Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century

EX. 13-17C  Superius    and tenor   of  the preceding   with    a   new contratenor

EX. 13-17D  Superius    of  the preceding   with    two new voices

So the chanson arrangement (or Liedbearbeitung, as the composer(s) of the Gross senen pieces
would have called it) was a very important genre historically. A few scattered predecessors aside (like
the “vielle players’In seculum ” given in the Bamberg motet manuscript discussed in chapter 7), it was
the earliest form of instrumental chamber music, in effect the earliest form of “functionless” or
“autonomous” instrumental music.

The word “functionless” should not be misunderstood: obviously, everything that is used has its use. If
the Glogauer chanson arrangements were played for recreation and enjoyed, then recreation and
enjoyment were their function. But providing the occasion for active (players’) or passive (listeners’)
enjoyment of sound patterns is a very different, far less utilitarian sort of function from marching or
dancing or worship. It emphasizes leisure, contemplation, pleasure in sensuous diversion and abstract
design—in a word, “esthetics.”

We are witnessing, in short, the earliest manifestation of the condition of “absolute” art or art-for-
art’s-sake as defined a good three centuries later by the German thinkers who invented and named the
philosophical category known formally as esthetics, or inquiry into the nature of the beautiful—
particularly Immanuel Kant, who coined the phrase “purposeless purposiveness” (Zweckmässigkeit ohne
Zweck) to capture its paradoxical fascination. Anybody who attends concerts and sits still, intently
watching and listening while people on stage zealously hit skins with sticks, blow into brass tubes or cane
reeds, and scrape horsehair over sheep gut, will know what purposeless purposiveness is all about
without elaborate explanations, and the skin-hitters, tubeblowers, and gut-scrapers know best of all.

Of course the modern concept of “absolute music” is not completely or even accurately defined if we
do not emphasize the supreme value placed on it as an artexperience since the nineteenth century. By
contrast, the fifteenth-century forerunner, compared with a cyclic Mass or a motet or even with a texted
courtly song, was of all genres the lowest and the lightest, mere fluff. And yet the leisured clerical senior
citizens who sat around amusing themselves with the Glogauer Liederbuch in the last decades of the
fifteenth century could nevertheless be described as the earliest literate “music lovers” in the modern,
esthetic sense.

MUSIC BECOMES A BUSINESS