Gerald Abraham (1904-88) was one ofBritain’s most eminent writers on music. His many other publications include the editorship of The New Oxford History of Music.
THE CONCISE OXFORD
HISTORY OF MUSIC
Gerald Abraham
Oxford University Press, Walton Street, Oxford 0x2 6dp
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First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback 1985
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The concise Oxford history of music / Gerald Abraham, p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Music—History and criticism. I. Title.
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Preface
It has long been generally agreed that large-scale histories ofmusic by single authors are things of the past. Nevertheless it has seemed to me that a chronological synoptic survey ofthe whole field in tolerably readable quasi¬ narrative form, a survey by one man who has for years been occupied in scrutinizing the work of specialists, might still be useful to the intelligent layman and non-specialist. It might even perhaps be useful to a specialist who, finding himself ‘knowing more and more about less and less’, might wish to stand back and consider the whole continuum of musical history.
It is the reality of this continuum that concerns me: music itself in so far as and when we can grasp it. Not composers except as producers of it, not instruments except as they help to make it; there are plenty of other books which give that kind of information. Instead of attempting a general valuation of X, I have tried to show what X contributed to the course, and perhaps the evolution, ofchurch music, oforchestral music, ofopera. Ifhis creative career falls partly in one period, partly in another, I wish to show each part of his output in the context of that of his contemporaries rather than in that of what he himselfhad already achieved or was to achieve later.
Far from being a condensation ofthe New Oxford History ofMusic, which would be impossible, this book is not even based on it. The New Oxford History employs the microscope, the Concise the telescope. Through the telescope one sees the broad lines and can also pick out details that reveal life and reality - though not, unfortunately, the details which would fill out and qualify simplified accounts of complex matters. In far distant time past the telescope is useless; one sees mostly haze and mirage. In the recent and immediate past it is again useless. One sees all too many figures close at hand - some ofthem personal friends and acquaintances - among whom it is not easy to pick out the really significant. Yet one must try to do so ifthe account is not to degenerate into a meaningless list ofnames. Even with the telescope there is a famous precedent for the use of the blind eye.
The choice is necessarily arbitrary, as many other decisions must be arbitrary - choice of music examples (I have tried to avoid the familiar), bibliographical references, and so on - though I have always had reasons for my decisions. Some omissions have no doubt been accidental; but the thinning out of references to bibliographical help and to complete editions
after the eighteenth century has been deliberate, not merely because the bibliography is impossibly large and the complete editions are less necessary to the probable reader - the intelligent layman or^student, not the mature musicologist - but because the probable reader is likely to be much better informed about music in the normal repertory. For the same reason I have modified my general approach, giving over-familiar music ofthe nineteenth century perhaps over-much space in order to avoid annotated lists of great names and works, but at the same time drawing attention to the music of secondary and tertiary masters so as to correct any impression that great names make up the whole picture.
Since the area I have swept with my telescope is practically boundless, I have directed it principally to what I conceive to be the main stream of Western music which flowed initially from Western Asia and the East Mediterranean lands. And not improperly, for in the long run it has spread and flooded the greater part of the world. It is true that the serious musicologist no longer regards ‘music’ as Euro-centred; he recognizes that the vast majority ofthe world’s inhabitants have their own musics - some of them ‘high’ cultures of great antiquity and sophistication. Even the widest Euro-American musical public is aware of their existence and sometimes enjoys superficially the musics of India, the Islamic world, and Eastern Asia, although these can hardly convey to Western listeners what they convey to natives oftheir own lands. All the same, Western music has developed more richly than any other and when it has come into contact with these others it has, regrettably, often tended to absorb or contaminate them without being more than occasionally and superficially influenced in return. Writing for the Western reader, I have tried to give at least brief aperfus of some outstandingly important non-Western musical systems, interrupting my main account at those points in history where the West became intelligently conscious of them.
The relationship between ‘high art’ Western music and anonymouspopular music presents another kind ofdifficulty. The relationship has been mutually'beneficial and the gap that began to open between them during the nineteenth century has been harmful to both. But here again I have generally had to bypass the music ofthe ‘folk’ as I have the ‘high art’ ofsome peripheral Western countries.
Even so, the areas I have tried to cover are so extensive that, in contrast to the specialist, I have found that I know less and less about more and more and have called upon kindly experts to save me from grievous error: in particular Professor Denis Arnold and Mrs. Arnold, Dr. E. J. Borthwick, Dr. John Caldwell, Mr. W. V. Davies, Mr. T. C. Mitchell, Mr. Jeremy Noble, Dr. Eaurence Picken, Dr. Richard Widdess, and Mr. Owen Wright. I am infinitely grateful to them and, last but far from least, to Mr. Anthony Mulgan ofthe Oxford University Press for his constant encouragement and helpful advice.
Part II The Ascendancy of Western Europe
Introduction 70
5. THE BEGINNINGS OF POLYPHONY 75
6. MUSIC OF THE PROTO-RENAISSANCE 97 The
7.
8. THE EUROPEAN
9. THE IMPACT OF THE RENAISSANCE 161
and Italian instrumental
Interlude
IO. MUSIC IN THE ISLAMIC WORLD 190
The origins of Islamic music
Music under the earlier caliphates 191
Safi al-DIn and the melodic modes
music in Spain and North Classical practice and theory
influence
Music under the divided caliphates
Part III The Ascendancy of Italy
Introduction 202
II. MUSIC DURING THE REFORMATION 2oy
Verbal intelligibility in church music
music ofJosquin’s followers
forms of secular polyphony
earlier sixteenth-century
paraphrase techniques in the madrigal
Masses
French chanson
chanson after Attaingnant
The church music of Willaert and his
de Rore and the madrigal
12. MUSIC DURING THE COUNTER- REFORMATION 244
13. SECULAR SONG AND INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC (c. 1560-C. 1610)
Netherland composers of madrigal
monody
14. SECULAR SONG (f. 161O-60) 295
The
15. THE EARLY GROWTH OF OPERA (c 16 10-60) 311 The
16. INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC (c. 1610-60) 328 The
18. THE DIFFUSION OF OPERA (
19. SECULAR VOCAL
20 RELIGIOUS MUSIC (C l66o-f. I 725) 395
Operatic influence on oratorio
in
The
21. INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC (f. 166c)-c. 1725) 419
22. CHANGES IN OPERA (f. 1725-90) 445
23. ORCHESTRAL AND CHAMBER MUSIC (C 1725-90) 482
24. MUSIC FOR OR WITH KEYBOARD (C 1725-90) 509
The later clavier music of Bach, The solo son^as ofJ. C. Bach and Handel, and their German the young Haydn 520 contemporaries 5°9 Mozart and the pianoforte 521 Domenico Scarlatti and the Clementi and some contemporaries 522 harpsichord sonata 5" C. P. E. Bach’s influence on Haydn 524 ‘The Scarlatti sect in London’ 5J2 The accompanied keyboard sonatas of Italian harpsichord composers 5H Haydn and Mozart 526
The decline of organ music in Mozart’s piano quartets and trios 527 Germany 516 The ‘keyboard song’ 528
German keyboard music for amateurs 517 German domestic song 529 Keyboard music with optional North German ode settings 529 accompaniment 517 Lyrical song and narrative ballad 53i Mozart’s Deutsche Arien 532
25. RELIGIOUS MUSIC (C 1725-90) 534
The decline of church music 534
Bach’s last cantatas and Matthew
Passion 534
in Italy
music in Italy
at Dresden
The ‘B minor Mass’ 535 Religious music at Vienna
The church cantata in decline 538
at Eszterhaz 55i Passion and oratorio in the age of
music at Salzburg 552 sensibility 539 The reform of church music by Handel’s English oratorios 542 Joseph II 553 English composers of oratorio 544
Interlude
26. THE MUSIC OF INDIA 558
The beginnings of Indian music 558 Differences of North and South 561 The musical system 559
27. THE MUSIC OF EASTERN ASIA 564
Early Chinese music 564 The Manchus and ‘Peking Opera’
Foreign influences on Chinese music 565 Chinese influence on Japan 569 Music under the T’ang, Sung, and Japanese music under the Shoguns
Yuan emperors 567 The impact of the West
The Ming period 568 The music of Indonesia 572
Part IV The Ascendancy of Germany
Introduction 574
28. opera (1790-1830) 577
Operas of the French Revolution 577 The romantic melancholy of Bellini 587
The Leonores of Gaveaux and German opera after Mozart 588 Beethoven 581 The dawn of German romantic opera 590
Spontini and ‘Empire classicism’ 582 Spohr and Weber 59i
Parisian grand opera 583 Continuous texture and reminiscence
Romantic opera comique 584 themes 592
Simon Mayr and Ferdinando Paer 585 Marschner and ‘horror opera’ 593
Rossini’s conquest of Europe 586
National opera in peripheral Opera in New York and London 595 European countries 594
29. ORCHESTRAL MUSIC (1790-1830) 596
Haydn’s last symphonies 596 Innovations in overture and Refugee composers in London 597 symphony 605
Popularity of the concerto 598 Schubert’s early orchestral music 609
Beethoven’s years of symphonic The symphony in the 1820s 610 composition 600 New trends 612
Piano concertos by Beethoven’s The piano concerto in the 1820s 613 contemporaries 603
30. CHAMBER MUSIC (1790-1830) 617
Haydn’s last chamber works 617 Varied concepts of chamber music 622
Beethoven’s early chamber music 618 Chamber compositions of Schubert’s
Dussek and Louis Ferdinand 620 _youth 624
Beethoven’s middle-period chamber Chamber music during the 1820s 625 music 621 Beethoven’s last quartets 626
31. PIANO MUSIC (1790-1830) 629
The piano sonata: 1794-1805 629 Dance music for piano 634
New piano textures 631 The piano sonata: 1816-26 635
The poetic miniature 632 The new generation 640
32. SOLO SONG (1790-1830) 642
Haydn’s canzonets and folk-song Cycles and collections of Lieder 645 accompaniments 642 The gradual revealing of Schubert 647
The romance in France 642 The German narrative ballad 649
The Lied in the 1790s 643 The art-songs of the Western Slavs 651
The inspiration of Goethe 644 Birth of Russian art-song 652
33. CHORAL MUSIC (1790-1830) 654
The open-air festivals of the French Haydn’s oratorios 660 Revolution 654 Oratorio after Haydn 662
Haydn’s symphonic Masses 656 Catholic music in the post-war period 662
The Mass in provincial Austria 657 ‘Missa Solemnis’ 664
Cherubini’s first Masses 658 Secular music 665
34. ORCHESTRAL MUSIC (1830-93) 667
The symphonies of Berlioz 667 Defections from the Liszt camp 685
Spohr and the programme-symphony 669 Symphonic music in the 1860s 686
Mendelssohn’s orchestral forms 671 Liszt’s international proteges 688
Concert overtures of the 1830s 672 Renaissance in France after 1871 691
Changes in the orchestral brass 675 The advent of Brahms 693
Schumann and the symphony 675 The symphonies of Bruckner 695
The romantic concerto 677 Dvorak: heir of Schubert 696
‘Tone-pictures’, ‘overtures’, and ‘tone- Russian orchestral music: 1876-93 698 poems’ 680 Orchestral composition in the West 699
Innovations in concerto and The young Strauss and his symphony 683 contemporaries 702
The ‘New German School’ 684
35- OPERA (1830-93) 705
36. CHORAL MUSIC (1830-93) 746
37. THE DOMINANCE OF THE PIANO (1830-93) 761
38. THE DECLINE AND FALL OF ROMANTICISM (1893-1918) 794
Interlude
39
Part V The Fragmentation of Tradition
Introduction 820
40. MUSIC BETWEEN THE WARS (1919-45) 823
Musical prosperity in America 823
Contemporary idioms in Britain 824
The main stream in Paris 825
Satie and Les Six ; 827
Ondes Martenot and quarter-tone music 831
The contemporary spirit in Italy 831
41. CROSS-CURRENTS AFTER 1945 846
The eclectic language 846
Messiaen’s grand synthesis 847
The Darmstadt Fenenkurse 848
Total serialization 849
Electronically-produced sound 851
Indeterminacy 852
The avant-garde in America 853
The twelve-note row 834
Hindemith and Gebrauchsmusik 835
Czech opera 837
East European masters 838
Music in Russia after the Revolution 840
The concept of ‘Socialist realism’ 842
Music during the Second World War 844
International disciples of Stockhausen 853
Modified serialism 855
The post-war symphony 856
Twelve-note music in the U.S.S.R. 857
Post-war opera 858
Stravinsky: the last years 859
* Page
1 Sumerian harp-players of c. 2650 B.C., represented on a vase from Bismaya (Oriental Institute ofChicago University). 8
2 Harp with bull-headed soundbox on an inlaid panel from Ur (c. 2600 B.C.) (London, British Musum). 9
3 Vertical angled harp on a clay plaque (2000-1800 B.c.) from Ishchali (Musee du Louvre, Paris). 11
4 Babylonian terracotta plaque (early 2nd millennium b.c.) showing a long-necked ‘lute’ (London, British Museum). 11
5 Bedouin lyre-player: from the tomb of Khnum-hotep (12th Dynasty) at Beni Hasan. 14
6 Egyptian angle-harp w'ith vertical soundbox, and lyre with curved arms, from Tomb 22 at Thebes (18th Dynasty). 15
7 Musicians in a wall-painting at Thebes (Tomb 38) playing harp, ‘lute’, possibly small castanets, double reed-pipes, and curved-arm lyre.
8 Fragment of an ivory unguent box, probably made in Phoenicia, possibly in north Syria, found in Ashurnasirpal IPs palace at Nimrud. Women musicians are playing a zither (or xylophone), frame-drum, and double reed-pipes (London, British Museum).
16
19
9 Ninevite lyre-players of the Sennacherib period, possibly prisoners guarded by an Assyrian soldier (from a reliefin the British Museum). 19
10 Elamite court-singer squeezing her larynx, from Nineveh (London, British Museum 124802). 20
11 Apollo, accompanied by two Muses (?), plays a seven-stringed lyre with a plectrum, after his arrival on Delos. From a late 7th-centurv b.c. amphora from Melos (Athens, National Archaeological Museum).
23
12 Players of barbiton, phorminx, krotala, and aulos: on the Mosaon amphora (Staathche Antikensammlung, Munich). 25
13 Troops marching to the aulos: from a 7th-century black-figure pot (Rome, Villa Giulia). 26
14 Procession of auloi and kitharas from the north frieze of the Parthenon (17thcentury drawing by James Carey. Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale). 27
15 First of two hymns to Apollo on the wall of the Treasury of the Athenians at Delphi (c. 138 B.C.) 36
16 Cup-bearer, tibicen, and lyra-player (fresco in the ‘ Tomb ofthe Leopards', c. 480-70 B.C., Tarquinia). 40
17 Etruscan musicians, wearing the long robes of their guild, in a relief on a 5thcentury b.c. sarcophagus from Caere (Rome, Museo Etrusco Gregoriano). 41
18 Reliefon a ist-century B.c. Roman sarcophagus from Amiternum (Museo Civico, Aquileia) showing two cornicines, a liticen, and four tibicines taking part in a funeral procession. 41
19 (a) Pipes of the 3rd-century organ at Aquincum near Budapest, (b) sliders admitting wind to the pipes, and (c) the sliders in position. 46
20
Papyrus ofthe 2nd century a.d. from Contrapollinopolis in the Thebaid: a paean to Apollo and a funeral song for a hero, with instrumental interludes (indented), in notation denoting note-values and rests (Berlin, Staatliche Museen). 49
21 Gloria in a St. Amand manuscript of c. 871, with transliterated Greek text and Latin translation in parallel columns {Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, ms. lat. 2291). 62
22
23
24
Two details from Hucbald, De Institution Harmonica (Brussels, Bibl. Royale Belgique, Codex Bruxell. 10078-95, fo. 87). 7$
Two-part composition on the melody ‘Benedicta sit’ {Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, lat. 7202, fo. 56). 79
Neumes written at varying heights above the words in the Laon Gradual ofc. 930 {Laon, Ms. 259, fo. 12). 81
25 Vox principalis (i) and vox organalis (ii) of a Gloria in the 11th-century Winchester troper {Cambridge, Corpus Christi 475, fo. 64 andfo. 142). 83
26 ‘Boethian’ letter-notation used to clarify pitch of neumes in an 11th-century Antiphonarium from the abbey ofSt. Benigne, Dijon {Montpellier, Bibl. de l'Ecole de Medecine, fo. 30). 83
27 Two-part setting of‘Ut tuo propitiatus’ (nth-century), notated in letters only {Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodl. 572). 83
28 The earliest source of ‘Per partum virginis’ {c. 1150) {Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale lat. 3719, fo. 64). 86
29 Miniatures in the Cantigas de Santa Maria of Alfonso X of Castile, showing players of guitarra morisca, rabab and lute, pipe and tabor, and tuned bells {Biblioteca del Monastirio del El Escorial). 99
30 Ballade with instrumental accompaniment in the Chansonnier Cange (Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, fr. 846). 101
31 (i) (a) Triplum, (b) motetus, and (c) tenor of Philippe de Vitry’s Fauvel motet ‘Firmissime/Adesto, sancta trinitas/Alleluya, Benedictus’ (Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, fr. 146, Jos. 45-45). 120
31 (ii) Detail from the Robertsbridge Codex, the earliest known collection of keyboard music, showing the end of an instrumental piece and the beginning of a transcription ofthe Fauvel motet (London, British Library, Add. 28550^0. 43v). 120
32(i) Landini’s ballata ‘Questa fanciulla’ in the Squarcialupi Codex. (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana, Pal. 87, fo. 138).
(ii) Keyboard transcription in the Codex Reina (Pans, Bibliotheque Nationale, nouv. acq.fr. 6771, fo. 85). 132
33 Players ofslide trumpet and two shawms in ‘The Hunt ofPhilip the Good’: 16thcentury copy ofa painting (destroyed in 1608) by a follower ofJan van Eyck (Paris, Musee de Versailles). 150
34 Part ofan organ composition ofthe Kyrie ‘Cunctipotens genitor Deus’ (played by the left hand) in the Faenza Codex of c. 1420. (Faenza, Biblioteca Comunale). 157
35 Two of the earliest known examples of free preludial composition for keyboard: praeambula in the tablature compiled in 1448 by Adam Ileborgh of Stendal in Brandenburg (Philadelphia, Curtis Institute ofMusic). 158
36 Florentine carnival singers: woodcut from Canzone per andare in maschera per carnesciale (Florence, 1485), a collection of song-texts w ithout music (Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale). 172
37(i) 'Ud (lute) in an early fourteenth-century copy of the Kitab al-adwdr (Book of Modes) of the Baghdad musician $afi al-DTn (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ms. Marsh 521, fo. 157F). 196
37(h) The big 64-stringed qanun (psaltery), invented by Safi who called it nuzha (from the same manuscript, fo. 158). 196
38
Three ladies painted by the so-called ‘Master of the female half-lengths’, a Franco-Fleming of the early 16th century, about to play Sermisy’s ‘Jouyssance vous donneray’. 214
39 Romance, ‘Toda mi vida’, for voice with vihuela accompaniment, from Luis Milan’s Libro de musica de vihuela de rnano, intitulado El Maestro (Valencia, 1535 or 1536).
238
40 The title-page of Marbeck’s The Booke ofCommon Praier noted (1550). 262
41 Bernardo Buontalenti’s design for ‘La gara fra Muse e Pieridi’, the second ofthe intermedii performed in Florence in 1589 at the wedding of Ferdinando de’ Medici and Cristina ofLorraine. (Crown copyright, Victoria and Albert Museum). 270
42 Dowland’s ‘Awake sweet love’ in his First Booke ofSongs or Ayres offoure partes (London, 1597).
43 The standard Elizabethan mixed consort, shown in a detail from the Unton memorial painting of c. 1596 (London, National Portrait Gallery).
44 One of Giacomo Torelli’s stage-sets for Luigi Rossi’s Orfeo, performed in the Palais-Royal, Paris, during the carnival of 1647.
279
291
323
45 The Oratorio del Santissimo Crocifisso, Rome, for which Carissimi composed his oratorios. 348
46 Renaud escapes from Armide’s toils in the Fifth Act of Lully’s opera (after the engraving by Jean Berain) 375
47 The opening of Purcell’s solo cantata ‘Bess of Bedlam’, published in the first volume of Orpheus Britannicus (second edition, 1706), with ‘through-bass figur’d for the Organ, Harpsichord, or Theorbo-Lute'.
48 Pelham’s Humfrey’s ‘Like as the Hart’ in the hand of the 18-year-old Purcell (Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum Ms 88, fo. 7).
392
417
49 Justine Favart as Bastienne in Les Amours de Bastien et Bastienne (1753), after a portrait by Charles-Andre Vanloo. She made theatrical history by dressing as a real peasant girl. 458
50 First of the four title-pages of Bach’s so-called ‘B minor Mass’ (Berlin, Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Musikabteilung). 536
51 (i) the sarangi has three strings played with a bow and forty to fifty sympathetic strings (ii) North Indian ensemble with (left to right) sitar, sarod, tambura, and tabla (Jodhpur, Rajasthan) (photo Deben Bhattacharya). 561
52 Players ofhand-drum and biwa. At the feet ofthe blind biwa player lie a pitchpipe and a small recorder. Illustration by Tosa Mitsunobu from the Shokunin Zukushi Uta-awase (1744). 571
53 Title-page of Le Sueur’s opera La Caverne (1793) (London, British Library). 578
54 Haydn (seated in the foreground) being honoured with a fanfare of trumpets and drums before the performance ofDie Schopfung in the Aula ofthe Old University, Vienna, on 27 March 1808. 661
55 Opening of the ‘Bluminen-Kapitel’ (flower chapter), after Jean Paul’s Siebenkiis, which was originally the second movement ofMahler’s First Symphony but later discarded, in autograph score (Yale, University Library, and Theodore Presser Company). 704
56 Coronation scene in Act 1v ofMeyerbeer’s Prophete: the first London performance at Covent Garden (24 July 1849) with Mario as John of Leyden and Pauline Viardot as Fides (Illustrated London News). 708
57 Wotan and Fricka, followed by Froh, Freia, and Donner, cross the rainbowbridge to Valhalla while Loge calls to the lamenting Rhine-maidens in the valley below: last scene of the first production of Das Rheingold, staged separately at Munich on 22 September 1869. 726
58 Liszt conducting the first performance ofhis Legende von der heiligen Elisabeth in the Redoute at Pest on 15 August 1865 to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Pest Conservatoire (after a drawing by Bertalen Szekely). 755
59 V. A. Hartmann’s project of 1869 for a city gate and bell-tower at Kiev, surmounted by suggestions of a traditional woman’s head-dress and an old Slavonic helmet. It was shown in the posthumous exhibition of his sketches, water-colours, and designs at the Petersburg Academy ofArts in March 1874 and inspired the last of Musorgsky’s Picturesfrom an Exhibition. 777
60 Composition sketch for the opening of Act v of Debussy’s Pelleas et Melisande', the curtain rises on a room in the castle where Melisande lies dying {Francois Meyer and Editions Minkojf). 803
62 Fate Marable’s jazz-band on a Mississippi steamboat (c. 1918). The trumpeter (fourth from the left) is Louis Armstrong. 817
63 Fernand Leger’s maquette for the decor for the original production ofMilhaud’s ballet La Creation du monde at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees, Paris, on 25 October 1923 (Stockholm, Dance Museum). 829
64 No. 12 of the cycle of seventeen ‘periods’ of Stockhausen’s Zyklus fur einen Schlagzeuger (Universal Edition). 856
Maps
Western Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean
Umayyad Caliphate, ad 750
Designation of notes by letters
Abbreviations
AfMF Archivfur Musikforschung
AfMW Archivfur Musikwissenschaft
CEKM Corpus ofEarly Keyboard Music
BWV Thematisch-Systematisches Verzeichnis der Werke J. S. Bachs
CMM Corpus Musicae Mensurabilis
ChW Das Chorwerk
DDT Denkmdler deutscher Tonkunst
DTB Denkmdler der Tonkunst in Bayern
DTO Denkmdler der Tonkunst in Osterreich
EDM Das Erbe deutscher Musik
EECM Early English Church Music
HAM Historical Anthology ofMusic
JAMS Journal ofthe American Musicological Society
MB Musica Britannica
ME Die Musikforschung
MGG Die Musik m Geschichte und Gegempart
M&L Music & Letters
MQ Musical Qiiarterly
NOHM New Oxford History ofMusic
OAMfMJ Oxford Anthology ofMusic (Medieval Music)
PRMA Proceedings ofthe Royal Musical Association
SIMG Sammelbande der internationalen Musikgesellschaft
StMW Studien zur Musikwissenschaft
TCM Tudor Church Music
VfMW Vierteljahrsschriftfur Musikwissenschaft
ZfMW Zeitschriftfur Musikwissenschaft
ZIMG Zeitschrift der internationalen Musikgesellschaft
Acknowledgements
Grateful thanks are due to the institutions named in the List of Plates, their trustees and directors, for permission to reproduce illustrations under their control. In addition acknowledgements are due to the following for photographic prints or other services: Fratelli Alinari (Plates 13, 16, 17, and 18), Bibliotheque de la Ville de Laon (Plate 24), the Mansell Collection (Plate 38), Robin Langley (Plate 47), the Mary Evans Picture Library (Plate 56), the Institute ofAfrican Studies, University ofGhana, Legon (Plate 61), and the William Ransom Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University, New Orleans (Plate 62).
Grateful thanks are also due to the following for permission to quote from the works indicated: Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd (Stravinsky’s Cantata, Symphony of Psalms, and The Rake's Progress), Durand et Cie, Paris and United Music Publishers (Messiaen’s Turangallla Symphony), Editions Max Eschig (Satie’s La Mort de Socrate), Editions Salabert (Honegger’s First Symphony), Schott and Co. Ltd (Nono’s Canto sospeso and Henze’s Prince of Homburg), Universal Edition (London) (Boulez’s Structures and Stockhausen’s Zyklus and Klavierstuck IP), and Universal Edition (Alfred A. Kalmus Ltd) (Berg’s Wozzeck).
Part I
The Rise of West Asian and East Mediterranean Music
Introduction
One wonders how many of the multitude who have helped to wear out Walter Scott’s story of a Hamlet without the Prince have ever bothered to consider seriously what that would be. All the other characters talk about him or to him so that we can make a host ofsurmises about him, but he is not there. He remains more immaterial than his father’s ghost. So it is with the music of the pre-Christian era. From a very early age we have instruments and representations of instruments, actual instruments fragmented but capable of reconstruction, and the names of instruments which cannot always be confidently attached to the right instrument. We have examples of what is almost certainly notation which scholars have sometimes claimed, never quite convincingly, to be able to decipher. We know how professional musicians were trained. We know that the Babylonians and Chinese very early arrived at scientific theories of music. Cultures and empires rise and are superseded: Sumer, Babylon, Egypt, Assyria, Chaldaea, Persia, Crete, Athens, Rome. In Egypt thirty dynasties pass. Troy and Carthage fall. Alexander conquers. Rome bestrides the Western world. But despite all our knowledge ofthese people’s instruments and practices, how they employed music and what they thought about it, the substance itselfescapes us. And just as the tragedy ofHamlet would not move us if he were not present, we remain unmoved by descriptions of instruments and accounts of theory. It does not help, it is only tantalizing, to read ofthe emotional excitement that could be aroused by the sound ofthe Greek aulos and how Sacadas ofArgos at Delphi in 586 B.c. was able to depict Apollo’s fight with the dragon in an aulos composition in several ‘movements’, or how David’s playing on the kinnor expelled Saul’s ‘evil spirit’. We cannot re-create these sounds, feel the emotional excitement, or even faintly imagine what Sacadas’s piece or David’s harp-playing really sounded like. The historian can only tell ‘the story of the play’ with the hero left out.
The story is itselfhideously complicated. One can only outline the main plot, following - for the sake of clarity as well as of concision - a line that leads blindly and with varying degrees ofdistinctness - from Sumer around 3000 B.c. and the succeeding Mesopotamian cultures, through Egypt to the Eastern Mediterranean lands generally. Some types ofinstrument and some practices - lyres and harps, the double-pipe, responsorial and antiphonal chanting - are documented from the earliest historic times. Lyres and harps
Introduction
and double-pipes were known in Sumer, in Egypt from the Old Kingdom onward, in Crete and probably Mycenae, indeed Greece generally, centuries before Homer, in Assyria and Babylon. (The Romans appear to have acquired the double-pipe from the Etruscans.) Percussion instru¬ ments, ofvarious kinds but mainly drums and rattles, are ofcourse universal but trumpets were merely signal instruments rather than genuinely musical ones. The spread of instruments of the lute family is less well documented but Mesopotamia - actually Larsa - had them c. 2000 and Egypt a few centuries later. Responsorial and antiphonal singing in temples was practised in Sumer, known in Egypt, and probably continued little changed when the Hebrews adopted it for psalm-singing. Curiously the panpipes seem to have been relatively late comers to the East Mediterranean scene; we do not hear of them until Homer mentions syringoi in the Iliad, though the Chinese had them much earlier - and_may have levitated them across the Pacific to Peru during the first millennium B.c. However when the first mechanical improvement ofwind-instruments was made - the invention of bags or chests for maintaining constant wind-pressure - the panpipes turned out to be the ancestor ofthe organ while the double-pipe begat only the humbler bagpipe, one of the most popular and widely diffused of folkinstruments but with nothing like the potentiality of the organ.
This is a basic distinction. The music of history is for a very long time largely the music of kings and priests, poets or philosophers; the music of comrhon folk has left few records in almost every age. The organ has accumulated a great literature; the bagpipe has not. The earliest music of which we know, Mesopotamian and Egyptian, was the music of the temple and the palace - not so very different when kings were also gods or priests. We hear later of the music of entertainers, of the Greek drama and the Roman circus, of wedding-songs and vintage-songs and shepherds playing pipes to their flocks or to each other, but these are very much ‘noises off. The first important injection of popular music into the mainstream was Christian song.
The psalm-singing of the early Church derived directly from the practices of the Jewish Temple and the synagogues. But hymn-singing by untrained congregations in various musical and linguistic dialects seems to have been a novelty. It was popular music, popular in two senses, although the great and memorable new hymn-poems - whether to new or traditional melodies we do not know - were written in the fourth century by learned men, St. Chrysostom in Greek, St. Ambrose in Latin. When Christianity became the official religion of the Empire the music of the Church became the most important form of music throughout the imperial dominions. In the confusion of the barbarian invasions and downfall of the Western Empire the liturgy and music ofthe Latin-speaking part ofthe Church were freed from the rigorous guidance ofByzantium. They went their own ways, diverging ever further from those of the East and in effect laying the foundations of Western music - which was long mainly ecclesiastical. Fortunately they were not papally dominated as those ofthe Eastern Church
Introduction
were imperially dominated, especially after Justinian. When cycles of liturgical chant were instituted for the Roman use they were disregarded in the Gallican, Celtic, Mozarabic, and even Milanese liturgies while any monastery was liable to do as it liked.
Attempted uniformity in the eighth century was brought about by a political accident: the misfortunes of the Papacy and the ambitions of the Frankish monarchs, Pepin the Short and his son Charlemagne. The first musical consequence of this Papal-Frankish alliance was the establishment of scholae cantorum first at Metz and then in other cities of Charlemagne’s
WESTERN ASIA AND THE EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN
Introduction
domains; the second was Charlemagne’s determined drive to establish uniform adoption of the Roman chants - for which his musical advisers, with little or no foundation, invoked the name and authority ofGregory the Great who had lived two centuries earlier. The attempted romanization was bitterly resisted but the antagonists still had no satisfactory musical notation as a weapon ofargument. For although the Greeks had had notation ofa sort since about c. 320 B.C., the key to it was not provided till six centuries later and centuries more were to pass before knowledge of notational devices percolated to the West. The first West European to write about them was a
Introduction
ninth-century West Frankish Benedictine and they were soon employed in a number of Frankish centres, mostly in what is now north-eastern France, but hardly at all in Italy - one indication amongjnany that the hegemony of living church music had passed not merely from Byzantium but from Rome to the ‘French’ lands ofthe Carolingian dynasty - more particularly to their north-eastern part plus St. Gall and a few other centres.
The change was of fundamental importance, not only because it marked the beginning ofthat ascendancy ofWestern European music which was to last almost unchallenged until the end of the fifteenth century. It saved Western music from the near stagnation which paralysed that ofthe Eastern church. Orthodoxy spread to embrace the Slav lands, and in the East had to compete only with the relatively insignificant Coptic, Armenian, and Ethiopian churches which had their own chants, but it was intensely conservative. Above all its music was hampered by its renunciation of instruments, based on the fears ofthe Early Fathers, while the Latin church accepted the organ and with its aid laid the foundations of polyphony from which the entire tradition of Western music has developed.
