Scales used in Renaissance music
Jonathan Dunne
I know this is a long shot but does anybody know what scales were used in
either renaissance music / early english folk music (1500AD)? The reason i
ask is, I'd like to incorporate some of these scales into my acoustic guitar
playing.
Thanks in advance for any replies
Jonathan
mike pritchard
Jonathan Dunne wrote:
Jonathan,
I can't really help you on your quest for documented scales, tho I've read a
little that some of the music included some unique scales. Are you familiar
with guitarist William Ellwood? A lot of his music has a sound that I think may
be close to what you're looking for. A couple of CD's I'd recommend would be
"Vista" and one that is actually called "Renaissance." The latter has a really
nice sound, a lot like the kind of music you're looking for. A listen may at
least give you some great influence and/or ideas.
I love to listen to Ellwood at night, especially after a gig with my band. Nice
way to unwind.
Mike P.
ravi...@mindspring.com
<jona...@vistatec.ie> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I know this is a long shot but does anybody know what scales were used in
> either renaissance music / early english folk music (1500AD)? The reason i
> ask is, I'd like to incorporate some of these scales into my acoustic guitar
> playing.
>
> Thanks in advance for any replies
> Jonathan
Aeolian and Dorian modes may be what you're looking for . Post to
rec.music.theory may get an expert reply
Leo Sadler
ravi...@mindspring.com wrote in message ...
posting to rec.music.early would be a good idea too.
Don't forget that the tuning was different - depending on when exactly your
music comes from, it could be in Pythagorean tuning, or mean tone tuning,
and the accidentals are different - A# was not the same as Bb. Also the
tuning was flat from modern tuning - over a tone in the case of some organs
of Bach's time. The lower tuning explains why there are no surviving
unaltered Stads, Amatis etc - modern tuning would rip the necks off an
original.
regards
fatian
John Sheehy
"Jonathan Dunne" <jona...@vistatec.ie> wrote :
>
>I know this is a long shot but does anybody know what scales were used in
>either renaissance music / early english folk music (1500AD)? The reason i
>ask is, I'd like to incorporate some of these scales into my acoustic guitar
>playing
Do a search in Deja News for posts (in rec.music.theory) by "Margo
Schulter" containing the word "renaissance".
--
<>>< ><<> ><<> <>>< ><<> <>>< <>>< ><<>
John P Sheehy <jsh...@ix.netcom.com>
><<> <>>< <>>< ><<> <>>< ><<> ><<> <>><
Ally
|
|Aeolian and Dorian modes may be what you're looking for . Post to
|rec.music.theory may get an expert reply
. . . and try rec.music.early as well.
Ally
bogus address
> I know this is a long shot but does anybody know what scales were
> used in either renaissance music / early english folk music (1500AD)?
> The reason i ask is, I'd like to incorporate some of these scales into
There is a humungous tutorial on modality in folk music (Scots in
particular) on my website. Might give you some ideas but I don't
know beans about playing the guitar.
Folk music hasn't changed much in tonality between then and now, as
far as can be seen from the limited amount of it that old which has
survived (rhythm and phrasing were *very* different, though). Art
music then was pretty remote from folk music in most respects except
for its scales; those scales were used for radically un-folky harmony,
counterpoint and large-scale structure (i.e. *forget* about the idea of
"putting chords to a tune", it didn't work that way; Margo Schulter's
postings to rec.music.early elaborate on this. Further, a lot of
Renaissance art music wasn't really constructed to have "tunes" any
more than typical pieces by Xenakis or Philip Glass are). Folk music
and art music converged more a bit later on, during the Baroque.
There is a lot of Renaissance music for guitar-like instruments: ask
in a good music shop that has early music scores. If you don't know it,
you will probably be surprised at how complicated and difficult it is.
One common form was "divisions", variation sets on simple folk or folk-
like tunes, which often extend them into wild torrents of high-speed
scales. Fingerpicking that is going to take practice.
========> Email to "jc" at this site; email to "bogus" will bounce. <========
Jack Campin: 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU; 0131 6604760
http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/purrhome.html food intolerance data and recipes,
freeware logic fonts for the Macintosh, and Scots traditional music resources
David Kilpatrick
wrote:
> in reply to:
>> I know this is a long shot but does anybody know what scales were
>> used in either renaissance music / early english folk music (1500AD)?
>> The reason i ask is, I'd like to incorporate some of these scales into
>> my acoustic guitar playing.
>
> There is a humungous tutorial on modality in folk music (Scots in
> particular) on my website. Might give you some ideas but I don't
> know beans about playing the guitar.
>
long post snipped
This is the first time I've come across Jack although he lives just 30 miles
away. His site he refers to is incredibly detailed and uses ABC notation
which I was entirely unaware of. Everything in it is true although it may
look like a fairly opinionated thesis. Jack doesn't seem to favour
guitarists, however, and there are two small swipes taken at guitar players
and guitarist-singers in the tutorial.
Jack also fails to mention the 18th c Scottish 'guittar' tutors and
manuscripts by name, preferring to keep to pipe and fiddle references where
possible. The open-chord tuning used on these instruments, and the frequent
restriction of fretted notes to a pentatonic or hexatonic scale, is easily
imitated on the modern guitar and Rob MacKillop has recently published a
complete tutor book based on tuning to DADGAD or DGDGBD with many examples
of mediaeval to 18th c Scottish instrumentals. Used in conjunction with
MacKillop's guittar, guitar, lute and mandour recordings of these tunes you
can begin to get a feel of how to handle the repetitive, often fast, figures
and phrases.
Two things seem to be vital to authentic playing. First, the classic guitar
hand position is not correct and a bluegrass-piedmont style is more
appropriate; thumbpicks were used, as indeed were plectrums, for wire-strung
instruments and the ring finger and pinky were rarely employed. This suits
modern guitarists quite well. Secondly, any tendency to an alternating bass
must be ironed out! There is a definite bass line detectable, but it has
that dotted rythm and often is more of a moving drone note or like an
occasionally repeated drum beat. Fingernails should be as short as possible,
and you need to practice a fast trill (shake) between two fingers, or finger
and thumb, on adjacent strings. Hammer-on and pull-off techniques were used,
but NOT string bending blue notes (!) or country multi-note hammer-pull
runs. Classic guitar style vibrato or a fingered tremolo between two notes
is not appropriate; the 'shake' would be used instead, creating a sound more
like a harpsichord trill. It's likely that this was copied from guitar-like
instruments, rather than vice-versa.
There is a US written mediaeval tune book from Mel Bay, with mainly Italian
and French troubadour material. To say this is tedious to play is an
understatement; the retunings to very plain open sets (DADAAD sort of stuff)
create interesting sounds, pity the tunes are so awful!
In the end, it is not the 'scales' which make the difference. It's how you
avoid harmonies which are inappropriate, and how you kill unwanted
resonance. A standard tuned guitar has open strings which may resonate, when
the renaissance tune doesn't need that particular harmonic at all. DADGAD
tuning can help a lot, especially if you play the melody on the G string so
that only D or A can sound on an open string.
I've said before on this NG that my friends refer to my normal playing as
'Elizabethan' (in fact, we now do a duet version of Buddy Holly 'All in the
Game' based on this!). Hardly any of that is to do with scales, or notes,
and a lot to do with avoiding full chords but playing widely separated bass
and melody notes with no thirds and lots of octaves. I picked up most of
that sort of approach from Pentangle, Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span,
Martin Carthy, John Renbourn and others many years ago and you can do worse
than revisit those classic 1970s British folk-rock albums. While hardly
authentic, they incorporated many deliberately mediaeval sounding parts to
back what they thought were mediaeval tunes.
David Kilpatrick
--
Read about our photo magazines: http://www.freelancephotographer.co.uk/
Personal website: http://www.maxwellplace.demon.co.uk/pandemonium/
bogus address
Keyser Soze <back...@netexpress.net> writes:
> x-no-archive: yes
Why on earth did you do that?
> "Jonathan Dunne" <jona...@vistatec.ie> wrote:
>> I know this is a long shot but does anybody know what scales were
>> used in either renaissance music / early english folk music (1500AD)?
> The leading composer for that era was Palestrina.
Palestrina was active towards the end of the 16th century, and simply
having the top job (composer to the Pope) did not add to his musical
significance. He was adopted by later generations as the epitome of
Renaissance music, probably because his work was the easiest to find
copies of and stayed in the repertoire because of its institutional
status, but he was only one among many and his compositions have an
unusually narrow stylistic range.
> The composers employed diatonic modes.
Not always. Gesualdo (roughly contemporary with Palestrina) was
extra-ordinarily chromatic, using hairy dissonances that sound much like bebop,
and some southern Italian composers in the mid-16th century even tried
microtonality, building harpsichords with something like 31 keys to the
octave. (Yet more reason for not equating folk music and early music;
art music was no folkier 500 years ago than it is now).
> The compositions avoided lines which sounded like scales.
People writing flashy instrumental music regularly used scales, since
they're an effective cheap trick at all times and places. See e.g. the
ricercares of Aurelio Virgiliano.
> They avoided tritones like the plague; avoided parallel 4ths, 5ths,
> and octaves.
> There are gazillions of tedious rules involved with this form of music.
Most of which is after-the-fact urban legend. Tritones were just fine
in appropriate contexts.
Here's a small piece dating from around 1500 like the man wanted. (The
hairiest thing for its size I have ever tried to write in ABC; it was a
real bugger getting these barlineless voices to synchronize right). For
a lot more in the same or a more folky style from a bit earlier, try the
Glogauer Liederbuch, a collection of German part songs. This works in
BarFly for the Mac; it may take a bit of tweaking to work with other ABC
software - the multi-voice stuff isn't fully standardized yet.
X:1
T:Ach meydlein rein
C:Heinrich Isaac (1450-1517)
S:xeroxed page 12 from a German anthology of recorder duets
Z:Jack Campin
L:1/4
Q:1/2=116 % my guess
M:none
V:1
V:2
K:C
V:1 g8 a4 c'4 b4 (a3b) (c'3d') b2 (c'3b ag) a4 g4 z2 a2 b4 |
V:2 z8 c8 d4 f4 e4 d2 (a3 g) (g4 ^f2) g4 z4 z2 d2|
%
V:1 c'4 (d'3c') (ba)(bg) a2 g4 (c'4 b2) c'4 z2 c'2 c'4 c'4|
V:2 e4 f4 g4 f2 e4 (dc) d4 c8 z4 f4|
%
V:1 a8 z4 d'8 b4 c'4 d'4 g4 a6 (gf) (f3 e/d/)(ef) g4 ^f2|
V:2 f4 f4 d8 z4 g4 e4 f4 g4 c4 d6 (cB) (A2 G2) A4 |
%
V:1 g8 d'4 b4 (e'3d') c'2 (ba) b2 (e'3d') c'4 (ba) b4 (c'3b)|
V:2 G8 z4 g4 e4 a4 g4 c4 d4 d4 c4 |
%
V:1 a4 g2 b2 a4 g4 z2 d'2 c'4 b4 a4 z2 g2 (b6 c'2) |
V:2 d4 e2 (g4 ^f2) g8 z4 g4 =f4 e4 d4 z4 |
%
V:1 d'4 e'2 c'4 (ba) b4 a6 d'4 ^c2 d'4 z2 d'2|
V:2 z2 f2 e6 f2 g4 a2 f4 (ed) e4 d8 |
%
V:1 d'4 b4 d'4 e'4 d'4 c'2 e'4 (d'c')(bg) (ab) c'8|]
V:2 z4 g4 g4 e4 g4 a2 g4 (fe) d2 d2 c8 |]
Doesn't exactly sound like something you'd hoist steins of beer to in
the pub, does it?
British composers of the time included William Cornyshe in England
(somewhat folkier) and Robert Carver in Scotland (at the outermost
extreme of technical complexity for his time and about as groovable-
to as Brian Ferneyhough).
bogus address
"David Kilpatrick" <da...@maxwellplace.demon.co.uk> writes:
> bo...@purr.demon.co.uk (bogus address) wrote:
>> There is a humungous tutorial on modality in folk music (Scots in
>> particular) on my website.
> small swipes taken at guitar players and guitarist-singers in the
> tutorial.
> Jack also fails to mention the 18th c Scottish 'guittar' tutors and
> manuscripts by name
Okay, I've now put a few tunes from these on my website (I transcribed
them months ago). Any others I ought to know about?
David Kilpatrick
>
> "David Kilpatrick" <da...@maxwellplace.demon.co.uk> writes:
>> bo...@purr.demon.co.uk (bogus address) wrote:
>>> There is a humungous tutorial on modality in folk music (Scots in
>>> particular) on my website.
>> Jack doesn't seem to favour guitarists, however, and there are two
>> small swipes taken at guitar players and guitarist-singers in the
>> tutorial.
>> Jack also fails to mention the 18th c Scottish 'guittar' tutors and
>> manuscripts by name
>
> Okay, I've now put a few tunes from these on my website (I transcribed
> them months ago). Any others I ought to know about?
>
As anyone from this group who has visited Jack's site will realise he is a)
probably a genius b) appears to operate on a 72-hour day.
Yes, of course, Jack. You can tell us precisely where Dick Gaughan derived
the tune and parts of the lyrics for Both Sides the Tweed, how this relates
to James Hogg, where Allan Ramsay comes into it, and what came before that.
And while you're at it, can you provide an educated guess at exactly what
Scott, Leyden, Hogg and others were actually hearing when Scott described
the singing of an old woman in the Border hills as being a sort of uncouth
or eerie wailing? Was she singing in quarter-tones, or microtones? Would it
have sounded like middle Eastern singing, perhaps? Do we need to build
guitars with quarter-tone frets?
Only joking :-)
David
James Andrews
: have sounded like middle Eastern singing, perhaps? Do we need to build
: guitars with quarter-tone frets?
They already do:
Also G&L is coming out with some, I think.
Jas.
--
James Andrews
Philadelphia, PA
remove the XX
bogus address
Peter Wilton <pj...@beaufort.demon.co.uk> writes:
> bogus address <bo...@purr.demon.co.uk> writes
>> art music was no folkier 500 years ago than it is now
> There are noticeable links between folk and art music through the
> ages (even if the two are not precisely the same thing) e.g.
> The Cantus Firmus mass which takes its tenor from a popular tune.
> FitzWilliam virginal book with its "serious" keyboard variations,
> but usually on popular tunes.
You get a similar process in pibroch; some pibrochs are based on
folk songs. However, nobody would over have said that *made* them
folk music - pipers who did pibroch, in former times, never played
popular pipe music.
> The cantatas of Bach which use Lutheran chorales as a cantus firmus
> (perhaps not the right term by this stage), which were once the devil's
> tunes.
How many of them were? Surely most of the hymn tunes of Luther's time
were written specifically as religious music. The Church of Scotland
is one example of the sort of thing that happened at this time: in the
immediate aftermath of the Reformation, having scrapped the entire body
of Catholic ritual music, they tried substituting Scottish folk songs.
It didn't work: the texts for the new hymns were mostly awful, and the
secular associations of the tunes were too strong for people to forget.
So within a generation they simply adopted the Anglo-Genevan Psalter of
around 1580, which contained not a single melody anybody in Scotland
would have encountered before, and the devil got his own tunes back.
Nobody tried using secular tunes for hymns in Scotland again until the
1870s, after Sankey and Moody.
> The similarity in style between some arias in the Handel-Mozart period
> and some drawing room songs.
Drawing-room songs are "light classical" music, which is yet a third
genre; in Britain, it began at the Restoration and gradually ousted
"high art" music after Handel's death (more so in England than in
Scotland, where parlour arrangements of national music filled the same
role). It maybe deserves more credit as a force for musical change
than it generally gets.
[stuff on 19th century developments...]
> The real point of departure [...] is [...] when it became conventional
> that certain popular traits should be avoided, so as to identify the
> "art" music genre as wholly distinct from the popular (the Brahms-
> Wagner era).
The idea of keeping genres separate by forbidding the interbreeding of
technical characteristics apparently survived into the Reithian BBC.
I once heard Jim Johnstone saying that the Beeb (who detested Scottish
danceband music and only permitted it on air because some influential
aristocrats and royals who liked it ordered them to) had an explicit
rule that dancebands were not allowed to use diminished chords. Hence
Angus Fitchet's "JB Milne", which puts an unavoidable diminished chord
right into the melody as a way of giving two fingers to the rulebook.
> So, it could be argued that the degree of separation of "popular" and
> "art" that we have taken as normative is actually exceptional, and
> brought the public reception of "art" music to its knees to boot!
Some of the most widely accepted art-music composers have also been the
least folky - Corelli was probably the first composer to get the ear of
the entire middle class of Europe, and there's not a single folk tune
in his work, or anything that sounds like one. Beethoven only used
folk tunes in obscure, minor pieces that hardly anybody knows. The most
widely heard today are people like Philip Glass, Arvo Paert and John
Tavener, none of whom use folk material. By far the most popular piece
of art music to come out of Scotland in the last generation is James
Macmillan's percussion concerto "Veni, Veni Emmanuel", which does use
what might be regarded as an (adoptive) folk tune, but only as one
element in a motorway-pile-up of images from all over contemporary
culture (not least, advocacy by a dishy performer who must draw in a
sizable part of her audience on sheer sex appeal).
People are pretty good at keeping multiple musical stylistic paradigms
in their heads if the situation's right. The idea that there is any
one idiom (in this case, folk melody) that necessarily enhances the
marketability of music ends up with the something-for-everybody tactics
of the American mass music industry, which in fact hasn't been all that
successful at appealing to everybody in the last few decades. They
keep getting outsold by quirky, individual performers who ignore the
market researchers.
Peter Wilton
<bo...@purr.demon.co.uk> writes
>
>> The cantatas of Bach which use Lutheran chorales as a cantus firmus
>> (perhaps not the right term by this stage), which were once the devil's
>> tunes.
>
>How many of them were? Surely most of the hymn tunes of Luther's time
>were written specifically as religious music. The Church of Scotland
>is one example of the sort of thing that happened at this time: in the
>immediate aftermath of the Reformation, having scrapped the entire body
>of Catholic ritual music, they tried substituting Scottish folk songs.
>It didn't work: the texts for the new hymns were mostly awful, and the
>secular associations of the tunes were too strong for people to forget.
>So within a generation they simply adopted the Anglo-Genevan Psalter of
>around 1580, which contained not a single melody anybody in Scotland
>would have encountered before, and the devil got his own tunes back.
>Nobody tried using secular tunes for hymns in Scotland again until the
>1870s, after Sankey and Moody.
I don't know how many of them were. Ones that spring to mind are the
"Passion Chorale" and Innsbruck. It may work better in Germany, I
suppose, because the folk tradition there is widely said to have been
"classicised".
>> The similarity in style between some arias in the Handel-Mozart period
>> and some drawing room songs.
>
>Drawing-room songs are "light classical" music, which is yet a third
>genre; in Britain, it began at the Restoration and gradually ousted
>"high art" music after Handel's death (more so in England than in
>Scotland, where parlour arrangements of national music filled the same
>role). It maybe deserves more credit as a force for musical change
>than it generally gets.
But don't forget that Haydn Welsh and Scottish folk song arrangement
was part of the same repertory, and probably sung by the same sort of
soprani who sang (e.g.) "My mother bids me bind my hair".
>The idea of keeping genres separate by forbidding the interbreeding of
>technical characteristics apparently survived into the Reithian BBC.
>I once heard Jim Johnstone saying that the Beeb (who detested Scottish
>danceband music and only permitted it on air because some influential
>aristocrats and royals who liked it ordered them to) had an explicit
>rule that dancebands were not allowed to use diminished chords. Hence
>Angus Fitchet's "JB Milne", which puts an unavoidable diminished chord
>right into the melody as a way of giving two fingers to the rulebook.
THAT is priceless!
>Some of the most widely accepted art-music composers have also been the
>least folky - Corelli was probably the first composer to get the ear of
>the entire middle class of Europe, and there's not a single folk tune
>in his work, or anything that sounds like one. Beethoven only used
>folk tunes in obscure, minor pieces that hardly anybody knows.
I was played some Alpine horn (I think) blasts at a conference recently,
which sounded straight out of the pastoral symphony (or the other way
round, I should say.)
>The most
>widely heard today are people like Philip Glass, Arvo Paert and John
>Tavener, none of whom use folk material. By far the most popular piece
>of art music to come out of Scotland in the last generation is James
>Macmillan's percussion concerto "Veni, Veni Emmanuel", which does use
>what might be regarded as an (adoptive) folk tune,
It will be at my Sidmouth workshop this Summer, I hope! A teenage boy
played this the other day on the young musician finals, didn't he?
>but only as one
>element in a motorway-pile-up of images from all over contemporary
>culture (not least, advocacy by a dishy performer who must draw in a
>sizable part of her audience on sheer sex appeal).
As the examples were drawn from a long time-span, I was including
popular idioms generally, since I take "folk" to be an artificial term
invented at a particular time to describe popular music from the past!
--
Peter Wilton
The Gregorian Association Web Page:
http://www.beaufort.demon.co.uk
george_hawes
<pj...@beaufort.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>In article <61...@purr.demon.co.uk>, bogus address
><bo...@purr.demon.co.uk> writes
>> Scotland in the last generation is James Macmillan's
>> percussion concerto "Veni, Veni Emmanuel",
> A teenage boy played this the other day on the young musician
> finals, didn't he?
Indeed. Although I have to admit listening to it in the car it
was hard to imagine why he or anyone would have chosen to do so .
OK, car radio's not the ideal way to listen to anything, but we
found it the only piece in the finals which was less than
engaging . .
G.
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