Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Classical Music (Classic FM Handy Guides Series)
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Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Classical Music (Classic FM Handy Guides Series)
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783961580 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Elliott & Thompson |
| Publication date: | 09/15/2015 |
| Series: | Classic FM Handy Guides Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Classical Music
Classic FM Handy Guides
By Darren Henley
Elliott and Thompson Limited
Copyright © 2015 Classic FMAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78396-158-0
CHAPTER 1
Early Music
In the Beginning
Music has been around for a long time. Historians have no doubt about that, although there are differing opinions about exactly when and where the idea of making musical instruments to play tunes first took hold. Fragments of primitive instruments, crafted more than ten centuries ago, have been found by archaeologists in places as far apart as Germany, Spain, Egypt and China.
Human beings are inherently musical. We can make all sorts of sounds with just our bodies, and the earliest musicians probably had no need for instrumental add-ons at all. Singing, clapping and even foot-tapping are all forms of music. In fact, they are used today as a means of teaching very young children about the rudiments of making music.
When we talk about 'Early Music' in the classical music world, it's in fact an umbrella term for two, sometimes three, periods in music prior to the Classical period. Usually, it means the combined music of both the Medieval and Renaissance periods, although some definitions take in Baroque as being early, too. We don't think that is the case and treat the Baroque period as being a completely separate entity.
The Medieval and Renaissance periods together cover just about all music-making up until 1600, with the Medieval era ending at 1400. Although there was undoubtedly music-making before AD 500, this is the rough date from which many musical histories start. The Renaissance sub-period of Early Music covers the two centuries between 1400 and 1600.
Aside from this date-based definition, Early Music is sometimes used today as a term for music that has been rediscovered in our time, and for which authentic forms of performance are pursued. This is sometimes known as the 'Early Music Movement'.
What Else Was Going On in the World?
Well, in the year 985 or 986, the Viking Bjarni Herjolfsson was blown off course and sighted the coast of America. The continent was not discovered officially by a European for just over 500 years, when Christopher Columbus landed in the West Indies in 1492.
The dawning of the second millennium saw England under attack from the Danes. In 1012, the invading forces rampaged through Canterbury, although they were bought off with 48,000 pounds of silver.
King Canute ruled England from 1016 to 1035 and King Harold was briefly on the throne in 1066 until William the Conqueror took over the crown following the Battle of Hastings. Scotland's kings included Macbeth from 1040 to 1057.
In fact, what we consider now to be Early Music was composed right through the time that England was reigned over by members of the House of Plantagenet (1154–1399), the House of Lancaster (1399–1461), the House of York (1461–1485) and the House of Tudor, ending with the reign of Elizabeth I between 1558 and 1603. In Scotland, James VI was on the throne from 1567, becoming James I of England following Elizabeth I's death in 1603.
This period encompasses the Crusades, the signing of the Magna Carta, the devastating scourge of the Black Death across Europe and the Hundred Years War between Britain and France, from 1337 to 1453.
So, the world was a busy place, with warfare at the top of many people's agendas as one tribe or nation plotted to take over another, only to find their efforts reversed a few years later. However, as you will see, there were huge developments in music, many of which were brought about by the Catholic Church.
Ambrose and Gregory
Although the title above sounds like a 1970s television sitcom, Ambrose was in fact Bishop of Milan between 374 and 397; and Gregory I was Pope between 590 and 604. Among the latter's many claims to fame was his decision to send Augustine to England to convert the locals to Christianity.
Between 500 and 1400, the principal surviving music is plainsong. It had been handed down for centuries already by the year 500. Bishop Ambrose and Pope Gregory are generally credited with making great strides in the evolution of plainsong, which was the unaccompanied singing that took place as part of church services, most often performed by monks.
Ambrose was an important figure in the development of antiphonal singing, where two parts of a choir sing alternately with the second section answering the first. Gregory's contribution is, however, more often remembered by musical historians, and he is given the credit for a more general overhaul of this area of music a couple of hundred years later. He gave his name to the result, and Gregorian Chant was born. He was responsible for formalising chant through his Schola Cantorum, which was not just a papal choir but a whole system of handing down choir music from generation to generation. He also produced publications such as The Antiphonar, a compendium of chants.
Hitting the Right Note
People had been trying to write down music for a while by the start of the second millennium, but there was no truly uniform method for making a record of exactly who had to sing what and when, and for how long.
We know that instrumental music was also being made in the centuries before the end of the first millennium, but there is no accurate record of what sort of tunes were being composed, so we can only imagine how they might have sounded.
As ancient and far removed as this period may seem to us now, it was a time of amazing and exciting developments. In around 1025, a monk called Guido d'Arezzo (c. 955–c. 1050) published his theories on musical notation. He had developed a system that meant chants could be read and then sung by anyone who had learned to decipher the code that he had created. Today, we call this deciphering 'reading music'.
For this reason, we are able to understand and give authentic performances of music written 1,000 years ago. It means that the heritage of classical music has been preserved in a way that other musical genres from around the world simply have not been. We have a lot to thank Guido d'Arezzo for.
The Really Early Composers
The first composer in this era is a woman. She is, in fact, one of very few female composers in this book. Equal opportunity does not seem to have played a great part in the development of much of classical music, although the announcement of Judith Weir as the first female Master of the Queen's Music in 2014 was perhaps the start of a long-needed rebalancing of the genders in the genre.
Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) was born into a noble family, and was sent away to a monastery at the age of just eight. By the time she was thirty-eight, she had become the leader of the nuns who were based at the monastery and, around twelve years later, she founded her own nunnery near the town of Bingen.
Hildegard was no ordinary nun. Apart from having a gift for writing poetry and music, she became an influential diplomat, corresponding regularly with religious and secular leaders. As a thinker, she made her name in areas such as science and medicine.
Hildegard became famed as a mystic and, between 1141 and 1170, she had no fewer than twenty-six visions. She wrote down their details and set them to music.
People travelled from far and wide to consult Hildegard, and when she died at the age of eighty-one (a remarkable achievement in itself at the time), the Catholic Church considered making her a saint, although it was not until 2012 that she was finally canonised by Pope Benedict XVI.
This period of Early Music also included the delightful round, 'Sumer is icumen in', often attributed to the Norfolk-born John of Fornsete (d. 1238/9). Worthy of mention, too, is Franco of Cologne (active in the 1250s), a German composer who standardised the measure of notes by codifying the length and appearance of minims, breves, crotchets, and so on.
After 1300, the ars antiqua was replaced by the ars nova, when plainchant gave way to polyphony – separate tunes for people with voices singing at different pitches (sopranos, tenors, basses, etc.), which all combine together harmoniously.
Some composers lived for the moment and others spent their time worrying about their legacy. One of the principal driving forces in the development of musical polyphony, Guillaume de Machaut (c. 1300–1377), was firmly in the latter camp, although he was not without talent: he counted Geoffrey Chaucer among his fans. In particular, Machaut is remembered for developing new ways of using rhythm.
Machaut became a canon in Reims when he was about forty, and he seems to have spent much of the rest of his life bossing around the monks who were instructed to reproduce copies of his complete works. His desire for musical immortality was not in vain and he is one of the best-known composers of the period, simply because so much of his music still survives.
Although he was a priest, this doesn't seem to have stopped Machaut writing extensively on the subject of unfulfilled passion, and many of his songs were not religious at all. Instead, he adopted the style of the troubadours, wandering poets and musicians who performed their work in the homes of the French nobility.
However, it's for his four-part Mass that Machaut is most respected. He was among the first composers to write four separate tunes for people with different voices, which combined together harmoniously, and this was a big step forward in the history of classical music. This new style of singing was known as polyphony.
The Renaissance Men
As you will discover as our story unfolds, there are periods in the history of classical music where similar developments occurred simultaneously in different countries. One of the big times of change in classical music was what we now call the Renaissance Period, from around 1400 to 1600, which saw a rapid rebirth of styles and ideas about how music should be composed. Literally translated from the French, renaissance means 'rebirth'.
The British tend to think of John Dunstable (c. 1390–1453) as heading up their group (or 'school') of Renaissance composers, while in France, it was the Belgian Guillaume Dufay (c. 1397– 1474) who was carrying the torch for the rebirth. The Renaissance was not just going on in the world of music; the new discoveries also spanned science, exploration and the visual arts.
John Dunstable was one of English music's greatest exports and, rather like The Beatles in the 1960s, he was very much the face of English music abroad in the mid-1400s. Composers around Europe were impressed by his style of writing and incorporated many of his new ideas into their own compositions. All of this popularity led to Dunstable becoming something of a property magnate back home, with a string of houses to his name across the south of England.
Almost all of the music Dunstable wrote was for use in church, and he managed to create a particularly rich sound. Guillaume Dufay was one of the Continental composers who was influenced by Dunstable's music.
Dufay was the illegitimate son of a priest and began his musical career as a boy chorister at Cambrai Cathedral. He moved on to Bologna in Italy and worked for the Pope in Rome and Florence. In the 1450s, Dufay composed a Mass based on a folk song called 'L'Homme armé', which translates as 'The Armed Man'. He was one of a long line of composers in musical history to use this title for a Mass – the most recent of whom is the Welshman Karl Jenkins, whose The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace was premiered in 2000.
Dufay wrote every sort of music that had been invented at the time, including a wider variety of religious music and a range of secular songs. Word has it that he was also the first composer to write a Requiem Mass, but this is hard to prove definitively because the manuscript has been lost.
It's easy to become confused about our next composer, John Taverner (c. 1490–1545). Don't mistake him for John Tavener (without the extra 'r'), who was a renowned choral composer of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. We will come to him much later, in Chapter 8.
John Taverner was one of the big stars of English music in this period. As well as being a composer, he was a friend of Thomas Cromwell, one of the main forces behind the dissolution of the monasteries. It is possible that Taverner was a supporter of these reforms; he is on record as saying that he was embarrassed to have penned 'popish ditties' early on in his career as a composer. This idea is explored in a 1970 opera called Taverner, which was written by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies. Again, more on him much later on in this book (see Chapter 8).
Thomas Tallis (c. 1505–1585) was another mighty force in English music. He was composing throughout the reigns of Henry VIII, who broke away from Rome and created the Church of England; Edward VI; Mary I, who was Catholic; and Elizabeth I, who was Protestant. Considering that Tallis managed to write music for the Church during all four of these reigns, he must have been as good at bending his style to suit the prevailing wind as he was at composing the music in the first place. Tallis is known for his church music in general, such as his Mass for Four Voices and his Lamentations; the staggeringly beautiful 'Spem in alium' is possibly his most breathtaking work, an amazingly skilful combination of forty separate vocal parts.
Tallis's exact provenance has been lost in the mists of time, but he was probably brought up near Canterbury, working first as an organist at Dover Priory. He then moved to Waltham Abbey in Essex in the same role, before becoming a lay clerk at Canterbury Cathedral.
From 1543 until his death more than four decades later, Tallis operated a job share with his pupil William Byrd (c. 1540–1623) as the composer and organist to the Chapel Royal. Byrd was known as 'the father of British music'. The fact that he survived to write anything at all is surprising, considering that he was known to be a Catholic supporter at a time when this was punishable by death. He became organist and choirmaster at Lincoln Cathedral in 1563, where he stayed until 1572 when he moved to London to take up the job share with Thomas Tallis.
Whereas Tallis wrote only a few pieces that were not for the Church, Byrd left behind some excellent examples of keyboard music and of madrigals (unaccompanied songs for a group of voices).
Byrd and Tallis lived out their lives in relative financial comfort because of the beneficence of Elizabeth I. She granted them jointly a patent that allowed them a complete monopoly on printing music and music paper in England for twenty-one years from 1575. Their first publication was called Cantiones Sacrae, which translates as 'Sacred Songs'. It was made up of a total of thirty-four different songs – seventeen by each composer.
This new means of distributing music meant that, for the first time, choirs could sing music from printed sheets, making it far easier for musical works to become established right across the country.
Back to Italy now, and it is important to remember that innovation in sacred music was not necessarily welcomed with open arms by the Catholic Church. Some of the changes were even the subject of papal decrees. With the rise of Protestantism, any modification of the status quo tended to be regarded as an all-out attack on the foundations of the Church itself. Some senior members of the Church even advocated changing things back to the style written by composers of the likes of Hildegard of Bingen, because they believed that the fancy new way of writing music meant that the sacred texts no longer had the same powerful meaning.
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (c. 1525– 1594) took his name from the pleasant hillside town near Rome where he was born. Chiefly a choral composer, Palestrina followed his employer, the Bishop of Palestrina, to Rome when the Bishop became Pope Julius III.
When he was asked to compose a Mass that would definitively prove one way or another whether polyphony really was the way forward for church music, rather than the plainsong of old.
Palestrina produced a Mass that was so beautiful that the critics gave up and the polyphonic brigade was victorious. He dedicated this new piece, which was composed around 1561, to Pope Marcellus.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Classical Music by Darren Henley. Copyright © 2015 Classic FM. Excerpted by permission of Elliott and Thompson Limited.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction,Preface,
Before We Get Started,
1 Early Music,
2 The Baroque Period,
3 The Classical Period,
4 The Early Romantics,
5 The Nationalist Romantics,
6 The Late Romantics,
7 The 20th Century,
8 The 21st Century,
Conclusion,
Where To Find Out More,
Acknowledgements,
About the Author,
Index,