More soon

Between work and travel, I haven't found time to update this blog as often as intended. So this is just a note to say there will be more soon! As writing on this blog is mostly a way to get myself to think and read more about medieval music, and in writing, to organise my thoughts, I won't be giving it up yet. But it would be nice to know if anyone is reading and finds particular topics of interest.

Otherwise, I am intending to follow up some the ideas about the application of  'rhetoric' to instrumental arrangement and performance of medieval tunes. There are many scholarly studies of the connection of rhetoric and music, and it is clear that canons of rhetoric were an important part of medieval learning and thought. But I want to take a more practical approach - are there rhetorical techniques and devices regarding construction and presentation of persuasive verbal arguments that can be directly used to improve the 'persuasiveness' of a musical performance?

Drones and polyphony

My last post discussed a little the idea of adding a drone to a monophonic piece as an effective way to enhance an instrumental performance. It illustrates a more general idea - if you are going to borrow from the vocal repertoire (and as a medieval instrumentalist, you are going to quickly run out of repertoire unless you do) then it is useful, perhaps essential, to think beyond just playing the notes in the vocal score on your instrument. Rather, you need to investigate what your instrument can bring to this tune. Many good musicians do this instinctively but it is useful (especially for those of us who aren't 'instinctive' musicians) to think about it consciously as well.

I should thank a workshop with the fantastic lutenist Crawford Young for making this point explicit (and Chris for reminding me of it). Young complained of students presenting him with a 'note perfect' instrumental rendition of an Ars Nova motet - his comment was "what is the point?". An instrumental version of a vocal piece should not just be a pale reflection of what would be better sung, presenting the notes without the words. It should use the song as the starting point for something else.

But to get back to drones. Clearly if a polyphonic vocal piece is played with at least one drone instrument (such as bagpipe, hurdy-gurdy or (arguably) medieval fiddle) on one of the parts, then a drone will be added to the polyphonic texture. A repertoire we often explore in such a way is the medieval conductus: technically, sacred music but not 'liturgical' in the sense that it is not an essential part of the mass. We have found many examples of two-part conductus that sound great in a two bagpipe performance. In taking this music as a jumping off point for an enjoyable instrumental performance, are we doing something inherently modern, or could this be defended as plausible historical practice?  

Adding a drone

I thought it might be interesting to look a little more into the use of drones in medieval music (that is, having a consistent sounding of the tonic or home note of the tune throughout the tune). It certainly seems to work well for a lot of tunes, and is a common feature of modal monophonic music in other cultures, but do we know if it was actually a feature of music in Europe in the middle ages?

For some instruments, a drone is more or less built in, with obvious examples being the hurdy-gurdy and bagpipe, although in fact early depictions of bagpipes do not always show a drone; and it is not always evident from descriptions and depictions of early hurdy-gurdies (synfonie or organistrum) that they necessarily included drone strings.

As mentioned in my last post, fiddles with flat bridges lend themselves readily to addition of a drone. Plucked strings such as early lutes etc. can be effectively played with one of the open strings used intermittently to create a drone effect. On the harp, the easiest way to add something with the other hand to a monophonic piece is to pluck a drone, but there is a strong temptation to make it 'movable' (i.e. to go to adjacent notes as the tune moves) which is not strictly a drone.  

So far these are all single instruments producing drones to accompany themselves - would musicians playing together have sometimes done so with one simply playing a drone? I previously discussed the early 'wind band' which seemed to consist of two or more natural trumpets with a shawm - which would seem to point to something more or less drone-like (including the tonic, fifth and octave) in the accompaniment.

However, in terms of direct evidence of use of a drone as a standard way to enhance a monophonic tune, I haven't been able to find very much so far. In fact the only direct description  I have found comes from a text on training singers, the Summa musice (which has been variously dated from the 12th to 14th century). This says that two part music (dyaphonia) includes 'baslicam' and 'organicam'; in 'dyaphonia basilica' one musician holds one note as basis, the other starts on fifth or octave and makes ascending and descending passages, joining with the bass at the cadences ("agreeing in his pauses with the one who holds the foundation for him").

Droning on

One of the first groups to really grab my attention and engage my enthusiasm for medieval music was Sinfonye, with their core sound established by Stevie Wishart's fantastic fiddle and sinfonye playing. In particular, her fiddle style is strongly drone based, an approach that seems well justified by the existing evidence for relatively flat bridges and consonant open string tuning in early fiddles, as well as its general effectiveness for modal tunes. Every so often I have encountered people who really do not enjoy music with drones (they also dislike bagpipes, for example) but more often I find the average listener who knows little about early music finds the sound particularly exciting and enjoyable, often without really knowing why.

So I was very interested when I came across this passage from (yet another) article by Chris Page about the organistrum and symphonia:

How did the lettered musicians of the 13th  and 14th centuries regard drone accompaniments? Had they constructed a hierarchy of string-techniques that distinguished (a) constant drones from (b) proto-polyphonic forms blurring into (c) genuine plurilinear polyphony? If so, were they prejudiced-as most modern Western listeners are-in favour of plurilinear music?2 Can the supposed social fall of hurdy-gurdies be explained by a dependence upon drones?

As I find so often with Page, his impeccable research and beautifully phrased writing seems to have subtext about what is 'ideal'  medieval music (pure vocal polyphony), with everything else some kind of preparation or departure that should be taken less seriously. Why should we expect medieval musicians to put these different approaches in a hierarchy? And isn't the 'prejudice' one of the modern Western classical music listener (or choral scholar), rather than one common to all Western ears?

Frustratingly, however, I haven't been able to find that Page ever answered the questions posed in this introduction. The referenced article (Part 1) makes a good case that the origins of the instrument are most likely to be German, not Arabic as some have claimed; and a following article (Part 2) that 'organistrum' and 'symphonia' (and variant terms) were used fairly interchangeably, rather than the first being always the 2-person instrument as is often suggested. But I can't find trace of a Part 3.