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St. Peter’s College Performing Arts Year 7 Medieval Music |
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Plainsong From the earliest times, people found that music could play a very
important part in their lives - perhaps to accompany ritual and worship, or
to provide entertainment and enjoyment. Few very early pieces of
`entertainment' music, such as songs and dances, have come down to us, since
this kind of music was hardly ever written down. The first people who really found a way of doing this were the monks of
Medieval times (Medieval meaning `of the Middle Ages'). And so most of the music, which has
survived from before the 12th century is that which was composed for the
various services of the Church. This music is known as plainchant, or
plainsong, or Gregorian Chant (named after St. Gregory the Great, who was
Pope from 590 to 604). |
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Troubadours During the 12th and 13th centuries a great
many songs were written by the troubadours
- poet-musicians who lived in southern France. The name
is connected with the modern French word trouver,
which means `to find', and so a troubadour was the `finder', or inventor, of both the
words and the melody of a song.. Many of these musicians were noblemen - one famous troubadour who
composed at least sixty songs was Thibaut, King of Navarre. Others, though,
were of much humbler birth. Whereas music for the church was set to
Latin words, the troubadours used their own everyday languages in writing the
poems for their songs. The melodies of these songs present us with one or two puzzles. All the
songs are written down in melody-line only. Only the pitch of the
notes is clearly indicated, but not the rhythm. We must guess what
this may have been. Matching the notes against the natural rhythm of the words is usually a good guide - but even so, the same song could be written out in modern notation in several quite different rhythmic versions. The second puzzle is that although themusic of each song consists of melody only, it is almost certain that in
performance there would have been some kind of instrumental accompaniment
- perhaps also an instrumental introduction, postlude (rounding-off)
and even interludes between verses. A composer might accompany himself
as he sang, or employ a minstrel to provide an accompaniment (see
the opposite page).
So in modern performances of these songs,
these puzzles must first be solved. We have to make a guess at how
the rhythm should go and how the words are spaced, and perhaps devise
some kind of simple instrumental accompaniment.
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The sound of plainchant may seem strange at
first, for it consists purely of melody. The voices sing in unison, with no
supporting chords or harmonies, and there is no instrumental
accompaniment. The chant melodies move smoothly in small steps rather than
wide leaps. And the rhythm flows gently and irregularly, mainly matching the
natural rhythm and stress of the Latin words to which this music is sung. |
