Playing medieval music medievally

Subject: RE: Playing medieval music medievally
From: Stower
Date: 05 Sep 18 - 06:11 PM

Jack, events in 20th century Kenya don't tell us useful information about medieval Europe, neither does Turkish music inform us about 14th century France. In the link you give for Douce Dame Jolie the dorian mode is transposed upwards, so the transposed reciting note is d'. I find it difficult to understand why you can't see what a central role that note plays in the melody.

As Anne says, medieval writers were the literate few, and so they are the only audience who can give us information.

Subject: RE: Playing medieval music medievally
From: Jack Campin
Date: 05 Sep 18 - 07:11 PM

The point of the comparison with the Turkish model is that there have been modal systems which fit secular modal music quite informatively. But nobody seems to have felt it mattered in the Christian Middle Ages (Grocheio said something to the effect that it was a waste of time trying) - except for the handful of tunes like "L'Homme Armé" that crossed over into liturgical use, so you'd need to know what contexts they'd fit into, why bother?

Reading back a bit, there were precedents for this. Ancient Greek music theoreticians had many subtle references to the music they couldn't analyze and didn't want to talk about. Quite likely this undocumented stuff (like aulos tunes) was the bulk of what ancient Greeks actually listened to.

Subject: RE: Playing medieval music medievally
From: GUEST,ripov
Date: 06 Sep 18 - 04:56 PM

Regarding non-mensural notation; this is not just a mediaeval matter, although nowadays some effort (like using bar lines)is usually made to better indicate the rhythm.

4/4 hornpipes whether "dotted" or not, are written (except by those unfamiliar with the idea) in straight quavers except at the end of a phrase. The performer knows, or is free to choose, just how the notes are proportioned. And my late wife, a vastly more experienced musician than me, once asked me to play from a sheet of music, which I did; but with my classical training I played it exactly as written, thus making a total fool of meself; it was unrecognisable. Until she joined in and I realised it was a well known blues number.

Too many years ago, when I was still a treble, I was taught that plainchant should have the same rhythm as speech. This turns out to be a counsel of perfection, at least for the average singer; and certainly for several singing together, when a certain uniformity of timing becomes essential.

Subject: RE: Playing medieval music medievally
From: Mr Red
Date: 20 Sep 18 - 03:26 AM

Historical Dance this Saturday social dancing with the Night Watch, described as Shakespearean. I'm sure the thread originator can tell us how much medieval music will be included.

Halesowen, West Mids.

Subject: RE: Playing medieval music medievally
From: Donuel
Date: 20 Sep 18 - 08:05 AM

An example of NOT playing medieval music medievally are CD recordings of chansons and sacred music by a choir with the solo addition of a tenor saxaphone. Perhaps the title is Requium. The recordings are made in churchs and sanctuaries with lots of natural reverb. I really like it.

Subject: RE: Playing medieval music medievally
From: Donuel
Date: 20 Sep 18 - 08:12 AM

saxophone and medieval choir

Subject: RE: Playing medieval music medievally
From: Manitas_at_home
Date: 20 Sep 18 - 08:16 AM

Jan Gabarak and Officium.

Subject: RE: Playing medieval music medievally
From: leeneia
Date: 20 Sep 18 - 12:00 PM

Thanks for the link, Donuel. I agree that the combination works.

Subject: RE: Playing medieval music medievally
From: GUEST,Some bloke
Date: 20 Sep 18 - 12:14 PM

Just seen the thread again.

I notice Jack Campin pulled me up by assuming I don’t know baroque from medieval. I do wish people didn’t purposely misread what others put in order to look smug. This is Mudcat, not some political social media.

I said that Gardiner (who happens to be a bit of a wizard when it comes to baroque in the opinion of many) believes that music (I didn’t note any genre or specific time period) has decreased tempo over the years and we tend to play most pieces slower than they were originally scored. It was an observation that is relevant to the thread, whereas noting the specialism of the scholar in question isn’t as he widens his observation beyond his genre.

Tsk.

Subject: RE: Playing medieval music medievally
From: GUEST
Date: 20 Sep 18 - 12:35 PM

I always find this fascinating. How, exactly, do we KNOW that a tempo has slowed, sped up or whatever considering there are no MMs to go by.
"Largo" can be broadly interpreted and is seemingly played according to current fashion. Isn't historical performance really all just a guess?

"Pick it up, ya slackers!!!" - A.Vivaldi

Subject: RE: Playing medieval music medievally
From: Stower
Date: 21 Sep 18 - 07:01 AM

Hello, GUEST,ripov. Your point about hornpipes isn't really (I don't think) connected with the problems of reading non-mensural notation. At some point it became the convention to write hornpipes in the wrong time signature, since they're written in 4/4 but played in 6/8. All this pseudo-mysteriousness we often hear people talk about hornpipe rhythm goes away if we just write them as we play them - in 6/8. That makes the rhythmic proportion right and takes away the need for those triplets. Blues and jazz are different matters, I think, as writing down something that is rhythmically quite free in a form that dictates where the beat lies is always going to be a clash of two media.

Mr. Red, you clearly haven't read the replies above. Since Shakespeare wasn't alive in the middle ages then dance from his period cannot be medieval. I think this is probably obvious.

Subject: RE: Playing medieval music medievally
From: Manitas_at_home
Date: 21 Sep 18 - 07:29 AM

I don't play hornpipes in 6/8. 12/8 maybe but often I play them heavily "dotted" so 12/8 would not be a good way to write them down.

Subject: RE: Playing medieval music medievally
From: Stanron
Date: 21 Sep 18 - 08:10 AM

Yes there's quite a difference in feel between 6/8 and 12/8. I think of swung hornpipes as 12/8. Dotted 4/4 gets close but before hornpipes were notated like that I'm not sure anyone actually played dotted 4/4. It's just a notation shortcut.

Subject: RE: Playing medieval music medievally
From: Jack Campin
Date: 21 Sep 18 - 11:54 AM

Gardiner was addressing an issue irrelevant to mediæval music. His thing is the Baroque, and he was trying to correct a long slide to slower tempi when playing Baroque music. There have been other times and places where the same process has happened: the most extreme is how Gagaku music developed in Japan, where what we now hear as the melody was originally the gracenotes in the Chinese originals.

But mediæval European music didn't go through centuries of being played progressively wronger. It went through centuries of not being played at all. Most of what is now known and played was never published until our lifetimes and is only known from one-off copies in manuscripts. There never were any misconceptions about its tempo.

Until very recently. Cait Webb described one school of performance as "drums and fun", imposing compulsive metric regularity and folkish jollity on the music for modern marketing reasons. The absolute pits for that, in my experience, is John Renbourn's atrocious rendition of Machaut's "Douce Dame Jolie", like a mashup of Singing Together and the Clancy Brothers. No performer with a clue would now do anything like that.

Subject: RE: Playing medieval music medievally
From: GUEST,Some bloke
Date: 22 Sep 18 - 08:50 AM

Gardiner addressed a historical point regardless of genre. His hypothesis was strengthened by noting marching tunes that were based on the time taken to travel between known barracks, instruments not used due to physical limitations at faster tempos and how sub melodies in many genres require certain tempos in order to “work.”

Please try to see beyond his label and note, not necessarily agree but note his interpretation of historical style.

If you require people to use the term “medieval” in order to accept that a large body of academia believe tempos were generally faster in use from medieval to c18 time, then I suggest you at least research it rather than embarrass yourself repeatedly.

Subject: RE: Playing medieval music medievally
From: Jack Campin
Date: 22 Sep 18 - 10:10 AM

Music that isn't played at all can't be getting played at the wrong tempo. Apart from liturgical melodies, no repertoire survived in actual use from the Middle Ages, and no practicing musician by Shakespeare's time could even have got their hands on a mediæval score to bungle it.

(The only Gardiner book I have is Music in the Castle of Heaven, which doesn't mention tempi anywhere, as far as I can see).

Another instance where the same music did get played slower is classical Ottoman music - the process is described in Feldman's Music of the Ottoman Court. Feldman figured out that tempi dropped by a factor of 3 between 1500 and 1800, holding steady from there on. You can work that out by seeing what percussion accompanists were expected to do: the number of drumstrokes in a bar went up as bars took more time. But the Ottomans retained their old repertoire over those 300 years - until the late Renaissance, Western European repertoire just got abandoned when the next big thing came along.

Enough - anonymous timewasters aren't worth any more effort.

Subject: RE: Playing medieval music medievally
From: leeneia
Date: 22 Sep 18 - 10:20 AM

Wrong tempo? Why assume that medieval pieces had a right tempo? Tempo probably varied from place to place, with the skill of the players, with the quality of their instruments, and (esp. with dance music) with the age and skill of the dancers.

In the case of a song melody with more than one set of words, sad words probably went slower than happy words.

Subject: RE: Playing medieval music medievally
From: medievallassie
Date: 22 Sep 18 - 04:53 PM

This is a resource that some of you might find valuable. I know I did because I was wanting to find the authentic words to a few of the modern folk songs such as "Frog went a Courting". This book has the medieval version :-)

Subject: RE: Playing medieval music medievally
From: Mr Red
Date: 22 Sep 18 - 05:26 PM

Ah, I think medievallassie might have wanted to post the blickie - this is what she sent to me.

Melismata. Mvsicall Phansies. Fitting the Covrt, Citie, and Covntrey Hvmovrs. To 3, 4, and 5. Voyces. (1611)

book to download. Enjoy

Subject: RE: Playing medieval music medievally
From: Tootler
Date: 22 Sep 18 - 05:40 PM

Going back to hornpipes.

Writing them in 4/4 is probably the best way because they are not always played in 12/8 time. They are mostly here in North East England and in Ireland but Southern English hornpipes tend to be played with straight quavers with maybe a slight lengthening of the first of a pair.

In fact hornpipes were originally in triple time, often written in 3/2 time but the way they were played often varied between 3/2 and 6/4 time. In the 18th century Willam Vickers manuscript he uses the beaming of the quavers to indicate how each bar should be played, beaming in 3s in some bars and in others in pairs. This kind of rhythmic variation within a tune seems to have been not uncommon in the renaissance (galliards frequently shift between triple and duple time) but seems to have died out in the baroque. I imagine this kind of rhythmic variation within a tune between triple and duple time could well have dated from further back than the renaissance.

I've read somewhere that the 4/4 hornpipe originated on the London Stage during the 18th century, likely in the second half of the century as Handel was writing triple time hornpipes in the first half of the century.

Subject: RE: Playing medieval music medievally
From: Tootler
Date: 22 Sep 18 - 05:49 PM

I realised that what I said about the Vickers manuscript doesn't follow properly from the previous sentence. Vickers actually notated hornpipes in 3/4 time, simply halving the note values.

Subject: RE: Playing medieval music medievally
From: GUEST,ripov
Date: 22 Sep 18 - 08:52 PM

>Stower
thank you

I would argue that "dotted" hornpipes are not played in triplets (any more than a strathspey is), although it is easy to fall into doing that; and they certainly have 4 beats in a bar: but this does illustrate my point.
My understanding is that:-
In plainchant the long is divided into 2 or 3 breves, depending on whether the the time is perfect or imperfect.. In perfect time, if two breves are written the first is (often) twice the length of the second. If the number of breves is odd there is a triplet somewhere!

Subject: RE: Playing medieval music medievally
From: GUEST,ripov
Date: 22 Sep 18 - 09:04 PM

>Tootler
yes
But not in baroque? Bach does that. And knowing just how to deal with it is one of the reasons why the better you know his music, the harder his (and others, eg Haydn's) music is to play.
In earlier music, syncopation can be made fairly obvious, or a simple change in the number of beats in a bar, the bars continuing at the same speed.

Subject: RE: Playing medieval music medievally
From: leeneia
Date: 24 Sep 18 - 11:07 AM

Hello, Tootler. I've noticed those hornpipes shifting from 6/4 to 3/2 and back.

Last Sunday we played a Courante which was in 6/4, except for the penultimate measure, which was in 3/2. It made for a strong thumping which signals that the dance is about to end. I've seen this kind of change before.

Subject: RE: Playing medieval music medievally
From: GUEST,Some bloke
Date: 25 Sep 18 - 09:20 AM

Repeating tunes in a progressive style was a way of reaching the tempo people were used to.

Fascinating series of lectures on the subject I attended when I was taking my Grade 8 many moons ago that our school arrangedca few of us to attend at RA.

Mind you, I do reference more than one book before posting, Jack. I assume you need to ensure it is fully crayoned in before moving to another book eh?

Just because I use Some Bloke rather than Ian Mather, doesn’t mean I enjoy my relating academic opinion being trashed by ignorance. An apology would be nice but not expected. I’m relating it. Unlike some here, I am not shackled by certainty. Just relating what I know has been proffered.

For anyone wondering who hasn’t read up the thread, I mentioned that there is a large body of opinion in musicology circles that overall, tempo has decreased over the last few hundred years. Interesting viewpoint relative to the thread. But seems to have been missed by Prof Sir J Campin, so dismissed and attempted to make others look silly.

Enough! (See his post for details)

Subject: RE: Playing medieval music medievally
From: medievallassie
Date: 26 Sep 18 - 12:04 AM

Thank you goes out to Mr. Red for posting the link to the Melismata that I sent to him. I mentioned to him that there was another book that I couldn't recall the name of but I was able to track it down in my files on another computer. The second book, published in 1609 but with songs that obviously were sung prior to that date is Thomas Ravenscroft's Deuteromelia which can be found here: http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/ravenscroft/deuteromelia/

Subject: RE: Playing medieval music medievally
From: Jack Campin
Date: 26 Sep 18 - 01:42 AM

Ravenscroft is well post-mediæval, you might as well say Beyoncé is Regency.

The idea of indicating triplets by beaming goes well past Vickers - Rachmaninov did it sometimes. The problem with the notation of triple-time hornpipes is that a lot of the people writing them in manuscripts didn't really know what they were doing. Many 18th century notebooks have 4 bars of 3/2 written as 6 bars of 4/4.

Subject: RE: Playing medieval music medievally
From: David Carter (UK)
Date: 26 Sep 18 - 02:25 AM

Kassia was medieval, even fairly early medieval. Many of her hymns have survived in Orthodox liturgy to this day, and you can listen to them sung by modern choirs on youtube. But how authentic is the modern rendition? And is the music really contemporary with the words? We know that the music for what we think of as medieval carols, such as the Wexford carol, is actually much more recent than the words.

Subject: RE: Playing medieval music medievally
From: medievallassie
Date: 26 Sep 18 - 09:41 PM

Jack, I'm going to have to protest that Ravenscroft is "well past medieval". A book published in 1609 contains songs well established in the years prior and the renaissance didn't start at the same time throughout the world. The fact that we as a society regularly sing songs from the 1800's and 1900's offers a very valid argument that a songbook published in 1609...when songs were predominantly learned from generation to generation through oral tradition...would contain songs from the 1500's and 1400's.

Subject: RE: Playing medieval music medievally
From: Jack Campin
Date: 27 Sep 18 - 03:30 AM

None of Ravenscroft's songs is known from any other source that would suggest an earlier origin. For "Scotland's burning", the content does suggest it predates him - but it relates to the invasion of Scotland in 1547, which was not in the Middle Ages.

There is no evidence that anybody anywhere in Ravenscroft's time derived the secular music they played from any mediæval source.

Subject: RE: Playing medieval music medievally
From: David Carter (UK)
Date: 27 Sep 18 - 05:57 AM

Ok, its not entirely secular (given the title), but Piae Cantiones, which dates from about 25 years before Ravenscroft, contains melodies which are medieval (In Dulci Jubilo for one), and it may be that others contained therein have a medieval origin.

Subject: RE: Playing medieval music medievally
From: leeneia
Date: 27 Sep 18 - 10:35 AM

I believe that Piae Cantiones was merely collected and printed in the 16th C, and that the tunes themselves are older.

Subject: RE: Playing medieval music medievally
From: David Carter (UK)
Date: 27 Sep 18 - 12:42 PM

Some are known to be older because they are found in earlier sources, with others is not really known.