Language of the Spirit

Chapter 1

THROUGH THE MIDDLE AGES (UP TO 1400)

Wherever and whenever we find people, we find music. Likely an integral part of human life from the beginning, music has left its traces in instruments and in art dating back to the dawning of our species. The oldest instruments found from the cave days are flutes made from mammoth ivory and bird bones, over forty thousand years old. They have four holes, enough to provide a simple scale. Earlier bones with drilled holes that may be flutes date back over eighty thousand years; their makers were Neanderthals.

All the arts have a primeval connection to magic and mystery, and music is no exception. Animals painted on the walls of caves sanctified shrines that were in use sometimes for thousands of years. Whenever music has emerged from the obscurity of time, it has been connected to ritual, to ceremony, to what we call religion, but to ancient humanity was simply the ambience in which they lived. Instruments and song and painting and poetry and dance probably evolved together. All of them were linked to mystery, the uncanny, the holy.

Sumerian artifacts from the third millennium BC include a lyre whose body is the image of a sacred bull in gold and lapis lazuli. The walls of Egyptian tombs are full of music. In paintings and reliefs we see an array of sophisticated Egyptian instruments: harp, lyre, lute, flute, oboe, trumpet, percussion instruments. We see little bands of servants playing harp and lyre and flute for their mistress; men sitting on the ground, their arms raised in supplication, singing to the accompaniment of a harp; naked girls dancing to the music of a double flute. Singers ushered the dead into the afterlife, their lyrics sometimes written on the tomb:

We don't know what the music of ancient Greeks or Romans sounded like, any more than we do Egyptian music, but again we know their instruments and the lyrics of their songs. Singers and players and dancers disport themselves around Greek pottery. Epic poetry, such as the Iliad and Odyssey, was meant to be sung, often accompanied by lyre. Every ceremony from temple to marriage to Olympic games had its music, in the approved scale pattern, using the traditional instruments. The choruses of Greek drama danced and sang their poetry (millennia later, Greek theater inspired the creation of opera). There survives a story of a performer on the aulos, a double-piped oboe, who in an amphitheater played a depiction of a battle so powerful that people were still speaking of it two hundred years later.

The Greeks founded musical theory as it exists to this day. The philosopher Pythagoras was the first person we know of to define musical intervals in terms of mathematical divisions of a string: stop a string in the middle and pluck it, and you have an octave; stop it a third of the way and you have a fifth above that, and so on. In white notes on the piano, starting on C is the major scale and A the minor; modes are scales starting on the other notes. Greek names for various forms of scales are still with us: the Dorian mode, which Plato says inspires bravery in battle; the Phrygian, which inspires peace; the Lydian, which promotes languor so ought to be avoided. The modes, their names and connotations, survived into the sacred music of the medieval and Renaissance periods.

Later in the West, the Christian Church provided the impetus for the systematic development of music. What we call Gregorian chant, named after Pope Gregory who according to legend codified it in the sixth century, is a pure, unaccompanied repertoire of vocal melody sung in Latin that has graced religious services for over a thousand years. For a sample, look for a chant version of Veni sancte spiritus. (If you hear chords in the background, find another version—authentic chant is unaccompanied.)

In the early history of Western music, there have been two epochal developments whose reverberations continue into the present. The first was the development of the world's first effective system of musical notation. Notes finally could be written down like words, reproduced faithfully, and disseminated widely. Earlier civilizations, including the Greeks, had made efforts at notation, but the notes were skimpy and in any case now indecipherable. Around the eleventh century Christian monks developed the basics of writing down notes and rhythms; over the next centuries that evolved into the system of notation we use today.

Notation was more than a practical method for preserving an expanding repertoire of music. It changed the nature of the art itself. To write something down means that people far away in space and time can re-create it. At the same time, there are downsides. Written notes freeze the music rather than allowing it to develop in the hands of individuals, and it discourages improvisation. Partly because of notation, modern classical performance lacks the depth of nuance that is part of aural tradition. Before notation arrived, in all history music was largely carried on as an aural tradition. Most world music is still basically aural, including sophisticated musical traditions such as Indian and Balinese. Most jazz musicians can read music but often don't bother, and their art is much involved with improvisation. Many modern pop musicians, one example being Paul McCartney, can't read music at all.

As a young composer I thought about trying to notate the way jazz legend Miles Davis plays a single note: he might fuzz into it with a half-valve attack, bend the note en route, and/or inflect the pitch as a "blue note," and end with a small slide down. Soon I realized that I would need three or four levels of notation to get all that down, and somebody reading it would never have the fluidity that Davis does in playing from his head. Notes are irreplaceable in our music, but at the same time they can be an obstacle.

In the end, though, the invention of a sophisticated musical notation was a unique event in history that fundamentally changed the equation. When the West committed to notation, it made possible another fundamental development in the history of the art: the invention of counterpoint and harmony. These require a little explanation.

The most common way to understand a piece of music is as a melody with some kind of accompaniment: guy singing with a guitar, soprano with an orchestra, a tune in a string quartet, that sort of thing. This covers most of the music we hear, including essentially all popular music. But in fact there are three ways of presenting melody in a piece, and the name for them is textures.

The simplest texture, the kind of music that dominated the world for countless ages and in many places still does, is monophony, meaning a single melodic line with no integral accompaniment. One may add drums or a drone or the like, but no harmonies; the tune is essentially the whole thing. This covers everything from the ancient Iliad and Odyssey, which were sung, to Gregorian chant, including the troubadours of the Middle Ages, most world and folk music from time immemorial, and you singing in the shower (unless you have a guitar in the shower). If the tune's the thing and accompaniment is ad hoc and optional, it's monophony.

When music in more than one part began to happen—which in the West took place around the 800s, because people had only heard monophony, they first developed a new kind of music that was still basically all melody. It happened in stages. Some monasteries began singing monophonic chant in two levels: the same tune sung in parallel lines a fourth or fifth apart. This was called organum. An example of later and more sophisticated organum is the beautiful and otherworldly Winchester Troper, from the eleventh century.

Over the next centuries these added lines gradually grew more independent. Meanwhile the art of notation became steadily more sophisticated to keep up with pieces that were getting too long and complicated to remember. Finally, music arrived at polyphony, meaning two or more melodies that are superimposed, all more or less equally important. The first polyphonic composer whose name we know was a monk named Léonin, who worked in Notre Dame in Paris in the twelfth century. In his Viderunt omnes you'll find simple but lovely proto-polyphony, much of it florid lines written above drones, those drones being stretched-out notes of a Gregorian chant. Mixed in are stretches of traditional monophonic plainchant and also simple two-part polyphony. It appears that Léonin also made some important advances in notating rhythm.

By the next century at Notre Dame, the monk Pérotin was writing elaborate polyphony in four parts. In many ways Pérotin set the pattern for much polyphonic music for centuries to come: you take an existing melody, in his case Gregorian chant, and compose more melodies around it. In Pérotin's case, the chant lines are again stretched out into long drones, over which he wove his voices. (Note that in polyphony each part is called a voice whether it is sung or played on an instrument.)

Like the other arts, Renaissance polyphony flourished in splendid and enormously sophisticated forms. This was the golden age of pure polyphony, most of it composed for church (though there were plenty of secular songs and dances, too).

So, that's polyphony, which is a Western invention and specialty. What, then, is counterpoint? Actually, sort of the same thing. The terms are often used interchangeably, but strictly speaking, polyphony is the name of a musical texture, and counterpoint is the technique of writing polyphony. In practice, many musicians tend to use polyphony to refer to such music written during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and counterpoint for the baroque period and later. That's how I'll use them here.

So, again: monophony is a single melody; polyphony/counterpoint is music made of intertwined melodic lines. The third kind of texture, homophony, is a single melodic line with chordal accompaniment—back to guy with guitar, leading tune in an orchestral piece, and so forth. In other words, most of the music we hear is homophonic: melody and some kind of harmonic accompaniment.

As soon as polyphony developed, composers realized that you can't just slap tunes together; the results have to sound good, the melodies complementing one another instead of getting in one another's way. Musicians began to develop rules about what kinds of sounds were desirable—in our terms, rules about harmony. In the West, at first, harmony was seen as an incidental effect of polyphony. It was hundreds of years before the kind of harmony we're familiar with had evolved. Early polyphony has an exotic, visceral sound with delicious harmonic clashes that would later be banned. For a sample, try the Sederunt principes of the aforementioned twelfth-century monk Pérotin. (One of my favorite versions is one from 1976 by David Munrow and the Early Music Consort of London.) Note that this kind of polyphony, long pieces with thousands of notes, would have been impossible to realize or even conceive of without notation. Here is sacred music joyous and dancing, as if exulting in the boundless potentials of a newly redefined art. Music has been exploring those possibilities ever since.

Again partly thanks to notation, the ensuing music of the medieval period saw an expanding repertoire, much of it with an experimental cast as composers explored techniques of organizing and rationalizing the new polyphony. One early and lasting device was canon, meaning a single melody sung or played in staggered entrances, so it makes polyphony with itself. Call canon a kind of grown-up round, such as "Frère Jacques": one voice sings a melody, soon another voice starts the same melody, and in the overlap the single melody makes harmony with itself. A canon does the same thing, but without going around and around. Here's a diagram of a three-voice canon:

This is a straightforward canon, but there are many possible variations. The echoing entries of the melody can start on the same note or on a different degree of the scale. Among the more arcane types are the inversion canon, which has the melody alternating right-side up and upside down. There is the odd beast called the crab canon, in which the second entry of the melody is backward. (For a composer, this is absurdly difficult to do well.) There are puzzle canons, in which a single melody is written out and you have to figure out for yourself where the later entries of the melody start, and/or on what degrees of the scale. In all cases, the result has to make coherent harmony. There are more arcana involved, but let's leave it at that.

The Middle Ages have a reputation for general dreariness and violence, and to be sure, there was a lot of that around. If you were a serf in the fields, life could be pretty nasty, but even serfs had their bagpipes and dancing on feast days. Those with money and position, however, knew how to have a splashier good time, and music was inevitably involved. This was the time of troubadours and minstrels, wandering singers who made the rounds of town and castle and were vital to any proper whoop-de-do. We know some of their songs and dances because sometimes a monk liked one enough to write it down.

It was in the poetry and song of the Middle Ages that the modern Western idea of love developed, an almost mystical union of two lovers that came to be called courtly love. The highest expression of courtly love was in poetry and music. We've been singing about this stuff ever since.

It was in the context of courtly love that the greatest composer of the Middle Ages emerged: Guillaume de Machaut, who was born around 1300 and died much celebrated in Reims in 1377. He was a musician and composer, poet, priest, and courtier; served as secretary and chaplain for the king of Bohemia; and became canon of Reims cathedral. Machaut wrote the first integrated polyphonic setting of the Catholic Mass. My favorite performances of the result, the Messe de Nostre Dame are sung in a bright, natural style aiming at how the old monks might have sounded. (The Taverner Consort recording is in that direction, and there's a nicely reedy version by the Ensemble Organum.)

Machaut is most admired for his secular love songs both monophonic (in one voice) and polyphonic. Of his monophonic songs in the troubadour tradition, most famous is the lilting "Douce dame jolie" (Fair sweet lady), one of the hits of the era. Fluent in the stylized passion of courtly love poetry, Machaut was also a vital experimenter with technique, including the complex arcana of polyphony. His polyphonic music, far from the tamer and more rule-bound harmony of later centuries, sounds exotic to our ears. The text of his celebrated "Ma fin est mon commencement" begins, "My end is my beginning, and my beginning is my end." And indeed one of the parts is a palindrome, in which one voice goes halfway and then reverses course backward to its beginning. This kind of game is plenty hard to master, but to make it elegant and attractive, as Machaut does, is far harder. Rather than recommend particular pieces for this prolific composer, I suggest trying several recordings of his work and looking for the liveliest, most colorful, most beautiful-sounding renditions you can find. One starting place could be his enchanting collection of love songs and poems Le remède de fortune (The Cure of Ill Fortune).

How to summarize medieval music as a whole? While a crucial moment in the evolution of classical music, medieval music is much more than a stepping stone to bigger and better pieces. Whether sacred or worldly, the music has a distinctive archaic timbre, often kind of hollow in sound—in many ways the musical equivalent of medieval painting, with its stylized saints and Madonnas in primal colors. It often uses modes rather than our major and minor scales. You'll find Renaissance music richer in sound and more familiar in its harmonies, but if you can get on the wavelength of medieval music, it's as compelling as any—and the dances are robust and irresistible.