CHAPTER I

MUSIC OF THE EARLY AND MEDIÆVAL CHURCH AND EARLY SECULAR MUSIC

The music of the earliest Christian church as evolved from contemporary practices and systems; the alliance of the Roman liturgy with music; the _Schola Cantorum_--St. Ambrose and liturgical music; his hymns; Gregory the Great and his reforms; the Gregorian antiphonary; sequences and tropes--Progress in musical methods in the northern countries; Hucbald and _organum_; Guido of Arezzo; Franco of Cologne and measured music; growth of part-singing--Early secular music; the Troubadours and Trouvères; Adam de la Hâle; the Minnesingers and the Mastersingers; mediæval secular forms; The early madrigal and its precursors, the _chanson_ and _frottola_; ‘Sumer is icumen in’; relation of folk-music to art-music.

I

Accustomed as we are in the present age to rapid progress and swift development, it seems difficult to understand why it should have required so many centuries to develop among human beings a feeling for the necessity of more than a single melody or voice-part in music expression. The earliest music of which we have any knowledge is monophonic, a single melody sung by a single voice, or by a number of voices in unison or in octaves. This characteristic prevails not only in the music of primitive races, ancient or modern, but also in the music of those ancient nations that attained a high degree of civilization--Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Assyrians, Hebrews. The Greeks and Egyptians understood thoroughly the theory of intervals and they possessed an adequate comprehension of intervals in the melodic sense, where tone follows tone. But it seems never to have occurred to them to apply this knowledge of intervals to sounds of different pitch heard simultaneously, certainly never seriously enough to lead them to make experiments in the use of these intervals for the purpose of evolving two or more independent melodies or voice-parts sounding at the same time. Even the crude device of having two melodies move in parallel fifths or fourths, as in the _organum_ of Hucbald, was not employed until the tenth century of the Christian era. And, the principle of discant or added parts to a given melody having been once established, it required nearly six centuries more of constant experimentation with vocal part-writing before there emerged any clear or conscious feeling for what we call harmony or a progression of chord-units. Since the sixteenth century, however, musical progress has unfolded with constantly accelerated pace.

Until about the beginning of the seventeenth century, when secularity entered the domain of music and received such important consideration in the development of dramatic and instrumental music, practically the whole creative energy of art-music had been expended in the interest of religion. From the earliest times the most important music of the Greeks, Egyptians, Assyrians, and Hebrews was associated with their respective religious rites and ceremonies. Roman civilization contributed nothing of importance to the musical knowledge or practices of its time, for militant Rome was far more interested in assimilating from the culture of conquered countries than in originating and developing practices of her own. Even the dawn of the Christian era, with the tremendous dynamics of its new moral and ethical ideals and its prophecy of intellectual freedom, did not usher in any essential departure from the old musical usages. The early Christians merely selected from current musical systems and contemporaneous melodies those elements that were best suited to the services of the new religion and to the religious home life of its adherents. Until the period of open persecution set in, the converts to the new religion did not in general follow a social or economic life that differed in any essential respects from that of their neighbors who still paid homage to the old forms and trod the old paths of religious worship. The believers in the new and the old forms of religion mingled freely in the daily rounds of their various duties and pleasures. Just as the early Christian art did not differ in principle from the best Pagan models, so the music of the early Christian congregations was absorbed into their services from the musical practices of the communities from which the converts came. Those in the East naturally turned for their musical material to the noble melodies of the Hebrew synagogue and to the more chaste Greek melodies whose association was farther removed from sensual Pagan rites. Those in the West borrowed freely from current Græco-Roman music, employing, of course, only those melodies that were purest and most refined in character and association.

From this point of contact with the old civilization, the music of the early Christian worship gradually developed along the line of its own inherent and individual needs and kept pace with the internal unfoldment of the liturgic idea that at an early date imbedded itself firmly in all branches of the church services. The line of continuity in passing from the old to the new, however, was unbroken. Public ceremonials and priestly sacrifices have always produced conditions exceedingly favorable to the development of rituals and liturgies. This was conspicuously true of the Hebrew religion, as well as the Pagan religions which were practised in the opening centuries of the Christian era. It is not altogether surprising, then, that many Pagan ideas, forms, and ceremonials were incorporated into the ritual and liturgy of the early church, especially after the third century, when Christianity was received into the favor of the State.

While the organization of the early Christian church was still simple and its government more or less democratic in character, the congregation took an active part in the musical portion of the service. But the gradual development of elaborate liturgies and ceremonies, the transformation of the clergy from representatives of the people to mediatorial functionaries, and the general hierarchical tendencies of the times--all contributed in bringing about a condition distinctly unfavorable to free congregational singing. Indeed, this was specifically forbidden in all liturgical services by the Council of Laodicea (343-381), and while the transfer of the office of song from the people to the clergy was not immediately effective, congregational singing in the apostolic sense passed out of existence in the fourth century. It is true that in private worship and in non-liturgical services the singing of hymns and psalms by the general body of worshippers was permitted, but the rapid growth of sacerdotalism irresistibly led to the corresponding withdrawal of initiative from the individual worshippers, until the clergy in all liturgical services finally assumed all the offices of public worship, inclusive of song, which was regarded as an integral part of the office of prayer.

The establishment of the priestly liturgic chant marks the real beginning of the history of music in the Christian church, for music after that event became a matter of special qualifications and preparation on the part of the performers, and of rigid adherence to prescribed formulas and regulations in all details of performance. It followed with utmost logic from the doctrine of the universality and immutability of the church that its liturgy, rites, and ceremonies should not only remain unchanged from age to age, but should be uniform in all countries and localities where her authority was recognized.

In the study of the Roman Catholic liturgy its alliance with music must be kept constantly in mind, for in inception and in development it was and always has been a musical liturgy. In working out the problems of securing the desired uniformity in respect to musical settings for different localities and of handing down to succeeding generations the musical forms that had gained the sanction of church authority, the church fathers were confronted with difficulties the magnitude of which it is not easy for us to comprehend. It was not until the eleventh century that a system of staff notation was devised whereby the exact pitch of notes could be accurately represented, and a full century elapsed after this vital invention before an adequate system of measured music was evolved whereby the exact relative duration of notes could be represented. A detailed account of the slow and laborious development of the elementary material out of which the fair edifice of modern music was finally to be reared will be found in Vol. I of this series. It will suffice here to say that the authorized versions of the various chants, as the liturgy was gradually taking definite and final shape during the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries, had to be taught and preserved by ‘word of mouth,’ this process being somewhat aided, through visual association, by means of a kind of musical shorthand called ‘neumes,’ consisting of dots, short lines and combinations of lines written over the syllables to be sung, which indicated the general direction of the melody but not the exact intervals between its tones as it fluctuated up and down in pitch. Even this crude system of representing pitch relations by visual symbols was of great assistance to the singers, for in principle it sought to serve the same purpose that our modern notation accomplishes in suggesting to the eve the outline of the melody. Indefinite as it was in not indicating exact intervallic relations, it greatly aided in recalling to mind the melodies already memorized, assistance which was greatly appreciated by the singers, for as many as a thousand different melodies were used during the church year, many of them for a single occasion only.

To eliminate conflicting traditions and to bring about uniformity in all branches of the service, singing schools were established by order and under the direction of ecclesiastical authorities (the first one in 314 at Rome by Pope Sylvester), in which the clerical singers received thorough instruction and training not only in the exact forms of all the chants to be used, but also in all matters of intonation, qualities of tone suited to different chants, enunciation, etc. These schools (_scholæ cantorum_) brought about as much uniformity and permanency as were possible in the absence of more exact notational means. But even with these great handicaps, a wealth of musical material was accumulated even before the twelfth century, whose plenitude and affluent beauty it would seem have never been rightly appreciated or exploited by the Catholic Church itself. The difficulties in deciphering the vague neumes in the mediæval manuscripts have undoubtedly operated to keep these treasures hidden away in their original depositories; yet the results of the labors of occasional enthusiasts in translating some of them into modern notation would indicate that here are unexplored channels for the permanent enrichment of the literature of Catholic music. In his _motu propria_ of November 22, 1903, Pope Pius X turned the attention of the Catholic world back to the glories of the mediæval Gregorian music and, indirectly, to the old manuscripts, treasure-stores of long forgotten melodies of the old church singers that are still hidden away in the monasteries and abbeys of Europe and northern Africa, as well as in the more accessible museums and libraries of Europe.

The earliest known manuscripts date from the eighth, possibly the sixth, century. But aside from the traditional music of the liturgy, handed down from generation to generation by word of mouth and preserved intact, in Rome at least, by the severe discipline of the singing schools, we possess very few examples of music whose origin can with certainty be placed before the eleventh century, when our present staff notation came into being. Yet even with so little actual music of the period at hand we know with great definiteness the character of ecclesiastical music from contemporary writings, edicts, and decrees.

II

When early Christian music finally freed itself from the influence of Pagan models in the interest of its own internal necessities, it opened the way for the first time in history for the development of a purely vocal art, dispensing with the assistance of the instruments that formed such an essential part of the musical practices allied with Pagan religious rites and ceremonies. For the first fifteen centuries of the Christian era almost the only art-music was that which was cultivated by and for the church, and since the church during this period persistently frowned upon the use of instruments, the history of the music of the period is the history of choral music.

But while in Italy the use of instruments was rigidly forbidden and any deviation from prescribed practices was a punishable offense, greater difficulty was experienced in enforcing this church law in those countries of Europe, now known as France, Germany, and England, which had more recently been won to the standard of Christianity by the militant missionaries of Rome, but which still retained a rugged independence that clung tenaciously to many local customs. In some of these localities instruments were freely used and in the monastery of St. Gall in Switzerland festival occasions were graced by a band of harps, flutes, cymbals, a seven-stringed psaltery, and an organ. Notwithstanding a few noteworthy exceptions, the music of the Roman Church can be characterized as pure vocal music until near the end of the sixteenth century at least. And when instruments were occasionally used--the organ more and more toward the end of the sixteenth century--it was for the purpose of doubling the voice-parts in order to gain greater sonority.

After the office of song was restricted to specially trained clericals, thus bringing music within the domain of culture and laying the foundation for its development as an art, the first name of importance among those who strove to bring order and increased effectiveness into the chaotic conditions of liturgical music was St. Ambrose, Bishop of Milan (340?-397). Much that was attributed to him until a few decades ago has been proved to be apocryphal and legendary. We may with much certainty, however, affirm that his enthusiastic interest in the music of the liturgy resulted (1) in carefully sifting the material that had been gradually accumulating, and (2) in bringing into the ritual of the Western church from the Eastern three elements of great value to its further development--antiphonal singing of psalms by two alternating choirs, responsorial singing, and Greek hymnody. His great interest in the last-named field led him not only to translate many of the finest Greek hymns into Latin, but inspired him to write new Latin hymns to be sung, probably to simple melodies, after the Greek fashion. Among the hymns (about ten in number) from his own pen may be named _Veni Redemptor Gentium_ and _Eterna Christi Munera_ (‘Hymnal Noted,’ Nos. 12 and 36).

St. Ambrose’s innovations soon found favor elsewhere. Antiphonal psalmody was introduced into the service at Rome by Pope Celestine (pope from 422 to 432), and in a short time was quite generally adopted throughout the domains of the church. St. Augustine (354-430), who was a friend of St. Ambrose and a collaborator with him, and who is said to have made a collection of Ambrosian melodies for the use of the church, bears touching testimony to their emotional effect: ‘How I wept at thy hymns and canticles, pierced to the quick by the voices of thy melodious church! Those voices flowed into my ears, and the truth distilled into my heart, and thence there streamed forth a devout emotion, and my tears ran down, and happy was I therein.’ (St. Augustine, ‘Confessions,’ Book 9, chap. 6.)

The so-called Ambrosian collection vied in importance with the Gregorian for several centuries and many of its finest features were undoubtedly incorporated into the later and more comprehensive collection. So important a place does St. Ambrose fill in the history of ecclesiastical music that the term Ambrosian is still applied to usages, both liturgical and musical, of the Church of Milan, which distinguish its service in certain respects from the Roman service, and which are supposed to have been originated by the great Milanese bishop.

After St. Ambrose the next prelate to impress himself profoundly on the course of development of church-music was Pope Gregory the Great (pope from 590 to 604). While recent research[1] has proved beyond doubt that a multitude of reforms and innovations attributed to him by mediæval legends and repeated by later history belong in reality to a much later period, it is well established that he manifested an enthusiastic and well-directed interest in the music of the service, that he introduced many corrective measures to curb the growing danger of secularizing church-music through the use of unauthorized embellishments and licenses in singing the chants, and that he brought about a thorough and far-reaching reorganization of the singing schools. When he became pope in 590, the liturgy was practically completed as far as its actual material was concerned. Since the earliest practices of the church had encouraged a musical liturgy, he found in actual use a vast number of chants and musical settings for various parts of the services. These musical settings differed in different localities. In conformity with his definitely conceived policy of establishing in reality one universal church for all peoples and races, with centralized power and highly-organized form of government, he set about to accomplish a definite systematization and an authoritative organization of all liturgic functions, together with the necessarily similar regulation of the music associated with the liturgy. This reform was in the nature of a codification of existing material, and while he did not finish the great work, he brought it within the bounds of uniformity as regards both liturgy and musical settings, and gave to these results of his labors all the permanency that the solemn law of the church could command. The liturgical portion was called _Sacramentarium Gregorianum_ and the musical portion _Antiphonarium Gregorianum_, and from the seventh century these two books are always met with side by side.

The interesting and fanciful stories of Pope Gregory’s labors as composer of chants and as teacher in the _Schola Cantorum_ must be discarded as wholly unproven legends, and to the same category belongs the tradition that after compiling the Antiphonary he caused a copy of it to be chained to the altar of St. Peter’s, as containing the only music authorized by the church. One of the direct results of his reorganization of the singing school, however, was the establishment on a permanent basis of the Sistine Chapel,[2] or papal choir, at Rome. This organization, the oldest choral body in the world, was for centuries the court of final resort in all matters pertaining to the traditions of Gregorian chant and it maintained a practically continuous existence from that far-off age until the temporal power of the pope came to an end in 1870, when it was practically disbanded. Since that date, however, its members have from time to time been called together to sing in the Sistine Chapel on occasions of special significance.

The Gregorian collection or antiphonary, which was the musical law of the Roman Church until the Renaissance period, was probably not settled in final form until the time of Gregory II (pope 715-731) or Gregory III (pope 731-741). However much Gregory the Great may have accomplished in establishing methods of permanency and universality in the ritual-music, the processes of selection, accretion, and assimilation went on for more than a century after his death. This collection, which was written in the vague neumes of the period, became the most important factor in the music of the Western church and by the end of, the eleventh century had practically superseded all other bodies of ritual-music--such as the African, Celtic, Gallican, and Spanish[3] (Mozarabic)--which had previously gained ascendency in the various countries which acknowledged spiritual allegiance to Rome.

The historic collection of Gregorian music divides itself into two large groups--(1) the music of the Mass, together with that of the baptismal, burial, and other occasional services, corresponding with the modern Missal, and (2) the music of the daily Hours of Divine Service, corresponding with the modern Breviary. There are about 630 compositions in the first large group, in which only scriptural words appear, classified as follows: about 150 Introits (_Antiphonæ ad introitum_), about 150 Communions (_Antiphonæ ad communionem_), 110 Graduals, 100 Alleluias, 23 Tracts, and 102 Offertories. In the music of the second large division (the Hours of Divine Service) there is much less variety than in the music of the Mass. As this group of services did not have the same official position as the Mass, less restraint was exercised in regard to modifications. In this collection are to be found some 2,000 antiphons and about 800 Greater Responds, besides many Lesser Responds, Invitatories, and Versicles.

It is now quite generally believed that there were no essential differences between Ambrosian and Gregorian music. If any differences existed, they were in such compositions as the Ambrosian hymn, which was written for the use of the congregation and was more measured and stately in its swing than its Gregorian counterpart, which was sung by the trained choirs and therefore capable of much more rhythmic freedom and melodic embellishment.

The Roman singing school (_Schola Cantorum_) played a large and important part both in the labor of codifying the great collection since known as Gregorian music, and in spreading the Gregorian chant among the faithful in other lands. This latter task was greatly facilitated by the establishment of numerous singing schools, modelled after the Roman school, in England, France, and Germany, under the auspices of monastic orders or powerful prelates. Among the most famous of these schools were the one at Metz, founded by Bishop Chrodegang, which maintained great prestige up to the twelfth century; the one at Oxford, founded by Alfred the Great; the monastic school of Fulda, which held the foremost place in Germany; and the one at St. Gall, Switzerland, whose fame and achievements eclipsed all the others and which was celebrated far and near for the elaborateness and excellence of its musical service and for the devotion and enthusiasm of its monks in the advancement of ecclesiastical music during the eighth, the ninth, and especially the tenth century. England became acquainted with Gregorian chant during the lifetime of Gregory the Great, when St. Augustine (not to be confused with the Latin father) was commissioned in 597 as an apostle to carry Christianity to the island across the channel. In France and Germany (Franconia and Allemania) Pepin,[4] and especially Charlemagne, gave energetic and active support to the movement to bring about uniformity with Rome, and by the beginning of the ninth century the Gregorian chant had supplanted the old Gallican chant in all the domains of the great emperor. Spain, however, did not accept the Gregorian chant until the eleventh century, during the reign of Pope Gregory VII.

The inexact system of notation (neumes) in which the Gregorian antiphonary was written necessarily laid great emphasis on the oral transmission of the melodies, hence it was hardly possible to attain perfect uniformity in different countries and in different periods. Yet it is believed that the singers of the Roman school, who were subject to severe penalties for even slight infractions of the traditions of the Gregorian procedure, succeeded in preserving through the Middle Ages not only the great body of Gregorian chant but their traditional performance with a wonderful degree of purity and inviolability. But away from Rome, while the general principles of procedure were preserved intact, modifications in details undoubtedly crept in, some unconsciously and some in deference to the various national or local predilections. Thus in Gaul and the northern countries generally, the oriental style of ornamentation, retained from earlier periods in many of the Roman melodies, met with scant favor. To satisfy these sturdy and independent singers the ornate qualities were frequently softened or eliminated altogether.

Additions to the original ritual music of the Gregorian service appeared about the beginning of the tenth century under the names of sequences and tropes. The sequence was a melody of hymn-like structure which derived its name from its position in the Mass, being a continuation or sequence of the Gradual and Alleluia. It had long been a custom, introduced from the East, to prolong the final vowel of the Alleluia-chant, sung between the Epistle and the Gospel, into a free melody or vocal flourish without words, called jubilation, originally a kind of ecstatic improvisation. French musicians in the ninth century added words to these melodies. They thus became separate compositions to which at first the name ‘prose’ was given, since the words adapted to the music were without meter. Later, when these compositions became thoroughly independent, texts in metrical form were written for them, the name ‘prose’ was dropped as no longer appropriate, and the new name ‘sequence’ assumed. This change in name and character is credited to the St. Gall monk, Notker Balbulus (died 912). Sequences became very popular from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries and mediæval office-books abound in fine specimens, many of them of extreme beauty and originality. During the tenth and eleventh centuries the monastery of St. Gall remained the chief centre of activity in the composition of sequences and Notker found a multitude of followers, mainly in Germany. Quite independent of the St. Gall influence, a second centre of activity appeared at the monastery of St. Martial in Limoges, culminating in the twelfth century in Adam of St. Victor in Paris. These sequences, patterned after the Greek model, approached more and more the form of the hymn, in which they finally disappeared.

In the sequences the vernacular, as well as Latin, was employed and they were freely used in the Mass, becoming ‘a sort of people’s song.’ But since they were in reality extra-liturgical, they were all suppressed, except five, when the Council of Trent revised the Roman liturgy in the sixteenth century. The five at present in use are: _Victimæ Paschali_, appointed for Easter Sunday, written by Wipo early in the eleventh century, the oldest of the five and the only one similar in structure to Notker’s sequences; _Veni Sancte Spiritus_ for Whitsunday, written probably by Innocent III at the end of the twelfth century, called ‘the Golden Sequence’ by mediæval writers; _Lauda Sion_ for the festival Corpus Christi, written by St. Thomas Aquinas supposedly about the year 1261; _Stabat Mater_, sung since 1727 on the Friday in Passion Week, of uncertain authorship; and _Dies Irae_, sung on All Souls’ Day and in the Requiem or Mass for the Dead, written by Thomas of Celano late in the twelfth century or early in the thirteenth century. In the thirteenth century the poetry of the Latin Church attained its period of greatest brilliance and amid the rich efflorescence of this wonderful epoch the _Dies Irae_ stands incomparable, the finest example of rhymed Latin poetry of the Middle Ages. Second to it in poetic beauty is the _Stabat Mater_. It should be added that the authors of the above sequences were combined poets and composers, as poetry and music were twin-born arts during the Middle Ages.

Another of the many illustrations of the readiness with which the churches of the West accepted the musical practices of the East was the ‘trope,’ which was adopted among the Franks in the ninth and tenth centuries from the many Byzantine musicians who came into the West during this period. The trope was not unlike the sequence in its development. The name was originally given to any succession of tones without text that occurred in the florid chants. Tuotilo of St. Gall (died 915) developed the tropes into quasi-independent compositions by setting words to them and interpolating them among the chants of the Mass, thus thrusting them into the Gregorian liturgy. These interpolations, some very extensive and ornate, found their way into all the Mass-chants except the Credo, which was considered too sacred to violate. But since the tropes were regarded by the Council of Trent as weakening accretions to the venerable structure of church-music, they, as well as the sequences, were banished from the liturgy in its final revision.

III

The tendency of ecclesiasticism has always been to curb and discourage individual effort toward progress in all matters pertaining to the development of ritual-music. This was not altogether strange, for until modern times music existed in the church solely for liturgical purposes. It was not desired that its effectiveness should be considered apart from the religious idea with which it was so intimately associated in the liturgy. So completely were text and music merged into one artistic unity that the church authorities consistently and persistently resented any effort to glorify music for its own sake or at the expense of the liturgic idea. The state of immobility in which ritual music existed was the natural sequence to the church doctrine of immutability. Notwithstanding constant temptation to experiment and introduce innovations, the efforts of the Roman singers were rigidly restricted to the problems of perfecting the performance of the ritual music as prescribed by church law and tradition. From the standpoint of the liturgy (from which standpoint alone this music should be judged) the Roman singers must have attained a standard of ideal perfection in beauty and expressiveness of tonal utterance, and in preserving the original liturgical significance of the music in the service.

So conservative was Rome and so fettered was Italy by the venerated traditions of the Papal Chapel that no change in musical methods was possible in this field. Outside of Italy, however, conditions were more favorable to progress. In the triumphant march of Christianity over Western Europe under the leadership of Rome many concessions were made to local customs and usages. The independent northerners steadily refused to accept with unquestioning allegiance the traditions of Rome in all matters pertaining to ritual-music, and thus stagnation was prevented and the hope of further progress for music in time became a reality. Out of the experiments and occasional innovations of the venturesome singers of the northern countries there were slowly and laboriously laid the foundations on which it became possible to construct the succeeding system of ecclesiastical polyphonic music. But when, in the fullness of time and with infinite patience and toil, this stately edifice was reared, how appropriate and fitting it was that the Roman Palestrina, himself associated for many years with the Sistine Chapel, should have been the one to lay on its altar the richest treasures of religious music that the Roman Church possesses, the purest, most complete and perfect expression of the spirit of the Roman liturgy!

Before the Carlovingian era the practice of music was restricted to the singing schools founded for the preservation and propagation of Gregorian chant. But with the great impetus given to learning under Charlemagne the consideration of liturgic music passed to the monastery study. Music became a compulsory subject in the curriculum of the cathedral and monastery schools, and its theory as well as its practice received the attention of the learned monks and scholars. It was from this direction that the next recorded advances in musical art appeared.

In the writings of these ecclesiastical musicians and scholars we find accounts of the clumsy, yet persistent efforts of the singers and theorists to break away from the prevailing monophony or unison chanting of Gregorian music and to improve upon current systems of notation. The Flemish monk Hucbald (who died about 930), in his _Musica enchiriadis_, described the earliest known efforts at polyphony, which he called Organum or Diaphony (See Vol. I, pp. 161 ff). Guido d’Arezzo (died about 1050), sometimes called ‘the father of music’ and undoubtedly the most impressive musical personality in the early part of the Middle Ages, probably originated the four-lined staff for indicating pitch relationships and invented solmization, a system of reading music through the association of tones with syllables that is the direct ancestor of our present-day systems of reading music by syllables (‘Tonic Sol-fa,’ ‘Movable Do,’ ‘Fixed Do’). He is credited by later writers with many innovations and discoveries which possibly belonged rightfully to talented and ingenious contemporaries who, however, did not succeed in stamping themselves on their own age as vividly as did this great singer and teacher. Franco of Cologne (died about 1200), in his famous treatise on Measured Music, gives a voluminous account of his own and contemporary thought about intervals, consonances and dissonances, time-values of notes, etc.

By the beginning of the thirteenth century the science of music had reached the point where music could be accurately notated as regards both pitch and time relationships and its further development became correspondingly accelerated. The organization of music on the twofold basis of regularity of stress or accent and of fixed proportions in the division of time-units was hastened by the growing desire of singers to add a new voice-part to the old Gregorian chant. This practice of part-singing, at first called ‘organum,’ later ‘discant,’ undoubtedly had its origin in the study-rooms of the choirs and singing schools. The choristers were naturally chosen because of their unusual aptitude for music. The larger part of their time was given up not only to the perfecting of means for the most effective performance of the church music, but also to the study of the theory and practice of music in all its then known phases. The creative instinct more and more seized upon them. Notwithstanding ecclesiastical restrictions the singers were too much under the seductive spell of the inner spirit of their art not to yield to the ready temptation of delving into the infinite possibilities of new tonal combinations and devices that lay so close at hand. When the idea of singing two melodies at the same time was once grasped (we have no definite knowledge how it was first suggested), the singers took it up with avidity.

At first experiments were restricted to two voices or parts. While one chorister was singing a familiar chant-melody another would sing a second melody an octave or a fourth or a fifth below it, usually joining it at the end in unison. The progression of two voices or parts moving in parallel octaves was known to the Greeks and was called by them ‘magadizing’--from the magadis, a stringed instrument. The singing of two concurrent parts in parallel fourths or fifths did not offend mediæval ears as it does modern ears, probably because of the exact parallelism of such melodic movement, which is merely a different kind of unison.[5] The earliest parallel movement was evidently in fourths, not in fifths, as usually stated in musical histories. (See Weinmann, ‘History of Church Music,’ page 74.)

Various kinds of organum soon came into vogue. Three-part organum resulted from doubling the lower of the two parts an octave higher, and four-part organum from adding to these three parts the original upper part an octave lower, thus producing simultaneously moving octaves, fourths, and fifths. Such a progression of parts, quite obnoxious to ears accustomed to harmony, impressed Hucbald as ‘a delightful concord.’[6] As the experiments increased, the accompanying voice (the discant) was added above as well as below the chant (the _cantus firmus_, or fixed voice). The monotony of exclusive parallelism was broken by sometimes sustaining the same tone in one part while the other part moved up or down (oblique motion) or by letting the two parts move in contrary direction, and lastly, by mixing these three kinds of tone movement, thus producing greater variety in the intervals used. When this freer movement of parts was recognized as essential to more pleasing vocal effects, the word discant came to be applied to it to distinguish it from the more primitive form of movement--organum--in parallel fourths, fifths, and octaves. Until the thirteenth century the intervals most used in all styles of part-writing were fourths, fifths, octaves, and unisons. Thirds and sixths, though occasionally permitted, were regarded as dissonances until the period when harmony came to be a conscious element of musical thought.

[Illustration: The Playing Angels] _Altar piece by Hubert and Jan van Eyck_

Until a definite system of notation was devised, the discanting parts to the chants were extemporized by the singers. But when the staff was invented and notes or points were employed to indicate the exact pitch of the tones of the melodies, the name counterpoint (_punctus contra punctum_, note against note) was given to the part or parts added to the chant (_cantus firmus_). The term counterpoint[7] displaced discant in the thirteenth century, and from this time the art of counterpoint developed as the number of added parts increased and the various kinds of intervallic relationships among the interdependent parts were recognized and systematized.

The foundation of all the art-music of the Middle Ages was the chant; and the science of music concerned itself wholly with the addition of more or less free and independent parts to the chant-melodies. Musical invention, however, was limited entirely to these accompanying parts. Until probably the fourteenth century or even later, composers as such were unknown. Since music in the church was never considered apart from the liturgy to which it was wedded, not only did the melodic form of the chants themselves (that is, their rising and falling inflections of pitch) follow quite closely the natural rhetorical utterance of the words of the liturgy, being an intensification of the natural values of forceful speech, but for several centuries after the principle of polyphony was thoroughly recognized the intricate church compositions, such as the masses and motets, were constructed by using the liturgic chants as subjects and adding free parts to these. At first the principal melody (subject) was taken from the chant books; but in course of time secular songs of the day found their way into the choral parts, either as the principal melody to which other parts were supplied or as an accompanying part to a given plain-song melody. The secular words, frequently of questionable moral quality, were often carried along with the melodies into the sacred company of actual ritual-music and the singers found such a combination neither irreverent nor incongruous. It was quite analogous to the custom, common among the early painters, of painting the portraits of such ordinary mortals as wealthy purchasers or patrons on the same canvas with saints or apostles, or even with the Madonna. The church authorities frowned upon mingling secular and sacred elements in ecclesiastical music in this manner, and the practice, so common in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, led to such gross abuses that it was finally suppressed.

The important rôle which the church singers themselves played in the development of music in this formative period is worthy of passing notice. Foremost in importance is to be noted that the choirs were in fact training-schools for composers. Almost without exception the church composers were graduated, so to speak, from the choirs into the more exalted and distinguished sphere of creative work, having first gained their practical training and experience as choristers. But the humbler singers themselves were not without a good measure of influence. In their experiments in the study-rooms, as well as in the actual singing of written compositions, they served to counteract the pedantic rules of theorists by following the dictates of the ear as against mere rule. Thus chromatic tones not indicated in the score were frequently sung by the experienced choristers who followed their natural musical feeling, and later theory sanctioned what they intuitively felt. In this way natural musical impulse (which Wagner has so beautifully symbolized in Walther in _Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg_) many times softened the austerity and harshness of musical practices dictated by mediæval theory.

IV

While, under the guidance of scholasticism, the stream of church song was thus gradually gaining artistic momentum and expressive beauty and power through the upbuilding of a complicated science of melodic interweaving, a second stream of song, unfettered by rule or tradition, was modestly and quietly flowing along, gushing from the hearts of the people and fed from secular emotions and experiences. Until the humanistic movement in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries discovered points of contact and mutual interdependence, these two streams of religious and secular song seldom touched in their onward flow, for they sprang from widely divergent sources and were guided by widely differing principles of artistic utterance. In the history of Western Europe ecclesiastical music has exercised a remarkably small and disproportionate influence on the nature and development of secular music; on the contrary, it has frequently weakened and changed its own standards under the impact of secular ideals and styles. Many folk-songs doubtless imitated melodic and modal characteristics of the chant-melodies, but there has always existed a certain antipathy between these two forms. The early indifference of the popular mind to church music is easily traceable to the facts that this music was cultivated exclusively by ecclesiastics, that it was sung in Latin, a language which the people neither understood nor cared for, and that the people had no part in church song outside the few non-liturgical hymns.

The discussion of secular music in the Middle Ages is necessarily beset with difficulties of large proportions, since very few authentic examples of folk-melodies of this period have been preserved. Musical learning was confined almost exclusively to monks and ecclesiastics who had no real interest in the preservation of these wild-flower products. Those that were pressed into service as parts of polyphonic church music undoubtedly underwent melodic and rhythmic alterations to suit their new environment. In all of them words and music were twin-born; but, while many of the beautiful mediæval and earlier poems are extant, their melodies seem to be irretrievably lost.[8]

The secular music of the Middle Ages had no direct or immediate bearing on the development of musical art, but the courtly troubadours and minnesingers and, later, the mastersingers of humbler origin, served to keep alive the practice of solo singing with instrumental accompaniment and thus maintained the idea of individual expression which had been banished from the church in the early centuries. The first outburst of popular song that attained the significance of a distinct movement occurred in southeastern France among the nobles of sunny, contented, and cheerful Provence. These troubadours, who flourished throughout southern France, Italy, and Spain from about 1100 to 1300, were concerned largely with the deeds of chivalry, especially that phase of the idea of knightliness that glorified the love of some beautiful or good woman as the inspiration of, or the reward for, deeds of adventure or valor. In the intense feeling and strong lyric impulse of these courtly poet-singers is to be found the beginning of the modern art of lyric poetry. They showed great ingenuity in the invention and elaboration of verse-forms[9] and coupled with this gift was a musical inventiveness of marked power which in time developed a style quite divorced from the influence of plain-song. The melodies, following the rhythmical swing of the verse, frequently approximated the structure and feeling of the modern phrase and phrase-group. The development of this feeling for the organization of melodic units later led to most important results when the secular impulse seized upon the perfected methods of scholastic music.

In the north of France and in England the trouvères (both ‘trouvère’ and ‘troubadour’ mean ‘an inventor or finder’) followed close upon the troubadours, whom they freely imitated both in style and poetic themes. In their artistic activities, however, they were more closely associated with ecclesiastical poets and musicians than were the troubadours, there was less divergence from the church style in their melodies, and hence their efforts entered more directly as a shaping force in the succeeding epoch of musical development in Flanders and England. They were also more frequently of humble origin than were the troubadours. Adam de la Hále (about 1230 to 1287), probably the most conspicuously gifted in the long line of worthy trouvères, was of humble birth, the son of a well-to-do burgher of Arras, in Picardy. He was a master of the _chanson_, sixteen of which are preserved written in three parts and in rondeau form. These are among the oldest known examples of secular compositions in more than two parts. In the same manuscript with these _chansons_ are preserved six Latin motets in florid counterpoint. His name looms large in musical history, however, from the fact that his dramatic pastoral play called _Le jeu de Robin et Marion_ (written for the French court at Naples, where the first performance was given in 1285) is the earliest example of what we now call comic opera. It is written in dialogue and grouped into scenes; airs, couplets, and pieces for two voices singing in alternation but never together are scattered through the play, during the performance of which eleven personages appear. This quaint song-play, which is a development or expansion of the earlier _pastourelle_, was given in Arras in 1896 during the festival in commemoration of the composer. Adam’s task seems, however, to have been little more than that of a compiler, since the most of the songs were not of his own composition. Nevertheless he is altogether one of the most interesting personalities in the pre-Netherland period.

Parallel with the impulse given to secular song and poetry by the troubadours and trouvères, but beginning a little later, was the growth of the minnesingers, or love-singers, of Germany. This movement, extending through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, was limited almost exclusively to men of noble birth and aristocratic rank and was associated with the pomp of courtly life. Its influence on the general trend of musical development was, therefore, less marked than that of the corresponding movement in France, particularly in northern France. Relatively fewer of the minnesongs reached or impressed the popular ear, because of the greater exclusiveness of the minnesingers and the less pleasing outlines of their melodies, especially the earlier ones. The range of their themes was wider than that of their French contemporaries, including nature, qualities of character, patriotism, and piety, as well as love and chivalrous deeds. The minnesongs on the whole display more seriousness than is found in the songs of France, primary emphasis always being given to the words. At first modelled after the declamatory style of Gregorian chant, their melodies lacked the easy flow of the troubadour songs, but the later ones are marked by strongly modern feeling for rhythm, phrase structure, and definite key, and display the delightful naïveté of the German folk-song. Many of them undoubtedly passed into folk-melodies and from thence into the chorale literature of the German Reformation period.

The mastersingers followed in the wake of the declining minnesingers. Drawn entirely from the burgher or artisan classes and organizing themselves into guilds after the manner of the contemporary trades-union, they strove to imitate the methods of their aristocratic forerunners, without, however, sharing their artistic and lyric endowments. At a time when their social and economic superiors were entirely engrossed in the political and religious turmoils of the times, they succeeded in keeping alive a real love for music in the hearts of the common people and in preserving a wholesome reverence for the dignity and worth of the art. Aside from this important function, they did nothing directly to advance the art of music. In _Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg_ Wagner gives an historically accurate picture of their hopelessly pedantic methods and reactionary spirit, which were indeed far removed from the nature of real folk-music. The vast bulk of their melodies were weak imitations of church chants or popular folk-songs. At long intervals a mastersinger such as Hans Sachs, the quaint and lovable cobbler of Nuremberg (1494-1576), would manifest a spark of real lyric genius. The first guild is supposed to have been established at Mayence on the Rhine in 1311 by Heinrich von Meissen, called Frauenlob, himself a distinguished minnesinger, the last of that order. The guilds multiplied and were especially active from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. After 1600 the movement lost its significance and the guilds dropped by the wayside one by one, though a few lingered on until the nineteenth century, the last one having been disbanded at Ulm in 1839.

The special historical significance of the troubadours, trouvères, and minnesingers is to be found in the fact that these secular poet-musicians of both high and low degree composed their melodies under the impulsion of natural, spontaneous musical feeling rather than prescribed theoretical law. If they followed the feeling for church modes at all, this feeling instinctively led them to construct their melodies more and more in those modes corresponding to our modern major and minor scales. Naumann, in his ‘History of Music,’[10] gives a number of these melodies in full. One of them, _L’autrier par la matinée_, by Thibaut, King of Navarre (1201-1253), a celebrated troubadour, moves entirely in the key of G major. Another is ‘The Loveliness of Woman’ (_Tritt ein reines Weib daher_), a proverb[11] by the minnesinger Spervogel, dating from the middle of the twelfth century, a refined melody clearly in the key of D major, employing every tone of the scale. A third, ‘Broken Faith,’ a beautiful and touching minnesong by Prince Witzlav, is modern enough in key feeling and melodic structure to have flowed from the pen of Schubert. In all of those quoted the phrases are clearly outlined, a sense of design and melodic cohesion is manifested in the frequent repetition of phrases, and through them all there breathes the spirit of free lyric invention that differentiates them sharply from all existing church models and makes them close kin to the developed songs of the eighteenth century and later. The gradual development of such an untrammelled feeling for free melody among the people explains the comparative rapidity with which art-music, after its secession from the church modes and ecclesiastical methods early in the seventeenth century, developed new forms and expanded into new paths that led to a popular appreciation never before accorded to music.

V

The secular impulse from whence sprang the simple melodies of the minnesingers and troubadours soon found a channel for fuller expression in the art-music of the period immediately following the decay of chivalrous song. It was inevitable that the tendency toward secularization, already strongly developing in the other arts--notably painting and architecture--should extend to music also. The beneficent alliance of music and poetry both in the service of the church and in the less pretentious effusions of the secular poet-musicians of courtly estate naturally led thought to a desire that music should be the helpful companion of poetry in all her wanderings, in the domain of secular experiences as well as religious. As soon as the spirit of polyphony had been firmly established in ecclesiastical music, the church composers began to turn their attention to the rapidly widening field of secular poetry for material on which to exploit their newly-found contrapuntal skill. The first application of the principles of polyphony to secular art-music manifested itself in the French _chanson_ and the Italian _frottola_. Both of these were merely popular melodies brought within the domain of the contrapuntal principle. The _frottola_ seems to have been always set for four voices in very simple movement, the _chanson_ for either three or four voices. These two forms soon merged into the madrigal, which expanded its scope so as to include almost any lyric composition of delicate texture dealing with thoughts of rustic humor, sentiment, or passion, couched in the language of everyday life. The madrigal in time developed into a special department of composition, having a brilliant history of its own and engaging the interested attention of nearly every noted composer from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. The word, whose derivation is hopelessly entangled in a maze of disputed sources, appears as early at least as the fourteenth century in connection with pastoral or rustic poems of amorous character, and very naturally the name was soon transferred to the music to which the words were set.

Few madrigals whose composition antedate the invention of printing have been preserved. But all authorities agree that even in its earlier stages it was composed for three or more voices in the prevailing church modes. Throughout its best period, which closed practically with the sixteenth century, it maintained the characteristic of being sung without instrumental accompaniment of any kind.[12] The association of concurrent parts with plain-song undoubtedly suggested similar treatment for secular melodies, and the troubadours and trouvères were probably the first to put this suggestion into practice. But they passed out of existence before the art of discant had progressed beyond its first stage of infancy and further development of polyphonic secular music was left in the more skilled hands of the scientifically trained musicians of the church. The madrigal, or more strictly speaking its predecessors, was forthwith adopted by the church composers, who treated it with much tenderness and lavished on it all the learning and technical skill they could command. Since these composers, however, were so thoroughly imbued by training and experience with the characteristics and idioms of church music, we find no essential differences, as far as the music is concerned, between the madrigal and its ecclesiastical counterpart, the motet (see