The Instrumental Consort Repertory of the Late Fifteenth Century

Jon Banks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780754653400
• eBook ISBN: 9781351543453
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Though individual pieces from the late fifteenth century are widely accepted as being written for instruments rather than voices, they are traditionally considered as exceptions within the context of a mainstream of vocal polyphony. After a rigorous examination of the criteria by which music of this period may be judged to be instrumental, Dr Jon Banks isolates all such pieces and establishes them as an explicit genre alongside the more commonly recognized vocal forms of the period. The distribution of these pieces in the manuscript and early printed sources of the time demonstrate how central instrumental consorts were to musical experience in Italy at this time. Banks also explores the social background to Italian music-making, and particularly the changing status of instrumentalists with respect to other musicians. Convincing evidence is put forward in particular for the lute ensemble to be a likely performance context for many of the surviving sources. The book is not intended to be a prescriptive account for the role of instruments in late medieval music, but instead restores an impressive but largely overlooked consort repertory to its rightful place in the history of music.

Chapter 1
Introduction: What Instrumental Consort Repertory?

A fascination with instruments is one of the abiding hallmarks of the early music performance movement, and one that accounts in no small measure for its wide appeal. Instruments are far more than sounding objects; they occupy a unique position at the hub of an interaction between musicologists, art historians, performers, acousticians and craftsmen that for many is one of the most creative and attractive aspects of ‘early music’. If anything, their shape and feel provide us with a far more immediate link to the past than the sounds they make ever could. Translating the painted or carved images from real medieval artifacts into real instruments allows us literally to recreate the world we see there; without a world of medieval sounds to refer to, modern sounds are deprived of any equivalent resonance. Images of instruments seem to pervade medieval culture, in paintings, sculpture and stained glass. Literary sources, too, provide us with names for these instruments and their players; our entire medieval heritage conspires to convince us that, for a privileged few at least, instruments and their performance were an integral part of daily life.

It is curious, then, that the one area of medieval culture that is conspicuously reticent about instruments is the surviving written music itself. No piece of conventional staff notation before the early sixteenth century directly specifies any instrument whatsoever for its performance. Instruments are occasionally mentioned in the texts or titles that are copied alongside musical notation in ways that might suggest their involvement — famous examples are a fourteenth-century textless piece entitled ‘In seculum viellatoris’ (‘In seculum of the vielle player’) or the indications of parts that are ‘gut zu blasen’ (‘apt for winds’) in the fifteenth-century Mondsee manuscript — but these, suggestive as they may be, are very few in number and frustratingly vague.¹ Perhaps the earliest unequivocal instrumental designation to survive is from a Copenhagen manuscript of about 1540–50, where a five-part setting of the famous ‘Tandemaken’ melody carries the rubric ‘krumbhörner’.² We may as well take this at face value; we know that crumhoms were played at the time, most probably in consort, and it is remarkable that each of the parts fits the conspicuously restricted ranges of these instruments perfectly. Nevertheless, this is once again an isolated example. There is a great deal of late fifteenth-century consort music that might be supposed to be for instruments for one reason or another, but no instruments are specified in the sources, despite other part-designations, such as ‘Cantus’, ‘Tenor’, ‘Contratenor’, ‘Bassus’ and so forth (which refer to the function of the part in the ensemble and have no vocal connotations) being diligently copied out in many cases.

It is important to distinguish the exceptional Copenhagen ‘Tandemaken’, a five-part consort piece in conventional staff notation, from the other numerous instances of instrumental music that survive in tablature from the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Tablature is an alternative system of music notation that shows a player where to put his fingers on an instrument by means of letters, numbers and other symbols. As such it is entirely specific to the given instrument, which is generally a keyboard or lute in the period under consideration. Moreover, the distinction between staff notation and tablature is more than just one of alternative methods of notation; music in tablature is almost exclusively for solo instrument in this period (the six duets included in Spinacino’s two lute books of 1507 are exceptional in this respect), whereas polyphonic music in staff notation calls for a larger consort of players. The two types of notation seem to represent two musical traditions, with tablature being clearly instrumental and staff notation being used for Masses, motets, secular songs and other primarily vocal types. However, the tantalizing references in the Copenhagen and Mondsee manuscripts suggest that instruments were involved in the performance of at least some consort music in staff notation, as do other features of the music itself, as will be discussed below.

Much music in mensural notation in the early renaissance is clearly intended to be sung, since it has words written out under one or more part. Even where no words are supplied, this does not correspondingly demand an instrument. The great majority of sources from the period present all the musical parts of a composition on a single page; since they all cany the same text, the singers may as well read the words off just one part. This is a far cry from modern practice, but it makes sense in a renaissance context, where it is clear that singers never expected the exact matching of words to syllables that is taken for granted with modern notation and even where they found the words underlaid directly beneath the music, much of the detailed matching of syllables to notes was still left to their discretion. Within a set of given conventions, applying a text from another part on the same page is not much less practical than having it roughly underlaid. Texting was presumably one of the many areas, like musica ficta, phrasing, tempo or dynamics, which were subject to common conventions that did not need to be specified in the notation itself. By the same token, a great many poetic and liturgical texts would have been familiar to professional singers, who might have been expected to apply them to the music from memory.³ The wordless vocalization of untexted accompanying parts has also been proposed, a practice that is now taken for granted in modern interpretations of the chanson repertory.

Even where a piece of music is copied without any text at all in any voice, not even so much as an opening incipit — and there are many such cases — it is still not possible to discount the possibility that it was supposed to be sung, especially if the music resembles that of a chanson or Mass movement. In a culture that placed a higher value on memorization than our own, singers may have known the words and not needed them to be written out. It has also been proposed that within the context of otherwise texted sacred repertories, such as the Trent codices, chansons were copied without their original words expressly so that cathedral singers could supply a variety of other specially written texts according to what was appropriate for the many non-liturgical occasions at which they might be called on to officiate — festivals, public performances, or the type of civic welcomes given to visiting royalty known in Germany as ‘Ansingen’.⁴ Even outside this specific situation, if singers vocalized accompanying parts to a song then they could presumably vocalize entire pieces without words; or perhaps the sources that leave out words were originally intended to include them but are simply incomplete or corrupt. It is not possible to simply assume that a given piece of music is instrumental simply because it lacks words in its written form.

Approaches to identifying an instrumental repertory; style, texting and genre

In the face of all this, the central premise of this book — that there is a substantial repertory of ensemble music in staff notation from the end of the fifteenth century that is unambiguously instrumental rather than vocal — requires some careful justification. The idea of some of the written music from this period being for instruments rather than voices is of course not new, and it is regularly assumed that certain compositions by Agricola, Josquin and others were specifically conceived as such.⁵ However, the intention of this study is to build on the methods used to identify such ‘exceptional’ pieces and from there demonstrate how they amount to a well-defined and important repertory in their own right, clearly distinct from the chanson or related traditions.

Previous discussions of a possibly instrumental repertory amongst the chansonniers have concentrated on the issues surrounding the identification of individual pieces of music as instrumental rather than vocal, principally on the basis of internal stylistic evidence. The issue of an ‘instrumental style’ was first discussed in detail by Sarah Fuller, following which two complementary articles by Warwick Edwards and Louise Litterick proposed the existence of three main genres that may be assumed to have been conceived for instrumental composition from the outset.⁶ Both of the latter writers agree that the majority of pieces based on a pre-existing line from a polyphonic chanson — called ‘res facta’ by Edwards after Tinctoris’s example — must surely be instrumental.⁷ Edwards in particular defines the form rigorously, identifying several sub-genres within it and providing convincing stylistic grounds for distinguishing ‘res facta’ instrumental pieces from Mass movements that use similar compositional procedures.⁸ Pieces freely based on monophonic melodies are judged different enough from res facta compositions (which quote rhythmically fixed lines from polyphonic chansons) to be accounted as a separate genre by both authors, though here the possibility that it might represent an instrumental form is advanced much more tentatively.⁹

The third category of pieces to be identified as possibly instrumental is a group of freely composed movements, called ‘songs without words’ by Edwards and ‘instrumental chansons’ by Litterick.¹⁰ Once again, the genre is defined and distinguished from other vocal music by particular features of musical style that are discussed in detail.¹¹ In all cases and genres, though, all commentators have been careful to qualify any assessment of pieces as instrumental by stressing the imprecision of internal stylistic evidence drawn from the written music. They freely acknowledge that there are no features of either style or texting in late medieval and early renaissance music that unambiguously specify instruments. Furthermore, no matter how precisely they are defined, any features of compositional style that might be labelled as ‘instrumental’ inevitably crop up in the mainstream repertory of Masses and motets, which is unquestionably vocal; a particularly good example of this is the famous ‘Benedictus’ from Isaac’s ‘Quant j’ay au cour’ Mass.

The issue of style is peculiarly fraught, as both Edwards and Litterick readily admit. There is no reason to suppose that a piece used by instrumentalists, even if it was specifically conceived for them, was obliged to follow any particular stylistic pattern other than the universal conventions of fifteenth-century composition. Even if it were possible to establish distinct criteria for ‘instrumental’ and ‘vocal’ styles, some kind of interpenetration between the two would be inevitable, and we should also expect any repertory, instrumental or otherwise, to draw on the widest variety at its disposal; there is even the possibility of deliberate emulation or imitation between genres. As a result, it can only ever be possible to advance a distinction between ‘instrumental’ and ‘vocal’ music based purely on internal stylistic evidence with great circumspection, however suggestive that evidence may be.¹²

The identification of an instrumental repertory that is put forward in the present book draws extensively on the ideas and categories proposed by Edwards and Litterick, but develops them in the light of a body of further evidence, much of which is independent of matters of musical style. Thus the implications of the surviving pieces with ‘unsingable’ part-ranges are considered, as is the relationship of certain genres to the music preserved in unequivocally instrumental sources of the time, such as lute tablatures. The most convincing evidence though, which provides the most persuasive argument for the survival of a clearly definable and substantial instrumental consort repertory among the ‘chansons’ of the late fifteenth century, stems from a consideration of the music not as individual pieces but as a repertory in the context of its sources.

Many musical manuscripts and prints from late fifteenth-century Italy carry little or no underlaid text at all. The best known of these are the early printed anthologies issued by Petrucci — the Odhecaton, Canti B and Canti C, but there are more than a dozen other major manuscript sources from the same period which are essentially textless. The number and consistency of these sources make their lack of text seem more likely to be a matter of deliberate planning than a casual incompleteness, as will be argued further in chapter 3. Further evidence that texts might be deliberately omitted as a matter of policy is provided by manuscripts like the Segovia codex, which is carefully organized into texted and untexted sections whose divisions are clearly reflected in corresponding contrasts of musical style and genre. Even in mixed sources without any apparent sectional organization, such as the manuscript Florence, Panciatichi 27, where an impressive variety of genres seem to be jumbled up almost at random, it is clear that certain types of piece are texted and others not. The sheer quantity of the textless sources, and the careful consistency of the mixed sources, strongly suggests that textlessness is not an accidental feature.

This sense that the textless pieces among these Italian sources are complete as they stand is enhanced by the way that they together make up a remarkably coherent repertory. The sources in question are often described as ‘chansonniers’, since the majority of their contents can either be directly identified as French chansons without their words, or are in a style that suggests that they might have originated as such. Likewise, the textless items in the mixed sources are predominantly chansons without words, or at least pieces that resemble them. In addition to this generic similarity of repertory, many of the same individual pieces appear in these manuscripts over and over again. Agricola’s motet-chanson ‘Si dedero’, to take a particularly favoured example, appears without text in twenty different sources, whereas only five transmit it with the words that were undoubtedly part of the original composition. Significantly, none of these latter five are Italian ‘chansonnier’ sources; among the latter, the piece is always textless and indeed seems to have assumed a separate identity as a wordless composition there. Thus it can be seen that the repertory of textless pieces is not just an adaption of whatever material was to hand, but focusses on specific types of piece and features a core of particular favourites.

There are a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Musical Examples
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: What Instrumental Consort Repertory?
• 2 Lutes, Players and the Humanist Tradition
• 3 Defining the Repertory
• 4 The Textless Chansonniers: Repertory, Compilation and Use
• 5 Instrumental Items in Mixed Sources
• 6 Epilogue
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index