Entire Album
DANZA
Instrumental music and virtuoso performance in the Middle Ages and today
If the task of the musician who wishes to play instrumental music of the Renaissance, the Baroque and of later periods is to form an interpretation from source materiais, then the task of the musician who wishes to perform instrumental music of the Middle Ages is first of all to reconstitute a performance practice from various Indications. The history of Western instrumental music - and its supposed emancipation in the 16th century - did not begin at the Renaissance. It can be divided into two periods, the first running from the Church Fathers to the so-called discovery of the New World by Christopher Columbus, the second stretching from 1500 to the present day. The first period involves more than six centuries of oral tradition, whilst the second has five centuries of written music.
The performance of instrumental music of the Middle Ages can offer today’s musicians on one hand the enormous pleasure of discovering a repertoire and forms, and on the other the great satisfaction of leaming to master a body of instruments with
unsuspected timbres and qualities; there is also of course, within a framework defined by the study of the source material, the simple joy of giving free rein to one’s imagination through the practice of improvisation. In fact, with the absence of any systematic historical collection of material conceming the jongleur’s art, and given that the jongleur was most often storyteller, singer, instrumentalist (mastering up to twenty different instruments), dancer, magician, actor, acrobat and spy, the modem instrumentalist is faced with a dilemma: whether he accepts to play again and again the same ten or twenty pieces that have been miraculously preserved in a few manuscripts dedicated to the poetry of courtly love, or whether he takes the trouble to reconstitute a more infinite repertoire, in so doing reviving an old oral tradition, by composing original pieces in the different forms and styles that he has studied and by arranging vocal music, the entire repertoire of songs for dancing in particular. Finally, strengthened by this enriching experience and armed with his own inexhaustible inspiration, he can improvise, for example, couplets of dances (and not just the ‘points’ of an estampie) and entire musical forms; he will have to prove his creativity in the fields of omamentation, diminution, in preludes and bridging pieces. In short, he will know how to make the hard work of musical archaeology, necessary as it is, alive and entertaining.
It is precisely this that Millenarium has striven to bring about in its last five themed CDs for Ricercar, whilst still attaching great importance to the instrumental pieces that are judiciously and generously spread over each CD. After ten years of research, of composition, of experiment on stage and in the rehearsal room, and of a wish to share in the joy of an exciting collective task, the time had now come to devote ourselves to an entire album of the instrumental music of the anonymous virtuosi of the time of the Cathedrals, concentrating particularly on dance music because it was present in every class of feudal society.
Even if the cult of genius and of virtuosity appeared with the development of the concert and the settling-down of the musicians who had been destined since the Renaissance to occupy prestigious functions under the patronage of the nobility and the bourgeoisie, virtuosity,
invention and ingenuity were never missing from the skills of the jongleurs of the Middle Ages despite certain music historians who remain fixed on the idea of progress. Far from being an end in themselves, these ‘primordial virtues’ of the itinerant musician were principally intended to astonish and amaze the listener, whether he be nobleman, priest or peasant. These virtues allowed the male and female jongleurs to be welcomed temporarily into the society of the time by the people whom they had temporarily amazed. The jongleur-musician-singer-dancer-instrumentalist was forced to display his virtuosity, for it was a question of simple survival. In accordance with the oral tradition of passing on knowledge and skills, the first of the virtuoso skills of a musician was to construct the instrument or instruments that he wished to play: there were no music shops at that time! The second was, in a world where there were neither public schools, teachers, instruction books nor lessons, to leam to play his instruments. The third was to attract the attention of his audience, and the fourth and last was to keep it. The same applied to the singer as to the instrumentalist - most often the same person - in direct contradiction of the Church Fathers who, during the first period of Christianity, denied the existence of any ‘erudite’ music, be it popular or courtly, in other words music that was not instinctivn that means music capable of inventivnesss.
There is a good deal of evidence, be it in treatises, repertoires, literature of the time, both in words and pictures, that proves the existence of a more leamed instrumental music that was played by virtuoso musicians, in parallel with music for religious, popular and courtly ceremonial use. The social, spatio-temporal and initiatory dimensions of the ceremonies of the feudal era are relatively well-documented, with the result that the music allied to these ceremonies is now the object of very serious study. How then, did things stand with the instrumental music produced for listening. the music especially composed, the instrumental inventions that sprang from dances like the estampie — whose function was described by Jean de Grouchy as a highly particular form of distraction for the soul that was almost therapeutical: 'By its complex nature, the estampie compels the concentration of the performer just as much as of the listener; it often distracts the powerful and the rich from perverse ideas’. We are also interested in this music, transformed as it is for listening purposes, so that we may pay homage to the master jongleurs of the past who have been such a source of inspiration to us.
In modern times, the cult of virtuosity has become more and more a cult of personality; virtuoso instrumental soloists, who had already become stage performers, if not circus animais, are now subject to an more or less conscious deification of the musician as a performer vowed to an irrelevant cult, to the detriment of what the composer wished to express. The performer is often reduced to the performance of a purely intellectual and abstract speculative act, one that is most often planned in advance and easily repeated. Towards the end of the Middle Ages, the virtuoso instrumental performer was emancipated from his jongleur’s function and art, having contributed to the invention of an autonomous, functional and complete language and having also succeeded in becoming a creator, producing his own invention at a moment’s notice; he however also became a slave to his own virtuosity, thanks to which he finally obtained a comfortable social status and an undeniable power of seduction.
Given that the rules of anonymity and of the oral transmission of knowledge and skills were totally respected during the entire Middle Ages, it was only at the end of the 14th century that the first written works appeared that revealed the names of virtuoso musicians and of instrumental musicians in particular. Chronicles describe the wonderful exploits of Francesco Landini with his organetto and the therapeutic gifts of Valentina Visconti with her harp; the instrumental diminutions preserved in the Codex Faenza, the estampies in the Florentine manuscript preserved in London and the compositions of the Ars Subtilior all clearly attest to the presence of a certain instrumental virtuosity at the close of the Middle Ages. Illustrations depicting the jongleurs playing, dancing and singing at the same time, reports of poetic jousts and the Trobar Clus and ancient notations that show the use of quarter tones all corroborate the improvisatory talents of the musicians and also implicitly suggest the existence of a certain type of virtuosity during the Romanesque period. The definition of virtuosity during the Middle Ages is, however, totally different from the Romantic definition of virtuosity.
Etymologically speaking, virtuosity is derived from the Italian word virtuoso, which is itself a derivation of virtu, energy or quality, from the original Latin word virtus, signifying virtue. Mediaeval music was principally modal in character and still adhered to oral tradition; its mastery of musical parameters such as intensity and timbre in a Pythagorean system of tuning clearly had nothing to do with the pursuit of dexterity and swift speed that was already very much present in the first diminution passages. With its reformulation of the concept of virtuosity, Millenarium now presents its vision of mediaeval virtuosity to the 21 st century.
Since its founding in 1999, Millenarium’s goal has been to interpret the most virtuoso and fascinating music of the Middle Ages in a thoroughly modern and Creative manner. In its programme entitled Danza and with the help of its own compositions positioned side-by-side with the very few traces that were codified in Italy at the end of the 14th century, the Millenarium wishes to display the heights reached by the virtuoso instrumentalist of the Middle Ages before the great irruption of the Renaissance; they wish to re-establish links with the tradition of the Western musical virtuoso as composer, performer and improviser of his own virtuoso and learned music.
For Millenarium Christophe DESLIGNES Translation: Peter LOCKWOO
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