How Composers worked - 1450 to 1500

 

Josquin and his contemporaries created great cathedrals of sound, but how they actually did it is still deeply mysterious.

 

The little we know is as follows:

 

Insight: this is a world of vocal music, not influenced by “keyboard” thinking. Organs were only introduced to be used when they had run out of things to sing! The aim being, of course, to offer continuous praise to the Almighty.

 

Insight: the chants of the earlier church were the main, or even sole, raw material for musical thought.

 

Insight: the soundworld is as a result, entirely modal, albeit with ever increasing ability to change modes via new accidentals.

 

Insight: most music would therefore contain a significant proportion of improvised material -

 

Insight: a significant proportion of all music would as a result be un-notated. This is not helpful for the modern student.

 

Insight:  church communities were the social setting of music creation, with choirs from young to old, the young being trained up.

 

Insight: the core skill for singers was free improvisation over existing chants.

 

Insight: those singers who showed promise in improvisation were given extra tuition by the master, gradually initiating them into the higher skills of composition. One of the interesting pieces of evidence is a report on the disciplinary proceedings against a Director of Music who failed to give one-to-one improvisation coaching for his singers.

 

Insight: a significant proportion of compositional study was dedicated to how to form cadences. Tuition documents reveal this.

 

Insight: after cadences, the student would go on to studying “fuga”, the art of combining melodies contrapuntally, from free counterpoint to strict and ingenious imitative counterpoint. Studying exemplars and committing them to memory was a large part of the tuition process.

 

Insight: this is a staggering thought: all the above was achieved by memory alone. Scores were not used in this period. In other words, the music was never, ever, from start to finish, notated with vertical alignment until a much later date. The evidence pointing to this is convincing:

 

…a vast amount of written material survives from this period, but none of it in score. Not until the late 1500s was a form of scoring introduced, the ten line stave, with C as the centre line.

(Do we have a date for the first examples of modern scores? Probably late 1500s.

 

…most of this material is in a form unusual to modern eyes, “quasi-score”, where each voice part is written out individually, with no vertical alignment whatsoever. This has implications, set out in italics below.

 

…documents survive which describe how music was organised in church communities, and all references support the above insights.

 

…there survives a series of manuscripts of early and later drafts for compositions by Cipriano de Rore which show his working practice. In his early drafts he makes elementary mistakes, corrected in later drafts, which would have been glaringly obvious if he had written them out in score. This supports the hypothesis that he did not use scores, but held all the alignments in his mind. How else would he spot his own mistakes?

 

Insight: the use of quasi-score means that the composer must have been able to visualise mentally how the parts combined. If true, this is a phenomenal ability. In the modern world there are individuals who can play eight games of chess simultaneously without boards, all moves held in the player’s mind. Renaissance composers must have had a similar mental power. As corroboration, there is a document which describes the audition process, terrifying to us, for a Director of Music, which involves playing on an organ, at sight, a composition written in parts only. Playing from score is challenging enough, but playing from separate parts beggars the modern belief.

 

There are documented examples of prodigious feats of memory from the period in question, eg the “cathedrals of memory”. This is a separate topic, but it makes these insights into Renaissance composition slightly less incredible. 

 

As regards the ten line score, it was considered a useful tool for composition students to learn from, but proper composers worked in their heads.

 

Vocal polyphony was a linear process. Horizontal thinking was the norm. Vertical thinking, ie chord based composing, was very much a Feature of the Next century, the Baroque. There are teaching material documents describing this. The most common procedure was to combine a superius  (soprano type part) with a Tenor. (The tenor is the origin voice, the source material - in the early Renaissance the chant selected to form the composition was usually given to the Tenor part, the Latin word tenor implying a holding function.) The bass line was very much an afterthought.

 

The insight to take away from the above is that as soon as a two part soundworld is created by adding a superius to a tenor, there will be harmonies to find, some notes that work well and some that don’t work at all. It was the composer’s challenge to find the most beautiful solutions. 

 

There are documents describing compositions that show that some were thought more beautiful than others. Then as now, the composers producing the most beautiful music achieved the highest status. 

 

Then as now it was hard to put into words the process of writing sure-fire reliably beautiful music. Or beautiful painting or dance or poetry, come to that. If it were common knowledge, then everyone could do it. 

 

If we try to capture beauty in a bottle, as it were, we might look at Palestrina’s compositions, because they were considered paragons at the time. One could list his compositional thumbprints and make a to-do list. Ebb and flow, rise and fall, one gesture balancing another…how easy he makes it look.

 

Here is another difference with the modern age. Can you judge a composition just from the way it looks on a page? Up to a point one might say a cautious yes, but all polyphonic music looks bewilderingly similar on the page. There are documents showing that composers would never release a piece till they had heard it sung,  and made final edits.

 

As further indication that composers thought in lines, there is a letter from Guillaume de Machault where he is sending a love song to a sweetheart, saying that the song was in three parts and he would send the fourth at a later date. Can one imagine Beethoven saying the same?

 

Another indication of this linear way of working is an account of a composing competition where two competitors anonymously provided a fifth part to a four part composition, and one was judged better than the other. 

 

Keyboard composing was diifferent from vocal composing, and lute composing different again. Keyboardists did use aligned staves with what we would call bar lines. Lutanists used tablature. The first modern scores for vocal music did not appear till around 1600.

 

There are many documents which show that composers and singers alike were obsessed by the rules of part-writing. Compositions that had forbidden progressions were deemed imperfect, and their creators lost status as a result. So writing parallel fifths was a really bad career move!

 

This way of composing meant that larger compositions were built of smaller units. Variety could be introduced by setting some groups of parts against others, and contrasting those sections with full sections. It also means that motivic development and recapitulation of previously heard music did not occur, because it was not needed. Each new text deserved and received its own unique treatment.