How Music Developed: A Critical and Explanatory Account of the Growth of Modern MusicHenderson, W. J. (William James)
History
How Music Developed: A Critical and Explanatory Account of the Growth of Modern Music
Henderson, W. J. (William James)
Music -- History and criticism
FIRST STANZA OF "MATONA MIA CARA."
ORLANDO LASSO.
[Music: SOPRANO, ALTO, TENOR, BASS.]
Stanza:
Ma-to-na mi-a ca-ra
Mi fol-le-re can-zon
Ma-to-na mi-a ca-ra
Mi-fol-le-re can-zon
Can-tar sot-to fi-nes-tra
Lant-ze bu-on com-pag-non
Don, don, don,
di-ri di-ri
don, don, don, don;
Don, don, don,
di-ri di-ri
don, don, don, don.
Chapter V
Progress of Popular Music
Troubadours, jongleurs, minnesingers, and
meistersingers--Wagner's "Tannhäuser" and "Die Meistersinger"
as historical pictures--The German volkslied--The musical
guilds--The waits and the minstrels.
We saw that as far back as Dufay's time composers began to introduce
secular melodies into the mass. This was an evidence that the
ecclesiastical composers had been forced to make attempts to popularize
their works by a rude adoption of the melodies of the people. The
question, therefore, naturally arises: Who were the composers of the
secular music? Of course that is a question that cannot be answered very
definitely, but we do know who were the secular musicians of the time,
and we know that they were nearer the fundamental principles of modern
music than the churchmen were. The enormous mass of ecclesiastical music
produced in the middle ages was fit only for the worship of cathedrals.
It could never have been made to utter the notes of human passion, and
until some other style was found, the modern symphony, song, and opera
must have remained impossible. Church counterpoint survives to-day only
in church music and in the German fugue, a form of music which is
conspicuous for its intellectual rather than its emotional qualities.
The early secular musicians had no science at all, and very little art.
Their music was, therefore, simple and unpretentious, but it contained
the germs of our modern art forms, and it was bound in time to force its
way into the studies of the fathers.
The secular musicians of the early time were wanderers on the face of
Europe. They were the troubadours, jongleurs, minnesingers,
meistersingers, and minstrels.
The whole race of strolling musicians in the middle ages almost
certainly descended from the Roman comedians who were driven out of the
seven-hilled city when Alaric swept down upon it with fire and the
sword. They wandered into foreign lands to sing and pipe before the
Frankish chiefs, now their lords and masters. In the earliest days they
were simple vagabonds, whom the law did not allow redress for bodily
injury wantonly inflicted. In the latter half of the twelfth and the
early part of the thirteenth centuries these strolling musicians began
to be employed in the mysteries and miracle plays, and thus gradually
arose in the public estimation. Even before that time they had begun to
be taken into the service of the knightly troubadours and minnesingers
as accompanists, their French title being jongleurs.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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