Music

By CARL ANTHON

AN Elizabethan composer who contributed not a little to the luster of his period prefaced his Plaine and Paste Introduction to Practicall Musieke with the following little scene. At a distinguished dinner party the guests, getting up from the table, got ready for some music. The hostess distributed part books, but one gentleman who was present admitted with embarrassment that he was unable to sing from music books. “What!” the guests whispered to each other. “A gentleman, and not able to read music at sight? What is the matter with his education, his upbringing?” The poor man was an object of general ridicule, and ran straight to a musician to complete his education.

A singer seeking employment at the papal chapel in Rome — or at almost any other large chapel in those days — had to pass a rigid examination. After religion and morals had been properly investigated, he would be handed apart book of a Mass and asked to sing it, — at sight, of course, — improvising intricate ornaments as he went along. Worse yet, he might be asked to improvise right then and there a fourth part to a three-part motet! Counterpoint by heart (contrapunto alla mente) the Italians called it, and it was considered an essential craft for the professional musician.

Again, a certain Italian composer, in dedicating his most recent madrigals to the “gentlemen of Urbino,” expressed the fear that these compositions might not be acceptable to them because they were “accustomed to having new and fresh compositions, not yet in print, every evening.”

For centuries the ability to perform music was an indispensable part of a gentleman’s equipment. Popes, princes, scholars, and politicians were accustomed to demonstrate proficiency on one or more instruments or in singing. The sixteenth century was the great period of amateurism in many fields of artistic endeavor. Men of many walks of life sketched and painted, wrote sonnets, and made music.

Most of the great painters of the period were avid musicians. Pope Leo X composed religious music and spent large sums on good musicians. The Grand Duke of Tuscany, Cosimo de’ Medici, was such an addict of music that he took songs and madrigals, carved on wooden tablets, with him into the Arno River whenever he went swimming with his friends. The princes of Ferrara and Mantua and the members of their families were well educated in music, and some of them were exceedingly accomplished players and even composers. English rulers — Henry VIII, Catherine of Aragon, Queen Mary, and Queen Elizabeth — were instrumentalists.

Italian nobles organized private, so-called “academies” to participate in scholarly discussions and to take music lessons from professional musicians employed for this purpose. Counts Mario and Alessandro Bevilacqua of Verona maintained their own little musical academy; Alessandro was no mean composer himself. The great madrigalist, Carlo Gesualdo, prince of Venosa, a bold innovator in harmonic progressions, was an amateur. So also was Ercole Bottrigari of Bologna, a gentleman scholar who has about thirty works on astronomy and mathematics to his credit, and was an indefatigable translator of Greek and Latin authors. At the age of eleven he could already play the lute, the viol, the harpsichord, and several other instruments. In later years he wrote at least four treatises on ancient and modern music. The father of Galileo, the great astronomer, was a philosophic and musical dilettante of note who was intimately connected with the resuscitation of Greek drama and the birth of the opera in Florence.

Another practice in sixteenth-century music, totally foreign to our own age, was the art of improvisation. This was not restricted to music alone, but was present in some form in many other fields.

Improvisation in music was manifested in many ways. The most obvious form was the contrapunto alla mente alluded to earlier. This consisted of inventing a melody to go with one or several others while singing with the choir. Most Italian professional singers were expected to do this, and the musicians and theoreticians of the day went into raptures indescribing the “celestial harmonies” produced by the great church choirs when improvising.

In those days the notes written down represented only a sort of skeleton to be filled in by the performer as he pleased. The printed page was not sacrosanct as in our day, and performers were given wide scope for individualistic bents.

Our era is sadly unique in that it indulges almost exclusively in the music of the past. Whereas in the sixteenth century, and up to the early nineteenth, music had to be “strictly fresh,” certainly not more than five years old, in order to meet the approval of listeners, it must now be “strictly mellowed with age. Despite efforts to include contemporary composers in the musical fare of symphony programs, audiences still feel uncomfortable in the presence of so much dissonance and noise. We find a deep gulf between composers and performers of the concert stage, on the one hand, and the public, on the other. A handful of composers write the music, and a few handfuls of virtuosi perform for the non-participating mass of the people.

In the sixteenth century a choirmaster could hardly get a job unless he had published some compositions, and he had to provide a good deal of the music performed in church services. Today, churchgoers would frown upon a choirmaster who would presume to impose his own or other contemporary compositions on them. We are antiquarians; we preserve the treasures of the past and tend to depend upon them almost exclusively for our edification. The broad basis for a flourishing musical culture is lacking.

It will be pointed out that many more people play musical instruments today than in previous centuries. This is true as far as sheer numbers are concerned. However, education which was formerly the prerogative of the upper classes is now the common property of all. Everyone nowadays supposedly has had a liberal education of some sort, including the knowledge of musical notation. But what a comparative few ever develop this knowledge into a practical avocation in later life!

Imagine today the President of the United States or the Prime Minister of Great Britain playing Hindemith quartets, or the ambassador to France (in earlier and happier days) sending home enthusiastic reports about the performances at the Paris opera house, or himself singing the tenor in a fourpart cantata!