Musical Modes: Part 3A, Non-European Modes

This is the third of three blogs on musical modes. Part 1 is about “church” modes, Part 2 is about rhythmic modes, and Part 3 is about Non-European modes.

In an odd assembly of too much information and nearly none, I’ve decided to split this Part Three into at least three pieces: the first is on Israel and Jewish modes, the second on the Arab lands and Islamic modes along with Asia, and the third on everything else (India, Australia, Africa, and the New World with a possible nip into Greenland).  I’ve found some good information about India, but the data on the other places is a bit sparse as yet.

It’s interesting to note that “mode” means different things in different cultures. For the most part, a sense of which notes or rhythms are relevant is implied by the word “mode,” and in some cases, both rhythm and notes are prescribed.

In this blog, I’ll start to look at non-European modes. I found that there was plenty of research on Jewish music, some on Muslim or Arab modes and on Asia, and then less and less on India, Africa, Australia, and the New World.

Israel and Jewish Chant

When you think of Israeli music, your ear already pops into a mode, a major scale with a lowered second on the way back down. There are European scales that do this as well, known as melodic minor and harmonic minor, where the intervals are either different on the way back down the scale or the half-steps are not in expected places. If you have access to an instrument, play these and see how they sound.

 

 

 

 

But the real thing is much more complex. Jewish chant has five modes, each prescribing a series of notes. The modes are further refined by presenting in a trope—both rhythm and a sequence of notes in a pattern. The trope pattern is replicable in any of the modes, and there are 14 tropes. (I hope to write a blog on these at some later date.)

Have a look at the melodic modes. Notice that they don’t all have eight notes in them, and that the sharps and flats are not where you’d expect. (The different length of the notes is only to make a pleasantly similar-sized line and has no musical significance.)

 

 

 

 

Each mode is used for certain specific celebrations, such as Friday night services, High Holy Days (Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah), biblical cantillation, prayers for funerals, and so forth. It’s thought that the modes were created as an aid to memory before the advent of notation.

It’s important to note that the chants are often still written without musical notation, but instead have the mode marked at the right edge of the lyrical lines (remember, Hebrew is read from right to left), and marks are made above certain letters to help the cantor know where to make certain changes in the tropes (a theme or predictable section of music). Music meant to be sung by the congregation looks like white note mensuration (see Part 1 for a brief explanation of this), but read from left to right, with the clef and key signature at the left edge, just like European music, but the chant meant for the cantor is not spelled out so literally. This probably allows for a little creative license, especially regarding the pitch. (Cantors undergo significant training both in music and in religion. They know what they’re doing.)

Just as European music is based on that of earlier cultures, so is Israeli music based on what came before. Around the 5th century BC, Israeli music separated from Egyptian, Babylonian, and Assyrian music; in general, it was around this time that it became hard to discern Greek influences anymore. There was a general hostility toward Greeks and Hellenistic spirit in Judaism particularly and efforts were likely made to make the music and religious services distinct and separate. (Remember, the Greeks and Egyptians were fond of several gods, and Judaism marks the switch to a single central god. They would have wanted their music to reflect this major change.)

A lot of music was vocal, as the human voice is the one instrument most people can play. But there would have been some instruments too, used as accompaniment rather than featured as solo or orchestral instruments. We can be pretty sure that they used the instruments named in the Bible (in Psalms 33:2, 92:4, 144:9), and there were 10 strings (on the lyre, ‘asor) or 12 strings (on the harp. There is also some evidence of 8-stringed harps. In Africa, there are one-stringed harps and a more common four-stringed instrument, so it’s probable that these 8-, 10-, and 12-stringed instruments evolved from those simpler ones before being documented in the Bible).

There is some speculation that songs would have been played or sung in octaves, with one voice high and another low, as there is a proliferation of stringed instruments around then. Stringed instruments make octaves obvious and unavoidable. This parallel-octave element remains to the present day in Greek and Russian Orthodox (Catholic) music, but it isn’t really known how it would have been done back in the beginning, or when and where it diverged.

In the Orient, there were (and still are) some smaller intervals than what we think of as half steps—a half step is the distance between a white note and a black note on the piano—called microtones. There’s some evidence that these seeped into Israeli music, but it was otherwise largely pentatonic (also like music in the Orient), meaning that each mode had only five notes.

As part of the separation from Greek music, Clement of Alexandria (d. 215 BC) cautioned against chromatic and theatrical melodies of the heathens (meaning the Greeks). So they were deliberately NOT using all of the available notes, but made scales up from a select few. That’s kind of interesting, don’t you think? To me, it seems to imply that they understood the Pythagorean theoy, even if they didn’t call it that yet, and could divide a string into the same eight or twelve notes that we still use today.

As part of creating specific music (or types of music) for specific events, they assigned modes to occasions. For instance, Doric (including the notes EGABCDE, and which is a Greek name) and Spondic, (including the notes EFGABDE, and is another Greek name) modes were for libation songs. Drinking was important enough to warrant a mode series.

Modern theorists say that most Jewish chant is Dorian (like a C-major scale—all the white notes, only starting on a D) except Lamentations, which were Phrygian (again only on the white notes starting on E), and Jubilations, which were Lydian (white notes starting on F). Remember, though, the mode is not limited to those exact notes but can be moved to accommodate a voice, so long as the half-steps are in the right place (see Part 1 about Church Modes, if you’ve forgotten how this works).

You’ll notice that Mixolydian and all the plagal modes are missing. There are just three modes.

Like many other religions, Judaism imbues certain numbers with mystical qualities. The number three comes up a lot. Music sung in the synagogue takes three forms: prayer modes, orientalization/orientation (“Arabization” of melody), and crystallization of prayer recitations.  Cantillation or Biblical modes are used for Scripture readings and prayer modes are used for everything else.

Ten also comes up a lot. For instance, ten is the number of strings on a psaltery, harp, or lyre, there are ten famous psalm singers, and there are ten modes in psalm melodies.

Of course, there is more than one Jewish tradition so there is more than one kind of Jewish song. Pentateuch cantillation is still chanted by Persian and Yemenite Jews, for instance.  Although the original Sephardic tradition ended with the Spanish expulsion in 1492, it was revived in Jewish settlements in the Netherlands. The Netherlands became quite a haven for Jews until the middle of the 20th century.

Although there are many traditions, all ancient, there’s a theory that monody and monophonic music came from a socio-political effort of the Jewish monistic conception aiming at unity in all things, perhaps as a backlash from the multi-god Greeks and Egyptians. The Catholic Church must have had the same thought when they borrowed the idea.

Sources:

Discovering Jewish Music, Marsha Bryan Edelman, The Jewish Publication Society, 2003

Music in Ancient Greece & Rome, John G. Landels, Routledge, 1999

Music of the Jews in the Diaspora, Alfred Sendry, A.S. Barnes and Company, 1970

Music in Ancient Israel, Alfred Sendrey, Philosophical Library, New York, 1969

Perspectives in Music Theory: An Historical-Analytical Approach, Paul Cooper, Dodd, Mead, & Company, New York 1973

The Rise of Music in the Ancient World: East and West, Curt Sachs, Dover Publications, 1943

Many thanks to Cantor Pamela Rothman Sawyer for her expertise with Jewish chant.

Musical Misperceptions

There are loads of things that we all take for granted about Gregorian chant that are fundamentally false. I’ve been collecting these for a little while, and here’s a short selection of them.

• Pope Gregorius did not invent Gregorian chant. Chant was alive and well long before he was born. While he was pope (590-604), he instigated the documentation of chant. There wasn’t any music notation yet, so it was mostly the lyrics and the suitable events that were written down.

• Pope Gregorius also got credit for updating the calendar. But basically, he wanted an accurate way of documenting the various feasts of the year along with the assortment of suitable songs and had a calendar built. The real update to the calendar was done by another Pope Gregory in the 16th century.

• Gregorian chant was originally sung in Greek, until the language of the church officially changed to Latin in the 3rd or 4th century. Even then, it was only Latin in Western Europe—all of Byzantium stuck to Greek. It’s from this language digression that the names for the current flavors of chant originate: Gregorian in Rome, Ambrosian in Milan, Gallican in France, and Mozarabic (or Visigothic) in Spain.

• Liber Usualis, long thought to be the ultimate source for Gregorian chant, was only compiled and published in 1896, and is an abridged collection from four other works (the Gradual, Antiphonal, Missal, and Breviary).

• The Mass used to be comprised of the songs of the Proper (Kyrie, Gloria, Credo,Sanctus, Agnus Dei), exemplified by Bach’s B minor Mass in its highest form, and of course, many other favorite composers (Palestrina, Josquin, Brumel, et al). A change of meaning came around 1300, when the songs of the Ordinary (Introit, Gradual, Alleluia, Tract, Offertory, Communion) were added. Songs from the Proper were included as early as the 6th century. It seems that the Ordinary songs originated in Byzantium and spread westward.  Their arrival in Rome wasn’t documented until around the 11th century.

• Not all Propers were created equal. Although current practice offers only a few choices for the Propers, there is documentation for more than 300 versions of Agnus Dei (in chant. There are WAY more options in polyphony and more modern music).

• There are lots of similarities between Jewish and Gregorian chant: absence of regular meter, responsorial and antiphonal performance, prevailingly conjunct motion, psalmodic recitation, syllabic style mixed with melismas, and use of standard formulas. It’s probable that Christian chant was based on Jewish, although it doesn’t seem to be documented.

• Alleluia (hallelujah) does not mean “yippee.”  It’s from Hebrew, translated from Greek and then derived into Middle English, and means “praise ye Jehovah” (or Yahweh).  Its first known use in English was in the 14th century. In the New Testament, it appears only in Revelation 19 (although it’s there four times). It was translated in the Septuagint (the Jewish Greek version of the Bible made in the pre-Christian period) and became “alleluia in the Vulgate, which was the 4th century Christian Latin version of the Bible.

• Gregorian chant is not sung only by men. In fact, the earliest documents imply that antiphons had women and children singing in response an octave up from where the men sang the first part. This is documented by a fellow called Philo, a Jewish chronicler in circa 60 A.D. That’s right, 60. So around the same time people were starting to document the New Testament.

• The idea some people have of Gregorian chant, where it’s sung on one note with a vacuum-cleaner swoop to begin each new phrase is fairly new. Gregorian chant is super melodic. The single-note thing was invented by Giovanni Guidetti (1530-1592). I don’t know why, though.

• Gregorian chant is not (correctly) sung all at one plodding speed. It was meant for the words of Christ to be sung slowly and on a low pitch, the words of the Jews to be sung fast and high, and a medium pace and pitch for the words of the evangelists Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

I hope you enjoyed this little list. Let me know if you have others to add! (I do too, but I’m still looking for documentation for some of them.)

Chords versus Polyphony

It came up at rehearsal last night. The bass was having trouble because his note was strange and he couldn’t make it line up into a chord. The answer was simple: The music was based on a medieval song and it wasn’t a chord at all because chords hadn’t been invented yet.

*The following history lesson pertains to European music. African, Asian, and New World music can be told in similar stories, but with some changes, like African was rhythm-based, Asian was pentatonic, and the New World was rhythmic and pentatonic.

In the beginning, there was monody. Monody is a single line of music: no harmony, no drone, not even rhythm. Gregorian chant, for instance, is usually monody. One person sings or a group sings a single line of music. If the notes have varied weights, lengths, and colors, it can be lovely. Hildegard von Bingen, my favorite composer, wrote a lot of this sort of thing.

But Hildegard didn’t invent it. Oh no. She built on about 4,000 years of tradition that came from Mesopotamia, Egypt and Israel, and Greece. All of those cultures have known songs (although the documentation situation is bleak because music notation didn’t really take off in the West until about the 8th century of the Common Era). But in the 900 years since Hildegard, all kinds of fancy things have happened.

For instance, around the end of the first millennium of the Common Era, someone noticed that in certain songs, one note stood out as dominant. In fact, it could be sung or plucked on a harp, lyre, or psaltery continuously while the melody was sung against it. And thus was harmony born.

But it wasn’t harmony like you think of today. It was a single note produced for the duration of a song. It didn’t move, although later drones did change if the mode of the song changed. (A mode is like a key signature that declares which notes occur to make a scale. It’s different, though, and I’ll save that discussion for another time.)

Suddenly, the melody was affected by the context each note had to the drone. Some combinations were prettier than others, but all had some sort of emotional impact. It was not a leap, then for the drone note to begin to move, and so began a new form of music, called organum, and later, conductus.

This new music had two discrete lines of melody: the tenor or cantus firmus, which slowly produced the melody of the chant and provided a sort of moving drone, and the duplum, which floated away from the melody and often exhibited some performance skills. Organum originated around the end of the first millennium of the Common Era. The tempo was thought to be the walking tempo of the monks entering the church up the long center aisle, but don’t be fooled—this was not rhythm. This was just tempo.

Conductus came around the 12th century, mostly in France, and allowed a more florid showing. Instead of the tenor part holding the ground (the cantus firmus), both lines of song could wander melodically around. And once that happened, the future opened up.

Conductus allowed complex melodies in more than one part. If you can do two, you can do three or even four voices. Remember, chords weren’t invented yet, so each line was melodically interesting on its own. If one of your voices didn’t show up, no harm: the remaining voices sounded mighty fine on their own.

This gave rise to polyphony—multiple lines of melody—and the musical form called the motet. Now, the word motet comes from the French word “mot,” which means “word.” So you have to understand that the significant change here was the focus from the melody to the words.

It’s subtle, though, so let me help you. In chant, organum, and conductus, the words shaped musical accents, note duration, and sometimes the way the melody climbed or fell. The words were a sort of vehicle on which the music rode. But with polyphony and the invention of the motet, the words became the central character, and, for the first time, words that were not quotations from the Bible were documented.

If you think you don’t know what a motet is, guess again: Lots of familiar Christmas carols are based on them, such as “Deck the Hall.” That little “fa-la-la-la-la” bit is the give-away. The composer was using a kind of filler in secular music to mean something they weren’t willing to say outright. Lots of secular motets have this sort of device when the boy and girl disappear into the grassy meadow of a lovely spring day. It’s a euphemism for “frolicking ensued” and a raised eyebrow.

But to us, the interesting bit about motets is not the words. It’s the parallel lines of melody. You see, by the 13th century when motets were getting popular, people were rather likely to be run over by a cart, catch the plague, or otherwise take a leave of absence without warning. You couldn’t count on the same people showing up from one week to the next, so it was important that each melodic line stand on its own. If only one guy showed up on Sunday, the mass could still be sung. If two guys showed up, all the better. By the time you’ve got three or four, the music was getting pretty fabulous.

Now, during all this exploration of multiple lines, several other things developed. Rhythm, for instance, although it wasn’t a driving factor as it is in modern music. Rather, it provided a subtle connection so that the various sung parts could line up pleasantly. I talked about this a little in my blog post about the history of music notation. (http://coloraturaconsulting.wordpress.com/2011/03/18/the-history-of-music-notation/)

Once rhythm was part of the musical scene, the rules of harmony began to develop. There were new resting places in the form of longer notes where things lined up in all the parts. There were parts that moved in parallel, perhaps a few notes apart, perhaps in opposite directions, crossing in the middle. And these architectures invited a whole new set of rules for harmony.

Once we had harmony (where the music lined up among the various parts), we were just a breath away from having chords. You see, if you pass through the same three lined-up notes several times in a song, you start to think of those three lined-up notes as a sort of theme. And themes have meaning, either emotional or in a sort of musical color. And presto bingo, the chord was born.

Timed nicely with the development of music notation into what it looks like today, the new rules of harmony demanded the use of chords. For vocal music, this was truly significant, as it moved the melody out of ALL the parts and into only ONE of the higher voices. The other parts provided the chord structure underneath. So it might have been interesting to sing the alto line in the 13th century, but by the end of the 15th, your part was mostly filler, fleshing out the chord. That makes it a lot harder to sing than a more melodic line.

At the same time, keyboard music was taking its place center stage. For the keyboard, once chords were available, everything became possible—in the early days, the chords were abbreviated by number within a key signature, and by the time of the great Romantic masters, chords had expanded well beyond simple three-or four-note combinations to become grand elaborate augmented and diminished whatnots involving all dozen of your fingers and a few of your toes.

And so, dear bass singer, that is why Chopin and Ciconia don’t sound much alike and why that wasn’t a chord.

Musical Modes: Part 2, Rhythmic Modes

This is the second of three blogs on musical modes. Part 1 is about “church” modes, Part 2 is about rhythmic modes, and Part 3 is about non-European modes.

In the 10th century, music was starting to diverge from unison; one voice maintained a somewhat slow and steady tune (called the tenor) and another voice waxed ecstatic (often called the superius or the altus). Although the rhythms in the wandering voice didn’t matter much to the steady voice, there were certain markers that needed to be met so that syllables or unison notes could be lined up.

Without written notation, both singers had to listen and take visual cues from one another to stay in step. There was the tenor voice plodding purposefully toward the final note while the other voice wiggled and wandered and all but mamboed in a way that thrilled the listener.

They had to come up with some way to keep together, to change syllables at the same moment and to come to a satisfying end together. At first, they must have employed significant glances or nods, but in time, a form of rhythm evolved. The original two-part music, organum and conductus, was performed as the monks walked down the aisle as part of the mass ceremony. A natural rhythm accompanies such things, and voila! Rhythm joined melody.

At first, rhythms were only allowed in certain prescribed forms, what are known as the rhythmic modes. They do seem to travel in threes—the count tallies to three or multiples of three in each of them. This may have had some religious symbolism, but it is actually more likely to come from secular music. The dancing aspect of the rhythms is rather easy to hear.

The work being done to create a notation system was pivotal in the development of rhythmic modes. There had to be some way to aurally tie one voice to the other, and writing it down made it easier both to learn and to perform. It also made it possible for more than two singers to participate.

It is thought that the development of rhythmic modes originates from the treatise De musica by St. Augustine in the 4th and 5th centuries. He described two units of measure, a long (longa) and a short (brevis), where the short was exactly half the length of a long. But they didn’t really get down to documenting these until they had block-note mensuration in the late 11th century. The first notation for the rhythmic modes was based on the block-notes they used for writing down the chants.

It isn’t known who originated the six rhythmic forms, although it is rather likely to have begun at the school at Notre Dame in Paris, where considerable work was being done regarding documenting music theory and coming up with new musical forms. In the 13th century, there was a definitive treatise (attributed to Johannes de Garlandia) that at last described these modes in De musica mensurabili positio.

The first mode was likely the first to be used, a pattern of a longer note and then a shorter one. The reversal of the order to a short and then a long note was a natural progression, and that is the second mode. It is thought that the sixth mode was a sort of ornamentation of this arrangement in that it is three short notes, equaling both the first and second mode in duration.The third, fourth and fifth modes are thought to be later developments. The third consists of three notes, one that is half-again as long as a long note (or the equivalent of three shorts), a short, and then a normal-length long (like a dotted quarter, an eighth, and a quarter note in modern notation). The fourth mode is a short, a long, and a triple-wide long (like an eighth, a quarter and a dotted quarter note in modern notation). And the fifth mode is like two triple-wide longs (two dotted quarter notes in modern notation).

At first, the problem must have been that re-using the same rhythmic patterns throughout a single piece grew tedious and it was also a little hard to document—not everything ends neatly at the end of a rhythmic mode. By the 13th century, scholars at Notre Dame had come up with something called fractio modi (the breaking of the mode), which combined notes of several modes and filled in spaces with notes that didn’t comply with any mode and with rests (silence). They also created a diamond-shaped note to indicate running patterns, usually downward and which may have been performed as ornaments rather than staying in a particular rhythm. (This shape got borrowed back into block-note chant notation.)

Polyphony (multiple melodic lines) made it necessary to indicate how the various voices fit together. The Notre Dame School replaced the even unmeasured flow of plainchant and early polyphony with the recurrent patterns of long and short notes of the rhythmic modes. No song is likely to have maintained any single rhythmic pattern for the duration—it would have seriously squelched the exuberant nature of the wandering voice or voices.

And of course, a sensitive artist wouldn’t follow the notation on the page with mathematical rigor, but would introduce rhythmic nuance suggested by the text and the mood of the poem and by the melody itself. This probably caused the creation of even more developments in the musical world.

It’s interesting to note that the six rhythmic modes correspond to the “feet” of meters in classical poetry. Although the modes have names (Trochaic, Iambic, Dactylic, Anapestic, Spondaic, and Tribrachic), they are usually referred to by their numbers (1-6).

Like the literary meters, the formulas created by these rhythmic modes allowed development into the musical shapes we find familiar today—soon, they needed meters divisible by 2 or 4, and now, we have things with sevens and fives and nines!

Next in the series, non-European modes.

Sources:

Early Medieval Music Up to 1300, edited by Dom Anselm Hughes, Oxford University Press, London, 1954

Medieval Music, Richard H. Hoppin, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1978

A History of Western Music (8th edition), J. Peter Burkholder, Donald Jay Grout, Claude V. Palisca, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 2010

Musical Modes: Part 1, Church Modes

This is the first of three blogs on musical modes. Part 1 is about “church” modes, Part 2 is about rhythmic modes, and Part 3 is about non-European modes.

A mode is a kind of “do-re-me” experience, like a modern musical scale. Modern scales are based on what are called church modes (because they were used in church music). Before there were pianos and organs, a note’s relationship to any other note was somewhat changeable. There were stringed instruments (like the harp, psaltery, and lyre) whose tuning could be changed in a matter of moments or even accidentally, and flutes, whose tuning was entirely dependent upon hole placement and the length of the instrument, and was super easy to get wrong.

Before the 10th century, music was learned by memory because there wasn’t notation, and presumably, melodies changed and mutated with each individual who tried to learn and with every skilled performer who messed with it a little for the pleasure of it. Patterns emerged. Then, as now, people enjoyed recognizing familiar elements and the patterns began to be expected. In modern music, this is still true, with cadences and a certain pattern of chords that indicate that the end is approaching. Ever notice that people sing along when it’s familiar? That’s exactly what I mean.

You might think of modes like punctuation. Certain sounds, just like at the end of a sentence or question, indicate something specific to the listener. This is also true with melodies. As music evolved, certain patterns were thought of as pleasing and were re-used and re-formulated; these patterns and their elements became the modes.

The specific modes were not really a concept until the 10th century when exact pitch notation and the Guidonian system (you can read more about this on my blog entry The Guido’s Hand Seminar ) came into being in Europe. This meant that a song started on the same pitch every time it was sung rather than adapting it whatever pitch suited the singer’s comfort. But once modes were invented as they tried to document the existing chants, they found that the majority of the chants fit into the new theoretical system of modes. How wonderfully convenient!

In the end, modes are easy enough to define in modern terms: modes are a species of notes in an octave series distinguished by the placement of half and whole steps—in other words, if you moved do-re-mi around on the piano, always playing eight notes in a row, and only playing the white notes, you could play each of the eight modes.

Just for contrast, later music, such as that from the Classical or Romantic eras, uses only two modes, major and minor. One modern scale is formed the same way as another, with the half steps (the black keys on the piano) in identical places, no matter which note it starts on. Depending on how you look at it, modern scales are way simpler (because there are only two of them) and way more complicated (because you have to memorize which notes are part of which scale or where the half-steps are). Each mode has a distinctive sound to it, unlike modern scales where, unless you have perfect pitch, one major scale sounds much like any other.

There are two forms of modes: authentic and plagal. These names come from the four original modes Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, and Mixolydian and a near relative of each, beginning a fourth lower and using the same series of notes called Hypodorian, Hypophrygian, Hypolydian, and Hypomixolydian. In the middle of the 16th century, mode placement and transposition created four new modes: Ionian and Hyperionian (ending on C), and Aeolian and Hyperaeolian (ending on A). Ionian sounds just like a C major scale, in case you were wondering, which is the usual do-re-me arrangement.

Modes were not regarded as repeatable from octave to octave, like a modern scale is. A single octave of the mode represents the normal range for a melody in that mode. Stretching beyond the octave was simply not done. Authentic modes seldom have melodies that drop below the starting note (or the final note) by more than a single step; plagal modes can wander further below and a step above the octave.

In the 10th century, as theorists tried to formulate a strategy, they found that they could relate their discoveries into the Greek system of modes as described by Boethius and later Latin writers. That’s why the modes have Greek names, although nothing else about them is Greek. (It is humorous to note that the names were misapplied, but that’s a subject for another day.)

In the first half of the 12th century, the Cistercians amended some of the chants to make them fit into the new modal system. The Cistercians, a particularly severe and fundamentalist order of Catholicism (Bernard of Clairvaux was a member), took a biblical passage literally and deigned that no music should extend beyond the ten strings of a psaltery. To do this, they had to transpose some chants or parts of chants.

As scholars tried to fit existing chant into the parameters of the nascent notation system, they struggled with getting the notes and intervals to sound the same. This was because they hadn’t invented all those black keys on the piano—the sharps and flats. Music was written without accidentals other than the occasional B-flat. Even well past Bach’s time in the 18th century, B-flat was considered the ”devil’s note” and its use was restricted in the extreme. For instance, you could only have a B-flat on the way up a scale. B had to return to its natural state on the way back down. At any rate, the only accidental in Medieval times was a B-flat, so they had to move some chants around, squeeze them by force, in order to get them into the modes once they’d established what those were.

Before the invention of the staff, identifying the mode didn’t matter. The correct intervals were applied wherever they were sung within a singer’s range—the starting note as you and I know it simply didn’t matter. Once the lines of the staff forced the invention of absolute pitches (where a C is always a C), elements like a singer’s range, the placement of accidentals, and whether a chant was joyful or sad became relevant.

Establishing the modes freed composers from centonization, which just means using an existing melody to create a new song. Prior to music notation, melodic themes made it possible to learn a wide variety of chants by rote memorization. You only had to learn the new words and stick them into the familiar melody. After the staff’s invention, there were more options and new melodies were created with wild abandon. Okay, maybe not wild abandon, but with the full freedom that having an outline provides.

After notation was invented and the modes put into common practice, chants were constructed so that the third and fifth notes were emphasized in addition to the first note of the mode. Phrases begin and end on these notes more than on any others. This is foreshadowing for the more modern chord.

Okay, so that’s church modes in a nutshell. Next up, rhythmic modes.

Sources:

Early Medieval Music Up to 1300, edited by Dom Anselm Hughes, Oxford University Press, London, 1954

A History of Western Music (8th edition), J. Peter Burkholder, Donald Jay Grout, Claude V. Palisca, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 2010

Medieval Music, Richard H. Hoppin, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1978

The History of Music Notation

Ancient music was learned by rote. At first, there weren’t too many instruments; there were drums, and of course people sang, and they shortly figured out how to make a whistle, which evolved into the flute. Back in biblical times, there were a few stringed instruments, such as the psaltery, the lyre, and the harp.

This is my psaltery. I built it from a kit from MusicMakers, Inc. It can be held on the lap and chords strummed (by silencing irrelevant notes) or held upright against the torso, and plucked with a plectrum.

Here’s an attractive “minstrel’s” psaltery, meant to be played upright. I found it (and its kin, which are for sale) at www.PsalteryDreams.com. That same site offers this lovely little lyre.

At any rate, around the 6th century, folks began to write music down. They didn’t really have a system, and the symbols they drew more or less reflected the way a hand leading a choir rises and falls. In the following link, you can see a comparison of notation then and now.

http://www.music.vt.edu/musicdictionary/appendix/notation/Neumes.html

The dates on the chart in the link are not quite right (it depends on what country you’re documenting), but they’re close enough for most folks.

The left column of squiggles is what Hildegard von Bingen still used in the 12th century. In the 6th century, when these neumes began to be used, they were not drawn on ledger lines, so there was no way to know how great the interval was between two notes—accommodating the text might require that a note identical in pitch to a neighboring note be placed higher or lower on the page. These were called “unheightened neumes.”

By the 9th century, composers started to draw ledger lines and the pitch intervals between notes began to be consistent (“heightened neumes”). For the first time, someone could accurately melodically replicate a song they had not heard, although the length of notes was still up to the individual performers. They narrowed the number of ledger lines to four in about the 10th century (notes in a sequential scale on a row—on the line and between the lines—added up nicely to the eight notes of a modern scale. Music was still in five-note modes at the time, but because finding the drone note was an obvious way to pair voices, the octave became an important concept to the evolution of early harmony and polyphony. More on that later). (You might want to visit my earlier blog aboutfor more on who and how they came up with the staff that evolved into what we use today.)

The block notes in the center column of the table began to be popular in the late 11th century. The block notes very much imitate the earlier neumes, but the duration of a note began to be relevant. The duration was influenced partly by text and musical sensibility, but composers could add dots and little lines (called epicemas) to note shapes indicating that a note should be lengthened and by how much. The primary motivation for developing these larger note shapes was so that groups could participate (rather than soloists, for whom the earlier music was intended). They were large enough to be seen from a distance because a whole choir sang from one large book.

Block notes are still in use by people who perform Gregorian chant. The earlier neumes are still used by Hildegardians and by scholars working on the Gregorian chants that are old enough to have been written in them originally. The neumes provide perfectly singable information, and are considerably more musically informative than modern notation regarding nuance of inflection, duration, intensity, and intention.

The previous link’s chart is missing a stage in development, so here’s a link to what happened next, called white note mensuration.

http://ieee.uwaterloo.ca/praetzel/mp3-cd/info/raybro/jjj1a.jpg

Although it was developed in the early days of the 15th century, white note mensuration was fast replaced (within century and a half, or so) by modern notation (in the right-hand column of the earlier link’s table). White note mensuration was not adopted by all countries—the Italians, always innovators, were the primary adopters. They invented the system because rhythm and measured beats began to be relevant.

In white notes, the black diamond was a count of one beat, the open diamond with a stem was two beats, the dot meant to add half again (so a dotted open diamond was three counts, a dotted black diamond was a beat and a half), and so forth. The number of ledger lines increased to five because relatively little music took place in less than an octave. (More singers had training than ever before, and keyboard instruments began to increase in popularity and offered considerably greater range than previous instruments.) For the first time, duration of a note was prescribed by the composer.

How fast or slow the piece was performed was largely up to a conductor, a role that was another new invention (someone who interpreted the music and led the group in a formal way—previously there was a leader to keep groups together, but leaders had no special training and just waved a hand around to show when to change notes). Some of the symbols (like the C with a slash through it on the top lines near the left edge) told the leader how fast to go (a C meant—and still means—common time, which is heartbeat or walking speed, or 60 beats per minute; a C with a slash meant half that speed, or twice as slow, etc.), and instruments and singers could finally begin to make complex music together because the rules of music were starting to converge on a standard.

The end of the 16th century saw the establishment of major innovations that would change music composition forever: key signatures (how many sharps and flats—the black notes on the piano), measure lines (separating a series of notes into discrete chunks that added up to a specific number of beats), clefs (marking a range of notes. Some clefs already existed, but they were considered movable. The 16th century created a standard and pitch range for each), and time signatures (how many beats per measure throughout the piece—a major innovation in allowing larger groups and diverse instruments to perform together).

The rules of music were pretty stable by the end of the 16th century, when modern notation was in common usage. This is where Michael Praetorius and Syntagma Musicum fits in, the documentation of modern music notation and performance that J.S. Bach finished, and the standards that we still use today. They got it so right that nothing has changed in 300+ years.

What we do with these notation standards has changed considerably, in large part, thanks to Beethoven. But that’s a story for another day. So is the tangent about rhythm and rhythmic patterns and its merry companion, counterpoint. In brief, rhythm wasn’t part of Western music until white note mensuration made note lengths standard. With rhythm came harmony (as opposed to polyphony), and in a hop, skip, and jump, music began to sound modern. Consider the Italian Renaissance the beginning of modern music, with rhythm, harmony, notation standards, and pitch standards. Harmony plus rhythm bred counterpoint further north. But I digress.

Here’s a little running parallel that I can’t resist. Polyphony—multiple parallel lines of melody—began to develop in the very late 12th century and hit its height in the 14th century (or thereabout, depending on what country you are talking about). Harmony (in the modern sense, where chords follow an established formula and some musical lines are not at melodic but are provided purely to fill in harmonies) evolved around the late 15th century, right around the development of modern notation. The pianoforte had been invented and allowed faster evolution than ever before because, for the first time, a performer could play loudly and softly on a single instrument and specific emotions could be defined by a composer. Emotion hadn’t really come into it before. It was all about the math.

And then Beethoven came along and made the math less of a dominating characteristic. He introduced instructions about emotions, so rather than interpreting for themselves, musicians and their listeners were on the same journey.

And that, my friends, is my History of Music Notation in 3+ pages.

Guido’s Hand Seminar

Today I played hooky from work and went to an early music seminar at Stanford University. Was it fabulous? You bet!

Let me tell you a story.

Back in the 11th century, music notation was a new idea in Europe. It’s not clear if he invented the system, but a Benedictine monk named Guido d’Arezzo is credited both with coming up with what we now know as solfeggio (do-re-me, etc.)  and with designing a nifty mnemonic device using the creases on the left hand to mark off the notes of the scales.

First, you have to know that music notation originally didn’t have the five lines you’re used to seeing. The earliest marks were squiggles on the page called neumes. At first, they described the musical gesture, but not which note should be sung or its duration. Gregorian chant was initially documented this way, starting in the 9th century. Music was learned by rote, and this method sufficed for more than a century.

But by the end of the 10th century, music was getting more complicated (still only one melodic line, still no harmony but now the words were painted across the page in wild and wiggly patterns) and was harder to memorize. Someone had the clever idea to scribe lines on the page, and in the 11th century, duration still was left to the discretion of the performer, but the pitch—the note that’s produced—was finally defined by the composer. The relationship from one neume or note to another could be discerned by its relationship to another neume.

In the 11th century, it became somewhat standard to use four lines rather than marking the whole page with ledger lines. And guess what? If you look at your hand from the palm side, you can see four lines: one where the fingers meet the palm, the two finger joints, and the top of the fingers! Ta-da!

This is what Guido discovered (or is credited with discovering); that each joint on the hand could represent a note, and once learned, he could point to the joints of the five left-hand fingers and the singers would know which note to sing.

This was the premise of the seminar. First, we heard the story of Guido’s life from a professor from Washington University in St. Louse (Dolores Pesce). She told us about the life and times of Guido and others who were making music at that time. She also talked a little about the way the modes were spread across the musical scale and how each mode fits with the others. She had nifty examples from early texts, and we sang a few, to illustrate the way each mode sounds. (Like modern scales, a mode is defined by the half steps—where the black keys on the piano fit in with the white keys. Modes were invented in ancient Greece and morphed into modern scales in about the 16th century.)

Next, we heard about how “literacy” could be optional if using the Guidonian Hand mnemonic device, and a professor from UC Davis (Anna Maria Busse Berger) used the famous troubadour, Oswald von Wolkenstein as an example.

Then, Jesse Rodin of Stanford, with three singers  from Stanford and one from Princeton, illustrated how it works. First, they sang a Kyrie just the way you or I would, from the notes on the page. Then, they sang it in solfeggio, illustrating the notes on their hands as they sang.

Now here’s the interesting part. They sounded pretty good when they sang it as written. But when they sang it in solfeggio and pointed at their hands, the pitch was better, they sounded like they were listening to one another more, and unbelievably, the syllables seemed to make the music more exciting. Instead of singing Ky-ri-e and e-le-i-son slowly and dragged out for a whole line or more, they sang ut (the original syllable for “do”), re, me, fa, and sol.

Suddenly, the various melodic lines popped out. Suddenly, the cantus firmus (the chant melody sung slowly while the other parts were sung more quickly) was apparent and the high voices only a compliment to it rather than burying it, as had been the case when it was sung with the words of the Kyrie.

After that, wonder of wonders, lunch was served. Get this: a free event that included lunch. More get this: an entirely vegetarian lunch with several vegan offerings. Double get this: hardly any nightshades (which I am allergic to). And triple get this: it was delicious. I went back three times for something called Carrot Halva. If you are in the San Francisco Bay Area, check out Udapa Palace who catered the event,  in Sunnyvale, Fremont, Berkeley, and San Francisco. Apparently, they are also in Los Angeles, Gaithersburg Maryland, and New York City.

After lunch, the professor from Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins (Susan Forscher Weiss) showed us the many variations of the hands. Apparently, the illustration that we all think of as Guido’s own hand was not in any of Guido’s documentation. There must have been 30 or more images, some showing a spiral pattern of notes, and others the more ladder-like pattern that is usually thought of as the Guidonian hand. Some hands did not look like hands at all, and others had illustrations of saints or other elements than the words of solfeggio.

Next up was the famous composer and teacher, Alejandro Enrique Planchart, from UC Santa Barbara. He was charming and entertaining, but mostly, it was exciting to hear him illustrate how composers used solfeggio in their work. He passed out editions of his own edition of Morales’ “Missa L’homme arme” (“The Armed Man”) and he sang bits here and there and then we listened to a recording. Then, wonder of wonders, he sang with the students from the earlier hand demonstration.

Finally, Peter Urquhart (University of New Hampshire) talked about the modulation of modes (which have five notes) to something recognizable in modern times (with eight notes). It was a controversial discussion, and I’m afraid lots of it was over my head.

It was also lovely to see some old friends, Catherine and Alcides Rodriguez-Nieto and Sachiyo Aoyama, as well as people I don’t see very often, such as Michael and Susan Murphy, Dr. Bill Mahrt, and Herb Myers. There were about 40 people in attendance, some students, lots of professorial types, and a few of us who wandered in from the early music community.