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A (Very) Brief History of (Western) Music
By Honey Meconi
Choral singing has played the largest role of any kind of music-making across the entire history of Western art music, especially when it comes to sacred music. The human voice, after all, was the first musical instrument, and the practice of group singing can be traced back thousands of years.
During the Middle Ages, from the late fifth century up to the fifteenth century, almost all of the music performed in the Catholic Church was plainchant (sometimes called “Gregorian Chant”), a single melodic line sung by a choir in unison in free rhythm. Both the texts and melodies of plainchant have continued to inspire musicians up to the present day, as we can see with one of the most popular chants of the time, the anonymous Alma Redemptoris Mater in honor of the Virgin Mary.
Composers scarcely restricted themselves to a single melodic line. In a work such as the anonymous Stella splendens, a medieval pilgrimage song, the texture expands to two voice parts, each of which now has a distinct rhythm. Choral expansion is a hallmark of the Renaissance (the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries). Guillaume Du Fay’s motet for the consecration of the Florence Cathedral in 1436, Nuper rosarum flores, now has four parts, with the bottom two using a plainchant melody for the consecration of a church. Tomás Luis de Victoria’s setting of Alma Redemptoris Mater is even fuller, with eight voices divided into two choirs, a “polychoral” texture beloved of the high Renaissance and later years.
The succeeding Baroque period (from 1600 to the earlier eighteenth century) saw the invention of opera, whose dramatic tone soon influenced all other vocal music as well. Claudio Monteverdi’s Lauda Jerusalem, a setting of a psalm text from the Vespers service published in 1610, shows this through its use of seven voices that juxtaposes two three-voice choirs against tenors singing a plainchant melody. Another spectacular example of dramatic writing appears in the Miserere mei Deus, a psalm setting by early Baroque composer Gregorio Allegri. Here the choral singing is again split between two choirs; it alternates between written-out melodic lines and repeated-note chanting of the psalm text. A recurring refrain features an otherworldly soprano line that soars far above the supporting voices. The young Mozart heard this work in Rome during one of his childhood tours of Europe. However, as a composer of the Classical period (from the earlier eighteenth century to its end), Mozart emphasized balance and symmetry in his choral music, in keeping with the eighteenth century’s veneration of the architectural proportions of classical antiquity. We see this in Mozart’s Ave verum corpus, written just six months before his death in 1791. This outwardly simple but deeply moving work for the feast of Corpus Christi was probably the test piece for his appointment as Kapellmeister Designate of St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna.
Liturgical music continued to be important in the nineteenth century, often known as the Romantic period. Works by Felix Mendelssohn and Anton Bruckner represent two contrasting examples. Mendelssohn’s gentle psalm setting Laudate pueri is for three-part women’s voices and organ, composed for a community of Roman nuns in 1830. Completely different is Bruckner’s Os justi, written in 1879. This eight-voice motet reflects a compositional movement called Cecilianism (after the patron saint of music) whose goal was to restore the use of medieval and Renaissance sacred music, and to write new pieces in older styles. Consequently, Os justi is for eight-part unaccompanied chorus (since most sacred works before 1600 did not use instruments) and uses the Lydian mode for its harmonies; Lydian was one of the medieval modes used before major and minor keys developed during the Baroque. The early music influence is especially unmistakable in the final “Alleluia,” sung in plainchant rather than in parts.
The twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the modern/ contemporary period, adopts an almost “anything goes” philosophy when it comes to choral music. Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s “choral rhapsody” Sea Drift (1908) for eight voices, narrates an evocative poem of a young woman on a storm-drenched shore, while Igor Stravinsky’s Ave Maria (1934), for four voices, sets the famous Marian prayer in shifting meter, a hallmark of modernism. And Cecilia McDowall’s six-voice Alma Redemptoris Mater (2010) is both of its time (in its use of dissonance and sustained sonorities) and of the past, as it sets the age-old text with reference both to the original plainchant melody and the varied textures of the Renaissance.
Honey Meconi is the inaugural Arthur Satz Professor at the University of Rochester, where she is also Professor of Musicology at the Eastman School of Music.
