A MISPLACED TRADITION?

Something that has been ‘misplaced’ has been either put in the wrong place or lost altogether (for example, because it had been misplaced). This may have happened to a tradition of early music which we will call ‘non-mensural polyphony’. To start with, it cannot easily be found because it goes by many names. Researchers variously call it ‘simple’, ‘primitive’, ‘archaic’, ‘peripheral’, ‘organum-like’ (‘organal’), ‘early’, ‘liturgical’, ‘usual’ (‘usuell’), ‘monastic’ (‘klösterlich’), ‘oral’ and ‘retrospective’ polyphony. You may be forgiven for thinking that a musical tradition with so many names would command the particular affection of music historians – but no. The plurality of the nomenclature only suggests that they did not really know where to place it. Understandably, leading reference works and general music histories make no mention of it. But the misplacement is not entirely accidental; it corresponds to a misconception in the historiography of early European music.

‘Medieval music’ is conceived as a dual tradition: monophonic and polyphonic. Monophony comprises liturgical plainsong and – more marginally – vernacular artsong; polyphony begins with early organum and arrives, via ‘Notre-Dame’ and ‘ars nova’, at Renaissance counterpoint and the music of our time. ‘Simple’ polyphony is understood – when mentioned at all – as a minor or more conservative variant of polyphony, which has failed to reach Renaissance counterpoint and thus our time; it lacks both the progressive trajectory of counterpoint and the ritual dignity of monodic plainsong. Under these historiographical preconceptions, it is no surprise when certain traditions of music-making disappear from standard history-writing. ‘Simple’ polyphony is in fact not the only species threatened by musicological extinction: Latin song in its diverse non-liturgical traditions and early instrumental practices are usually discussed in music histories only as far as they were notated and polyphonic.

Archival, theoretical and literary sources of the era, however, do not always distinguish between monophony and polyphony. Neither of these terms was actually used at the time. The contemporary terms ‘diaphonia’, ‘organum’ and ‘discantus’ (with their variations) were more special names that never embraced all the possible techniques we would call ‘polyphony’. It remained ‘plain’ even with embellishments or enhancements. It became multiple, for example, when doubled at the fifth and octave.

Euripides’ Alcestis is a strange and cruel story, despite its happy ending. The play's peculiar combination of a domestic catastrophe with other-worldly fantasy has continued to startle and intrigue its audiences. ‘Adult themes’ are treated here like fairy-tale motifs. Alcestis does not seem to have been a widely read drama in Handel's time, and its use for his opera seria Admeto (1727) – to the extent that one may employ the term a ‘use’ – was probably not popularity-driven. Wendy Heller's essay on this work has deepened our understanding of the gender rivalries, the uncanny intimacy and the playing with simulacra that characterise this play in its Italian operatic versions. The Hanoverians, for whom (according to Heller) this seems to have been a key drama, may have had needs answered by such lore, or secret fears stirred by it.

Other stories from the political and domestic history and legend of the ancient Jews, Greeks and Romans are often more tragic and horrible. Parricide, incest, human sacrifice and military slaughter of innocents are frequent themes. The Bacchic lore and the Iphigenia myth, for example, became fundamental plots for the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century musical theatre (respectively), probably not because the particular ancient texts narrating them were popular reading, nor simply because they aroused the canonic reactions of terror and compassion, but because these topics seem to have reflected a persistent cultural concern with barbaric memories. The themes of parricide and human sacrifice, in particular, seem to have evoked shudders in early modern audiences that the theatre could not ignore. Some of these themes are used in Handel's operas and oratorios, although not in the majority.

Why did Handel set certain stories and not others? Who decided, and by what criteria, on the topic of an opera or oratorio in the performative context of London stages? How did choices of plot for the musical theatre relate to the reading repertories of their audiences? None of these questions can be answered here as such, but it may be helpful to explore at least one segment of the theatrical repertory – the raisons d’être, the strategies of presentation and the possible intertextual implications of Handel's operas and oratorios on themes from antiquity.

THE VAST REPERTORY of English fifteenth-century settings of the Mass Ordinary is now available in critical editions to such an extent that general overviews seem possible. Particular progress has recently been made with editing compositions of the post-Dunstaple generation, datable approximately between 1435 and 1465; it is on this repertory that the present study will focus. The historical and critical interpretation of this music faces questions of cultural context, of dating and transmission, of performance practice, of ritual function, of sonority and aesthetics, allegorical meaning and structural innovation. Previous research has largely been inclined towards named authors – Dunstaple, Power, Benet, Bedyngham, Frye, Plummer – usually in the context of the editions themselves. Typically, discussion of styles has been stimulated by contested composer attributions or hypothetical new ascriptions. The numerous anonymous works have attracted less attention, although there are studies of stylistic layers in the earliest part of the repertory, of the authorship of the anonymous M. Caput (m7), and of a few mid-century cycles. The following short contribution attempts to throw some light on a relatively neglected aspect of compositional style and aesthetics: imitative counterpoint. In the mid-fifteenth century this technique seems to have been relatively infrequent (at least in England), so that its occurrences may offer all the more useful clues towards attribution, dating and general stylistic classification. One observation to be elaborated here is that the uses of imitative counterpoint in English masses of this period are drastically differentiated. There is neither a simple stylistic progression in time (for example, from less to more imitation), nor can it easily be explained why certain compositions should be full of the device, others bare. The fascinating possibility emerges that imitative composition depended on the whim of composers, and in some – although not all – cases may have functioned as a personal fingerprint.

This essay will first survey some contrapuntal characteristics of imitative writing in this repertory, paying attention to stricter and freer forms, and to rhythmic and textural implications. Special kinds of imitative counterpoint and its highlighting will be observed. Then it will consider the significance of the technique for text-setting, text underlay, textual meaning and general form.

The Impatience with the Work-Concept

In the title of this symposium, in some of its papers and in other recent writings on the musical work-concept, I sense an impatience with the work-concept that may do more harm than good to musical scholarship.

The work-concept has, of course, deeply influenced our musical culture; it is as ‘real’ as any aesthetic idea can be, and many generations of musicians have believed in it. When, however, the title of our symposium presents ‘reality’ and ‘invention’ as equal options for its definition, the verbal opposition implies that ‘invention’ means here ‘a fake’, ‘a fabrication’. As a historical statement, this would seem frivolous; I can only conclude that it is a rhetorical statement making a tongue-in-cheek reference to the demystificatory rhetoric which paints European cultural traditions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as deeply devoted to fakes, ‘myths’ and ‘imaginary museums’.

In fact, when musical scholars spoke seriously of ‘The Myth of the Netherlands School’, the ‘Myth of Nationalism’ or ‘The Myth of the Musical Work’, they expressed a commitment to demystification and thus to truth and morality. Here, the term ‘myth’ is to be read not in the dignified sense of ‘a hallowed tale’ but in the common-parlance sense of ‘something fabricated’. What is the point of accusing a historical conceptual notion of being fabricated? Perhaps these are the offshoots of a Puritan rationalism that denies value or legitimacy to things that are not real, and perhaps there is an intention of warning young people off concepts, canons or distinctions that intellectuals have thought up to deceive them. A general mistrust of concepts characterises the tradition of philosophical realism so common in Western popular religion and Anglo-American political philosophy. This tradition outlaws concept as a carrier of truth and draws the consequences by elevating universal concepts that for normative reasons cannot be denied, such as God, Beauty, Nation, Work, to the rank of material existence. In the modern world, where scientific standards have changed more drastically than philosophical ones, the philosophical realist has turned positivist and falls into his own trap, now needing to argue that God, Beauty, Nation, Work, etc. are unreal and therefore untrue. When it is sometimes claimed that no musical works exist but only individual texts or performances, this same sort of disappointed realism may be involved.