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Classical Metrics and Medieval Music
Classical Metrics and Medieval Music
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CLASSICAL METRICS AND MEDIEVAL MUSIC
ALBERT SEAY
Albert Seay (B.A. and B.M., Murray College; M.M., Louisiana State
versity; Ph.D., Yale University) is presently professor of music and
man of the Music Department at Colorado College. His publications
critical editions of composers and Latin treatises for the American Inst
of Musicology. His book, Music in the Medieval World, was publis
1965 by Prentice Hall.
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60 RMMLA BULLETIN JUNE 1969
(One might remark that things have not changed too much at the present
time.) This stress upon speaking well was a strong one and an oratorical
talent was much to be treasured. Some idea of the high esteem of a brilliant
speaker is reflected in the magnificent essay of Cicero, "De Oratore." In
this work Cicero discusses many aspects of the orator's art, the profits to
be gained by doing it well, the type of influences wielded by great speakers
in the past, and the importance of the orator in the life of the state. One of
the most interesting of these points is that found in Book III, Section 60,
where Cicero talks of what the orator needs beyond those words with
which he hopes to sway his audience. There are gestures, to be sure, as well
as clear and meaningful enunciation of the words as standard procedures;
but, which is more important to our subject, there is the use of various tones
of voice and certain kinds of rhythmic phrasings. Evidently, this gives the
orator something of the problems and techniques of the musician, for music
too works with both these items, labelling them, however, melody and
rhythm. That the affinity of the two arts is a close one is further made clear
by Cicero's repetition of the anecdote about one of the Gracchi, who, in
making his speeches to the audience, brought with him a player of the
fistula or reed flute, a musician who performed in the background at the
same time as Gracchus spoke. This music had two functions, the first to
suggest by what was being played the general mood of what was being
said, to underline the words of the orator by means of music (again, paren-
thetically, I might point out that movies and TV have changed nothing of
this attitude); as a second point, the music was to suggest something of
the rhythm of the words and to emphasize certain of them by the length or
shortness of the accompanying notes. Gracchus was thus made a more
effective orator by his use of music as a way of increasing the impact of his
speech.
As is remarked by one of the speakers in Cicero's colloquy, one cannot
go around carrying flute players with him (save in the case of mad sopranos
who always seem to have them in their handbags). But one can teach
aspiring talents how to speak and how to deliver speeches if the reasons in
back of having a flutist around can be retained. So it is with Roman edu-
cation, for, from the evidence of many early manuscript sources, signs were
rather rapidly worked out to show the embryo lawyer or orator just how
certain kinds of lines were to be delivered. The system as devised was one
of writing various types of symbols over the text of the work to be studied,
these symbols giving the student a hint as to the method of delivery, stresses,
length of syllables, etc.
It is this system that became so important in the history of the develop-
ment of musical notation in the Western world. Originally designed to in-
dicate the quantity of syllables alone, they could rather easily also indicate
a raising of the voice or its lowering if they were placed in a relatively
higher or lower position. One may easily see this in many of our earlier
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CLASSICAL MERICS AND MEDIEVAL MUSIC 61
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62 RMMLA BULLETIN JUNE 1969
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CLASSICAL METRICS AND MEDIEVAL MUSIC 63
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64 RMMLA BULLETIN JUNE 1969
through the preciseness of notation of rhythm and of pitch that take their
beginnings in our Latin past. It is this achievement that makes us believe
that those who have spoken of a renaissance in the twelfth century have
spoken with accuracy and truth, for it is the twelfth century in which all
these developments began.
The influence of poetic procedures taken from the classics is not primary
for the greater part of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, for the influence
of the rhythmic modes becomes weaker and weaker during this time. Still,
the great Latin writers continue to be quoted by almost every writer on
music in the period. For example, in his Complex of the Effects of Music,
Johannes Tinctoris, a Belgian theorist writing around 1475 at the court
of Naples, calls on either Vergil, Horace, or Ovid in almost every one of
his twenty chapters. In some cases, the quotation is not always what one
might have expected, were it not for the reverence in which these three
writers were held. I think here of the chapter in which Tinctoris is dusting
off the old question that "Music adorns the praises of God." To substantiate
this point, he introduces the well-known passage of the Aeneid, Book VI,
where Aeneas is speaking with the Sibyl to a choral background. This is
not an isolated example, for one soon learns the tags and looks forward to
seeing them, cheek-by-jowl with something taken from either the Bible or
a Church Father.
The study of the three great Golden Age poets (and others as well) re-
mained as one of the strongest parts of the school curriculum, with every
student eventually taken through the classics. With the renewed interest in
the classics during the fifteenth century and with the beginnings of printing
as a way of diffusion of texts, the audience for the Latin classics (and the
Greek ones as well) became a wide one indeed; one can but remember
the fantastic success of the distinguished printer, Aldus Manutius, and his
long series of what can surely be considered as the ancestors of our present-
day pocketbook, to see something of this spreading of acquaintance with
the classics among a population which, in earlier years, might well not have
made such a contact.
In teaching the classics, music was called into service as a valuable
instructional aid. Instead of merely reciting those sections of the Aeneid
that one had learned by straight memorization, some devised simple ways
of singing them, so that they would be easier to recall. It also helped in
motivating the student who might well have forgotten the prime necessity
of knowing Latin well, not only for the esthetic pleasure of reading its great
works but as a practical tool for those who intended to continue their study
in the universities.
A second way of encouraging Latin students and increasing their fa-
miliarity with the language was by the presentation of school plays, these
incorporating large chunks of the masters. One such play of this kind was
the Ludus Dianae by Conrad Celtes, performed before Maximilian at Linz
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CLASSICAL METRICS AND MEDIEVAL MUSIC 65
in 1501; in it, there were musical settings of antique meters. In 1507 comes
one of our first collections, this prepared by Celtes' pupil, Tritonius, in
which the settings are of Horatian odes. Other musical settings followed
rather rapidly, the ones in Germany alone surprising by their multitude,
settings made by Michael in 1526, by Senfl (a close friend of Martin Luther)
in 1534, and by Paul Hofheimer in 1539. So important had these settings
become that they were even used to teach melody formation, as in the
Dodekachordon of Glareanus, published in 1547.
What made these settings of interest and of musical importance? Per-
haps the most important elements are those of rhythm and musical style,
for they seem to have introduced a new approach at a time when music had
been leading to a kind of contrapuntal complexity that still remains without
parallel. The development of musical style from the time of Notre Dame to
around 1500, this last that period showing the supremacy of a contrapuntal
school of composition best represented by Josquin des Pres, is one in which
the emphasis turned more and more toward strong individuality of each
voice line, opposition of rhythms between one part and the others, intellec-
tual complication for its own sake and a kind of music that seems at times
to provide words only to give the mouths of the singers something to do
besides sing "ah." Melody lines were conceived as raw material for de-
velopment and little or no attention was paid to the prosody of the text and
its rhythmic characteristics. What text there would be, in all four voices,
was almost unintelligible, for these were few, if any, occasions on which
the text would be pronounced simultaneously by all four voices.
It is the complete variance with these normal methods that sets off
these school Horatian and Vergilian compositions from the usual ones of
the times. First of all, for clarity of pronunciation, all the voices concerned
sang the text homophonically, that is, in vertical harmonic arrangement with
simultaneous presentation of the syllable in all voices. Block chords were
provided and, the basic melody being found in either soprano or tenor
voices, there was simultaneity of movement and pronunciation in all the
others. It was at the opposite pole from the procedures developed in the
previous two centuries or so, those which had led to complex counterpoint
and independent parts.
The second point, of perhaps more importance to our subject, is that
composers of this kind of school song early recognized that they could not
ignore the basic metrical movement found in the text which they were
setting. The principle was rapidly formulated that the antique meter of
the text had to be matched by a corresponding musical rhythm. Dactyls
and iambics, when set to music, required an analogous succession of long
and short notes, one in which the long notes would be taken as exactly twice
as long as the short ones. The length of notes to be used to various words
would be determined by the length of the particular syllable, not by the
will of the composer or by the demands of the musical phrase.
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66 RMMLA BULLETIN JUNE 1969
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CLASSICAL METCS AND MEDIEVAL MUSIC 67
past led to a much more highly developed artistic result, this worked out
by poets of the Pleiade, particularly by De Ba'f; not only was there the
humanistic desire to imitate the sentiments and language of the ancients,
but there was also the desire to imitate their rhythmic structures as well.
From this came the movement known as "vers mesuree," where French
words were arbitrarily given quantitative values for their syllables, rather
than retaining the qualitative ones. With these quantitative values the poet
could imitate exactly metric structures as found in Greek and Roman
poetry, with all the variety of metric lengths therein available. Settings of
these poems were then made by various court musicians, in particular by
Claude Le Jeune. His published musical collections contain many examples
of this "musique mesuree," both for sacred and secular purposes. Like the
German school songs, there are patterns of longs and shorts in a homophonic
manner, the longs twice as long as the shorts.
I hope I have been able to suggest something of the tremendous impact
upon musical procedures made by metric theories exemplified by the work
of the great classic Latin poets. New methods in the musical handling of
rhythm by Western composers have often owed their inspiration to the sister
art of poetry, although the manner of application often led eventually to
something showing little of its origin. The first great crisis of Western
music, how to handle the rhythms of polyphony, could not have been so
easily solved without the model of the Latin past in poetry as a starting
point. And again, when music had almost reached an impasse in com-
plexity and in disregard of its poetic text, it was again the same wellspring
that provided a new answer, one that has furnished composers from Arcadelt
to Debussy and Stravinsky with satisfying answers.
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