Chapter 7 -- Secular Medieval Music

Illustration 1: Master of the Saint Bartholomew Alter "The Baptism of Christ" detail (1485)

The vast majority of music that survives from the Medieval Period is sacred. While we have much more than we do from Classical Greece (and we have a good idea of what it sounded like), most of the music handed down from this era is sacred.

There are a couple of good reasons for this.

First, a keyword in the above statement is survives. One of the great casualties of the collapse of the Roman Empire and the destruction of the storehouse of knowledge at Alexandria was literacy. The ability to read and write took a back seat to simple survival for the average person. When there were few manuscripts of any kind for people to read, it was a nearly useless skill—probably worse than useless given that survival was a job that required virtually every waking moment.

The few people who were able to read and write were the nobility (because their lives could afford such a luxury) and the clergy (whose job was heavily involved with the understanding, preservation, and dissemination of the Bible and the liturgy).

The ability to read and write music was shared by the same two groups. There is a good collection of secular music from the Middle Ages, but given human nature we know there must have been more. While they wouldn't have had organized concerts like ours in the symphony hall, there would have been many social occasions where music was present.

The reason that there isn't more of it left over is that the people who played it were often unable to notate it. Most of it then would have been passed along orally and like the earliest music, died when its composer did. And of course, the monks whose duty it was to notate and copy music would have a tremendous bias toward the sacred music.

Given the arduous task necessary to copy each music manuscript page by page (and the expense and scarcity of the writing materials), monks would be predisposed to copy only the sacred music even if they enjoyed the secular music.

A second reason is simply that a very large percentage of music composed in the Medieval Era was sacred. As noted above, the Church was the most powerful—and wealthy—organization in Europe. Without science to illuminate physical laws, without bacteriology to allow understanding of the causes of diseases and plagues, fear and superstition became the method of explaining the unknown. The concept of “random chance” was completely off the radar screen of a person who lived in the Middle Ages. Earthly existence was ultimately looked upon as a dangerous, misery filled prelude to a blissful afterlife. The Church represented the hopes of the greater world to come.

At least with literature, great secular classic literature of the past was well known to many. However, it was considered to be a stepping stone to assist in the understanding of the Bible. The era was centered around religion, so much so that many of the “secular” songs talk about God more than contemporary religious songs!

Much of the instrumental secular music from the Medieval Era is in the form of dances in simple repeating forms that the musicians likely would embellish or use as a basis for improvisationi.

While the instruments were primitive by modern standards, there was still a wide variety of tone colors available. Flutes and recorders were made of wood (not metal as in modern instruments). There were a number of string instruments including the fiedel, lute, and psaltery; a few primitive brass instruments including the sackbut (an early version of the trombone), early versions of the organ; the hurdy-gurdy (an early semi- mechanized instrument); and numerous types of drums and other percussion instruments.

Vocal music was performed by minstrel singers, often known as troubadours (the name given in southern France), trouvères (the name given in northern France), and minnesingers (from Germany). Some of these may have been the stereotypical traveling musicians, but the most famous ones were comfortably employed as musical servants of the nobility. For many centuries afterward, musicians would be drawn to the Church and the Court for employment opportunities. Among the functions of traveling musicians would be to carry news from other parts of the kingdoms.

This vocal music was a monophonic line which could be accompanied on the lute or harp, probably using one of the Church modes. These poet/musicians sang of nature, of courtly love, of knightly legends, and of the sense of the mystical that pervaded their lives. Common forms of secular music are known as the rondeau, virelai, the frottola (many of which we would simply lump under the heading "ballad").

A lot of modern performers perform Medieval Vocal music by singing falsetto. In trying to reconstruct original performance practices, many musicologists have concluded that the balladeers sang this way rather than full voice, but there is disagreement and this performance practice far from universal.

Eventually, Medieval music began to take on an additional dimension—more than one line of music being performed together with each other. This is called polyphony.

In the polyphonic era, an important form of music evolved, known as the motet. Derived from the French word for word—mot—motets were several layers of vocal lines with different texts, often in different languages. One of the layers was often a piece of sacred melody. Oddly, a somewhat earthy text might be paired with the sacred melodyii.

By modern standards, Medieval polyphony sounds fairly primitive and even sometimes grating to the ear. Composers had yet to discover the rewards of lines that imitate each other (known as imitative counterpoint).

One major distinction between secular and sacred music of the time is the use of dance rhythms. Most musicologists believe Gregorian chant was performed very freely with no underlying rhythmic pulse. That would make sense—the music was attempting to connect with a very spiritual plane and most definitely not the physical. The philosophy of the era was dualist: a conflict between the spiritual and the physical. Music that connected with the sensual physical level was definitely not welcome in a religious setting.

There is also a very practical reason why vocal secular music would tend to be a little more rhythmic—rhyming poetry is much easier to memorize verbatim than free text. When you can't write it down (because of literacy issues or that the raw materials are scarce), memory serves as the next best thing. There are accounts of scholars who had developed phenomenal memories. It was a necessary talent for even those who had the ability to read as books were fairly scarce.

Scholars trace the origins of metered, rhyming poetry in European music to the Islamic culture in Spain.

Illustration 2: Master of the Saint Bartholomew Alter "The Baptism of Christ" detail (1485) i Modern musicians attempting to reconstruct this music follow the same practices. The concept of treating music as a fragile museum piece is a relatively recent one. Improvisation has been an essential skill of “classical” musicians throughout most of Western history. ii Perhaps surprisingly, the modern era is far from the first era to produce music that has objectionable lyrics. One of the earliest collections of secular music is Carmina Burana, a series of songs written in the 13th century thought to be composed by students studying for the priesthood. Although not quite “sex, drugs, and rock and roll”, they are surprisingly earthy for the time, with topics ranging from drinking songs to lusty songs about the pleasures of the opposite sex. 20th Century composer Carl Orff set a number of these texts to music for his own choral/orchestral masterpiece also called Carmina Burana.