Instruments and voices

So back to the issue of whether historical information justifies instrumental performance of vocal music. (I feel I should make a disclaimer here, as I am not a medieval music scholar, and there are doubtless many people out there who know more about this than I do...but as I am in the position of needing to decide what to perform, making myself write something about the issues at least helps me clarify the gaps in my knowledge).

Take as an example the 13th century secular 3-part motet, which typically has a different text underlay for each voice (technically, the lower voice does not really have underlay but rather the word representing the chant from which it is derived). Even for a purely vocal performance this raises issues - was it the case in period that all voices would always be sung together, with the resulting constraint on intelligibility? Examples where different manuscripts record 2, 3 and sometimes a 4th voice suggest some flexibility on this, and there is also a 1325 reference (Jacques de Liege) to each part of a motet being performed in isolation. And would it be sung only once, or repeated, perhaps allowing the listener a chance to focus on each voice in turn?

As hinted in an earlier post, I think there is good reason to think that motets might also sometimes been played by a single instrumentalist, perhaps with whatever concessions necessary on the instrument for the multiple lines (three lines are plausible on harp, but some sense of more than one line possible on quite a few other string instruments - and what about the double flute?). Intabulations seem to show this as a common practice for 14th and 15th century, but it could be late development. Also plausible is that an instrumentalist might have played one or more line while singing another.

But would several instrumentalists have played together, each following one line?  Such a performance has the advantage (over a single instrument intabulation ) of allowing the different timbres of instruments to distinguish the lines more clearly. But here the evidence gets murkier - there are certainly depictions of instrumentalists playing together, but that does not mean they played polyphony (plenty of musical traditions follow a multi-instrumental, monophonic model). On the other hands, some of the lines in motets are in fact based on dance tunes (e.g. caroles) so borrowing is certainly going on between monophonic and polyphonic genres.

And would instrumentalists and singers ever have performed together, either doubling or sharing the parts? In short, I don't know, but writing this has given me some impetus to try to find out a bit more...