Evolution and Music

Part I of this essay dealt with the relations of human musical experience to the changes of consciousness initiated by actions of the Hierarchies in allowing the cosmic intelligence to enter the human domain. In particular, as we moved towards the consciousness soul era, the experience of the God-filled fifth was lost and the empty space was filled with the major or minor third, and the system of tuning changed from the Pythagorean, based on acoustically correct fifths, to the mean-tone, based on acoustically correct major thirds.

According to Rudolf Steiner, the effects of the changes of consciousness were most evident in Europe and the transition to the consciousness-soul era was particularly clear among the English.

We always used to think that there were natural laws of form and color. At one time a classical artist was thought of as one who worked within those laws. Romantic artists are supposed to have revealed a wilder and more elusive picture of nature. Modern artists have shown a strong tendency to step outside nature altogether, or, if you prefer it, to have revealed the nature of the sub- or semi-conscious. Working with stone or wood the sculptor had to let his imagination be schooled and inspired by the nature of his medium. It is arguable that the system of musical tones described by the Greek theorists, misunderstood and simplified by the musicians of the Middle Ages and metamorphosed into the major-minor system in the Renaissance, had a more pronounced grain, so to speak, than any piece of wood that ever modulated the form into which a sculptor would try to shape it. In the next section I give some episodes from the long historical process that eventually led to the musical equivalent of poured concrete. This sounds like a bad story but one has to remember that some wonderful things have been made out of poured concrete.^¹ It is really part of the story of our effort, as human beings wanting the freedom to take charge of our own destinies, to gain absolute control of all the materials of our existence, from the earth we walk on to the music we make and the thoughts we think.

Freedom is not merely a matter of being allowed to do anything you like. Whether you have just left home and are trying to set up your own establishment, or you are making your first steps in spiritual enlightenment, or you are composing music in a new style, freedom depends on technique. Not only on technique, of course – technique seems to some people to be just the boring bedrock necessity, the Martha to the Mary of inspiration. But let it not be forgotten that although without Mary there may be no guests, without Martha there will be no meal. If you work with language you know that grammar is a wonderful thing. Grammar is beautiful in itself and so is musical technique. People often make a fuss about being free to express themselves in whatever way they choose, but when you have no technique you have no choice and end up making mud pies.

One sign of a changing relationship to music was a ninth century treatise called Musica Enchiriadis, a musical handbook which, with the slightly later commentary, Scholia Enchiriadis, gave some of the earliest examples of organum.^²

To say that organum is an odd-sounding word for odd-sounding music is true as long as we are simply stating a fact about unschooled modern consciousness. Many things seem odd until we get used to them, and some are highly resistant to familiarity. The Latin organum was derived from the Greek organon, meaning a tool or an instrument, and from early Christian times onwards it meant any musical instrument, but more particularly an organ. It is not clear how it came to be used as the generic term for several different kinds of church music but it may have been in the sense of a system, as in Aristotle’s Organon or system of thinking.

Unlike the Greek theorists of a thousand years earlier, these sources give examples of actual music and lessons in composition. The Greeks gave us accounts of the musical materials; the Enchiriadis manuscripts tells us how to use them, giving the impression of a system that has reached a certain point of equilibrium, a system that is well enough established to embrace textbooks and lessons. It is clear, therefore, that the procedures described by the anonymous author, or authors, must already have been in operation for quite a long time. It is quite possible that what seems primitive to us was actually the sophisticated culmination of many years of experimentation in ways of combining different voices.^³

The most obvious feature of the musical examples given in the Enchiriadis manuscripts is the motion of the voice parts in parallel octaves, fifths and fourths. Modern people are used to singing in octaves, since this is the way that men and women sing unison songs together, but music which moves in parallel fifths or fourths tends to sound archaic and weird. Certain kinds of parallel motion already began to sound weird in the early Renaissance and, by the sixteenth century, parallel octaves and fifths were forbidden.^⁴ An important point to bear in mind is that harmony, as we have experienced it for the past five hundred years, is absent from early organum. In parallel organum everyone was singing the tune, and this idea persisted, although with radical modifications, until the end of the sixteenth century, by which time a delicate balance between melody and harmony had been achieved. It’s what we mean by polyphony.

Compared to music a thousand years later, with its complex structures, elaborate counterpoint, chromatic harmonies and added-note chords, parallel organum uses very few of the available resources, but once we get used to it we can appreciate its grandeur. Even in the ninth century strict parallelism was sometimes abandoned either to allow voices to begin and end on a unison or to avoid the tritones (augmented fourths and diminished fifths) mentioned in Section (vi) of this essay, but intervals other than the octave, fifth and fourth were admitted very grudgingly and major and minor thirds and sixths were regarded as dissonances.

More and more treatises, tracts and actual compositions are available from the following two or three centuries, and the tendency towards complexity is evident in the combination of voices moving at different speeds and the increasing use of other intervals besides the octave, fifth and fourth. By the thirteenth century major and minor thirds had become much more prominent and had been recognized as consonances – albeit imperfect ones – by theorists. Most of the music of the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries is completely unknown to the listening public, but for those who are interested many of the compositions of two historically shadowy figures called Léonin and Pérotin, who worked at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris in the twelfth century, are available on record.^⁵ An English monk who took a course at the Sorbonne wrote as follows:

“Léonin was the best composer of organum. He wrote the Great Book of Organa, for Mass and Office, to enlarge the divine service. This book was used until the time of the great Pérotin, who shortened it and rewrote many sections in a better way. Pérotin was the best composer of discant – he was even better than Léonin – and he wrote the best four-part organa, such as Viderunt and Sederunt, with the most ample embellishments of the harmonic art.”

In pure parallel organum the voice parts are of necessity written note against note, but in the work of the Notre Dame masters the upper voice moves relatively quickly over a slow-moving tenor^⁶ which carries the chant melody on which the composition is based. In Pérotin’s case there are often two or three upper voice parts, at times moving at different speeds, and major and minor intervals often appear.

In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries techniques of composition continued to develop in the sense of using more and more of the potentialities of the tonal system, but what was new about the “New Art” was not only a matter of technique. Guillaume de Machaut (1300-1377) is probably the most well known composer of this period and he is worth studying as a character as well as a composer. Gustave Reese gives some insights:^⁷ “He took holy orders at an early age and in 1323 became secretary to John, King of Bohemia … Guillaume finally became a canon of Rheims, where he lived in a large and elegant house. King John appears to have taken him along on many of his escapades over Europe…” Guillaume was a considerable poet and was compared by his contemporaries to Petrarch. “In his later years he entered into an amorous correspondence with a certain Péronne, and references in it to his work give us some insight into his attitude towards composition. In one letter, in which he avows that he writes only for Péronne, he includes the lines:

Qui veut qu’on rie et chant et dance. That wants to make you laugh and sing and dance.

Machaut was, in fact, being true to the ideas of the New Art – the Ars Nova – which were circulating at the beginning of the fourteenth century, most prominently (in our eyes, at any rate) through a short treatise of that name by his older contemporary Philippe de Vitry. According to the authors of New Oxford History of Music, “Ars Nova is the first full manifestation of pure musical art, freed from the service of religion or poetry and constructed according to its own laws.” I quote this because it introduces the idea of music as an autonomous art, which is one of the themes of the rest of this article.

Machaut comes across to us over the centuries as a modern personality. He is involved in adventures, intrigues and love affairs, he wants to express his feelings in poetry and music, and he looks back nostalgically^⁸ on the previous century when the age of chivalry was in full swing. He composed a great deal of popular music as well as church motets and the first known complete setting of the Ordinary of the Mass.^⁹ Reese quotes the musicologist Heinrich Besseler: “Here for the first time, in art and in life, the schism, incapable of solution, between inherited, fate-imposed form and new, original experience, comes to light – the true sign of an old culture grown overripe.” It has to be remembered that a statement is not necessarily true just because an eminent German musicologist made it; some might charge Besseler with romanticizing over the end of the Middle Ages and point out not only that something analogous may have happened at the beginning, or just before the beginning of the classical period of Greek history, but also that we know a great deal more about the Middle Ages now than Besseler and his colleagues did in the 1930’s.^¹⁰ It certainly appears that the acceptance of anonymity and authoritarianism that has always seemed so characteristic of the Middle Ages began to be disturbed by individual initiative earlier than we once thought, but Besseler’s remarks still have the ring of truth and, to the student of Rudolf Steiner, say “Consciousness soul” very loudly.

Machaut was a very worldly cleric who regarded his verse and music as vehicles for self-expression. His music is rhythmically and harmonically freer than that of his predecessors. And yet, when all is said and done, it still sounds quite alien to modern ears.

While the Ars Nova was in full swing in France something odd and unaccountable was going on in England. One manifestation of this was the appearance of the well-known and heavily debated round Sumer is icumen in, “which adeptly turns a single line into four-part polyphony, then adds a pair of crossing and repeating figures below, creating a glorious six-part sonority that is unique for its age and country.”^¹¹ The debate is not about the quality of the round but about its origin and date of composition. Before 1940 the manuscript, if not the composition, was thought to be the work of John of Fornsete, a monk of Reading Abbey in England, and to have dated from about 1240. The round is often referred to as “the Reading rota”. In 1944 Manfred Bukofzer published a study in which he adduced “strong evidence to show that the piece dates from 1310-1325 and has no demonstrable connection with Reading.”^¹² The Pelican History (1960) puts it at 1280. The Concise Oxford History of Music (1985) and the New Harvard Dictionary of Music (1986) blandly describe it as “mid-13^th century.” A difference of opinion amounting to plus or minus forty years might not seem of much moment to a music-lover who is not professionally involved, but it has been a matter of concern to some anthroposophists, the point at issue being the appearance of full major harmony a century-and-a-half before the start of the consciousness-soul era, or Fifth post-Atlantean Age.^¹³

Let me remind the reader that according to Rudolf Steiner the Fourth post-Atlantean Age, or age of the intellectual soul, began in 747 BC, which coincides with the traditional date of the founding of Rome, that it lasted 2160 years and that it ended in 1413.^¹⁴ The increasing use of major and minor intervals has often been regarded as the musical sign of the succeeding consciousness soul age insofar as in previous ages of the world the fifths and larger intervals had been experienced as revelations of the hierarchies, whereas the major and minor thirds became intimately linked with the inner lives of human beings. People who felt that 1240 was a great deal too early for such a thoroughly jolly-major piece as Sumer is icumen in to have appeared were very relieved when “modern scholarship” postponed it until the fourteenth century. Presumably they were quite disappointed when further modern scholarship put it back into the thirteenth century, but I’d like to reassure them and tell them not to worry any more, since their concerns were unwarranted in the first place.

Steiner emphasized that great evolutionary stages do not start or end suddenly, but merge into one another. I have suggested that the evolution of our connection to music is linked to that of our connection to thinking. In describing the descent of the cosmic intelligence Steiner says that the midpoint of the process was about 400 AD. “Preparations began in pre-Christian times and the change was not completed until the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries AD.” In view of Steiner’s words it is not at all surprising that we should find that both the style of scientific thinking that we associate with the Renaissance, and the use of major and minor intervals in music should have begun long before 1400 and overlapped for a long time with more ancient usages. “Scientific thinking” is almost as difficult to define as “classical music” but, whatever it is, it started early and took several centuries to arrive at the kind of fluency that we find in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It takes time to master a new medium and to expunge the confusing vestiges of the old one.

To speak of increasing fluency does not automatically imply that the thinking or the music of the eighteenth century is better than the thinking or the music of the preceding centuries. A philosophy or a piece of music that is the result of a fierce struggle with intractable material may be far more compelling than one in which everything has fallen smoothly into place. One of the things that place Handel, Bach, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven in a different league from their talented contemporaries is that although they worked with a fairly well established medium they were always challenging it, stretching it far as it would go. It would take a brave soul – or perhaps a foolhardy one – to undertake to show that these baroque and classical composers were in some way “greater” than the finest composers of the sixteenth century, when the last hurrah of the modal system, combined with the resources of major and minor harmony, had produced the glorious period of musical effulgence known as the Golden Age of Polyphony. The beauty and perfection of the style, epitomized by Byrd, Palestrina and Victoria, did not prevent sixteenth century composers from expressing joy, sorrow and pain in ways which are, to the practised ear, all the more telling for taking place in such a refined context; but their style did not allow the kind of unfettered emotional release that some composers desired. Of various composers who fractured the style without entirely breaking the mould, Gesualdo is the best known, but several early baroque composers, including Monteverdi, felt that it was time for something quite different and a new style was proclaimed.^¹⁵

Sumer is icumen in is an extraordinary piece for several reasons. With its four-part round over a two-part pes – a kind of ostinato – it is the earliest known example of six-part writing.^¹⁶ Compositions involving canon, the technique of which the round, or rota, is the simplest form, were not unknown, but nothing as complete and assured as this had appeared before. Scholars have wrangled over whether it is a piece of folk music or the work of an expert musician, using the same evidence – notably the presence of a Latin text below the original English words, and Latin instructions for performance – to support opposite conclusions. The Latin text is an Easter poem and the idea of a group of monks solemnly singing Perspice christicola, que dignacio to the rhythm of Sumer is icumen in, lhude sing, cuccu strikes me as very funny.

While it is true that Sumer is icumen in is something of a lonely eminence it must be emphasized that surrounding countryside was not altogether flat, and it is generally acknowledged that from the late thirteenth century onwards the use of major and minor harmony was favored in England to a greater extent than on the continent. The resulting music did not, however, sound much like modern major/minor music. Here follows a short explanation, which the sophisticated reader may decide to skip.

A major chord, or triad, consists of the fifth, third and first notes, or degrees, of a major scale, so it is natural to refer to it as a 5-3-1 chord. In practice we assume the 1 and simply call it a 5-3 chord. In C-major the notes are G, E and C. A minor triad has a similar relation to the minor scale, and in C-minor would consist of G, E-flat and C. The first degree of the scale implied by the chord – C in this case – is called the root of the chord, so a 5-3 chord is also known as a triad, or common chord, in root position. Now it seems that the English around 1300 did not favor common chords in root position; they preferred them in what is now known as first inversion, so that in C-major the notes would be C-G-E, E being the bottom note, instead of G-E-C. If we start with E and count upwards, G is the third note and C is the sixth. So this chord is called a 6-3.

The English of the late Middle Ages loved successions of 6-3 chords. The people of continental Europe like them too, but it is generally believed that the English liked them better and sooner. Such music did not have to be written down. There were fairly simple rules for taking an existing melody and adding the desired harmonies to it, a practice which became known as discant^¹⁷, and in the early fifteenth century an English composer called Leonel Power wrote a treatise on the subject. As I have mentioned in other connections, the existence of a treatise or set of rules generally indicates that whatever the treatise is about has been going on for a long time. Power was evidently a true representative of “Merrie England”. “This manner of singing”, he writes, “is mery to the singer and to the herer”, and “the mo imperfit tones that a man synges in the trebyll the merrier it is.”^¹⁸ “Imperfit” refers to the fact that the major and minor intervals had been classed as imperfect consonances, notably by Johannes de Garlandia who, in spite of his unlikely name, was an English theorist – presumably John Garland. In all fairness I have to mention that Johannes was not altogether faithful to his country of origin. “Although my mother was England”, he writes, “France was my nurse, and I prefer my nurse to my mother.”^¹⁹ Unnatural child!

One often gets the impression that the reason for the long delay in granting recognition to the thirds and sixths as consonances was religious rather than musical or acoustical; the Church Fathers may simply have found them too “mery”. Be that as it may, by the early fifteenth century the English preference for “mery” harmonies and flowing rhythms was noted and approved internationally. The most distinguished English composer of the first half of the fifteenth century, John Dunstable, was celebrated in verse in a poem dedicated to the Duke of Burgundy, for whom Dunstable may have worked at one time.

And thereby have they learned apace, to make their music gay and bright.^²⁰

This point of view was echoed by the eminent Flemish theorist and composer Johannes Tinctoris (1435-1511). In the introduction to his Liber de Arte Contrapuncti^²¹ of 1477 he remarked that while “learned people” were unwilling to admit that any music worth hearing had been written in the preceding forty years, there were actually many composers (whose names were to become quite well known again in the twentieth century – Ockeghem and Busnois, for instance) who gloried in having studied with Dunstable, Binchois and Dufay. “Nearly all the works of these men”, he says, “exhale such sweetness that in my opinion they are to be considered most suitable, not only for men and heroes, but even for the immortal Gods. Indeed, I never hear them, I never examine them without coming away happier and more enlightened.” ^²²

The English leadership was short-lived. James Haar^²³ remarks that Tinctoris “elsewhere credits the beginning of this musical renaissance to the English under Dunstable’s lead but says that of late the English have foundered in provincial conservatism while the French musicians have forged ahead to write ‘in the newest manner for the new times.’”

It is with the increasing prominence of major and minor intervals that mediaeval music first begins to make what we may call “heart contact” with modern listeners, just as it did with Tinctoris. Having made that sweeping statement I must immediately qualify it with the observation that many people find Gregorian chant, sung in unison, extremely moving, and the same is true of other kinds of chant. It is doubtful whether any of the chants that we know today date all the way back to Gregory’s time (c.600 AD) but some of them certainly antedate the Reading rota by three or four centuries. It seems probable that the chant enabled people to feel some vestige of the old communion with the spiritual world and that even in our own time something of the sort remains. The stresses of modern life and the wounds inflicted on our souls are very different from those of the Middle Ages. Music of this sort may not heal us but it still provides something better than the “quick temporary relief of minor aches and pains” promised by common analgesics. The remark at the beginning of this paragraph really applies to what we may call “composed music” or perhaps “art music”, not to traditional chant and probably not to folk music. Musicians who increasingly wanted to take control of their medium and use its substance in whatever ways they thought fit were just as likely to stir you up as to calm you down.

The phenomenon of composers taking charge of their medium made the church fathers feel very uneasy. They generally thought that unison ought to be the rule and polyphony, even of the simple kinds described in the Enchiriadis manuscripts, the exception. As the music became more complex the objections became more heated.

“Could you but hear one of these enervating performances executed with all the devices of the art, you might think it a chorus of Sirens, not of men; and you would be astounded by the singers’ facility, with which indeed neither that of the parrot or nightingale can compare… the high or even the highest notes of the scale are so mingled with the low or lowest that the ears are almost deprived of their ability to distinguish.”^²⁴

So wrote John of Salisbury around 1150^²⁵. By 1322 Pope John XXII, one of the Avignon^²⁶ popes, was so disturbed by the musical goings on that he issued a decree forbidding all but the simplest harmonization of the chants and condemning singers who “truncate the melodies with hockets, deprave them with discants and even trope the upper parts with worldly songs.” Church music was, after all, supposed to turn the congregants’ minds away from the secular and towards the divine, and hair-raising displays of virtuosity on the part of the singers were hardly likely to achieve the desired end. The authorities were not pleased to observe that composers sometimes incorporated popular melodies into their work and that congregations sometimes recognized them and sang along using the original, often highly unsuitable, words.

Objections to the influence of inappropriate kinds of music date back at least as far as Plato, and continue to the present day, especially in Waldorf Schools; what makes these events in the Middle Ages different is that the art of composition was freeing itself from both folk tradition and ecclesiastical authority. Besseler’s remark about Machaut is applicable not merely to Machaut’s situation, but to the situation of composers in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in general. “… The schism, incapable of solution, between inherited, fate-imposed form and new, original experience, comes to light…” Composers and their music were on their way to the kind of artistic autonomy that was achieved in the eighteenth century, flourished in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and produced any number of solutions to Besseler’s “schism”. Besseler was right, however, in the sense that no solution can be permanent – each artist has to find his own way. As I hope to show later, it is lamentable but inevitable that music’s hard-won autonomy should be gravely threatened in the twenty-first century.

We might expect that the secular music of the Middle Ages would make a more immediate appeal to us than the church music, but we often find that, as taken in though our modern ears, it seems to have little or no relation to the words. When we come to Sumer is icumen in we hear, perhaps for the first time in history, music that expresses exactly the spirit of the words. Please note that I am talking about how the music sounds to us now, not how it sounded to people then. Nothing else in the thirteenth or fourteenth century achieves this so clearly, but fourteenth and fifteenth century discant does seem to have a breath blowing into it from a more modern world.

Most of us know – or think we know – Sumer is icumen in, but other music of the period is harder for the unspecialized music-lover to come by. Volumes like the Penguin Guide to Compact Discs list virtually nothing from the thirteenth century. Even Anonymous is not mentioned. This does not mean that recordings do not exist, only that they are rare, they don’t sell and you have to hunt for them. If you happen to live near a large record store^²⁷ it may be worthwhile to look in the generally very small section labeled “Mediaeval”. Used LP stores may be more helpful. Remember that if you do find recordings of thirteenth century music you may not enjoy listening to them, but at least you’ll get some idea of how it sounded. Two collections that I have found thoroughly enjoyable over the years are an Argo LP, Mediaeval English Lyrics, which includes several selections from before 1300, and a Nonesuch LP, The Worcester Fragments, which contains music from the early fourteenth century. Both recordings illustrate the English fondness for music that was easy on the mediaeval ear – and remains so even for the modern ear. Music of Power, Dunstable, whose name now often appears as Dunstaple, and their French contemporaries Dufay and the quaintly (to our eyes) named Busnois, is more readily available on disc, but such music is apt to move in and out of the catalogue with amazing rapidity.^²⁸ One readily available example of discant is the Oxford Carol Book’s version of the Song of the Nuns of Chester, in the edition by Denis Stevens and John Parkinson. (No. 67) The best way to get the idea of discant is to sing it; fortunately it’s not very difficult.

Mention of the Worcester fragments suggests another way of understanding the mediaeval attitude towards music. We jealously guard the manuscripts and memorabilia even of minor musicians, and our concert halls constantly echo with the music of long dead composers. Things were very different in the Middle Ages.

Worcester Cathedral, in those days a Benedictine monastery and a seemingly remote outpost more than a hundred miles north-west of London, was the home of a long line of composers, singers and organists. We know none of their names but their music has come down to us by a very strange path which has less to do with the artistic worth of their compositions than with the value and scarcity of the materials on which they were written. In the modern world we are so enamored of the past that we go to extraordinary lengths to preserve its relics, and it seems quite shocking to us that six hundred years ago the worthy musicians of Worcester did not scruple to dismember the manuscript volumes of outmoded music and use the pages, or even sell them, as binding material. Most of the fragments remained in Worcester and survived the transformation of the monastery into a cathedral, which they might well not have done if they had remained in their original form, but bits and pieces reappeared as far afield as Oxford and London. A great deal of musicological detective work has been needed to put the resulting jigsaw puzzle together, a task obviously made more difficult by the continued absence of several pieces.

Our love affair with the past is not a simple thing with a facile explanation. When I was a boy I was already scratching my head over the fact that, according to my most immediate mentors, there had been no “great” composers for the preceding fifty years. I didn’t realize, of course, that I was echoing Tinctoris. “The mark of great music”, people used to say, “is that it has stood the test of time”, so it seemed that one important qualification for greatness was to have been dead for at least half a century. Composers from Beethoven on often wrote consciously for posterity, and posterity has responded very well. I don’t believe that such an idea ever occurred to Haydn or Mozart, but they did have the idea of music as a “thing-in-itself” and not as an adjunct to something else. The symphony, concerto or quartet did not require any justification beyond what it did for the listeners. In Haydn’s time the idea of a public concert, attended by anyone who could afford the entrance fee, was still a fairly new one. So, I believe, was the idea of painting pictures (apart from family portraits) so that people could buy them and hang them on their walls. It is extremely doubtful whether the musicians of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries ever gave a passing thought to posterity. For some of them it was evidently a joy and a challenge to push the boundaries of style and technique, but their music was intended to accompany worship, drama, dancing, eating, drinking and talking. It was only the wealthy who, like Duke Orsino in Twelfth Night, could afford to employ musicians to improve their moods. When the church music – organa, motets and conductus – of the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries fell into disuse there seemed to be no point in preserving it for future generations. When a style was gone it was gone, and the musicians of the current generation needed binding materials for their new choirbooks.^²⁹ I am fascinated by the thought that the music was less important than the substance that it was written on. This doesn’t sit well with our romantic notion, fostered in the nineteenth century, of the Artist with the mission of creating timeless masterpieces. It wasn’t until the twentieth century that people assembled in halls or churches to listen to recitals of the kind of music that people in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries thought not to be worth preserving.

I have spent some time on certain aspects of music in the later Middle Ages partly because most people know very little about it and partly because of the light it sheds on the evolution of human consciousness. The musical signs of the consciousness soul age show up earlier than has generally been acknowledged, and they do so particularly among the English, who, according to Rudolf Steiner, played a significant part in ushering in the new age. The English have generally been treated condescendingly by their continental musical colleagues; the fifteenth century was the only time the continentals ever acknowledged that the English had got ahead of them, and that situation didn’t last long. Leonel Power’s remark that the presence of “imperfit” intervals made the music “mery” is only one side of the picture. If the “imperfit” intervals were minor instead of major the music might turn out to be sad, and if major and minor intervals were placed in close juxtaposition they might produce something that went beyond mere happiness or sadness. Such juxtapositions, known in England as false relations and in the USA as cross relations, and in either case suggesting familial discord, were particularly favored by some of the sixteenth century English composers, notably Thomas Weelkes (1576-1623). Tovey refers to the “provincial English taste for collisions between major and minor thirds in the same chord”^³⁰, which blossomed into “an art that is of consummate and classical purity” in some of Weelkes’s madrigals. In Hence, Care thou art too cruel Weelkes produces “a chain of modulations which Schubert or Brahms would have been proud to sign.” People unfamiliar with Tovey’s sense of humor are apt not to notice that when he mentions the “provincial English taste” his tongue is already halfway into his cheek, and that when he refers to “the vicious English taste for false relations” it is all the way there.

The general view that from about 1500 AD until the present time the English have been stylistically backward needs some modification. Thomas Morley (1557-1602), Weelkes and their fellow madrigalists were greatly inspired by the Italians Marenzio (1553-1599) and Gastoldi (1550-1622). Marenzio’s madrigals were reprinted by Thomas Yonge, a modestly accomplished composer, as Musica Transalpina, and by Thomas Watson as Italian Madrigals Englished. If you are not used to using the word English as a verb you must understand that it may carry unexpected implications. In Watson’s edition it was not only the words that were “Englished”; Morley “Englished” the music as well. We have already seen how in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the English led the way in the use and enjoyment of major and minor harmonies. Now we shall see how some of the English madrigalists made the work of the Italians point in a new harmonic direction.

The madrigalists, both Italian and English, lived at a time when the system of mediaeval modes was still officially recognized as the basis of musical composition, but for the most part their music behaves as if it is perfectly happy within the major/minor system that superseded the modes. The character of the “Englishing” has been very clearly described by Gustave Reese.^³¹ The key figure is Morley, who published Balletts to Five Voyces and Canzonets to Two Voyces in 1595. A ballett is a composition for several voices, with verses in a fairly simple chordal style and a fa la refrain. One of the best known examples is Morley’s Now is the Month of Maying. The form, its name and the fa la are Italian but Morley often gave the style an English twist by expanding the fa la into a brilliant quasi-instrumental interlude and by rewriting the whole piece in a more complex contrapuntal^³² style. By comparing Morley’s Shoot, false love, I care not with its Italian model, Gastoldi’s Viver lieto voglio, Reese shows that Morley had a “more modern harmonic sense than Gastoldi” and “a clearer conception of tonality, which is typical of the English school as a whole.” This requires some explanation.

Perhaps the most characteristic thing about music after 1600 is the development of a feeling for key rather than mode. Particular modes were generally associated with particular pitches, but a major or a minor scale is the same at any pitch, since it is defined only by the sequence of whole-steps and half-steps. This is not the same thing as saying that a piece of music is not changed by transposing it from one key to another. G-major, D-major and C-major are all equally major, but changing key from G to D has a definite effect on the listener. Technically it’s known as “modulating to the dominant”, D being the fifth note of the G-major scale. I don’t want to lay down the law about what must be considered subjective effects, so I’ll merely say that there is a certain lightness or brightness about modulating to the dominant. You get this same sense of brightness simply by using dominant harmony without actually changing key. Moving from G-major to C-major, the subdominant, has somewhat the opposite effect like sinking comfortably back into a plush seat. (The subdominant is so called because it is the dominant – i.e. the fifth note – below the tonic instead of above it.) The sense of strong outward movement that we experience in the symphonic allegros of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is associated with this pressure towards the dominant.

Now Gastoldi, in the original of the ballett under consideration, has G for his tonal centre. This is not quite the same thing as saying that the music is in the key of G, since Gastoldi was still working within the modal system, but it is not always easy for modern ears to tell the difference. In the course of the verse and the refrain there are ten cadences or phrase endings. Five of them are on G, the tonic, four on C, the subdominant, and one on D, the dominant. Morley reverses this tendency towards the subdominant. In his reworking of the piece there are four cadences on G, only one on C, four on D and one on A, the dominant of the dominant. “Morley’s knack of reaching in very sure fashion for both the dominant and the ‘dominant of the dominant’ gives him the ‘fresh’ quality that has endeared him to modern madrigal singers… If at one time the Italians outstripped the Franco-Netherlanders in chordal writing, they were in turn to be outstripped by English in developing a feeling for harmonic propriety.”^³³ This is not to suggest that Gastoldi’s harmonies were improper, only that they tend to be backward-looking, whereas Morley’s are forward-looking.

Reese gives a telling account of the English habit of what might be called metamorphic conservatism. “The rise of the madrigal in England is a complete musical expression of one characteristic aspect of Elizabethan life, its eager emulation and appropriation of foreign culture. It parallels in time the literary Italianization that led to the “New Poetry” of Sidney, Spenser and the sonneteers, c.1580-1600, a period of enthusiastic translation, adaptation, imitation and plagiarism of everything French, classical and, especially, Italian. Like this movement, the madrigal was a sudden growth for which models had been available for decades, a belated extension of a current already past its prime on the continent... But like all pertinent manifestations of this general cultural tendency, the madrigal in England was more than a simple importation of an Italian ideal, as it was in Germany and the Netherlands: it was a unique nationalization of it, a relatively small but brilliant aftermath of the great madrigal tradition. Never before and perhaps never afterward have English musicians adopted a foreign style with such whole-heartedness and intelligence, and at the same time added so much of their own and produced so distinguished a native repertory.”

Reese suggests that the trait that distinguishes the English madrigal most strongly is its “songfulness”, “a tendency toward melodic writing that has some vague affinity with English folk song.” What we see here, in addition to a purely musical trend towards something more in tune with the modern world, is a tendency for “art music” to escape from the province of the aristocracy and to become the property of the people – or at least the developing middle class. The working classes had to wait a lot longer for their turn.

Morley’s madrigals are daffodils from the spring of the consciousness-soul age.

Part III will make no more attempt at a full report than either of the preceding sections. It is aimed rather at giving an impression of the musician’s situation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the light of more recent events in esoteric history.

3 See Gustave Reese, Music in the Middle Ages, Norton, New York, 1940, p.249 et seq. Interested readers will undoubtedly be able to find more modern sources, but, unlike many younger musicologists, Reese is eminently readable, actually has a sense of humor, and does not subject his readers to a barrage of obscure and largely unnecessary terminology.

5 Lyrichord LEMS 8002 contains organa by both composers. The performances were recorded forty years ago but are still highly regarded. Hyperion CDA 66944 gives a wider selection of Léonin’s music with fine performances and excellent documentation.

8 In writing this I was struck by the thought that nostalgia is essentially a consciousness-soul phenomenon, but I wouldn’t be dogmatic about it.

9 The Ordinary of the Mass consists of the prayers which are said or sung throughout the year – Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus and Agnus Dei – as distinct from the Proper, the prayers appropriate to particular days or seasons. Several good recordings of the Messe de Nostre Dame, are available, one of the best being by Jeremy Summerly and the Oxford Camerata on Naxos 8.553833. An excellent selection of Machaut’s secular works, performed by Emma Kirkby and the Gothic Voices, appears on Hyperion CDA 66087.

10 Reese’s reference is to work published by Besseler in 1935. Besseler continued to be active and highly regarded for several more decades.

12 Gustave Reese, op. cit. All German musicologists are eminent but Bukofzer was unusually so. He taught at the University of California in Berkeley from 1941 until 1955.

13 The consciousness soul is the expression of the human psyche that has developed since the beginning of the Fifth Post-Atlantean Age around 1400 AD. It is characterized by a feeling of isolation from both the spiritual and the physical world but it also carries the potentiality for working back into full and conscious communion.

14 There has been some mild controversy over the exactitude of this number in relation to the transition from BC to AD and the presence or absence of zero AD. In view of the way Steiner spoke about dates and transitions this strikes me as being of zero importance.

15 Gesualdo (1560-1613), while apparently staying within the polyphonic style, introduced passages of startling chordal harmony. Monteverdi (1567-1643) and some of his contemporaries introduced the continuo style, in which melody, harmony and bass were strongly differentiated.

16 Because of frequent unison doublings the effect is mostly of three real parts – according to Bukofzer, at any rate. When parts hit unisons, however, they are usually going in different directions, so the impression is certainly of more than three parts.

19 Ibid. p. 287. There has been some controversy about Johannes de Garlandia – John of Garland, as one commentator calls him – since there appear to have been two or three of him.

22 Printed in Strunk, Op. cit. See also James Haar’s article, Value Judgements in Music of the Renaissance, in Companion to Mediaeval and Renaissance Music, Ed. Tess Knighton and David Fallowes, University of California Press, 1992.

25 John of Salisbury (1115-1180) was a noted philosopher and churchman, a student of Peter Abelard and a friend of Thomas à Becket and, from 1176 until his death, Bishop of Chartres. Steiner mentions him in the Karma Lectures.

27 I’ve left this sentence unaltered so that readers can enjoy a pang of nostalgia while googling whatever they’re looking for.

28 English Mediaeval Lyrics, Argo ZRG 5443, was published in 1965, and The Worcester Fragments, Nonesuch H-71308, in 1975. As far as I know neither has been re-issued on CD but you can probably find them on the net. The Orlando Consort has made a very well reviewed recording of some of the Worcester Fragments on AmonRa 59. The Hilliard Ensemble gives an excellent selection of Dunstable’s music on Virgin VER5 62342-2 and the Orlando Consort is said to be equally good on Metronome 1009, although I haven’t heard them. L’Oiseau Lyre has recorded practically every note of secular music that Dufay ever wrote. Fortunately there are fine recordings available on the bargain Naxos label; Chansons on 8.553458 and the great Mass setting on the folksong L’homme Armé on 8.553087, with the admirable Jeremy Summerley and the Oxford Camerata.

33 Gustave Reese, op. cit.

Part III »

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