frequently.
Instrumental support for the
singer, the sparse documentation notwithstanding, was neither uncommon
nor necessary. The combination of instrument with singer formed a
distinct sound-picture of unique quality, a colour of sound not
available — officially — in church (attempts to introduce instruments
into church were repeatedly condemned by church authority). We can
sympathize with the desire to bring into the church the myriad sounds of
countless colourful instruments which were all available for musical
entertainment outside. The key word is colour. There was indeed a great
assortment of instruments, the vielle, rebec, rabel, lira, rote, lute,
guiterne, citole, chitarra sarasenica, psaltery, harp, flute and
doucaine to name just few. Because essentially any of these instruments
might mingle with any other, many varied and enticing instrumental
colours might surround a singer's voice.
It is however probably fair to
say that more time was spent absorbing the music of the church than that
of the secular musicians. In a few of the larger establishments —
notably Notre Dame in Paris — church musicians found ways to adorn their
music with ornaments of new sounds quite unlike those of the secular
world. The new colour of sacred music was polyphony, which can be viewed
as an attempt to ornament liturgical and paraliturgical music in a
manner unlike that of existing secular practice through the creation of a
new vocal sound. Whereas instruments created colour through the
heterophonic performance of monophonic music, voices, being of
essentially similar quality, developed the colour of polyphony as a new
resource which was to shape the succeeding music of the West.
The
vox humana grew from being a casual purveyor of text to being an
instrument of colour, even devoid of text, and thus the creator of an
abstract musical art for which special vocal techniques had to be
learned.
The Music and the Composers
Several
compositional genres for the voice developed in and around the
liturgical music in the late 12th century. Liturgical music consisted
largely of chant, of course, but there was an irrepressible urge to
amplify the chant (as well as the entire liturgical service), and this
led to new and interesting creations. The amplification of liturgical
texts occurred as tropes (new material) or farces (existing material).
Tropes normally involved the composition of new melody, and often
overwhelmed the item being troped by their sheer size. Tropes occurred
as polyphony as well as monophony.
The genre called ‘conductus’
consists of musical settings of Latin non-liturgical and non-biblical
texts. These settings might be monophonic (‘conductus simplex’), or
polyphonic (‘conductus duplex’, ‘triplex’, etc). Conductus was composed
in one of two manners: either with a melody, which was placed at the
bottom with synchronized disciplined descanting above, or as a
composition of short sections with no clear melody but consisting of a
flow of consonance and dissonance as well as syllabic and melismatic
writing. The text was treated for maximum comprehensibility, the words
set coinciding in all parts. The rhythm of the text determined the
rhythm of the music, while in melismatic passages the rhythm derived
from the practice called modal rhythm, which is similar in many ways to
iambic, trochaic etc metres.
‘Organum’, which also made use of
modal rhythms, occurs exclusively in liturgical composition. Organal
composition in the period under discussion proceeded in a manner quite
unlike that of conductus. An existing chant melody is amplified by
organum per se, in which each note of the melody is sustained while
melismatic descant is placed over it by ‘discant style’, in which both
chant and descant move in modal rhythms; these styles are bridged by
short passages, sometimes called ‘copula’. Sections of organum called
‘clausula’ were written in discant style, and were recomposed again and
again for the same chant (substitute clausula), for which new descant is
composed over the same section of chant. Sometimes in the 13th century
these clausula were texted; not only was the original chant text
retained in the bottom, but additional texts were placed in the upper
parts. Although originally these new texts were liturgically
appropriate, they later veered from that path and assumed (often in
French) a decidedly secular character. These French texts were
frequently passages from French secular romances, whence the name
‘motet’ for this form.
The motet became a separate genre of
composition, completely secular in use, and a field for compositional
experimentation. The bottom part was no longer chanted but was played on
an instrument (the vielle was preferred), and it is here that
instruments first gain entrance to the world of learned, polyphonic
music. During the latter part of the 13th century, new rhythmic ideas
were introduced into motet composition. Petrus de Cruce departed from
the convention of modal rhythm by subdividing long notes into any number
of shorter equal notes: three, four, five, six, seven etc. Rhythmic
innovations and their notation settled into a system — codified by
Franco of Cologne, and later Philippe de Vitry — which served as the
basis for musical thought and expression up to the present day.
The
Occitanian poetry of the 12th and 13th centuries, the troubadour lyric,
symbol of courtly love, included a wide range of subjects — politics,
philosophy, nature, love — and was composed on several artistic levels
ranging from the simple song (‘trobar plan’) to the enigmatic, dark
poetry (‘trobar clus’) including unusual original rhymes (‘caras
rimas’).
Arnaut Daniel was active towards the close of the 12th century, and was an enthusiast of the ‘trobar clus’. His poem Lo ferm voler
established his reputation for posterity: as the original sestina, it
was praised by Dante and imitated by Petrarch and many others. It has
strophes containing six lines and six rhyme words which occur in a
different position in each strophe, and concludes with a tornada
consisting of three lines, each of which contains two of the rhyme
words. This is one of the most published of the troubadour lyrics.
Raimbaut d'Aurenga,
more or less a contemporary of Daniel's, maintained in a dispute with
Giraut of Borneilh that to compose in ‘trobar plan’ was to court the
praise of fools. Aurenga preferred to appeal to men of intelligence
through his ‘caras rimas’. In this poem he introduces a number of words
which rhyme with his name.
The German poets, the ‘Minnesinger’, were
unaffected by the catastrophic destruction of the Languedoc through the
Albigensian Crusade and they continued the monophonic song tradition
into the 15th century. Meister Alexander (13th century), also
called "der wilde Alexander" (Wild Alexander), is poorly represented in
the surviving collections from the Middle Ages. This was certainly one
of the famous songs of its day, with an added strophe relating the
innocent children, the snake and the bitten child to the parable of the
foolish virgins.
In the Middle Ages authorship normally referred
to the text rather than the music, so that we know the names of few
composers of liturgical music. Without doubt the best-known composer in
this genre (for us today) is Perotin, who is identified by a single
medieval author, an Englishman known to us as Anonymous IV, who
identified a few of his compositions in his 13th century treatise.
Perotin composed organa, clausula and conductos for Notre Dame in Paris.
The compositions were originally performed by the schola cantorum of
soloists at the cathedral, but they circulated beyond these confines and
were known long after organum was no longer sung in the Parisian
liturgy. The Montpellier Codex, for example, a large 13th-century
collection of basically secular music of an educated circle, also
contains this organum of Perotin, which suggests the possibility of its
survival as non-liturgical absolute music (as it is performed here) — as
part of the liturgy it would have been performed but once a year.
The Instruments
Many
medieval sources provide us with information concerning the use of
instruments and to a lesser extent the attributes of the instruments: no
actual instruments have survived. During the monophonic period (12th
and 13th centuries) instruments were usually combined according to
colour and function rather than range. The major types of instruments
existed in an almost infinite variety, some suited for melody playing
others for drones and still others for the two combined. Thus (according
to Chrétien de Troyes) a large ensemble would sparkle like a tree full
of birds each with his own song, a splendid combination of reeds and
flutes with plucked strings and bowed strings of all sorts. A great many
of these instruments fell out of use or retreated from art music during
the formative years of the polyphonic period (14th century), as the
demands of this new music became highly specific.
The Chitarra Sarasenica
(Moorish guitar) is one of the longnecked lutes common around the
Mediterranean. It is plucked with a quill and has wire strings. It is
pictured in the miniatures of the cantigas manuscripts and elsewhere,
and mentioned by Grocheo, Machaut, Ruiz and others.
The Lute is a short-necked plucked instrument, similar to the
Arab ‘ud. It is one of the most common instruments of the Middle
Ages.
The rabel
is a long-necked bowed instrument similar to the chitarra sarasenica,
and is pictured in Iberian sources. The long wire strings yield a warm,
nasal tone not unlike that of many Eastern rebabs.
The vielle
is the most common bowed instrument, and the indirect ancestor of the
violin. It is discussed by many authors, including Grocheo and Jerome of
Moravia, who also discusses the lira, a small bowed string instrument with a pear shape, similar to the lirica of Dalmatia today.
The voice,
both male and female, cultivated the head, middle and chest resonance
with greatly varying placement. Mixture of resonance areas seems to have
been avoided, as against modern practice, or at least was uncommon.
There were strong regional characteristics of colour and articulation
techniques (the florid, stepwise singing of the Romans, the less ornate
singing by leaps of the Teutons). The language concerned was a major
formative element in establishing the different regional characteristics
of the voice.
This recording was made to honour the artist
Johnny Friedländer and was originally issued in a limited edition to
accompany a set of his lithographs which bore the title Hommage au Studio der frühen Musik.
Thomas Binkley, 1976