Music History

A Sketch of the 1749 Conflict

Posted on by John Richard Ahern

Frederick the Great was young. He had his hand on the rudder and a pleasant zeitgeist blowing into his sails. Johann Sebastian Bach was, at this time, a year from his death, and his whole reputation was built around a resistance to this zeitgeist. It was the same old battle that had started in the 1590s in Florence, but it was perhaps coming to a head here 150 years later in royal palace of Germany. Bach and Frederick were to engage in a clash of ideology, and not on entirely equal footing. J. S. Bach was the last great contrapuntal composer, and everyone knew it. Even his son, J. C. Bach, apparently knew it, since he was in the employ of Frederick the Great, composing music just how Frederick liked it. Not contrapuntal.

J. S. Bach, the father, arrives. Frederick shows off all his beautiful harpsichords and pianofortes, the way millionaires these days show off their cars. As Bach is feeling around one particular model, Frederick asks him if he might improvise a bit. He gives Bach a fugue subject of 8 measures. The melody contains 4 measures of straight chromatic scale. The rest contain intervalic relations designed specifically to make parallel fifths and parallel octaves a likely occurrence. The melody was conceived precisely to make it difficult for Bach.

Lots of people were present at this point, including members of the 18th century “press”. Bach had a reputation of being the last great contrapuntal master and legends had grown up around him about his ability to spontaneously invent a fugue. The ability to do so on a competent level, however, was more or less unprecedented in that age and possibly even in past ages. Given a melody like this with this level of pressure is bad enough. Much more was at stake than Bach’s reputation, though, and everyone knew it.

Bach took the royal melody and subsequently improvised a three-part fugue or “ricercare” on it. Keep in mind: a fugue does not simply harmonize its main melody. You essentially have to maintain two other, separate melodies whenever that melody appears. You must do so while adhering to the rules of counterpoint, which insist that there be no parallel fifths or octaves between voices. And you must do all this while still being artistic in your invention: melodies need to be recycled, structure has to be observed, and, much like a debate round, after the first page and a half, no new material should be introduced, only old stuff developed.

If Bach’s later transcription of his improvised ricercare is anything like what he improvised, Bach didn’t simply meet Frederick’s impossibly difficult taunt. He did so slapping Frederick in the face. Frederick’s whole opinion of music was based on the idea that the Old Style was outdated, incapable of entertaining, incapable of elegance. He favored the galant style, which was a direct descendent of the Italian monodist style. It was much more harmonically based music, the sort of thing Rameau would be proud of. It loved ornate melodies and simple ostinato accompaniment.

And so Bach does his typical thing, almost caricaturing Frederick’s caricature of counterpoint, making the fugue quite grave and serious. But here and there, he dabbles galant style on top of the royal melody. He does what he’s consistently done throughout his career: he imitates the galant style and does so in a contrapuntal way. The result is better than the original galant. And not just better all around, but better at the specific goals of the galant style. Better at entertaining, better dance music, a more enjoyable lightness, a more engaging elegance. Bach was the worst sort of opponent for a young man trying to lay to rest an outmoded style. Bach was just simply better at music than everyone else, and so at a grumpy 68 years old, he did an epic in-your-face to a young, rich prince who hated church music.

The papers, after the event, couldn’t elaborate in too much detail on the broader implications, for obvious reasons. Frederick had expected the evening, apparently, to be a once-and-for-all triumph of the galant style. By tempting Bach’s pride to bite off more than he could reasonably chew, Frederick could essentially take down the best the old style had to offer. Laughter is the greatest weapon, and an unsuccessful Bach would have allowed for some great smirks. But, there was nothing reasonable about how much Bach could bite off.

So the papers didn’t report that Frederick had, in some sense, lost the battle. But not, it seems, the war.

What is musica mundana?

Posted on by John Richard Ahern

I think musica mundana has been misunderstood both in antiquity and today. The point is not, I think, to redefine our conception of the heavens into our predefined concept of music, but the other way around, at least, or maybe a redefinition of both. Mostly our conception of music needs redefining, though. It’s interesting to note that Boethius in De Musica registered himself as something of a skeptic of the idea of musica mundana and made fun of people who thought the music was actual music, music that you could hear.

Clearly we can’t hear it, and the usual explanation is that the music of the spheres is something so fundamental to our surroundings that we have ceased to notice it for its ubiquity, but were it to stop, we would immediately notice its absence. I’m not sure where this idea has its origins, but it may be clouding us as to exactly what the ancients thought about the subject.

This is just guesswork, but I think the idea comes from a few observations about music and about astronomy:

(a) Motion through air creates sound.

(b) That sound can be manipulated into music by combining two motions whose movements span certain ratios (2:1 being an octave, 3:2 a fifth, and so on).

(c) The heavens also move.

(d) They can be explained in terms of similar ratios.

(e) Consequently, the heavens are engaged in the same sort of activity.

Music, then, is a genus—the genus of objects in motion according to whole-number ratios—which subsumes the species (a) heavenly bodies (musica mundana) and indeed also (b) what we now call music (musica instrumentalis).

Repetitive Hans Zimmer

Posted on by John Richard Ahern

It’s interesting that in an age that is obsessed with musical repetition—Hans Zimmer, rap loops, phase music, etc.—we often object to older music, particularly Baroque and pre-Baroque, on the basis that it’s repetitive. And it’s totally true: think of the passacaglia, the ground bass, ciaconne, theme and variation, and, going back farther, rondeaus. If you listen to these older forms, it often takes one musical idea and repeats it over and over in different slightly permutations.

Which leads me to wonder, we all find “Time” and “Dream Within a Dream” by Hans Zimmer to be really effective. But is that simply the zeitgeist working its magic? Maybe 400 years from now, people will find that music as tiresome as we find Italian baroque. Or, if you like Italian baroque, now you know why.

You also think of the more boring Italian composers who were still really popular in their time. Then there’s Henry Purcell, who takes repetitive forms and goes crazy. Can you take phase music and do the same to it as Henry Purcell did to the unimaginative forms of his day?

Tuotilo’s Chromatics

Posted on by John Richard Ahern

Tuotilo’s Introit trope Hodie cantandus est nobis includes on Quis est iste puer, quem tam magnis preconiis dignum voci feratis a really interesting juxtaposition of B to Bflat or the famous me against fa dissonance created by conflict of the hexachordum durum and the hexachordum molle. B mi is only separated by one note (A) from B fa. As a modern listener it makes pretty much no sense; as a Renaissance listener, it smacks of the pathos of Purcell or something. I find it hard to accept that these were more or less arbitrary choices on Tuotilo’s part. He has to have chosen this unusual formulation for some reason. Probably the reason’s just that he thought it was a cool sound, but I guess that’s intriguing to me because chromaticism fascinates people as early as c900.

Globalization and Gregorian Chant

Posted on by John Richard Ahern

Wright and Simms’ Music in Western Civilization points out that Charlamagne’s mandates for “a uniform system of writing and schooling, as well as of chant and liturgy” was one of the first sources in the middle ages to unite Europe. “in sum, the core of what we still call Gregorian chant was created north of the Alps during the ninth and tenth centuries, and it was an amalgam of Italian, French, and German religious music. During the next hundred years, the newly refurbished and enlarged repertory was carried back to Italy, and to Spain and England as well, thereby creating, on a limited scale, the first “globalization” of music. On any given day, monks in central Italy, for example, would sing the same chants, in more or less the same way, as those in southern England or northern Germany. Although the Holy Roman Empire soon lost its political cohesion, the liturgy and music of the church continued to provide a common cultural thread throughout the entire Middle Ages.” (Wright & Simms, Music in Western Civilization, 23.)

Trickle-down Musical Economics

Posted on by John Richard Ahern

In a music history class today, the professor was talking about subtle effects that render medieval and Renaissance music alien to our ears. He mentioned elitism and class as one of them. Medieval and Renaissance music, at least the sophisticated stuff that we have manuscripts of, was understood and sometimes even heard only by the clerical class, the educated class (which was—duh—really small). I writhed.

I’ll be interested in talking with him about this more, but I think that represents an inaccurate view of the relationship between popular music and High music in any culture. There will always be trickle-down. No matter what the class situation is like (here, I think, the analogy breaks down), whatever trend High music takes will eventually show up in popular music. I think this has always been true and continues to be.

(1) Chuck Klosterman talks about Elvis Costello’s critique of ’80s metal. “…[H]e thinks it’s a ‘facsimile’ of what legitimate artists already did in the past. What he fails to realize is that no one born after 1970 can possibly appreciate any creative element in rock ‘n’ roll: By 1980, there was no creativity left. The freshest ideas in pop music’s past twenty years have come out of rap, and that genre is totally based on recycled, bastardized riffs. Clever facsimiles are all we really expect.” (Chuck Klosterman, Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural Nörth Daköta)

But isn’t that exactly what happened 50 years earlier—maybe even 25—in the world of Classical music? Innovation simply stopped with the second Viennese school. That’s a situation tracked heavily by musicologist and a constant theme of this blog. Classical music died, and innovation stopped. The only real attempt to compose High music now is in a sort of rehash of the pre-tonal (Arvo Pärt and co.).

(2) Coldplay, a ridiculously popular band these days (too popular for some total poseurs), gets that distinctive Coldplay sound from assiduously avoiding the leading tone. (Interesting to note: they don’t use a mode in “Viva la Vida”, but they do use a sus4-3 chord in place of a straight dominant, which means that “ti”, scale-degree 7, never appears.) To cut the music theory jargon, they never have Vs, dominants; they never use the crowning achievement of common practice tonal music. No, wait, I didn’t cut the music theory jargon, darnit. Anyway, take my word for it. They’re modal. (Agh. Sorry.) Why are they modal? Maybe because that’s the direction that composers in academia took a couple decades before.

Actually, let me get really crazy. Think of some of the iconic “classy” bands in rock history. Think of the British ones. What do all the British ones do? Rely heavily on modality. Think of the Beatles. Maybe this is an intangible throwback to what Ralph Vaughan Williams was onto, that the British folk spirit speaks through Dorian and Mixo-Lydian and Lydian. And when academia recovers that blessed tradition, perhaps so does the popular world, but less consciously (and maybe less artificially, too).

(3) And, more to the point, look at masses in the Middle Ages. If class is really such a big deal, why was the parody mass on L’homme arme the most popular thing in the world to do? If you take “Yesterday” and work the melody into some sacred piece, people in church who know nothing about music and composition will start to giggle. Giggling, I submit, is the first and most important sign of understanding a piece’s composition. They’re engaging with the music. So, can we realistically suppose that Dufay and Ockeghem and Josquin had other motives in mind when they wrote their pieces? Who were they trying to impress? Who were they trying to appeal to? The people who know L’homme arme. In other words, everybody. (Okay. Everybody in Europe in the 15th century, but you get my drift.)

But! You say. That isn’t trickle-down, that’s trickle-up. But I’d say this represents some give and take altogether in the Middle Ages. Think about the popular tunes that get into the Piae Cantiones, things like Angelus ad virginem. Those whistle-able tunes are from chants monks would sing. They come from the Gregorian corpus, or antiphons, or whatever. In an age when folk music is molded so willingly by High music, I think High music is much more likely to cross that bridge itself.

There it is. I submit that whatever happens in High music will have an affect, seen or unseen, on popular music. The real battles lie in what is the philosophy behind both and how that philosophy conflicts with the musical assumptions of other ages.

Apple Doesn’t Fall Far from the Tree

Posted on by John Richard Ahern

“Elvis Costello has questioned whether or not ’80s glam metal should even be considered rock ‘n’ roll, because he thinks it’s a ‘facsimile’ of what legitimate artists already did in the past. What he fails to realize is that no one born after 1970 can possibly appreciate any creative element in rock ‘n’ roll: By 1980, there was no creativity left. The freshest ideas in pop music’s past twenty years have come out of rap, and that genre is totally based on recycled, bastardized riffs. Clever facsimiles are all we really expect.” (Chuck Klosterman, Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural Nörth Daköta)

Not That You Should Insult Their Intelligence

Posted on by John Richard Ahern

“We mean by ‘congregational sense’ the capacity for composing what people who are unmusical without being tone-deaf can sing readily. This means making one’s point in language which does not itself give trouble to the singer—language he is more or less used to. The piece may be composed by a person who has a very large vocabulary at his command, but in writing what people ‘catch on to’ he is obliged to use that part of the vocabulary which is common to him and them: just as a preacher whose sermons tend to contain words like communicatio idomatum and hypostasis, no matter how excellent his arguments, is unlikely to hold the attention of a parish congregation.” (Erik Routley, Music of Christian Hymns)

Three People and a Question

Posted on by John Richard Ahern

Meet Louis Bourgeois, c. 1510-1560. He was John Calvin’s music man, compiling the Genevan Psalter in its original form and providing us with many of the “old” tunes like Old Hundredth, Old Hundred and Twenty-Fourth, etc. His harmonizations are typical, his bass lines are fairly smooth, and he’s unabashed about using what we’d call “inverted” chords. Who wouldn’t be? But he lived before Rameau, so he didn’t exactly know he was writing with inverted chords. He was, ostensibly, only following the rules of counterpoint and making his bass line singable.

Meet Claude Goudimel, c. 1520-1572, who produces harmonies of the Psalter for private use in homes of Calvinists. These were supposed to be easy ways of singing harmony around the table, since one couldn’t do it in Church. People usually comment on his rhythmic spiciness, but if you notice his harmonies, they’re similar to Bourgeois except that they never (well, hardly ever) use inverted chords. Goudimel’s bass lines are ridiculously hoppy, because no matter what chord you’re going to, the bass will always have the fundamental. There are a handful of exceptions that I’ve seen—not many at all. Its his preference for root position chords that elicits the complaints from congregants that he’s so “jerky”.

Meet Jean-Philippe Rameau, 1683-1764. Norton’s A History of Western Music states that his great contribution to music theory was “asserting that a chord keeps its identity through all its inversions and that the harmony of a passage is defined by the root progression rather than by the actual lowest note sounding. These concepts, now staples of music theory, were revolutionary at the time.” Rameau does this by introducing the concept of a “fundamental bass” or “root” that is, in its essence, the defining tonal note of the chord.

The question: if these ideas are so revolutionary, then why does Cladue Goudimel, 150 years before Rameau, assiduously seek out the fundamental bass in all his harmonies? How did he make all his chords in root position at the expense of a singable bass line, without even knowing what root position was? How can you be not aware of going against the common practice of your own time in such a noticeable way? And, if he was aware, what was he aware of? Surely not that he was going out of his way to give the bass the fundamental, because the “fundamental” as a concept shouldn’t exist yet. Could he have done this without even knowing what he was doing? Why did he?

An Educated Audience

Posted on by John Richard Ahern

“In my youth, living in the proximity of Brahms, it was customary that a musician, when he heard a composition the first time, observed its construction, was able to follow the elaboration and derivation of its themes and its modulations, and could recognize the number of voices in canons and the presences of the theme in a variation; and there were even laymen who after one hearing could take a melody home in their memory.” (Arnold Schoenberg, New Music, Outmoded Music, Style and Idea)