NEWSLETTER: 7 June 2020

A Little Reminder

Please don' t forget to keep looking at our website where, amongst other things, the Gerontius rehearsal videos are being regularly uploaded within the Member Area:

www.mkchorale.org.uk

Our Member Area is accessed by clicking on the ' L og In' text within the purple bar at the bottom of each web page. Once the Log In screen is loaded, insert the user name and password as below:

User Name: Members Password: SingersMK.19! The Member Area contains the followi ng:

Board member s Voice reps & Other key personnel The Choral Conduct ing Scholar Subscriptions & donations Policy documents Music downloads & Other useful links Past newsletters, papers & rehearsal notes AGM papers Concerts & Venue details

The Dream of Gerontius Rehearsal Links & Warm Up

Video 1 https://youtu.be/T8yhEVv-lRE

Video 2 https://youtu.be/nLhI6QUHUBY

YouT ube Links on Choir WhatsApp Sites This Week

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BDUVh0j-y4

https://www .google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://w ww.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000jqyr&ved=2ahUKEwjWqZnImObp AhWiolwKHechAOgQFjAAegQIAhAB &usg=AOvVaw2304_N4pgA5ll1 7 5cIJF_Yy

What Have You Been Doing This Week??

Anne Wood has been busy on her model of Hogwarts !!

Well done Anne !

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An Ode for Those Deaf Basses on the B ack Row!

When God gave out brains , I thought He said trains And I missed mine . When God gave out looks , I thought He said books So I didn’t get any . When God gave out ears , I thought He said beers So I ordered large ones . When God gave out noses , I thought He said roses And I ordered a red one . When God gave out chins , I thought He said gins So I ordered a double . When God gave out legs , I thought He said kegs So I ordered two fat ones . When God gave out heads , I thought He said beds And I ordered a soft one . Oh God! Am I in a mess ? Anon .

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Alex Aitken’s Potted History of Music

Part II: The Late Medieval Period (c.1100-1400)

Increased annoyance/tuts/medieval-angry-face at the existence of two versions of B from navigating between modes, hard, and soft hexachords results in shouts of FINE, a stomping of feet, and writing a ‘b’ with hard or soft edges. The hard-edged b becomes the natural and the soft-edged b, through mistranslation and transliteration (sleepy monk?), became a ‘flat’ in English instead of a soft. Meanwhile, Johannes de Garlandia defines how composers have been using Greek rhythmic modes in music (trochee, iamb, dactyl, etc.) around 1250. Léonin and Perotin show off by creating highly decorative sacred pieces using different words (mots in French, hence they become motets), with beaucoup de twiddle above and below the ‘fixed chant’ (cantus firmus in Latin) in the middle. Said chant was held – tenere/tenu in Latin/French – by the tenors.

Elsewhere the naughty-humoured Goliards, fresh from writing Carmina Burana texts, have blown raspberries at and influenced/corrupted the secular troubadours and jongleurs, who have now appeared in the south of France, juggling, setting fire to things, and serenading their courtly subjects with monophonic hits including ‘I Saw a Fair Maiden’, ‘Lovely Morning for a Bit of Plague’ and ‘A Syphilitic Lullaby’. Their bar form (AAB) canso, chanson and tenso become increasingly risqué, but the German Minnesingers and their love-infused Minnesang remain more polite.

Over time the Minnesingers decide gambling and drinking with the Goliards is more fun, and hand over the craft of love songs to the Guild of Meistersingers. In England someone decides to measure the arrival of summer by the resulting increased level of goat flatulence, and writes the round ‘Sumer is icumen in’. Back in the European church, square notation is concocted, with square notes for ascending patterns and diamonds for descending (oooh clever); the oriscus, quilisma, episema, and liquescent neumes appear to record further information for increasingly hungover singers; rhythmic timing and plague are still free, but ale, land, and a license to practise witchcraft increasingly expensive.

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Dots or _ are now added to notes to imply they are longer or held [tenuto named after the Latin for ‘ held’ and therefore is the earliest indication of how a note was to be articulated]. Half-cadences and full cadences begin to appear, based on Guido’s earlier description of the occursus (meeting) of two parts, and new instruments are created, with experiments of mixed success resulting in the lute, zither, dulcimer, harp, psaltery, hurdy-gurdy, lyra, organ, squirrel drums and bowed pheasant. The Templar knights rock up in France, sans shrubb ery.

Franco of Cologne finally comes up with the idea of having different shaped notes for different note lengths around 1250 (hooray – just in time for lunch), and explains the halving approach to get the maxima, longa, and breve (brevis being Latin for ‘short’). Franco’s idea of halving is extended to yield a semibreve (or ‘half-short’ in Latin), and a new smaller note (the minima). Technological innovation abounds, resulting in triumphs including hitting dulcimers with newly invented sticks from the newly invented tree. Johannes de Muris writes about mensural notation (note values are judged against other note values as in modern notation). Music was now in either tempus perfectum (the breve divides into 3 and is notated with a circle at the start of the music) or imperfectum (breve divides into 2 and is notated with an incomplete circle). Prolatio perfectum or imperfectum then divided the semibreve into 2 or 3 on the next sublevel. [Our C time signatures for divisions of two derive from the incomplete circle of tempus imperfectum; they did not originally mean common time or cut-common time, but denoted smaller or larger note values always divided into 2.] Time signatures now sort of exist, although most sacred music was in tempus perfectum.

The new polyphonic music is named ars nova (new art ) around 1320 and, by definition, makes everything before it ars antiqua (old art). Roman de Fauval is published about an allegorical horse, interspersed with de Vitry’s chansons (songs). Dante writes about fire, and Robert the Bruce gets angry that thirds and sixths are still dissonances, in between getting angry about other stuff. Red notation (coloration) is invented to reduce note values by two thirds and finally notate triplets/groups of three; scribes were eventually irked by swapping inks, later finding it quicker to write filled in vs. hollow notes. A monkocopier misreads a poorly-written natural as an h (we think); the Germans name B natural as h/H from then on since the Bb came first, and so should therefore be B, ja? The French properly codify a system of rhythmic notation, down to the semiminim, and produce a new shorter hooked (crochet ) note. 5

Mistranslation thinks otherwise and makes it the crotchet [We later call the semiminim the crotchet and transferred the hook to the quaver ]. The Hundred Years’ War begins (but not over the crotchet- quaver debacle ) and tennis is invented by two people hitting a plague-ridden onion at each other, supervised by onlookers eating strawberries. What fun.

Machaut then aces life by writing one of the first musical mass settings (Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, etc.), and turns troubadour songs into the secular lai, virelai, motet, ballade and rondeau, whilst writing tales of Reims (influencing Chaucer to write about Kent). Plague: 2nd set; new limbs please. Italian Trecento music appears with the Rossi Codex, also theorising the addition of dots to notes to extend them. Landini blends sacred and troubadour music into the secular madrigal, caccia and ballata (ballade), using imitation, independence of voices, ornamentation, canons, more chromaticism, and the first instances of word painting ( particularly of birds), but the third and sixth are still a dissonance. Peasants (and possibly pheasants but sans bow) revolt. Wyclif translates the Bible from Latin into English as the Great Schism splits the pope into three (ouch).

The new rhythmic notation leads to the isorhythmic motet (with looped melodic material – sorry Steve Reich). Ars Subtilior, or ‘subtle art’ as it was labelled in 1960, emerges as a far more refined and exclusive style of vocal music sung by connoisseurs, with über-complex syncopation, mad harmonies and cadences of snobbery, all written down in the Chantilly Codex with pretentious ink. Franco-Flemish composers and musicians spread throughout Europe, racing the famine, and sneak into England where , up until now, the world of English music was being held up by Mr and Mrs Bennett’s weekly serenading of their duck Wilson to a select audience in Thetford. All hell breaks loose.

Next: The Early Renaissance...

Keep Smiling!

Ian 6