have brought to light a number of works in the forms of motet,
conductus, rondel (neither the later rondo nor the round, but a
kind of triple counterpoint), which show that “Sumer is icumen
in” contains no unique technical feature; but no work within
two centuries of its date attains a style so nearly intelligible
to modern ears. Its richness and firmness of harmony are
such that the frequent use of consecutive fifths and octaves,
in strict accordance with 13th-century principles, has to our
ears all the effect of a series of grammatical blunders, so sharply
does it contrast with the smooth counterpoint of the rest. In
what light this smooth counterpoint struck contemporaries,
or how its author (who may or may not be the writer of the
Reading MS., John of Fornsete) arrived at it, is not clear,
though W. S. Rockstro’s amusing article, “Sumer is icumen
in,” in Grove’s Dictionary, is very plausible. All that we know is
that music in England in the 13th century must have been at
a comparatively high state of development; and we may also
conjecture that the tuneful character of this wonderful rota
has something in common with the unwritten but famous
songs of the aristocratic troubadours, or trouvères, of the 12th
and 13th centuries, who, while disdaining to practise the art of
accompaniment or the art of scientific and written music,
undoubtedly set the fashion in melody, and, being themselves
poets as well as singers, formed the current notions as to the
relations between musical and poetic rhythm. The music
of Adam de la Hale, surnamed Le Bossu d’Arras (c. 1230–1288),
shows the transformation of the troubadour into the learned
musician; and, nearly a century later, the more ambitious
efforts of a greater French poet (like his contemporary Petrarca,
one of Chaucer’s models in poetic technique), Guillaume de
Machault (fl. 1350), mark a further technical advance, though they
are not appreciably more intelligible to the modern ear.
In the next century we find an Englishman, John Dunstable, who had as early as 1437 acquired a European reputation; while his works were so soon lost sight of that until recently he was almost a legendary character, sometimes revered as the “inventor” of counterpoint, and once or twice even identified with St Dunstan! Recently a great deal of his work has come to light, and it shows us (especially when taken in connexion with the fact that the early Netherlandish master, G. Dufay, did not die until 1474, twenty-one years after Dunstable) that English counterpoint was fully capable of showing the composers of the Netherlands the path by which they were to reach the art of the “Golden age.” In such examples of Dunstable’s work as that appended to the article “Dunstable” in Grove’s Dictionary (new ed., i. 744) we see music approaching a style more or less consistently intelligible to a modern ear; and in English Carols of the 15th Century (1891) several two-part compositions of the period, in a style resembling Dunstable’s, have been made accessible to modern readers and filled out into four-part music by the editor “in accordance with the rules of the time.” And though it may be doubted whether Mr Rockstro’s skill would not have been held in the 15th century to savour overmuch of the Black Art, still the success of his attempt shows that the musical conceptions he is dealing with are no longer radically different from those of our modern musical consciousness.
4. The Golden Age.—The struggle towards the realization of mature musical art seems incredibly slow when we do not realize its difficulty, and wonderfully rapid as soon as we attempt to imagine the effort of first forming those harmonic conceptions which are second nature to us. Even at the time of Dunstable and Dufay the development of the contrapuntal idea of independence of parts had not yet so transformed the harmonic consciousness that the ancient parallelisms or consecutive fourths and fifths that were the backbone of discant could be seen in their true light as contradictory to the contrapuntal method. By the beginning of the 16th century, however, the laws of counterpoint were substantially fixed; practice was for a while imperfect, and aims still uncertain, but skill was increasing and soon became marvellous; and in 16th-century music we leave the archaic world altogether. Henceforth music may show various phenomena of crudeness, decadence and transition, but its transition-periods will always derive light from the past, whatever the darkness of the future.
In the best music of the 16th century we have no need of research or mental gymnastics, beyond what is necessary in all art to secure intelligent presentation and attention. Its materials show us the “three dimensions” of music in their simplest state of perfect balance. Rhythm, emancipated from the tyranny of verse, is free to co-ordinate and contrast a multitude of melodies which by the very independence of their flow produce a mass of harmony that passes from concord to concord through ordered varieties of transitional discord. The criterion of discord is no longer that of mere harshness, but is modified by the conception of the simplicity or remoteness of the steps by which the flux of independent simultaneous melodies passes from one concord, or point of repose, to another. When the music reaches a climax, or its final conclusion, the point of repose is, of course, greatly emphasized. It is accordingly the “cadences” or full closes of 16th-century music that show the greatest resemblance to the harmonic ideas of the present day; and it is also at these points that certain notes were most frequently raised so as to modify the ecclesiastical modes which are derived more or less directly from the melodic diatonic scale of the Greeks, and misnamed, according to inevitable medieval misconceptions, after the Greek modes.[1]
In other passages our modern ears, when unaccustomed to the style, feel that the harmony is strange and lacking in definite direction; and we are apt to form the hasty conclusion that the mode is an archaic survival. A more familiar acquaintance with the art soon shows that its shifting and vague modulations are no mere survival of a scale inadequate for any but melodic purposes, but the natural result of a state of things in which only two species of chord are available as points of repose at all. If no successions of such chords were given prominence, except those that define key according to modern notions based upon a much greater variety of harmony, the resulting monotony and triviality would be intolerable. Moreover, there is in this music just as much and no more of formal antithesis and sequence as its harmony will suffice to hold together. Lastly, we shall find, on comparing the masterpieces of the period with works of inferior rank, that in the masterpieces the most archaic modal features are expressive, varied and beautiful; while in the inferior works they are often avoided in favour of ordinary modern ideas, and, when they occur, are always accidental and monotonous, although in strict conformity with the rules of the time. The consistent limitations of harmony, form and rhythm have the further consequence that the only artistic music possible within them is purely vocal. The use of instruments is little more than a necessary evil for the support of voices in case of insufficient opportunity for practice; and although the origins of instrumental music are already of some artistic interest in the 16th century, we must leave them out of our account if our object is to present mature artistic ideas in proper proportions.
The principles of 16th-century art-forms are discussed in more detail in the article on Contrapuntal Forms. Here we will treat the formal criteria on a general basis; especially as with art on such simple principles the distinction between one art-form and another is apt to be either too external or too subtle for stability. With music there is a stronger probability than in any other art that merely mechanical devices will be self-evident, and thus they may become either dangerous or effective. With the masters of the Netherlands they speedily became both. Two adjacent groups of illustrations in Burney’s
- ↑ The technical nature of the subject forbids us to discuss the origin and characteristics of the great Ambrosian and Gregorian collections of melodic church music on which nearly all medieval and 16th-century polyphony was based, and from which the ecclesiastical modes were derived. Professor Wooldridge in The Oxford History of Music, i. 20–44, has shown the continuity of this early Christian music with the Graeco-Roman music, and the origin of its modes in the Ptolemaic modification (c. A.D. 150) of the Greek diatonic scale; while a recent defence of the ecclesiastical tradition of a revision by St Gregory will be found in the article on “Gregorian music” in Grove’s Dictionary (new ed.), ii. 235.
