So thanks, Rob. All week I have been bedeviled with thoughts about the value of “composition” as a musical act, both then and now. Not that this is a bad thing, mind you, but man, is it complicated. Rob Wegman’s terrific 1996 article that discusses the emergence of the Composer (with a capital C) in the last few decades of the fifteenth century has sent me scurrying back to my sixteenth-century theorists, wondering what the resonances might still be. Why is this important? Well, this could be a long story, but…
My sixteenth-century work deals with women performers, and we know for certain that they sang a vast repertoire, made up of both works that were composed expressly for them, and works that were not. No doubt they also composed, and probably also improvised (how else are you going to keep performing for between four and six hours a night?). One of the fundamental concepts behind Musica Secreta’s performances is that when it comes to women and sixteenth-century music, you take nothing for granted. The music as written can almost always only be a starting point because it’s almost always written in a format that women can’t perform on their own, i.e. with vocal parts that are out of range for the vast majority of women. We have known since Craig Monson and Robert Kendrick’s ground-breaking work on nun’s music that female ensembles happily arranged their way out of such conundrums, transposing parts, filling in with instruments, so it follows the score wasn’t sacrosanct to them. And when you look at some of the music they composed, it looks as if the published version is the “arrangement,” as it clearly couldn’t have been performed by women in the state (i.e. with tenor and bass parts) that it’s in.
So how come almost all the music that we know was composed for them is published in a way that we know it wasn’t performed – i.e. in five/six polyphonic voices (at least two of which are in the male ranges)? A large part of the reason is surely that this was the normal publishing format for the time, but I think that another aspect has got to be the fact that published composition was there to be talked about as much as performed. Counterpoint was the “noble” side of musical composition – loads of theorists say so (they got this from the Greeks), and it mattered a great deal to patrons and composers alike that the works that they paid for (and composed) were going to be critiqued. The more erudite the counterpoint, the more cultured the composers and the greater glory reflected on the patrons. So there are commercial and cultural considerations at work here, neither of which are 100% in kilter with the presumed aim of notation, i.e. to tell the performer what to do.
So when we look at, say, Wert’s madrigals in his Eighth Book, which feature three high voices and two lower ones – sure they could have been performed like that, but much more likely those three high voices were accompanied by instruments. Maybe the instruments played the polyphonic parts, maybe they didn’t. But to publish what the musica secreta sang would have been pointless, commercially and professionally. We now may want to talk about the music as it was performed, but Wert may only have wanted present and future generations to evaluate him on the basis of his compositional (and that means contrapuntal) skill.
Composers. What a funny lot. And, of course, this is why theorists like Zarlino get their knickers in a twist over what performers do to their precious counterpoint. They are “musici,” “maestri,” even “compositori.” Such interference makes their work less than noble, bringing it down to the level of the mere “cantori.” But, also of course, they wouldn’t keep making a fuss if performers didn’t keep doing it. By and large, though, the theorists are pretty bland as composers. No wonder performers wanted to spice things up by adding a little ornamentation here, replacing parts with an instrument there. Who knows, maybe they did a little bit of reharmonisation now and again. Think of it, tritone substitutions in species counterpoint; the rhythm changes instead of a romanesca. Hooray!! Get Christina Pluhar on the phone!
Have a good weekend, y’all, and a big Who Dat to my NOLA friends. All this sixteenth-century talk isn’t so far from the Boswell Sisters, you know. Whadja do to my song, indeed.