Poland I: The Middle Ages

As you would expect from such a great European nation, Poland has a long musical history and one that often shows a full-blooded engagement with the Western European mainstream - in spite of the country's prolonged periods of  foreign occupation from the East.

Poland's decision to embrace the Western Catholic Church rather than the Eastern Orthodox Church in the late 10th century is probably the crucial factor here. It opened the Poles to all manner of Western influences.

Gregorian chant came to Poland and became its dominant musical form for several centuries. (You can hear a programme - with examples - about plainchant in medieval Poland here). 

A tune from that time that has not only survived but thrived in Polish culture ever since is Gaude mater Polonia ('Rejoice, Mother Poland'), written for the beatification of the martyr St. Stanislaus of Szczepanów in 1253. It's been an important piece for Poles for centuries. It was used at royal coronations and weddings and after Polish victories in battle. What you will usually hear nowadays though is an elaboration of the hymn as a lovely four-part choral song composed in the 19th century by Teofil Klonowski. The work is still regularly heard throughout Poland (and beyond), especially in universities and on national holidays. I will admit to having some difficulties matching this up with the plainchant Gaude mater Polonia. (I am -officially! - confused over this point.) Please click on the links and see if you can reconcile them.

Even earlier (it seems) than Gaude mater Polonia and even more significant for Poles is Bogurodzica ('Mother of God'). This monophonic hymn - the first known hymn in the Polish language - was used to accompany coronations and inspire the armies of Poland in battle. Just how old it is and why is was originally written remains a mystery. It dates from somewhere between the 10th century and the 13th century, which is about an imprecise a dating as you will ever get in music. 

Bogurodzica still retains its power to stir the Polish spirit - and not just the Polish spirit. If you've never heard it before, you must try Panufnik's glorious Sinfonia Sacra. It is built on Bogurodzica and it always stirs my spirit.

Musicians came from the West to Poland throughout this period but the first significant Pole to stand out as an individual composer was Mikolaj z Radomia, whose career reached its peak around the 1420s. His music sounds very much of its age - the age coinciding with the early works of Dufay - thus proving the extent of Western European influence on Polish medieval music. Not much is known about the man behind the music. The music, however, is very pleasing.

Mikołaj's Magnificat shows his style at its simplest. You have two notated lines (the top and bottom ones), but a third (middle) voice is added by means of fauxbourden - that technique of harmonisation from Burgundy where the added voice sings in parallel to the upper voice (usually a fourth below). Moving on to one of his settings of the Gloria you will immediately hear that Mikołaj could also write imitatively and, as the same piece proceeds, you will also hear the effects of another late medieval technique, that of hocket - the process whereby lines passed rapidly between voices, aided by rests, resulting in a hiccoughing effect. A setting of the Credo also begins imitatively but this time continues (at least at times) in what's know as the conductus style - the technique where the upper voices tend to sing together and there's much more note-for-note writing. Mikołaj is giving us a one-man guide to some of the main features of medieval music! 

Other Mikolaj z Radomia pieces you might want to give a try include another Gloria, this one giving the treble (upper voice) the dominant part. Plus there's a delightful Alleluia (in a performance with instruments).

Poland's Renaissance was approaching...and with it a number of other stand-out composers. 

Catching incense

As I've explored more and more music from the past thousand years, I've found that I've ended up liking music from each and every era. As composer after composer and period after period fell into place (some more easily than others), I found that the last period of music to fall was the Renaissance - specifically Renaissance choral polyphony. I was OK with music from Dufay (first half of the 15th century) backwards and from Monteverdi (very end of the 16th century) onwards, but the music of that age that spread from roughly 1450 through to 1600 seemed hard to penetrate. It all sounded much the same to me, whether it be a Kyrie by Ockeghem, a Credo by Josquin or a Sanctus by Byrd. Instrumental music, Renaissance songs, homophonic choral music were fine, but unaccompanied choral polyphony all drifted through my ears without engaging my understanding. I felt as if I were hearing the same bland cloud of musical incense in pretty much every piece. I gave it time, however, and listened again and again and eventually it clicked with certain composers - Gesualdo, Victoria, Tallis - and the light then spread ever wider, until even Ockeghem, Josquin and Byrd fell. And when they fell, I could for the life of me think why I didn't love their music earlier. It was so beautiful, so masterful, so full of imagination.

I've tried to fathom it out ever since, and I now think I have an explanation.

The music of Dufay and, before him (going backwards in time), Dunstable and Machaut and Perotin and Hildegard is more immediate in its melodic appeal - as is the music of the Gabrielis and Monteverdi from the other end of the period and on. In other words, it's more tuneful. The emphasis was on melody because the melody the composers wanted their listeners to hear was placed where it could be heard most clearly - at the top of the texture. In a four-part piece, say, the sopranos (or more accurately 'superius') would have the tune, the tenors would have a plainchant melody to accompany it, the basses would provide a harmonic foundation and the altos would fill in the gaps (to put it simply!). The uppermost line - the one the ear catches onto easiest - was supreme. Come Ockeghem and Josquin - and those who came in their wake across the length and breadth of Europe - and this changed. All four voices became musically interesting in their own right and stopped specialising. The topmost line lost its primacy (however much its brightness of sound seems to magnetically draw our ears to it.) All lines were equal, and none were meant to be more equal than others (well, most of the time!). Therefore, it's not so easy to hear tunes because tunefulness isn't what the music's about.You are listening instead to a flow of harmony, expressed through interweaving lines. It's a luminous web of counterpoint. The lines are usually beautiful in their own right, but you don't (for the most part) hear them in their own right. They are blended. I'm sure many of you have had little difficulty in just enjoying hearing this blending of voices as they float dreamily across a stained-glass window, or the face of your radio. I'm afraid I need more. When I started following individual lines or listening to the flow of harmony, the clicking process began. After all, counterpoint where (say) four voices interweave and none has primacy is pretty much what Bach was about when writing his fugues. There's no reason why anyone who loves Bach fugues shouldn't take to Renaissance polyphony as well, is there?

Well, as I loved Bach fugues and yet didn't take to Renaissance polyphony anywhere near so readily, there must be more to it than that. What?

Well, composers before and after this period phrased their pieces in a different way to the composers of this period. The key is the way melodic phrases reach their cadences. Listen to Machaut or Dufay, for example, and you hear long, clearly-shaped melodic phrases built from distinctive shorter phrases, whereas with Ockeghem and Josquin the phrases seem to wander around without purpose. With Machaut and Dufay there are clear, punctuating cadences to which these phrases lead, whereas with Ockeghem and Josquin the cadences just seem to turn up - plus we have to wait longer for them to arrive. As a result, the feel of tonal-sounding harmony (which does seem to be something people respond to easily, even in modal music) is much less strong in the music from the heart of the Renaissance age than in any other period up till the 20th century. The freedom of the bass voice is another factor in the undermining of the sense we tonally-attuned modern types have of familiar tonal-sounding harmony in the music of Ockeghem, Josquin and Co. None of these 'problems' exists with a Bach fugue.

So, the music of the period I'm describing is less obviously tuneful and less harmonically familiar than either the music that preceded it or the music that succeeded it. (Yes, I know Machaut's music sounds unfamiliar too, but the unfamiliarity seems almost modern - unlike the unfamiliarity of the Renaissance masters). It is also far less concerned with contrast, especially as regards texture. That, I believe, is why I found it hard to come to terms with for so long. It seemed simultaneously strange and boring. Spend time with it though and it will surely cast its spell over you. Then it will cease to be strange and become anything but boring. The counterpoint can nourish the imagination, the entwining melodic lines carrying you along on one voice after another through lovely harmonies. 

Hopefully, you 'got it' much more quickly than me!

As examples of what I mean, please compare Dufay's motet Ave regina caelorum with the Kyrie from Ockeghem's Missa Prolationum or the Kyrie from Josquin's Missa l'Homme Armé. Or compare the Kyrie of Machaut's Messe de Notre Dame with Ockeghem's mesmeric Deo Gratias. (Some truly stunning music here!)

Canons to the left of them, Canons to the right of them

A few years ago, BBC Radio 3 broadcast 'A Bach Christmas', playing all the works of old Sebastian, and having enjoyed a feast of counterpoint I thought I might surprise the family with a little canon based on Bach tunes. They're not really into classical music (to put it mildly), but as I recorded it using the 'Bells' sound on our electric organ, it sounded very festive - like having our own cathedral to ring in the new year. It grabbed their attention for at least a couple of minutes. Yes, that was one wild new year!

I love trying to write canons but, no, I'm not going to share them with you. Instead, I want to try to give a short overview of what canons are.

You'll certainly all know what canons are anyhow (if you don't already know) if I tell you that they're also called 'rounds' (or 'catches') and you may have sung them at school. Popular examples are Frère Jacques, Row, Row, Row Your Boat and Three Blind Mice. 

A round is a piece of music where one voice (or instrument) begins the tune and two or more other voices (or instruments) join it later, singing the same tune, note for note, overlapping the first voice. The result is that different phrases of the tune are sung simultaneously. The result should sound harmonious. 

This definition (my own) of a round can serve just as well as the definition of a canon, as the round is only the simplest form of canon, known as a canon at the unison - that is when the second voice (and then the third voice and the fourth voice, etc) begins the tune on exactly the same note as the first voice. A canon at the octave is very nearly the same thing (and will sound pretty much identical to the listener, especially when a mixed choir is singing), except that the second voice begins...and I think you might guess where I'm going with this one...an octave higher. All my attempts so far have been canons at the unison or octave. 

The first-ever (known) piece of counterpoint was a canon at the unison: Sumer Is Icumen In (Summer is here!), dating from around 1260. Even if you don't read music, comparing the shapes of each of the lines in the score below should give you a good idea of how a canon at the unison looks on the page, and perhaps how it might work in practice:

With Sumer Is Icumen In, it's not very difficult to hear the process in action. Even the accompanying figure (which you can see beginning in the tenor part at the end of printed score) doesn't distract the ear. 

That's not always the case. A well-known later example of a canon at the octave is the eight piece, God grant with grace, in Tudor composer Thomas Tallis's extremely beautiful Nine Psalm Tunes for Archbishop Parker's Psalter, a piece known as Tallis's Canon, or as the hymn Glory to thee, my God, this night. Here the soprano follows four beats behind the tenor and begins an octave higher. The other two voices do their own thing, though occasionally echoing parts of the canon. Whether you listen from 6.10 in this video or 6.07 in this one or 6.08 in this one, can you hear the canon being sung between the tenor and soprano? I'm afraid I just seem unable to hear the piece as anything other than a soprano tune accompanied by three other voices providing harmony. For me, the tenor's tune gets lost in the lines and harmony of his two non-soprano companions. I can see the canon in the score but can't hear it in performance. Possibly if some performances brought out the tenor part out more (got Placido Domingo to sing it maybe!) then I might hear the process of Tallis's canon in action, but I'm not so sure about that. 

You can have canons at any interval - at the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, etc. Pachebel's Canon, if you were wondering, is a canon at the unison, with a ground bass for accompaniment: 

Canons are fun for composers. They are a bit like doing crossword puzzles or playing chess. They take a great deal of ingenuity to pull off. Many composers want us listeners to share their pleasure in the ingenuity of their canons. They want us to hear what they're up to. We listeners can indeed find it highly satisfying to follow the different voices as they imitate each other. However, some composers are far less concerned that the listener hears the canonic process. They might even wish us not to notice the intellectual scaffolding beneath their music. Or they might care only to please themselves, or connoisseurs of scores, or performers. The anonymous composer of Sumer Is Icumen In clearly fell in the first camp, and I suspect Tallis fell in the second camp.

Where does Webern fall with his Dormi Jesu from the 5 Canons on Latin Texts, Op.16? Well, he's not exactly hiding the fact that his pieces are all canons, having chosen that title for the set. This particular tiny little piece for soprano and clarinet, however, is an example of a type of canon that is rather hard for the listener to follow as a canon - canon by inversion. Here any rising interval in the first voice becomes a falling interval in the second voice - an instance of contrary motion. It's easiest heard at the very start of Dormi Jesu, where the first four notes played by the clarinet rise through three intervals and the soprano then enters with four notes falling through the same three intervals, upside down. Thereafter I suspect you will find it harder to follow (as a listener), given the wide leaps in the two lines and the fact that you will probably hear the two parts as being completely different melodies.

Even harder not to hear as two completely different melodies is the retrograde canon, or crab-canon, or cancrizans. Here the second voice imitates the first voice by simultaneously singing/playing the melody backwards. The ear is, I would say, incapable of hearing the second voice's part as a new tune altogether, unrelated to the original tune - except to anyone reading a score. With a crab-canon, the composer is satisfying himself and score-reading scholars, but not his listeners - at least as regards the satisfaction given by following canons. Obviously, the piece can still delight us even if we don't know that there are canons at work. (That really is obvious!) This truly excellent YouTube video gives a very clear demonstration of the cancrizans at work in a movement from Bach's Musical Offering.

And there's more. Stravinsky wrote a deeply expressive Double Canon, where two canons on different themes proceed simultaneously. You can have triple canons, or as many canons going on as you like. The great American-born maverick Conlon Nancarrow had twelve of them going on in his jaw-dropping Study No.37 for player piano! Plus, as the Nancarrow example shows, canons can be played at different speeds. There are prolation canons where the tune is, indeed, played at different speeds in different voices. A beautiful recent example is Arvo Pärt's Cantus In Memoriam Benjamin Britten. where an A minor scale falls repeatedly against itself at various speeds.

Canons have been with us since around 1260 then and continued to flourish for the rest of the Medieval period. They were very popular with the Renaissance and the Baroque. After a very short dip they rose again with the Classical era. Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven all wrote them. Many were jokes, such as Beethoven's delightful Ta ta ta, lieber Mälzel (the tune of which might well remind you of this). One of Beethoven's most wonderful creations, the quartet Mir ist so wunderbar from the opera Fidelio, is also a canon. YouTube has huge numbers of these fantastic little chips from Beethoven's workshop here. Canons lasted even through the Romantic era, where they tended to become far less strict and were usually accompanied examples, such as this gem from Schumann, his Study No.4 from Op.56. Brahms was their greatest Romantic exponent, using canons in many of his works and writing a fair few stand-alone ones, such as this magical specimen, Einförmig is der Liebe Gram, based on Schubert's Der Leiermann from Die Winterreise. With the coming of the Twentieth Century, canons of the stricter and unaccompanied kind came back with a vengeance. All manner of composers relished them, from Schoenberg (you should enjoy these!) to Stravinsky (see above), from Pärt (also see above) to Ligeti (not yet on YouTube). 

In other words, they've always been loved by composers and are one of the most durable musical forms.  Long may that continue to be so!

500 Years in a Nutshell!

For those who find the five hundred or so years of music prior to Monteverdi (c.1600) hard to get a handle on (as I did for many years), I thought that a little chronological guide, complete with YouTube links, to a few of the landmark composers across those many centuries might be a helpful starting point and might reveal, in the simplest and most direct way, just how music changed over that period. Even if it doesn't help much, there's some exceptionally beautiful music to be found at the end of every click!

Hildegard of Bingen, 1098-1179, O frondens virga (single-part chant, sometimes with drone)
Leonin, 1150s-?1201, Dulce lignum (two-part polyphony)
Perotin, c.1200, Viderunt omnes (three- and four-part polyphony)
Adam de la Halle, ?1237-1288, Bonne amourete me tient gai - Dame, or sui traïs (polyphonic secular song)
Guillaume de Machaut, c.1300-1377, Messe de Notre Dame (ars nova, isorhythmics, growing complexity)
Solage, late 14th Century, Fumeux fume par fumee  (ars subtilior, even great complexity)
John Dunstable, c.1390-1453, Veni Sancte Spiritus ('the English countenance', a new simplicity, the advent of Renaissance music)
Guillaume Dufay, c.1397-1474, Balsamus et munda cera (the Burgundian School, fauxbourdon, the birth of Renaissance music).

Johannes Ockeghem, d.1497, Missa Prolationum (the Franco-Flemish School, beginnings of distinctive Renaissance polyphony, growing emphasis on homogeneity of texture)
Josquin des Prez, c.1450-1521, In principio erat verbum (greatest composer of the Franco-Flemish School, the rise of an international polyphonic style)
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, ?1526-1594, Sicut Cervus, (Roman School, culmination of Renaissance polyphony) 
Orlande de Lassus, ?1532-1594, Timor et tremor (mature polyphonic style of the Franco-Flemish School, intimations of 'modern' style)
William Byrd, ?1540-1623, Haec dies (the international Renaissance polyphonic style in England, the greatest English composer of the Renaissance)
Tomas Luis de Victoria, 1548-1611, O magnum mysterium (the international Renaissance polyphonic style in Spain, the greatest Spanish composer of the Renaissance, and probably of all time)
Giovanni Gabrieli, c.1555-1612, Hodie completi sunt (from the Renaissance to the Baroque)

Claudio Monteverdi, c.1567-1643 Deus in Adjutorium (the Baroque!)

Ave abbatissa nobilis

Norman Lebrecht's blog Slipped Disc brings us news that Pope Benedict XVI is about to officially canonise a composer - the German abbess, Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), who is also set to made a doctor of the Church in 2012.

Hildegard's popularity has soared in recent decades, doubtless initially prompted by the growth of scholarly interest in women composers of the Middle Ages but moving dramatically into the public sphere when Gothic Voices (featuring Emma Kirkby) released their best-selling CD, "A Feather on the Breath of God", in the 1980s. TV programmes followed, including a BBC dramatisation of her life starring Patricia Routledge ("Man is in this connection an indication of the Godhead while woman, Richard, is an indication of the humanity of God's Son. If you have to perspire, your holiness, I wish you'd go into the back garden, so as not to disturb the people who respect us socially.") Hildegard (an 'holistic mystic') has now even become an icon of the New Age movement.

She wrote a large number of chants. (Cue a short history lesson!)

Plainchant appears to have grown out of early Jewish chants and began to be codified for Christian use by Pope Gregory I some 1,400 years ago. The melody is a single line which can be sung by either one singer or by a choir. Instruments can be used to double the line, but usually aren't. Harmony results from the use of a drone, whether it be just one long note underpinning the whole piece or a strictly parallel melody shadowing the line four or five notes distant from the melody proper.

What gives Hildegard's chants their unique, ecstatic quality is that they soar and leap and turn much more than 'run-of-the-mill' chant (if I may employ such a disparaging term for what are often beautiful melodies!). Her melodies can, on occasions, range well over two octaves and often dance across the central octave with great freedom, while the 'run-of-the-mill' chants of her contemporaries (if we use the word 'contemporaries' very, very loosely!!) usually stick to a far smaller range. Against the narrow intervals (stepwise motion, seconds and thirds) favoured by her fellow chant-writers, who seemed to like their melodies to curve like gentle hills, she made much use of those then-rare beasts, fourths and fifths, relishing the sharper angles they create, which (extending the same imagery) are more like mountain peaks. Her music also make much use of melisma (those swirls of melody on a single syllable of text), giving an even greater sense of life and joyfulness. All this means that Hildegard's music feels fresher, more expressive, more spontaneous, more tuneful, more sensuous, more modern even, to our ears than other plainchant of the time. It's plainchant that lets it all hang out. Or, to put it more formally and probably far more accurately, it's experimental, avant-garde plainchant. Reading around has taught me that the German lands at the time were surprisingly given to cultural experimentation and that new developments in art, architecture and music - including the question of how to make chant more expressive - were enthusiastically discussed in monasteries.

Some fine examples for you drawn from the many Hildegard's pieces available on YouTube. First, you could try one of her antiphons, O pastor animarum (O Shepherd of souls), which begins with a rising fifth and quickly makes use of a melisma on the -mar of 'animarum'. For a responsory, where the chant often alternates between a soloist and choir (one responding to the other), you should probably try what is doubtless Hildegard's most famous piece, Columba aspexit ('The dove peered in', text here). The two recordings linked to clearly show the contrast between unaccompanied chant and that accompanied by a drone. Other fine pieces and performances for newcomers to Hildegard's music include the antiphon O Successores Fortissimi Leonis ('O Successors of The Mightiest Lion") and the hymn Ave generosa  ('Hail, girl of noble birth').

Hail Saint Hildegard!