The first printed collection of Christmas carols was published in 1521 by William Caxton’s appropriately named apprentice and successor, Wynkyn de Worde. The surge in carol composition around this time, notably in northern Europe, was partly inspired by an earlier Italian tradition of tuneful sacred songs welcoming the Christ-child’s nativity. These lauda (praises) or cantiones (songs) were designed with the whole community in mind – even the peasantry – and they emerged at roughly the same time as the concept of the model manger, which was the brainchild of Franciscan friars trying to lure local shepherds down from the hills into church. Other origins of the Christmas carol include dancing songs (‘carol’ derives from the Old Greek choros and Latin choraula or caraula, meaning a circling, singing dance), the pagan celebration of the winter solstice, and some fragments of Advent plainsong. The northern European carols ‘Personent hodie’ and ‘Gaudete’, as well as the tune of ‘Good King Wenceslas’, all have their origins in earlier plainchant melodies.
‘In dulci jubilo’ enjoyed wide circulation in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries; as well as boasting an irresistibly catchy tune, it has two of the distinctive hallmarks of the early Christmas carol: a repeating final two lines, known as a ‘burden’ or ‘refrain’ (‘Oh that we were there, Oh that we were there’); and the mixing of Latin words with – in our case – English words. This technique – the mixing of languages – was immensely popular in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, producing what are known as macaronic lyrics (which may derive from the Italian maccare, to crush or knead, as does the sweet cake made from crushed almonds, macaroon).
In countries with a very cold winter, two decidedly non-Christian elements tended to be intermingled, somewhat perplexingly with the carol form. One was the barely disguised pagan roots of the winter and spring solstice celebrations, as seen in ‘The Holly and the Ivy’, with its talk of evergreen shrubs, the bark, the blossom, the horns, the berries, the rising of the sun and the running of the deer alongside one solitary grafted-in holy line, ‘and Mary bore Sweet Jesus Christ to be our sweet Saviour’. The other was the notion that seasonal binge-drinking, or wassailing (Anglo-Saxon for ‘saying cheers’), was somehow an appropriate way to praise the Lord, summed up hilariously in the early Tudor carol ‘Bryng us in good ale’:
Bryng us in good ale, and bryng us in good ale;
Fore owr blyssyd Lady sak, bryng us in good ale.
Bryng us in no befe, for ther is many bonys,
But bryng us in good ale, for that goth downe at onys.
And bryng us in good ale.
Bryng us in no mutton, for that is often lene,
Nor bryng us in no trypys, for thei be syldom clene
But bryng us in good ale.
Bryng us in no eggys, for ther ar many schelles.
But bryng us in good ale, and gyfe us nothyng ellys.
On it goes, offering up every known foodstuff as inferior to good ale. After the briefest of mentions right at the beginning, ‘Our Lady’ makes way for the true purpose of the carol: a Tudor booze-up. The Tudor period witnessed a boom in food/drink/Baby Jesus-related carols, surpassed in enthusiasm only by the Victorian era. The once-popular ‘Boar’s Head Carol’, for example, began life as a medieval tribute to a carnivorously excessive banquet at an Oxford college but was at some point refocused to mark the Christian Nativity. In some versions, Christ’s later sacrifice on the cross is likened – not very subtly – to that of the wild boar on a spit.
The ‘Boar’s Head Carol’ is not alone among nativity songs in anticipating the Crucifixion. When they weren’t thinly disguised drinking songs or pagan-inspired descriptions of northern European forests, fifteenth- and sixteenth-century carols tended, rather morbidly, to emphasise the fact that the new-born baby Jesus was going to die a horrible death and atone for the sins of all mankind. This trend suggests that the songs of Christmas and the songs of Passiontide, or Easter, were once linked, narratively, as in the ancient and still-cherished ‘Coventry Carol’, a lullaby that originated in a Passiontide community play, or ‘Mystery’ Play, for performance during Holy Week.
All these carols and songs – whether it’s the ‘Coventry Carol’, ‘In dulci jubilo’ or ‘Ah, Robyn, Gentle Robyn’ – are part of a significant shift in texture that was happening across all forms of music during this period. It is to do with where the melody sits.
When, in around AD 900, chanting monks started adding extra voices with new notes to plainsong melodies and beginning the process that became polyphony – the layering of many voices – it was always assumed that the principal tune was the bottom one and the accompaniment sat on top of it. Gradually, in the centuries between 900 and 1500, as two-voice parts became three, and then four, this principal melody got left behind inside the texture, surrounded by the other voices. This is how the third line down in any four-part piece of choral music came to be known as the tenor; not because it had anything to do with the range of the singer’s voice, but because this was the part that held the main tune, tenir being the French verb ‘to hold’, from the Latin verb teneo. This sounds odd to us, since we take it for granted that the tune of a piece of music sits on top of its chordal accompaniment.
This change in position, from the middle to the top, had begun sporadically in the hundred years or so before the sixteenth century, but it was during this period that the tune – particularly in choral music – drifted to the top and stayed there for good. The only style of singing where the tune is still consistently buried within the texture is in the Barbershop close-harmony tradition, where it is generally placed in the second-highest line.
Why did this shift occur? First, the rage for songs of courtly love gave people an appetite for songs that were memorable – which they were less likely to be if the tune was hidden away. And second, singing was becoming less constrained by the three- or four-part structure. While polyphonic singing, rather like a modern close-harmony group, was still a popular pastime for aristocratic types with time on their hands, a new generation of singers had learnt to provide an evening’s entertainment by accompanying themselves on one of a number of recently expanded and significantly improved instruments.
By 1500 the main instrument families were all up and running: sounds made by blowing across the top of a tube of air (recorders and flutes); sounds made by blowing across two pieces of reed (the shawm, the crumhorn and the bagpipes); by operating finger-keys that caused air to feed into pipes (the organ); by drumming taut skin (the nakers – twin drums – from the Arabic naqqara); by striking lengths of metal (glockenspiel); by shaking things (timbrel); by drawing a bow across gut (the rebec and the fiddle); and by plucking cords, or strings. This last category in particular had thrived over the centuries. We have already encountered the al’Ud, which came from Persia via Arabic North Africa and was introduced to Spain during the al-Ándalus Caliphate (711–1492). The al’Ud and its cousin the oud were both variants of the earlier Central Asian barbat or barbud, belonging to the rud (stringed instrument) family.
Seeking out common ancestors for similar types of instruments is in many cases complicated by the abundant exchange of commodities via trading routes that ran between Europe, North Africa and Asia. Taking as an example the notion of a resonating piece of long-necked carved wood with tense gut (or, later, wire) strapped along it, there were by 1500 a huge variety of related models: the Greek kithara and pandoura, the Eastern European and Russian gusli, the Welsh crwth, the German rotta, the Turkic kopuz, the Mongolian morin khuur, or the Indian rudra veena, to name just a handful. But we do know that the oud and al’Ud gave birth to the lute and its kindred vilhuela, prolifically – but not exclusively – in Spain. An angel on horseback playing a lute is embroidered on to the so-called Steeple Aston Cope (religious mantle), now at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, which reveals that the lute was familiar as far afield as England by the early fourteenth century at least.
From these plucked instruments, rested on the lap and nestled ag
ainst the body, with as few as six and as many as thirty-five strings, would grow innumerable further offshoots. In the second half of the fifteenth century, musicians began using a horse-hair bow against the vilhuela’s strings as an alternative to plucking, which meant it could now be played in three different ways: vilhuela de mano (plucked by ‘hand’ or finger), vilhuela de penola (plucked with a plectrum), and vilhuela de arco (played with a bow). This new third method led to the family of the bowed viol, also known as viola da gamba (played between the legs, as opposed to the viola da braccio, played on the arm, which also described the fiddle or, later, the violin). This same family formed its own distinct subspecies in the late fifteenth century and quickly became popular among the better-off, who might hire three or four violists (a ‘consort’) to play viols of different sizes rather like a choir: treble (soprano), alto, tenor, bass. Many aristocrats and wealthy merchants themselves played viols at home, too, sometimes combined in a duet with a plucked lute.
The vilhuela de mano and vilhuela de penola were expensive, complicated instruments, and a much simpler, cheaper, plucked alternative had developed alongside them: it had fewer strings and was variously known as the gittern in England and Germany, in France as the gitere or guiterne, in Italy as the chitarra, and in Spain as the guitarra. Lest you are lulled into a false sense of security at seeing, at last, a name that relates to an instrument that thrives in the modern world, I should point out that the gittern/guitarra of the sixteenth century resembles not so much a modern guitar as the delicate, shimmering mandolin, to which it is in fact closely related. It did indeed turn into the trusty guitar in due course, but not before it had cross-fertilised with another medieval instrument, the citole, whose chief successor in England was unhelpfully called the cittern. This last instrument was a common sight in Tudor barber-surgeons’ shops, hanging on the wall for customers or resident entertainers to while away the time.
What all of these stringed instruments have in common – more so than the other families of instruments available during this period – was that they made solo musical performances both possible and enjoyable, and the sixteenth century saw a boom in this pastime. Although the majority of professional musicians were men, contemporary paintings show that a huge number of amateur musicians were women. Indeed, if the anonymous song ‘And I were a maiden’, the sixteenth-century equivalent of Rihanna’s ‘Good Girl Gone Bad’, is anything to go by, female singer-songwriters of the Tudor period were not afraid of expressing themselves with bawdy candour.
And I were a maiden,
As many one is,
For all the gold in England
I would not do amiss.
When I was a wanton wench
Of twelve years of age,
These courtiers with their amours
They kindled my corage.
When I was come to
The age of fifteen year
In all this lond, neither free not bond,
Methought I had no peer.
When late-fifteenth-century European musicians came up with the idea of taking a bow of stretched hair to their vilhuelas and lutes, producing viola da gambas and viols, they set in train a series of innovations that would ultimately generate one of the most important instruments of subsequent centuries: the violin. But the idea was not a new one. Bowed instruments had been around for centuries in other continents, notably Asia. In China, there is written evidence of the xiqin – a couple of lengths of cord, animal gut or taut silk attached to a wooden stick and stretched across a resonating box – dating from the Tang dynasty (618–907). More elaborate versions featured a spike on the bottom to root it to the ground and a carved horse’s head on the top, the latter being a popular detail, not surprisingly, for horse-riding players from the nomadic communities of Central Asia. Early forms of the xiqin could be bowed with a strip of bamboo but horsehair had become the preferred material by the Song dynasty (960–1279). The Arabic rebab or rabab, which, like the al’Ud, came to Europe via Muslim Spain during what is known as the Islamic Golden Age – the Abbasid era of 750–1258 – shares so many characteristics with the xiqin that it is tempting to conclude that its basic design was brought from the East by traders, but the reverse hypothesis has also been advanced. The contemporaneous Byzantine Empire, which fell in 1453, had its own stringed archetype, the lyra, which initially had two strings, a pear-shaped wooden body with holes in it, for resonance, and adjustable pegs to grip and tune the strings – not unlike those on later violins and guitars. A Persian scholar of the early tenth century, Ibn Khurradadhbih, reported the lyra to be in widespread use throughout the empire, along with organs and bagpipes. A detailed picture of one, from around the eleventh century, survives on a casket in the Palazzo del Podesta in Florence, and the remains of two early-twelfth-century Byzantine lyras have been dug up in the Russian city of Novgorod.
The Byzantine lyra and the Arabic rebab gave us the specifically European rebec – which to modern eyes looks like a smaller, flatter violin with between one and five gut strings – and the vielle and fiddle (probably derived from the Latin vitulari, to celebrate or be joyful). The popularity of these precursors of the violin is especially evident in religious paintings of the early sixteenth century onwards, in which musical angels play rebecs, viola da braccias and fiddles of various shapes and sizes in a happy confusion. Matthias Grünewald’s panelled Isenheim altarpiece, Concert of Angels (c. 1515), is a good example, as is the less menacing ceiling frieze of the same name (1535) by Gaudenzio Ferrari at the church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli in Saronno. This astonishing fresco depicts a heavenly ensemble playing a colourful assortment of stringed instruments – lyra, rebec, viola da gamba, viola da braccia, miniature (‘pocket’) vielle/fiddle, lute, hurdy-gurdy and psaltery – as well as wind, brass and percussion instruments, an organ and a rare Indian reed instrument, the Nyâstaranga.
It is around this time that the violin finally makes its first appearance. Painstaking research by musicologist Peter Holman in the 1990s uncovered evidence for the birth of the violin and its deeper-toned siblings – which became the viola and the cello – at the behest of Isabella d’Este, Marchesa of Mantua, greatest of all early-sixteenth-century patrons of the arts and daughter of Ercole I, Duke of Ferrara, who commissioned Josquin’s Miserere mei. In December 1511 she made an order for a set of stringed instruments for the Ferrara court which, Holman convincingly suggests, were ‘new design’ violins, invoiced to a maestro Sebastian of Verona. If they were, this is by far the earliest record of the new instrument; and although no violins from the first fifty years of the sixteenth century survive, there is considerable circumstantial evidence of sets of violins in use in courts in northern Italy, Austria, Lorraine, Germany and France during these decades.
The oldest surviving violin made according to the design we recognise today is generally agreed to be one constructed by Andrea Amati of Cremona for Charles IX, King of France, in 1564. It is now in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Since Charles was only thirteen at the time, it is reasonable to assume the order was placed by his Italian mother, Florentine patron and lover of all the arts in the Isabella d’Este mould, Catherine de Medici. Cremona blossomed as a violin-making hub after Amati set up shop there in the 1560s, although his own enterprise was almost certainly preempted by those of maestri di violini Gasparo di Bertolotti in Salò (‘Gasparo da Salò’), Francesco Linarol in Venice, and Zanetto Micheli and others in Brescia. Amati’s family workshop was subsequently imitated by two other now legendary violin-making families of Cremona, the Stradivari and the Guarneri, in whose hands the town swiftly eclipsed the earlier reputation of Brescia. (What maestro Antonio Stradivari would have made of the news that one of his 1721 violins, the ‘Lady Blunt’ – named after its former owner, Lord Byron’s granddaughter – sold at auction in June 2011 for £9.8m [$15m], with proceeds going to earthquake relief in Japan, is anybody’s guess.)
The new Ferrara-Brescia-Cremona model of the violin had a stronger, brighter sound tha
n its smaller predecessors, and was capable of greater expression and versatility on account of the way the strings were arched over the bridge, instead of lying flat in a row as on a guitar or lute. The arching allowed for greater pressure to be exerted on the string by the bow without fear of accidentally catching the adjacent string(s). The violin’s absence of frets, which had been a feature of the viola da gamba family and the lute, also allowed its player greater freedom in the tuning and individuality of phrasing. What has emerged from study of the sixteenth-century violin, though, is that, for the first few decades of its existence, it was intended as a member of a group (consort), not primarily as a solo instrument. Typically, a batch of four might have been commissioned, with two or even three of the four calibrated to a lower pitch to make a fuller, self-contained chordal sound.
Class as well as fashion shaped the violin’s rapid dissemination across Europe. In the fifteenth century, the ruling elite had favoured consorts of genteel viols (viola da gambas) when listening to purely instrumental music, or to accompany singers; stringed instruments were associated with refinement, poise and virtue. For rowdier evenings of dancing, however, they had preferred noisier wind (and sometimes brass) instruments, which were considered rather coarse, licentious and – their assessment not mine – phallic. Anyone who was anyone in Europe had a wind band, or piffari, often imported from Germany, at their court. Despite the superiority of stringed instruments, the medieval fiddle or vielle had not been deemed fit for decent society: too common for the well-to-do, it belonged instead to the wandering street musician, suitable for the drunken rollicking of the peasantry but not a lot more. It was Isabella d’Este’s idea to commission stringed instruments for dancing that would replace the rude Teutonic wind bands but make a bigger, livelier sound than the viols – an instrument, she hoped, with the upmarket cachet of a lute. The (expensively made) violin was the solution, and the Marchesa of Mantua’s preference for it would probably have ensured its instant status as a must-have accessory for the progressive Renaissance court. Whatever the spur, the lure of the violin proved irresistible, and predominantly German piffari wind bands were soon surpassed by predominantly Italian violin consorts.
The Story of Music: From Babylon to the Beatles: How Music Has Shaped Civilization Page 6
