De Cuer Je Soupire and Early Harmony: A Whisper of Things to Come

Album: Music and Chants from the Time of Joan of Arc
Track: "De Cuer Je Soupire" (Track #9)
Composer: Anonymous
Instruments: 2 vocalists
Musical Form: Lai
Year: before 1420

There are many ways in which Medieval and Renaissance music can present a challenge to the modern ear -- not least of which are its use of unfamiliar rhythms, musical modes, and dissonances. Perhaps the most difficult thing of all, however, is learning to listen to compositions that are based on the principles of polyphony. Crudely speaking, polyphony treats the voices of a composition as independent entities, each moving through the musical space in a manner that is conscious of, but not tied to, the motion of the other voices. Unfortunately for the modern fan of early music, the majority of pieces composed since ~1600 have not been polyphonic, but have rather been based on the principles of harmony. Harmony, by contrast, treats the majority of voices in a piece like accompaniment to the melody, all coming together to form chords that change as the piece progresses.

To better understand the differences between the two approaches, think of a piece of music as a building. The parts of a polyphonic composition (the girders, bricks, etc.) are carefully interwoven so that the composite whole can remain stable and please the senses. However, this building lacks a foundation, so there are a limited number of ways in which pieces can be combined to achieve stability and still remain aesthetically pleasing. The use of harmony, however, provides the building with a foundation. Although the composer may use up many of the available parts to build this foundation, the stability it provides allows them more freedom in the design of the building. Whether or not the use of harmony over polyphony is better is a question of personal taste, but it is certainly easier, both on the composer and the listener.

Early Renaissance music was still being composed on the principles of polyphony, but there were hints of movement towards a more harmony-oriented style of composition. I already discussed the development of triads in 15th-century England. In "De Cuer Je Soupire," an anonymous composition included in a French manuscript written around ~1420, we hear two voices interacting in a manner that almost sounds like a chord progression. The higher voice clearly sings the melody and the lower voice acts as accompaniment. They undergo oblique motion for most of the piece, as the lower voice changes its pitch only for cadences and line changes. The effect is stunning, and perhaps somewhat familiar, at least in comparison to other compositions from the same time period.

Related Links: YouTube

Veni Sancte Spiritus and Missa Caput: Two Giant Leaps

Album: Dunstable: Sweet Harmony Masses and Motets
Track: "Veni Sancte Spiritus - Veni Creator" (Track #11)
Composer: John Dunstaple
Instruments: four vocalists
Musical Form: isorhythmic motet
Year: ~1431

Although early Renaissance composers were in many respects less experimental than their late medieval predecessors, there were still a great many musical forms and techniques that were being developed in the early 15th century. In an earlier post, I discussed John Dunstaple's pioneering the use of triadic harmony in his compositions; this technique can be heard again in "Veni Sancte Spiritus," a popular motet composed around ~1430. The piece is progressive in many respects, including its use of a musical mode that corresponds to the modern major scale and also its relatively wide range of pitches (called the "tessitura").

The wide pitch range of "Veni Sancte Spiritus" is most noticable in the tenor, which at times functions like a bass line. The tenor fails to truly carry the rest of the piece as a modern bass line would, but each time it strikes a low note, the piece is given new life. It does not move towards a dynamical climax as we might expect from a symphony, but is rather almost cyclic, as the isorhythmic tenor paces the higher voices. With each repetition, we are given a new opportunity for spiritual transcendence, but it is not just handed to us... we must find it for ourselves.

Although we hear hints of it here, a true bass part would not appear in a Renaissance composition until "Missa Caput," a cyclic mass composed by an anonymous English composer sometime around 1440. I haven't been able to locate any easily accessible recordings of this mass, but many other mid-15th century masses were modeled after it and I will review some of these in later entries. English composers were particularly influential on their continental counterparts during this period, in part because of the English occupation of France during the Hundred Years War.

Related Links: Allmusic

Nuper Rosarum Flores: The Power of Dynamics

Album: Guillaume Dufay: Quadrivium (motets)
Track: "Nuper Rosarum Flores" (Track #15)
Composer: Guillaume Dufay
Instruments: 4+ vocals, trumpet, organ, fiddle, harp
Musical Form: Isorhythmic motet
Composition for Comparison: "Lithium" by Nirvana (1991)
Year: 1436

As a teenager of the early '90s, still in the throes of adolescence, it was difficult to not get swept up in the pounding rhythms and catchy melodies of the grunge movement. In high school, I remember waking up every morning to "Smells Like Teen Spirit" -- the raucous transition between the opening guitar riff and distortion-heavy entrance of the bass and drums gave me something to be excited about at the start of a day that likely would, in all other respects, only erode my increasingly paltry teenage ego. There was something about the anticipation created by those guitar chords... a sort of musical foreplay by a song that knew to understate what it was soon to deliver.

This "soft-and-loud" dynamical technique was quite common in Nirvana's music and is perhaps most vividly demonstrated in "Lithium," a track off of their groundbreaking album, Nevermind. Note how the verse keeps a relatively low profile, emphasizing the lyrics and melody over the rhythm, while the chorus is an explosion of sound and a perfect expression of the "angst" that grunge music was known for exploiting. Kurt Cobain credited the Pixies with influencing his dynamical style, but this general technique had been around for many centuries before. Compare the verse-chorus transition of "Lithium" to the dynamical structure of Guillaume Dufay's "Nuper Rosarum Flores." To my ear, the effect is very similar. The melismatic, almost madrigaleque lines in the Triplum and Motetus (top two voices) are placed in contrast to the steady, booming rhythm provided by the bassus and tenor (bottom two voices) that enter 1:00 into the piece. I can imagine the dynamical changes would have sounded even more dramatic within the confines of a church sanctuary.

"Nuper Rosarum Flores" is famous for a variety of other reasons, perhaps most of all for being the last great isorhythmic motet. To some scholars, this represented a symbolic ending point for the medieval period of music, as the Renaissance style was noted for having a more free rhythmic form. Some have even claimed that the mathematical structure of the motet was formulated in order to mimic the proportions of the Santa Maria del Fiore cathedral, the building for which the piece was composed. My research has left me skeptical of this claim, however.

Related Links: YouTube (Dufay), YouTube (Nirvana), YouTube (Dufay, alternate version)

Fauxbourdon: A Treat for the Masses

Album: Dufay: Music for St. James the Greater
Track: "Missa Sancti Jacobi: IX. Communio" (Track #9)
Composer: Guillaume Dufay
Instruments: 3 vocals
Musical Form: Mass setting
Year: ~1430

One of the chief challenges of composing polyphonic music in the 15th century, as well in all previous centuries, was satisfying your own artistic needs, while simultaneously satisfying the needs of the church/court for which you were composing. This problem was particularly severe with sacred music, where the church often demanded that the scripture be clearly understandable to churchgoers in hymns and masses. This would limit composers to using parallel and oblique motion for much of the duration of the piece, greatly decreasing its complexity. In modern music, this is somewhat analogous to a songwriter being forced to write simple pop tunes in order to garner attention and raise money for their work.

Perhaps as a response to this limitation, Guillaume Dufay invented a technique called "fauxbourdon," a form of three-part parallel vocal harmony in which the two bottom voices sing at intervals of a perfect fourth and a sixth below the top voice. To imagine how such a harmony would be constructed, think of the notes in a triadic harmony (the example given in the link is from "Twist and Shout"), but adjust the root note up an octave. Here is an example of what it sounds like when used in a piece of religious music (skip to 0:45). The net effect is to give the music a more full (or "tonal") sound than simple homophony, while leaving the lyrics easily understandable.

The first known example of this technique is in the last section (the Communion) of Dufay's "Missa Sancti Jacobi," composed around 1430. The sound is not quite as pleasing as Dunstaple's moving triads, but it serves its purpose. After Dufay's introduction of it in this mass, fauxbourdon would see widespread use in continental polyphony through the end of the 15th century, particularly by Burgundian composers.

Related Links: Allmusic, Youtube

John Dunstaple and Triadic Harmony: The Burgundian Three, Part III

Album: Dunstable: Sweet Harmony Masses and Motets
Track: "Quam pulchra es" (Track #1)
Composer: John Dunstaple
Instruments: 3 vocals
Musical Form: Motet
Year: ~1410-1453
Composition for Comparison: "Twist and Shout" by the Beatles and "Surfer Girl" by the Beach Boys

The elegant melodies of Binchois inspired a generation of musicians and Dufay's epic compositions elicit awe and respect even from modern listeners, but the real revolution of Renaissance music began with John Dunstaple. This great English composer is credited with introducing a technique that is often taken for granted by the 21st-century ear: triadic harmony.

In short, a musical triad consists of the root, third, and fifth of a major scale and contains intervals of a third between successive notes. For you music-theory beginners out there, I've selected some modern, well-known songs to demonstrate what this sounds like. The first is "Twist and Shout" as performed by the Beatles, a rendition that should be familiar to anyone who has seen Ferris Bueller's Day Off. The majority of the song uses a single lead vocal with a pair of backing harmonies, but if you play to 1:25 into the recording, you'll hear the Beatles build into a triadic harmony, one note at a time. It begins with John Lennon singing the root note ("Ahhh...") over the twanging of George Harrison's lead guitar. Next George chimes in with the third, followed soon after by Paul with the fifth. At 1:28, they're in a full triadic harmony. It only holds a complete triad for the few seconds after 1:28 -- the sequence continues after that to the seventh, breaking the triad. The notes of a triad can also be struck simultaneously: C Triad.

It's not uncommon to hear full triadic harmony in modern music, particularly in pop music of the '50s and '60s. In "Surfer Girl," a song by the Beach Boys from 1963, they utilize it throughout much of the song, crafting the melody over top of the moving triads. In fact, the arrangement is in many ways similar to that of "Quam Pulchra Es," one of John Dunstaple's motets from the mid-15th century. This motet is one of the more blatant examples of how the interval of a third was being gradually promoted to the status of a consonance (that is, a stable musical interval) in the early Renaissance period. For those that have been following my Journey, this sudden addition of musical triads should be a very noticeable (and very welcome) change to early polyphony. Compare it to this early mass movement by Guillaume de Machaut, where fourths, fifths, and octaves dominate the harmonic structure. Although such intervals achieve a more "pure" sound, they are almost too easy for the human brain to process and we may be left feeling like something is missing.

Triadic harmonies were commonplace through most of the 15th century in England, but it won't be until the late 15th and early 16th centuries that the musical changes initiated by John Dunstaple and his English contemporaries begin to permeate the music coming from continental Europe. Unfortunately, because of Henry the VIII's dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530's, very little music survives from England in the preceding century and the process by which triadic harmony was introduced into polyphony may forever remain a mystery. Dunstaple was famous enough that some of his music has come down to us from continental sources, but the catalog of surviving music doesn't even approach that of contemporaries like Dufay and Binchois. This is indeed a shame, as many argue that John Dunstaple was the most influential English composer of all time.

Related Links: Allmusic, YouTube, Triads in Medieval Music, Intervals

Sumer Is Icumen In: Cuckoo for Canons

Album: Between March and April
Track: "Sumer Is Icumen In" (Track #20)
Composer: Anonymous
Instruments: 4 voices
Musical Form: Canon
Year: ~1250

Before I continue my Hopeless Journey into the Renaissance, I'd like to take a quick step back to mid-13th century England. You'll notice that England has been completely absent from my coverage of medieval music -- the primary reason for this is the scarcity of available sources. Most polyphony from the medieval period was sacred and the majority of English sacred music was destroyed during the dissolution of the monasteries, part of the English Reformation, in the 16th century. Fortunately, some English secular music has survived to the present day, including the famous canon, "Sumer Is Icumen In."

The canon really is a remarkable musical form: simple in structure, but complex in its presentation. A canon usually begins with a single musical line, sung by one or more singers. Before the line is completed, another voice begins singing the same (or a similar) musical line after a specified duration of time. Depending upon the complexity of the canon, this process can be repeated an arbitrary number of times, with new vocies appearing at intervals specified by the composer. To American ears, the most familiar canon is probably, "Row, row, row your boat," a campfire song written sometime in the 19th century. For that song, the second singer begins after the first has completed one measure, the third after he has completed two, and so forth.

"Sumer Is Icumen In" is similar to "Row, row, row your boat" in that it is a simple, light-hearted song that could conceivably have been performed for children (it means, quite literally, "Summer has come in"). It was written for six parts and is actually the first known example of six-part polyphony. Canons didn't really rise to prominence in sacred (or "artistic") music until the late 14th century, when the technique was pioneered by Italian composers and it wasn't until the mid 15th century that it began to catch on in the rest of Europe. Needless to say, these canons contained a great deal more complexity and depth than "Sumer Is Icumen In."

Related Links: YouTube, Wikipedia (includes translation)

Ma Fin Est Mon Commencement: Bound by Symmetry

Album: Machaut: Chansons
Track: "Ma Fin Est Mon Commencement" (Track #13)
Composer: Guillaume de Machaut
Instruments: 3 voices
Musical Form: Rondeau
Year: ~1330-1350

There is something about symmetry, whether visual, auditory, or even tactile, that appeals to the human mind. We associate it with beauty, perhaps as much due to the ease with which we process it as its association with genetic quality in a mate. Although it is more often associated with the visual arts, musicians have been using symmetry in their compositions for millenia, allowing its predictability to massage our subconscious as we tackle the artist's larger purpose.

Perhaps the most striking demonstration of symmetry in medieval polyphony is in "Ma Fin Est Mon Commencement," a rondeau by Guillaume de Machaut. Even a passing familiarity with the French language (modern or otherwise) should allow one to translate the title: "My end is my beginning." And so it is -- the musical lines in this piece each display a certain symmetry. The lowest voice, the tenor, sings a line that sounds identical when sung in reverse. Furthermore, the cantus (2nd voice) and triplum (highest voice) sing lines that are the mirror images of one another. The net result is something that feels strikingly familiar, even on a first listen. I think this familiarity sprung from a subconscious recognition of the underlying patterns in the piece; I doubt I would have picked up on the symmetry without being told.

Indeed, large-scale patterns were the norm in the ars nova, as isorhythm dominated the rhythmic structure of motets during that period. It seems likely that this piece also bears some relation to a burgeoning art form, the canon (more on this soon), although it predates the widespread use of that technique in French polyphony. It is certainly not Machaut's best work, but its novelty value alone makes it worth a listen.

Related Links: YouTube, Allmusic.com

Johannes Ciconia: Art Imitates Art

Album: The Saracen and the Dove
Track: "Doctorum principem - Melodia suavissima - Vir mitis" (Track #1)
Composer: Johannes Ciconia
Instruments: 4 voices
Musical Form: Motet
Year: 1409 - 1411

For an artist, catching someone's attention is much more difficult than it may seem at first. It doesn't matter the form of expression, a work of art always seems much more significant to the maker than it does to the casual listener. Over the years, musicians in particular have developed a wide variety of techniques to help overcome this difficulty, the synthesis of which led to what we would now call "pop" music. If implemented carelessly, the use of pop techniques can cheapen music, but in the hands of a gifted composer, their use can enhance the elegance and impact of a piece.

Among the most common tools of this trade is repetition. Whether on the scale of short sequences of notes or entire verses, repetition acts to reinforce a particular musical or lyrical theme. Even in medieval times, composers made use of repeated poetic stanzas (as in, for example, the virelai) or musical sections. In the late Trecento period, composers used "imitation," in which brief musical passages would be repeated, one singer after another. The repetitions were not always identical to the original passage, but the effect often resembled an echo.

Imitation was a particularly potent musical tool when combined with the hocket, as can be heard in "Doctorum principem - Melodia suavissima - Vir mitis," by Johannes Ciconia. The motet is about Francesco Zarabella, the archpriest of Padua Cathedral in the early 15th century, and it makes extensive use of the imitation and hocket techniques to construct an emphatic tribute to the man and his cathedral. The rapid melodic jumps, particularly at the end of the piece, are vaguely reminiscent of modern electronic music, but lend a more regal feel to the music in this context. This is one of the most impressive performances on the engaging album, The Saracen and the Dove, so I highly recommend it.

Related Links: YouTube, Doctorum Principem

Hoquetus I-II and Hoquetus David: Hocket Up

Album: Music of the Gothic Era
Track: "Hoquetus I-II" (first ~2 minutes of Track #1 on disk 2) and "Hoquetus David" (Track #20 on disk 2)
Composer: Anonymous and Guillaume de Machaut
Instruments: 2 cornetts, 1 shawm
Year: ~1300 - 1400

That's right, the hocket. Basically, a hocket is a piece where two voices alternate on notes of the melody, one resting while the other sounds. In modern music, you'll often hear a second voice harmonizing, backing the lead, or alternating on verses, but seldom will you hear two voices alternate on the melody multiple times in a measure. I was excited when I discovered this lost art, because it offers something that you'll never hear listening to the radio.

The hocket was actually pioneered by the Notre Dame School of Polyphony, but survived into the 14th century in secular music. I unknowingly encountered the hocket for the first time in "Amor Potest" (see Honking Geese), where its use was so simple-minded that I dismissed it almost immediately. In that piece, they alternated with uniform rhythm and minimal melodic complexity, but the two hockets listed above, "Hoquetus I-II" and "Hoquetus David", demonstrate a much more thorough mastery of the technique. Most notably, they offer rhythmic complexity ("Hoquetus David" is in 9/4 time) -- the way in which the voices pop in and out at irregular intervals, it feels as if they're surprising me even when I know exactly what's coming next.

External Links: YouTube