Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century

(Marvins-Underground-K-12) #1

On the basis of all the available evidence—contemporary pictures, literary descriptions of musical
performances, the writings of music pedagogues and theorists, archival documents—historians now
believe that the use of instruments to accompany the written repertories of medieval song depended a
great deal on genres and their social connotations. The higher the style and the closer its alliance with the
ethos of liturgical chant, the more likely was performance by solo voice alone. (Among the troubadours,
instrumentalists are known to have participated only in the marginal genres—descorts and dance songs.)
With the lowering of the social standing of trouvère song and its urbanization in the thirteenth century
came a greater participation in it by minstrel instrumentalists, especially fiddlers (viellatores), who had
their own professional guild in Paris. Such musicians regularly took part in pastourelles, in Latin
conductus, in church plays, and the like.


As Moniot d’Arras’s Ce fut en mai explicitly informs us, fiddlers had a repertory of their own in the
form of dances. The most elaborate dance form was variously called estampie, which suggests a heavy,
vigorous step, and danse royale. Its form was a little like that of the lai or sequence: a series of paired
strains called puncta (singular punctum) with alternately open and shut cadences. The earliest estampies
preserved in writing are those in the midthirteenth-century Manuscrit du roi (Fig. 4-8). Their notation is
very advanced for the time and completely encodes their rhythm (according to principles to be discussed
in chapter 7), as untexted dance notation needs to do.


FIG. 4-7A Notation of Ex. 4-10 (Porque trobar) in the cantiga manuscript. Compare this with Fig. 4-7b.
So far the evidence seems to suggest that instrumentalists performed such pieces and accompanied
singers where appropriate, predominantly as soloists rather than in “bands”—which is not to say that such
accompaniments were necessarily modest or primitive. Both historical evidence and observation of
contemporary instrumentalists who mostly work without notation suggest that medieval fiddlers and
harpers were often prodigious technicians, and that they cultivated techniques of self-accompaniment
(drones, heterophonic doubling, even counterpoint). Evidence of ensemble performance is rare,
ambiguous, and often (like the cantiga miniatures) questionable. But it cannot be discounted.

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