An Introduction to Early Music
Broadly speaking there are two types of early musician.
There are those for whom programme planning involves scouring the shelves of
specialist music shops for reliable modern editions of early music. But there
are also those for whom the atmosphere of a dingy library filled with the rich aroma
of rotting parchment acts on the senses like a Class A drug: to these zealots,
an encounter with code-named tomes such as W1 or Bologna 015 is equivalent to
the steam enthusiast's sighting of LNER 69523 or GWR L99.
So what are the sources of early music like? Frequently
incomplete, ambiguous, and illegible. But one thing they all have in common is
that they are extraordinary. Extraordinary because they have survived at all,
and extraordinary because many of them are the only surviving source for the
music that they contain. The feeling of leafing through decaying pages known to
have been copied by the likes of Ludford and Purcell is not easy to describe - the
distant musical past will never come alive, but this is arguably the closest
that you'll get.
The sources of early music fall into two categories:
manuscripts (handwritten documents) and prints. Before the invention of
printing in the second half of the fifteenth century all music had to be
prepared in manuscript. This was obviously a lengthy process, and one in which
scribes invested much time and effort. Unfortunately for the musician of today,
the physical appearance of the manuscript was often paramount, with the result
that the overall visual effect was sometimes allowed to ride roughshod over
textual detail. Early printed music was often ambiguous for different reasons
-if more than one impression was made in order to create a single page of
music, it is easy to see how the notes might not have fitted accurately onto
the relevant lines of the stave or between the relevant spaces. Moreover, the
replacement of stout parchment by flimsy paper means that many a unique folio
has been eroded by the corrosive action of primitive inks and exposure to light
and moisture.
However, these things become easy to live with, and the
real enthusiast will frequently revel in the natural degeneration of a
manuscript because it underlines its age and frailty, and hence its historical
value. In reality, points of editorial controversy usually occur when trying to
make sense of the things that early scribes chose not to indicate at all. Imagine,
if you will, a medieval composition. Title? Not always. Composer's name? Frequently
not. Scoring? Highly unspecific. Pitch? Huge can of worms. Tempo indications? None.
Marks of dynamics, phrasing, and articulation? No, no and no. And so it goes
on. But, again, the lack of such things often inspires today's editor and
performer. Apart from anything else, the scope for interpretation (if that's
not too dirty a word) is greater the further back in time that you travel,
precisely because of all the unknowns.
An understanding of early musical notation is, of course,
the key to the decoding of early sources. The written preservation of music is
regarded as a sine qua non for the Western classical musician, but if we
return to seventh century Europe we find a very different musical culture: one
of oral transmission. Isidore of Seville reported that "unless sounds are
remembered by man, they perish, for they cannot be written down". Two centuries
later a system had developed. The
outline of a melody was indicated by a series of squiggles
and dots (known as neumes, from the Greek word neuma = sign). Specific
pitch was not indicated: this notation merely existed in order to jog the
performer's memory. Gradually, the association between the vertical position of
a neume and its pitch began to be made - one neume placed higher on the page
than another represented a sound pitched higher in the voice than another. From
there, the alignment of neumes upon a series of horizontal lines (a stave) in
order to indicate precise pitch relationships was but a small step.
So much for pitch; but what about rhythm? Well, we cannot
be sure. Some believe that differently shaped notes implied different rhythms
in much the same way that modern musical notation does (a white note with a stem
[a minim] sounds for twice the length of a black note with a stem [a crotchet]
in the same context). However, the earliest rhythmic notation of which we can be
sure defines a note's length by its context rather more than by its individual
appearance. In the case of a single-line melody (for instance Gregorian chant)
the problem is unlikely to be resolved conclusively, but when two or more parts
sound at the same time the jigsaw will often only fit together in a limited
number of ways. As time went on, the appearance of a note became as important
as its context, until eventually - by the Baroque era - the shape and colour of
a note dictated its length precisely.
The development of musical notation is a complicated
story. The work of several musical theorists survives, but one theorist doesn't
always agree with another. The job of the scholar is partly to decide which
theorists to trust and which not. Just because the work of certain theorists
has survived doesn't mean that they necessarily understood everything that
there were describing. Now, as then, it is important not to believe all that
you read in the parchments.