Music and Performance in the Later Middle Ages

E. Upton

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781349447312, 9781137277701
• eBook ISBN: 9781137310071
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism

This book seeks to understand the music of the later Middle Ages in a fuller perspective, moving beyond the traditional focus on the creative work of composers in isolation to consider the participation of performers and listeners in music-making.

CHAPTER 1

HISTORY AND EVIDENCE

Evidence for the performance of music in the Middle Ages comes to us only indirectly. Public notices, concert reviews, and diary entries: all the familiar trappings of later public musical culture would not be invented for centuries. Only a very few mentions of music-making have been found in historical chronicles—such as the two famous examples from Du Fay’s life, the 1436 dedication of the cathedral Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, and the 1454 Feast of the Oath of the Pheasant held by Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy in Lille¹—but such rare reports are usually too vague to be useful—“the singers sounded like angels!”—and the occasions themselves are too extraordinary, once-in-a-lifetime events for generalization to be safe.

Performance contexts for sacred music, for the Mass or Offices, can be reconstructed using historical information about liturgy, about the architecture of liturgical spaces, and about church personnel, attested by pay records or the personnel files documenting benefices. For secular music the sources of external documentation are much more limited: unlike so many medieval churches and cathedrals, medieval domestic or court buildings have not survived, and even when recorded, the scripts of entertainments were never as consistently enacted as were liturgical services. As a result, much of our information for imagining the performance of nonliturgical medieval music has come from more indirect sources, such as fictionalized descriptions of music-making. Christopher Page has demonstrated how useful fictional depictions of music-making can be for informing our sense of performance norms.² His observations about the interactions of voices and instruments described in narrative poetry, and especially his observations about which instruments seemed to be appropriate in different contexts, prompted a revolution in early music performance practices in the 1980s.³ These same literary scenes can also be read for the pictures they provide of the totality of the performance experience. Not just performers but listeners too are present in these scenes and the settings, be they chambers or gardens, and the time of day may also be indicated. When dealing with fiction the historian is challenged to determine the extent to which authors are idealizing their descriptions, or even fantasizing, but these kinds of descriptions at least give us a starting place for imagining the performance of song in our period.

Surviving ascribed musical works indicate that many if not most composers whose names are known to us wrote music for church services and for entertainment as well. Church pay records have proven invaluable for reconstructing the careers of some of these composers, whose lives from childhood were shaped by interaction with church institutions.⁴ Financial records from courts have not survived to the same degree that church records have, so our picture of late medieval composers’ professional activities has ended up skewed toward the religious, distorting our overall impression of the variety of music and musical culture in the period. Extant pay records do not help us understand the scope of performance and composition duties for musicians whose work straddled the two realms. For someone like Du Fay who moved from court to court in his early career, only settling down back home in Cambrai in his early forties,⁵ it can be unclear how exactly he was being supported financially or materially and what exactly he was being asked to do in exchange. Some court records indicate payments to minstrels and other presumably illiterate performers,⁶ but the records do not tell us the kind or kinds of music they provided, let alone the performance settings. We can imagine the performance of minstrels, but the danger here is that our imaginations are almost certainly informed by immensely popular nineteenth-century medievalist fiction by writers such as Sir Walter Scott.

Because of the general dearth of documentary information concerning the performance context of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century music, musicological study of surviving songs has had to begin with the notes on the page. The first modern chronologies of medieval music were made by Johannes Wolf (1869–1947) and Friedrich Ludwig (1872–1930),⁷ who based their work entirely on clues discovered through paleographical study of musical notation.⁸ The subject of inquiry for Wolf and Ludwig was the development of mensural notation, that is, notation that indicates rhythm as well as pitch, and the observations that allowed these notations to be datable were a secondary result of that inquiry. Individual works of music were not datable in and of themselves, but rather only by comparison to other works under examination. Wolf and Ludwig’s studies were at heart philological endeavors, building on the dramatic successes that nineteenth-century German scholars had enjoyed in uncovering historical layers in recorded language. Medieval music was recorded in what had become a dead language, and nothing could be said about it until scholars had deciphered the written notes. Through working with musical notation, Wolf and Ludwig were able to perceive historical development in the encoding of rhythm. They realized that the stages in that development could be used as historical markers, akin to vowel shifts and the like in historical linguistics.

Johannes Wolf wrote his doctoral dissertation (Leipzig, 1893) on twelfth-century medieval music theory. He then turned to the study of musical manuscripts, then and now termed “source studies,”⁹ examining manuscripts from France and Italy. For his Habilitation (Berlin University, 1902) he wrote on music in fourteenth-century Florence. Two years later Wolf surveyed all then-known musical works arranged into temporal stages based on the structural elements of the notation’s treatment of musical rhythm, in his three-volume Geschichte der Mensuralnotation von 1250–1460 (1904).

Wolf’s contemporary Friedrich Ludwig had been studying thirteenth- and fourteenth-century French and Italian music at Strasbourg University (his 1896 doctorate was in History) when Wolf’s study was published. Ludwig used his own researches concerning notation as the basis for a long review of Wolf’s work in the journal Sammelbände der Internationalen Musikgesellschaft, correcting Wolf on many points. Wolf incorporated Ludwig’s corrections into his second publication, the two-volume Handbuch der Notationskunde (1913–1919).

Ludwig and Wolf had constructed their foundational chronologies for medieval music on the basis of observed changes in notational style and practice, and their success—newly discovered historical information tended to verify their style-based chronology—established that method as fundamentally sound. Fifty years later Charles Hamm followed those same methods in constructing his chronology of Du Fay’s songs for his 1960 Princeton PhD dissertation.¹⁰ Hamm correlated his observations of Du Fay’s mensural choices with then-known historical information about Du Fay’s career and datable compositions as well as codicological study of the manuscripts, to propose a chronology based on those choices. Four years later, Heinrich Besseler drew on Hamm’s mensuration-based chronology to organize his complete edition of Du Fay’s songs.¹¹

In establishing historical dates and chronology for medieval music, twentieth-century musicologists relied on musical details from surviving works as their primary source of evidence. Their work made use of the rare external evidence they found, but the foundational chronologies of medieval music were primarily built on internal evidence derived from analysis of technical aspects of musical works, specifically the ways in which those works were recorded in musical notation. The dialogue between internal and external evidence will become more apparent in the next section. There I will look closely at one particular song, Guillaume Du Fay’s ballade Resveilliés vous, to explore the shifting roles of internal and external evidence in musicological scholarship.

Guillaume Du Fay’s ballade Resveilliés vous is one of the very few fifteenth-century songs with a date of composition that can be verified by external sources.¹² Resveilliés vous is known to us from its unique copy in the Oxford ms Canonici misc. 213 (hereinafter Ox213).¹³ In the New Grove Work List for Du Fay, this ballade is glossed: “for wedding of Carlo Malatesta da Pesaro and Vittoria di Lorenzo Colonna, 23 July 1423.”¹⁴ That concise and detailed statement is the result of a century of scholarly detective work, based ultimately on clues in the song’s lyrics.

That the song concerns a marriage is made explicit in verse 5, the start of the first stanza’s second musical section. This verse reads Car au jour d’ui sera li espouses (“For today will be the espousal”). Whose espousal is also stated clearly: the refrain names the groom Charle gentil, c’on dit de Malateste (“Noble (or, high-born) Charles, called ‘of Malatesta’ ”) in clear and straightforward language. Charles’s bride is identified in the second stanza, verses 14 and 15, again at the start of the second musical section: Son proper nom est Victoire clames/ De la colonne vient sa progenie. This is not quite so straightforward, in that the poet plays with the puns between the name “Vittoria” and the concept of victory, and between “Colonna” the family name and “column” the architectural entity from which the family took their name, but it is not difficult to extract the bride’s name, “Vittoria Colonna,” from the lyric.¹⁵

These shining nuggets of historical information attracted attention to this particular song from the very first scholarly investigation of the Canonici 213 manuscript in modern times, that of Sir John Stainer (1840–1901).¹⁶ In 1895, Sir John presented a paper on the manuscript to the Musical Association; the text of his paper was published in the Proceedings of the Musical Association.¹⁷ Stainer’s focus was the composers whose music was transmitted by the manuscript, composers whose names were known from other sources. Stainer began his study by commenting on the numbers of songs in this manuscript by Du Fay and Binchois, as well as some “fifteen or sixteen” other composers whose names were listed as singers in the papal chapel in Coussemaker’s 1869 paper “Les Harmonistes des Quatorzième Siècle,” or as composers mentioned in the fifteenth-century poem “Le Champion des Dames” by Martin le Franc.¹⁸ Here in this manuscript, Stainer announces, is their music.

From names Stainer turns to dates. While some compositions by Du Fay have dates given in the manuscript, two of them can be dated by historical information:

The dates of two other songs of Dufay are fixed by historical allusions. One of these is in honour of the marriage of the great Charles Malatesti, lord of Rimini, with Vittoria di Lorenzo Colonna, niece of the Pope Martin. V. Charles Malatesti was born in 1364, and died in 1429; the date of this, his second marriage, I have not been able definitely to fix; but as Du Fay first came to Rome only in 1428, it probably took place very shortly before the death of Malatesti.¹⁹

By 1898, Stainer had refined his identification of the Charles Malatesti whose marriage the ballade celebrates. In Chapter 1 of Dufay and His Contemporaries by Stainer and his daughter Eliza Cecilia Stainer, Charles is now identified as the Lord of Pesaro:

Among [Du Fay’s] earliest compositions are six Italian songs included in our MS., one of which (“Quel fronte signorille,” transcribed p. 148) is headed “Guillermus du Fay Rome composuit” (see facsimile), and two French songs, one [fn: “Resveillies vous et faites chiere lie,” fol. 126 verso.], celebrating the marriage of the great Charles Malatesti, Lord of Pesaro, with Vittoria di Lorenzo Colonna, niece of the Pope Martin V., which took place on June 17, 1416.

In a footnote, the Stainers explain the new clarification of the groom’s identity: “There were two men who bore the name Charles Malatesti, one was Lord of Pesaro, and married Vittoria di Lorenzo Colonna (as stated above), see Litta, ‘Famiglie Celebri Italiane,’ Milan, 1869; the other was Lord of Rimini, and married Elizabeth Gonzaga. Yriarte in his ‘Rimini,’ Paris, 1882, pp. 57 and 59, has evidently confused the two.” The Yriarte cited in this footnote is the French writer Charles Yriarte (1832–1898), a man who specialized in both travel writing and historical studies. His book, Rimini: Un Condottiere au XV. Siecle: Etudes sur les lettres et les arts a la tour des Malatesta (Paris, 1882) must have been the source of Stainer’s earlier 1895 misidentification.²⁰ As it turns out, Yriarte had not only confused the two Carlos, but he also confused their wives, stating that one Carlo, the Lord of Rimini, had married both women, first Elizabeth Gonzaga and second Vittoria Colonna. Yriarte did know that Pope Martin V was Vittoria’s uncle; he also adds the detail that Martin’s successor, Pope Eugenius IV, awarded Vittoria a golden rose.²¹ The traditional papal gift of a rose or roses made of gold is best known to musicologists from Du Fay’s 1436 motet Nuper rosarum flores, which famously begins with the image of roses, the gift of the pope, blooming in Florence in the midst of winter.

Oddly enough, the confusion as to how many wives each Carlo had was already in place in 1627.²² Clementino Clementini wrote that some scholars mistakenly asserted that Carlo of Pesaro had two wives, but the truth is that he had only one wife, Vittoria Colonna; Clementini does not identify which scholars he was correcting. Anna Falcioni, author of the most recent study of Carlo of Rimini, confirms that the Lord of Rimini indeed had only one wife, Elisabetta Gonzaga, whom he married in November of 1386.²³

Clementini’s discussion of Carlo and Vittoria’s wedding, the only historical source for information about it, is quoted here in full:

Carlo s’ammoglió con Vittoria di Lorenzo Colonna, Nipote di Papa Martino & alli XVII di Giugno la condusse in Pesaro, e dopo le sontuosissime nozze alli XVIII di Luglio a Rimino, ricevuti da Carlo, che n’era Signore, e Prencipe, conforme alla grandezza dell’animo suo. Fu col tempo detta Vittoria sepellita in Sant’Apostolo di Roma, dentro adun’Arca di marmo con L’inscrittione (c’hoggi si vede) ch’ella vise anni cinguantasette. Alcuni Scrittori danno a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. History and Evidence
• 2. The Singers’ Voices
• 3. Polyphonic Music in Performance
• 4. The Listeners’ Experience
• 5. Reframing the Sacred/Secular Divide
• Appendix I: Altieri, Li Nuptiali
• Appendix II: Selected Cleffings in Ox213
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index