The tree of Ars subtilior

[Alain Naigeon]

The years around 1400 are often quoted as the time
of Ars subtilior. However I was sometimes advised
to notice that we have very few manuscripts (two,
I think) containing such music.

There's no reason to think that this data is the only
one to have been lost. It's been suggested here,
some time ago, that these manuscripts are perhaps
improvisations which have been written down.

Personnally I'm quite reluctant to this idea - but my
question of today is different : if this style is so
particular and only known by 2 manuscripts, what
*was* the dominant style around 1400?
Perhaps because of a guilty fascination, I realize
I don't know much about the forest hidden by the
tree of Ars subtilior!

(BTW, on Saturday evening I attended a concert by
Ensemble Gilles Binchois, who played Machaut's mass,
and I'd say there's a lot of Ars subtilior in it :-o ).

--

Français *==> "Musique renaissance" <==* English
midi - facsimiles - ligatures - mensuration
http://anaigeon.free.fr | http://www.medieval.org/emfaq/anaigeon/
Alain Naigeon - anai...@free.fr - Strasbourg, France

[Mark Rimple]

It's hard to know from just the manuscripts that survive how much ars
subtilior music there actually was. I'd include a few minor sources
alongside the big two (Modena and Chantilly). Clearly, there was a new
emphasis in the 15th century on comprehensibility and natural beauty, which
was masterfully achieved in the chansons of Dufay and his generation. But
it's hard to know which style was dominant. In fact, it probably varied
from court to court. Since the jury still seems to be partially out on when
or where Chantilly was copied, it's not so clear which courts favored these
works, and whether they were all ever performed in one place or were instead
gathered in one central collection. Also, the last I read, Torino seems to
have been written in the first quarter of the 15th century, so in Cyprus, at
least, the tradition lasted longer, during the birth of the early 15th c.
French chanson style. What qualifies a style as dominant in the absence of
a mass media or a market of ready consumers? Court records may help, but
there's so little to go on it's hard to know.

Almost a century later, Tinctoris explains mensural proportions as a skill
necessary for improvising against a slower part. Of course, the texted part
of an ars subtilior chanson is the cantus, which is the undeniable partner
for the slower Tenor. After 1400, we have poly-mensural, ars
subtilior-style music in Torino, and the chansons in Oxford Canonici 213;
the proportional tradition continues in later works by the Franco-Flemish
generation such as Ockeghem's Missa Prolationem or the mensural canons in
Dufay and Josquin's works.

The situation with late medieval and early Renaissance polyphonic
instrumental music, specifically (keyboard) intabulations, is similar: two
major manuscripts survive: for the 14th century, Faenza, and Buxheim in the
15th, with other supporting sources (Robertsbridge Codex, Paumann's
Fundamentum, other smaller MS, etc.). Again, this style didn't exactly
perish: the case has been made (by McGee & others) that the tradition
continues almost undisturbed into the Petrucci lute MS (Spinacino & Dalza)
in the early 16th c, and beyond.

From a performer's perspective, I really have doubts that most ars subtilior
works come from an improvised tradition. Many of these pieces have quite
tight harmonic (vertical) construction, and a rhythmic interdependence
between cantus, contra, and tenor, that, in my experience, is the hallmark
of conscious compositional planning. I've played & sung a good deal of the
complex ars subtilior chansons from notation, and my impression is always
that the parts fit well because the composer understood the interaction of
an ensemble, particularly on a rhythmic level. I'd examine Pictagoras, Sus
une fontayne, Se Galaas, En attendant esperance, Se Dedalus, or any of the
works of Trebor, to discover their degree of harmonic planning & rhythmic
interdependence. The hockets in Se Galaas argue against improvisation,
surely.

On the other hand, I do find that simplistic contratenors are easily
decorated with improvised ornamentation, but such decorations are more of an
elaboration or gloss that can serve to energize the rhythmic energy,
particularly toward cadences. (Or perhaps they're just my itchy fingers on
a fingerboard...) The alternate contra/triplum parts from Machaut, and the
newly composed contras of Zacharias and later elaborations (the si placet
voice tradition - Adam Gilbert had a great paper on this at Kalamazoo last
year) also seem to stem from this ancient tradition of glossing an existing
work (from a tenor/cantus pair or later, a superius/tenor/contra trio) to
create a highly individual interpretation of another composer's chanson.
Unless we want to entertain the (probably absurd) possibility of successive
improvisation of the ars subtilior chanson - Tenor - Cantus - Contra. But
this seems counterintuitive based on the fact that 1) the cantus carries the
text, and 2) the parts are full of vertical correspondences. It would be an
interesting experiment, though.

Cheers,

Mark Rimple
Assoc. Prof. Music Theory/Composition
West Chester University
Countertenor, Lutenist: Trefoil
http://www.trefoiltrio.com

"Alain Naigeon" <anai...@free.fr> wrote in message
news:43558b17$0$12493$636a...@news.free.fr...

[bill]

Alain Naigeon wrote:

> ... It's been suggested here,

> some time ago, that these manuscripts are perhaps
> improvisations which have been written down.

i'm inclined to think they are improvisations - perhaps
personalization's would be more to the point.

"el sabbio" collected tunes from passing pilgrims for his "cantigas de
santa maria" which represent a fixed point in time - how these pieces
were performed when he heard them.

but much like the parlor game in which i whisper something to you that
you in turn whisper to the person next to you, etc., etc., i'm sure
that as those tunes traveled across spain or down to rome, what they
started out as ended up as different from what came back.

- bill

[John Briggs]

bill wrote:
>
> "el sabbio" collected tunes from passing pilgrims for his "cantigas de
> santa maria" which represent a fixed point in time - how these pieces
> were performed when he heard them.

You have some very quaint notions! It's "el Sabio", 'the Learned' - not, I
fear, an epithet likely to to attached to you anytime soon.

In Martin Cunningham's excellent edition of a tithe of the Cantigas (the
Cantigas de Loor) he points out that Alfonso wasn't the Tenth of anywhere in
particular - he was really Alfonso IX of Asturias, Alfonso VI of Leon, and
Alfonso IV of Castile.
--
John Briggs

[bill]

my my ... positively bristly this morning. thank you for your mention
of "tithe" (still looking) and the history of kings but i believe the
subject under discussion was diversity of style in the playing of early
music and whether one should have precedence over another. camomile
tea, i'm told, is an appropriate beverage for the soothing of jangled
nerves and the discomfort of excessive bile ... bottoms up!

[John Briggs]

The subject was actually art music of c.1400. Just out of interest, to
which particular pilgrimage sites were your thirteenth-century pilgrims
passing?
--
John Briggs

[Mark Rimple]

Hi Bill,

Personalizations - I like that way of putting it. Would you consider there's
a difference between personalization and improvisation? The telephone
idea - the reception of the pieces from one performer to another seen
through variants in mss - is something you can examine in the pieces that
survive in each subtilior MS. Perhaps the fact that there aren't many
serious variants means the two mss are much more closely linked - I forget
the reams of paper I've read on the current opinions about the provenance &
relationship between both, but seem to remember the six-line staff give some
weight to a potential Italian one for Chantilly as well. But I could be
mis-remembering - that one has more French than Italian works, while Modena
has the Matteo da Perugia pieces. In any event, Ciconia's Sus une fontayne
is a special case, since it's a collage of (4?) Philipoctus' pieces, but the
contras of both surviving versions are rather different. I discovered this
by recording the one I didn't learn & memorize with Newberry, and it was a
trip to erase a contra from my head that I've been performing for years.
But mostly the personalizations aren't very extreme in my recollection -
take Fuions de ci, or the Machaut chansons that show up in Modena. They're
not very different from most other sources. The former must be at least a
decade past the composer's death. But since we don't have composers'
autographs, it may be true that they evolved certain aspects in performance
before they were copied in the Chantilly or Modena. For some pieces that
seem to have visual stimulation as their raison d'etre, though (Tout par
compas, Harpe de melodie), I doubt it.

Maybe we're talking about a practice closer to a jazz singer's
ornamentation, or a Baroque singer. Berkeley MS has "verbulae" or rhythmic
ornamental formulae that are intriguing. But are they for the composer or
performer or both? We'll never know, but it's fun to experiment with the
ideas with other performers.

Mark

"bill" <billkil...@virgilio.it> wrote in message
news:1130137345....@g44g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...

[bill]

Alain Naigeon wrote:

> but my
> question of today is different : if this style is so
> particular and only known by 2 manuscripts, what
> *was* the dominant style around 1400?

not being in the least bit "churchy" - i haven't a clue what the names
of those medieval spanish religious sites, popular with pilgrims might
have been. but i'd be willing to bet they had something to do with
some gal' named maria.

returning to the central theme of the posting, i'd have to say that all
collections of early music credited to "anon" have to be considered as
"folk" music of some sort or another - secular or other wise. this is
in no way meant to denigrate the music - quite the opposite.

perhaps "ars subtilior" in this instance, should have more of a "ars
alive!" connotation than "ars precise."

regards - bill

[bill]

Mark Rimple wrote:

> Maybe we're talking about a practice closer to a jazz singer's
> ornamentation, or a Baroque singer. Berkeley MS has "verbulae" or rhythmic
> ornamental formulae that are intriguing. But are they for the composer or
> performer or both? We'll never know, but it's fun to experiment with the
> ideas with other performers.

absolutely ... in reply to alain's other thread, someone named tim
quoted an early source lamenting the fact that "rude husbandmen and
artificers" without benefit of the king's livery were performing music
at the expense of royal musicians. i just can't see how a group of
"rude husbandmen ... etc.", busking a crowd on market day would play
the music in any other way but improvisational.

another wicked, recurring thought (hehhehheh) - aside from "rude
husbandmen and artificers" - is the absolute surety that two
musicologists of the day, on hearing a particular piece performed
differently, would have bickered like mad over the "authenticity" of
theirs over the other's version ... sound familiar?

regards - bill

[R. Mattes]

On Mon, 24 Oct 2005 05:05:43 -0700, bill wrote:

>
> Alain Naigeon wrote:
>
>> but my
>> question of today is different : if this style is so
>> particular and only known by 2 manuscripts, what
>> *was* the dominant style around 1400?
>
> not being in the least bit "churchy" - i haven't a clue what the names
> of those medieval spanish religious sites, popular with pilgrims might
> have been. but i'd be willing to bet they had something to do with
> some gal' named maria.

Oy veh! Better don't bet all your money. The biggest and most important
'spanish religious site' was probably Stantiago de Compostella (with
pilgrims from all over Europe visiting). So St. Jacob would be the guy's
name ...

> returning to the central theme of the posting, i'd have to say that all
> collections of early music credited to "anon" have to be considered as
> "folk" music of some sort or another - secular or other wise.

Are you serious? Why would our missing knowledge about the aouthor-
ship of a piece of music be relevant to the "folk"-ness of it?

> this is
> in no way meant to denigrate the music - quite the opposite.
>
> perhaps "ars subtilior" in this instance, should have more of a "ars
> alive!" connotation than "ars precise."

I start to fear that you aren't aware that the music we refer to as "ars
subtilior" was never called so in it's own time. This is a rather
unfortunate term coined by Ursula Günther IIRC.

Back to the org. topic: David Fallows did a rather interesting lecture
on later "ars subtilior" repertoire during a symposium at the Schola
Cantorum Basiliensis (15th century symposium IIRC) - the material is
published in 'The end of the Ars Subtilior', Basler Jahrbuch für
historische Musikpraxis, xx (1996).

HTH Ralf Mattes

> regards - bill

[bill]

R. Mattes wrote:

> Are you serious? Why would our missing knowledge about the aouthor-
> ship of a piece of music be relevant to the "folk"-ness of it?

must be nit-pickers day out ...

collections of music from an acknowledged composer (matteo da perugia,
solage, trebor etc.) would have been preserved and accredited as such.
anonymous pieces would have been collected and retained individually,
as they appeared, from sources who didn't - or couldn't - identify the
composer ... like informal musicians and something less than strident,
easy going, mild mannered musicologists with no thesis to defend ...
"folks."

> I start to fear that you aren't aware that the music we refer to as "ars
> subtilior" was never called so in it's own time. This is a rather
> unfortunate term coined by Ursula Günther IIRC.

fear not. how could the works of solage - (france - late 1300's),
matteo da perugia (northern italy - early 1400's) and ... i'm not sure
if they're on the list or not, but ... the monk of saltzburg and martin
codax of spain all be considered as a single collection?

i'm not above a little nit-picking myself: by "aouthor-ship" i assume
you mean the little run-about arthur used to fetch excalculator.

spellingcanbefun - bill

[John Howell]

At 5:05 AM -0700 10/24/05, bill wrote:
>
>returning to the central theme of the posting, i'd have to say that all
>collections of early music credited to "anon" have to be considered as
>"folk" music of some sort or another - secular or other wise. this is
>in no way meant to denigrate the music - quite the opposite.

You have a rather odd concept of "folk song," but at least you are
sharing your definition with us. In fact, part of the medieval
mindset was not to sign one's works or to claim authorship of them,
since in fact they were God's works and the
composer/painter/sculptor/architect was only the vessel used to carry
out God's inspiration.

As far as individual improvisation and individual stylization and
interpretation are concerned, of course that happened! How could it
not? That's how different uses came into being in different places,
when the mean speed of communication was probably less than one mile
an hour! One absolutely expects that in oral traditions.

As far as the ars subtilior repertoire representing improvisations,
however, I can't quite see it. Given that improvisation was ALWAYS
part of music making, and that we give much, much too much credit to
the blueprint on the page, these super-sophisticated pieces could not
have been notated at all without the 14th century innovations in ars
nova notation, and given the preciseness of that notation I just
can't see a bunch of the boys whooping it up at the Malamute Saloon
and hiring a scribe to transcribe the results!

John


--
John & Susie Howell
Virginia Tech Department of Music
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:John....@vt.edu)
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html

[John Howell]

At 3:30 PM +0200 10/24/05, R. Mattes wrote:
>
>Oy veh! Better don't bet all your money. The biggest and most important
>'spanish religious site' was probably Stantiago de Compostella (with
>pilgrims from all over Europe visiting). So St. Jacob would be the guy's
>name ...

St. James, I thought.

[John Briggs]

John Howell wrote:
> At 3:30 PM +0200 10/24/05, R. Mattes wrote:
>>
>> Oy veh! Better don't bet all your money. The biggest and most
>> important 'spanish religious site' was probably Stantiago de
>> Compostella (with pilgrims from all over Europe visiting). So St.
>> Jacob would be the guy's name ...
>
> St. James, I thought.

Jacobus in Latin.
--
John Briggs

[bill]

John Howell wrote:

> can't see a bunch of the boys whooping it up at the Malamute Saloon
> and hiring a scribe to transcribe the results!

neither can i. ars north of saskatoon gets numb with cold.

... RETURNING TO THE CENTRAL POINT! ...

i don't think there is ONE way to perform this music and ONE WAY alone.
notation - while an aid - doesn't stop people from experimenting now
and i don't think it did then.

time for dinner - bill

[Jack Campin - bogus address]

> part of the medieval mindset was not to sign one's works or to
> claim authorship of them, since in fact they were God's works
> and the composer/painter/sculptor/architect was only the vessel
> used to carry out God's inspiration.

*Some* mediaeval mindsets. I seem to remember a remark from Peter
Abelard that being deprived of his due credit for an idea hurt more
than being castrated.

============== j-c ====== @ ====== purr . demon . co . uk ==============
Jack Campin: 11 Third St, Newtongrange EH22 4PU, Scotland | tel 0131 660 4760
<http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/> for CD-ROMs and free | fax 0870 0554 975
stuff: Scottish music, food intolerance, & Mac logic fonts | mob 07800 739 557

[Todd Michel McComb]

In article <bogus-80BF2B....@news.news.demon.net>,

Jack Campin - bogus address <bo...@purr.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>I seem to remember a remark from Peter Abelard that being deprived
>of his due credit for an idea hurt more than being castrated.

Of course, he's kind of a special case, but you're right. It was
common, say, for troubadours to sing about themselves. A more
salient point here is that, even if a composer tried his best to
see that he was given credit for a piece in future centuries, he
might well have failed. This may come as a shock to some, but a
lot of information from the period is lost.

Todd McComb
mcc...@medieval.org

[Alain Naigeon]

"Mark Rimple" <mri...@comcast.net> a écrit dans le message
news: -NGdndin59zGzMTe...@comcast.com...

> It's hard to know from just the manuscripts that survive how much ars
> subtilior music there actually was.

Mark, thank you very much! I copy your message for a later
study and to keep the references you've given.

> From a performer's perspective, I really have doubts that most ars
subtilior
> works come from an improvised tradition. Many of these pieces have quite
> tight harmonic (vertical) construction, and a rhythmic interdependence
> between cantus, contra, and tenor, that, in my experience, is the hallmark
> of conscious compositional planning. I've played & sung a good deal of
the
> complex ars subtilior chansons from notation, and my impression is always
> that the parts fit well because the composer understood the interaction of
> an ensemble, particularly on a rhythmic level. I'd examine Pictagoras,
Sus
> une fontayne, Se Galaas, En attendant esperance, Se Dedalus, or any of the
> works of Trebor, to discover their degree of harmonic planning & rhythmic
> interdependence. The hockets in Se Galaas argue against improvisation,
> surely.

BTW, I had in mind another very concrete reason ; I think no one - not
Mozart,
not Stravinsky, not Boulez ! - would be able to write down the three parts
with all the rhythmic details just while hearing them in real time !
And of course : in the absence of details it wouldn't be subtilior any more,
and if hearing them several times in the very same version it would't be
improvisation anymore.

[R. Mattes]

On Mon, 2005-10-24 at 11:45 -0400, John Howell wrote:
> At 3:30 PM +0200 10/24/05, R. Mattes wrote:
> >

> >Oy veh! Better don't bet all your money. The biggest and most important
> >'spanish religious site' was probably Stantiago de Compostella (with
> >pilgrims from all over Europe visiting). So St. Jacob would be the guy's
> >name ...
>

> St. James, I thought.

Sorry, lost in translation: once again missed that english
transmogrifies Jacob/Jacques/Giaccomo/Jakob => James ...

Cheers,

Ralf Mattes

> John
>
>