Choral Music in the Renaissance Author(s): Howard Mayer Brown Source: Early Music, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Apr.

, 1978), pp. 164-169 Published by: Oxford University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3125600 . Accessed: 27/06/2013 09:22
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CHORAL
MUSIC IN THE

RENAISSANCE
HOWARD MAYER BROWN

Instrumental music did not equal vocal music in importance until the 17th century. While it is true that a sizeable amount of music conceived for instruments alone survives from the 16th century-and some of it is of a very high quality-most of the music composed during the Middle Ages and the Renaissancewas connected with a text, and most of the biggest and many of the best 15th- and early 16th-centurycompositions-at least most of the polyphony set to Latin words-were probably performed more often then by voices alone than by voices and instruments or by instruments alone. In short, music for unaccompanied voices forms the central repertory of sacred music in the Renaissance. That statement is surely a truism. There are doubtless good reasons why so many of our professional early music groups place more emphasis on instruments than on voices, but we ought always to be aware of the fact that early music means vocal music in the first place, a point I have made repeatedly in this journal and elsewhere, but which nevertheless seems appropriate to state once again in introducing this choral issue of Early Music. Vocal music is not necessarily choral music, though. The history of the choir has not yet been written. Presumably the first choirs in medieval western Europe were made up of clerics who sang plainchant. Polyphony was the province of the more musically adept soloists. Manfred Bukotzer, in his study of the performance directions in one manuscript, dated the beginnings of choral polyphony about 1430.1No one to my knowledge has yet challenged his conclusion, and archival evidence seems to bear out his contention (at least until new evidence produces new conclusions). Frank D'Accone, for example, who has recentlywritten one of the few studies that attempts to pull together information from a variety of sources to illuminate an historical trend with regard to performance practice, has very neatly demonstrated the growth in the size of choral establishments in some northern Italian churches in the late 15th century.2But to state baldly that polyphonic choirs did not exist before the 15th century (as I seem to be doing) is to imply that a rigid and clear-cut distinction should be made between groups of singers and a choir, distinctions that are patently artificial.
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D'Accone shows that 'choirs' (or do I mean groups of singers?) in northern Italian churches grew from about six men in the earlier part of the 15th century to about 20 men late in the century, plus an unspecified number of choirboys. Someone needs to demonstrate that the same process of growth occurred in other European countries as well, and in fact enough archival records have already been published to permit some tentative conclusions on the subject. I shall certainly not be surprised when D'Accone's figures turn out to be typical for the rest of Europe, and in the meantime they provide a valuable rule of thumb for performers. So far as we know now, in other words, Leonin's and Perotin's organa and clausula-virtuoso pieces that ought from time to time to appear in our well as late 14th-century continental music, concert programmes-as should be sung by soloists or by very small groups of singers. Ideally, Dufay's Masses require no more than about ten men and boys, while Josquin's and also Palestrina's and Lassus' were probably normally performed in the 16th century by choirs of 20-25 singers. Those conclusions seem to be justified by documentary evidence, and moreover they feel right. Dufay's ornate melodic lines need the flexibility and 'give' that soloists can provide, while Josquin's music as well as that by later renaissance composers, in which each of the four or five voices seems to be equally important and equally well conceived in relation to the words, and the melodies generally less fussy than those by early 15th-century composers, can use the greater weight bigger choirs provide. But if choral groups begin to seek to duplicate original performing conditions in the belief that the true character of the music only reveals itself when the sound is close to what the composer imagined, they will find their task even more difficult and frustrating than that of those instrumentalists who are very much involved in reconstructing old, lost sounds. Even if the choirmaster should assemble a group of the correct size, with an 'authentic' distribution of voice parts, and even though he take to heart the conclusions of Peter Phillips in this issue of Early Music about pitch, and even after he has rationalized the lack of castrati and the difficulty, in most countries except Britain, of finding choirboys (for, ultimately, arranging sacred music of the Renaissance for mixed choirs is a fatal compromise), there still remains the well-nigh insoluble problem of discovering or imagining how singers in the 15th and 16th centuries actually produced their voices. Singers are at a great disadvantage in trying to recover lost techniques. They are restricted to descriptions of singers and of singing, whereas instrumentalists at least have the physical objects to hand, with their built-in clues and limitations. But today we might not agree that a voice described as sweet-sounding in the 16th century would correspond in any way with what we think is sweet; surely it is even difficult to get two h``adiimnn `_'- fmdiu people to agree on an appropriate adjective to describe the voice of any given living singer. Quite aside from the subjectivity of mere descriptions, though, there is the additional difficulty of trying to corroborate our guesses about what the old writers mean. In the absence of time machines, we can never be certain we are correct. Even when writers seem to be saying something quite specific, they are not always unambiguous. For example, Dyer, in this issue of Early Music, interprets Conrad von Zabern's Joseph anda bagpipe Three player.AnEnglish singers about dynamics and voice range to mean that the registers of the remarks Bodleian 1320. Library, (Oxford, psalter,after MSAuct.D.22f 113v. Reproduced bypermission) voice should all be distinct and separate, loud in the chest register and soft 165

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Cloistered an illuminated singers; letterheadfrom a 14th-century Bodleian manuscript (Oxford, MS Liturg.198f 91v. Reproduced Library, by permission)

in the head register. Is it possible, though, that Conrad was merely describing the falsetto voice rather clumsily? Perhaps he only meant to explain that singers should not use their full voices at the top of their range because it would be too loud; instead, they should use falsetto, which is sweeter and less obtrusive. And how should we interpret Nanie Bridgman's suggestive report of a 15th-century Italian singer who excused himself because he could not for the moment use his 'voce da camera', his chamber voice?3 He had sung in church and for his students for a long time without stopping, and therefore he needed to rest before he could begin to perform chamber music again. How valid is his implied distinction between church and chamber singing styles? And does this one isolated incident justify us in supposing that Italian sacred music was sung in the Renaissance in a manner closer to the Musica Reservata holler than to the English cathedral hoot? Certainly many choirs in the world today cultivate sounds derived from their own local histories. German choirs seem to have grown from the 19th-century tradition of singing academies and associations of amateurs, Italian groups from opera choruses, and American groups either from college glee clubs (which is why they sometimes call to my mind memories of football games in the autumn) or from the German or Scandinavian singing societies that sprang up in many American cities during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In recent decades many choirs which specialize in renaissance

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music seem to be developing a rather light sound, produced far forward in the mask and with little or no vibrato. That sort of sound produces to my ears the best results-a clear texture in which all of the polyphonic strands are clearly audible-but the justifications for such a solution are empirical rather than historical. One of the knottiest problems of performing choral music fiom the Renaissance concerns the question of adding instruments. When are we justified in mixing cornetts and sackbuts with voices'? How 'authentic' are those recordings that present a colourful melange of soft and loud instruments doubling the singers in some passages and replacing them in others'? The last word has by no means been spoken on the subject, although a growing consensus rejects the notion that any instruments except the organ normally accompanied choirs in liturgical music before the 16th century. D'Accone finds no evidence of instrumental participation in northern Italian churches in the late 15th or early 16th centuries. James McKinnon has searched without success for documentary evidence of instruments in earlier liturgical ceremonies. And Craig Wright has recently reminded us that some important establishments in the Renaissance, such as the Cathedral in Cambrai (as well as the Sistine Chapel in Rome), did not even allow organ music to disturb the rcaippll//a ideal.4 Perhaps court chapels would tell a diflerent story. No one to my knowledge has yet investigated the possibility that princes permitted their instrumental ensembles to take part in church services earlier than the church authorities did. And no scholar has yet systematically surveyed the available information to discover when instruments were admitted to the church. Certainly by the middle of the 16th century many Italian churches regularly hired bands of wind players and the practice may go back to the beginning of the century in some countries and for certain special occasions. I myself think that many professional early music groups are too optimistic in mixing instruments with voices in their performances of sacred music, probably in the fear that modern concert audiences will find 167

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ManfredF. Bukofzer, 'The Beginnings of'

Renaissance Music(London, 1950),pp. 176-89. 2 FrankA. D'Accone, 'The performance of sacred music in Italy duringJosquin's time,
c 1475-1525', inJosquin des Prez, ed. Edward

Choral Polyphony', Studies in Medieval &

E. Lowinsky(London, 1976), pp. 601-18. (Paris, 1964), p. 197. quattrocento 4 D'Accone, 'Performanceof sacred music'; James McKinnon, 'Representationsof the Mass in Medievaland RenaissanceArt' (to be published); and CraigWright, 'Dufayat Cambrai: Discoveriesand Revisions',Journal
ofjtheAmericanMusicologicalSociety28 (1975),
5 H.

3 Nanie Bridgman, La vie musicale au

175-229. M. Brown, 'On Gentile Bellini's

Processionein San Marco (1496)', Proceedingsoj the TwelJthCongressojftheInternational MusicologicalSociety, Berkeley, Caliornia, August

1977 (to be published). See also illustrations to H. M. Brown'sarticle on music in the time of Boccaccio, EarlyMusic5/3 (July 1977), pp. 332, 333, 339. In an article on the pifferiof the court of* Mantua, which will appear in a forthcoming Prizerdescribes three occasions between 1475 and 1495 when the altacappella performed during Mass, once on military campaign and twice for noble weddings. None of the sources describing the events unequivocally states that the loud band accompanied singers, but they do make clear that the band played during the liturgical service. I am grateful to Mr Prizerfor letting me read his article before publication.
issue of Rivista Italiana di Musicologia, William

the 'authentic' versions too austere. But that austerity was probably mitigated in some circumstances even in the 15th century. Trumpets may have played in church sometimes, but possibly only to add a fanfare or two at coronations and other very splendid occasions. I have recently shown that soft instruments sometimes accompanied processions outside the church, through the city streets, in northern Italy in the late 15th century.5 And someone needs to integrate the well-known description of the consecration of the cathedral of Florence in 1436 into the theory that instruments were never played in church before the 16th century. On that occasion strings and winds played both during the procession and at the elevation of the host. The assumption we all make that choruses sang sacred music and groups of solo singers, one to a part, madrigals, chansons, lieder and other secular music, is probably a usable generalization, although stated so baldly it is doubtless over simple. Madrigalesque compositions were very likely sung in 16th-century Italy, for example, by relatively large groups (that is, by choirs), at civic and courtly ceremonies, during the intermedii staged between acts of plays, and at unusually sumptuous banquets. And in smaller courts and churches, and perhaps during the duller bits of the ecclesiastical year sacred music may well have been sung by a handtul of musicians even in important centres. Those exceptions beg the question, of course, of what is ideal and of how we should best serve the composer's intentions, and yet performance conditions varied as much then as now, and we should perhaps tolerate and even encourage experimentation and diversity. John Eliot Gardner's performances of Monteverdi's madrigals with large choir, for instance, may not be 'authentic' but his choir projects this music, almost certainly intended for soloists, beautifully, and it gains in sureness and force what it loses in flexibility and nuance in Gardner's readings. As with almost everything having to do with the performing conventions of past times, we must steer a narrow course between a complete and mindless permissiveness and a holier-than-thou purism that makes new dogmas and pretends to know more than it actually does. We would all like to be provided with a set of rules that can be mechanically followed, so that we can be certain that we are either right or wrong. But real life, including the real life of the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance that we are trying to reconstruct, seldom works that way. There are those, I daresay, who would claim that French secular music in early 16th-century Italy was never sung but always played on instruments, because the manuscript sources seldom supply text, and those who would claim that madrigals must never under any circumstances be sung by a choir, but the truth was probably more complicated and more diverse. Certainly when we compare the surviving music of the 16th century with eye-witness accounts of how it was actually performed on particular occasions, we almost always see that the versions that have come down to us in printed books and manuscripts were disseminated in a manner to make the pertformers' job easier. Compositions were published in a more or less 'neutral' version, the best way to convey the sense of the music and at the same time allow the performing musicians freedom to arrange them in the ways they thought best. In sum, there are still many things we need to know about choirs in the Renaissance and how they sounded, before we can claim with any

168

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assurance that we can judge the authenticity of a performance. How big were choirs at any particular time and place? How many singers in each voice range participated? How did they produce their sound? Which choirs and which for smaller groups of pieces should be reserved fotbr soloists? How many instruments can one add to a choir and what kinds should they be? If we could give convincing answers to these and other questions, we still could not claim that we know the greatest masterpieces of the 15th and 16th centuries until they become a regular part of the concert repertory in our present-day secular society. I have never understood why some musicians object to hearing renaissance masses in modern concert halls. They seem to me no more objectionable or out of place there than renaissance madrigals or chansons. And yet, how many masses and motets by Dufay, Ockeghem, Josquin des Prez, Lassus, Victoria, Palestrina or Byrd are performed each year in Alice Tully Hall in New York, or at the South Bank in London? Until the time comes when those works take their rightful place in the concert hall beside Susato and Praetorius dances and other quaint novelties on curious sounding instruments, we shall all have a distorted notion of the scope and dimension of early music. Collaert a drawing Stradarus. choral Celebration 1595.Engraving (Staatliches byjohannes byAdrian after Institutfilr ofMass withfull accompaniment Berlin) Musikforschung,

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