Mediaeval Polyphony – from organum to Josquin
VOICES
Tutor: Donald Grieg
Location: Morley Green Club, Wilmslow
Reviewer: Hugh Cherry
We knew we had arrived at the right place for this workshop when we saw a group of about 15 people waiting to get into the Morley Green Club. Fortunately the key was not long in arriving, which was as well because there was a lot to cover. The scope of the workshop was billed as from the 9th to the 15th centuries which covers the fundamental development of Western music from single-line chant to 4-part polyphony, and we had 21 singers – more than enough, although with the usual shortage of tenors. Donald Greig, the workshop leader, has sung with all the major early ensembles and more recently particularly with the Orlando Consort which specialises in covering the medieval as well as the early renaissance. Although he acknowledged performers in this area rely heavily on musicologists, he clearly had absorbed a huge amount of knowledge from having to perform such a wide range of music. He was also very tolerant of our somewhat variable sight-reading.
We worked through chronologically, so the morning was spent in the early and late medieval period and the afternoon we moved into the early renaissance, singing music by composers such as Perotin and Machaut in the morning, and Dunstable, Dufay and Josquin in the afternoon. We rapidly realised, if we didn’t know already, that there is a vast amount of scholarship that has been devoted to this period and we would only be scratching the surface. So we started with a lightning introduction to the oldest symbols – neumes, which were sufficiently abstruse that trying to sing from them directly was not likely to be productive and we sang from a transcription. We moved onto Gregorian chant with its traditional notation which proved entirely workable – many of us had attempted this before. The next task was to follow the development of polyphony by singing Organum – parallel voices in 4ths/5ths above or below the chant line. This could be bounded by the lowest note the chant ever reached (“Bounded Organum”) and proved surprisingly difficult. Apparently harmonising only with 4ths and 5ths is called ‘paraphony’ not a term I had ever come across before. The most famous organum – in four parts, was written by Perotin at Notre Dame, and there is a record of specific performances in Christmas 1198 and 1199. We also sang some English Organum from the Worcester fragments. It was pointed out that although there was plenty of non-religious music performed we have practically no written down examples preserved, so we were necessarily focusing on what we knew about – the music from churches and monasteries.
We moved on to Machaut (1300-1377, a contemporary of Chaucer, but who in contrast wrote both music and poetry) and part of his 4-part Messe de Notre Dame. This had quite tricky rhythms – at least for the upper parts. A particular feature, very characteristic of the time, was the way the leading notes at cadences were treated very much as dissonances. We were encouraged to sing them quite sharp to make the resolution onto the final chord (which had no 3rds) as satisfying as possible.
Dunstable’s (or Dunstaple’s, 1390-1453) music showed a very different style. Unlike in the earlier music where 2nds and 7ths were regarded as more pleasing than 3rds and 6ths, the position was now reversed. We sang Dunstable’s ‘Descendit in hortum meum‘ and the first non-unison interval was a major third, indeed there are few dissonances (using the accepted renaissance terminology). The overall effect is to move out of the austere medieval sound of 4ths and 5ths and very sharp leading notes into a ‘warmer’ perhaps more ‘modern’ sound with plenty of thirds, which we were now encouraged to flatten down towards just intonation. This sweetness of sound was commented on at the time – a writer described it as the ‘Contenance Angloise’ and it strongly influenced continental composers such as Dufay and Josquin. We also sang a Dufay 3-part chanson celebrating the good wine of his home district, which showed that the church did not totally dominate composition.
Our last performance was Josquin’s Deploration on the death of Ockeghem, one of his most famous works, and one that showed how all the exploration of the last five centuries had resulted in a mature, very expressive and fully polyphonic style. Unlike the earlier chant, organum and Machaut’s polyphony, this music is immediately familiar to modern ears, but perhaps to Josquin’s contemporaries it sounded modern, even dangerously exploratory.
We were left rather exhausted by the whirlwind tour of six centuries of music but with at least some understanding of all the varied processes that lead to the evolution of the renaissance style, and so on towards our 20th century music.
Hugh Cherry
First published in June 2015 Newsletter
