I
Polyphony was practically foreign to the music of the Greeks. They had observed, it is true, that a chorus of men and boys produced a different quality of sound from that of a chorus made up of all men or all boys, and they had analyzed the difference and found the cause of it to be that boys’ voices were an octave higher than men’s; and that boys and men singing together did not sing the same notes. This effect, which they also imitated with voices and certain instruments they called Antiphony, and they considered it more pleasing than the effect of voices or instruments in the same pitch which they called Homophony. The practice of making music in octaves was called magadizing, from the name of a large harp-like instrument, the magadis, upon which it was possible. But magadizing cannot be considered the forerunner of polyphony, for, though melodies an octave apart may be considered not strictly the same, still they pursue the same course and are in no way independent of each other; and the effect of a melody sung in octaves differs from the effect of one sung in unison only in quality, not at all in kind.
The allegiance of theorists to Greek culture all through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance has tended to conceal the actual origin of polyphony, but as early as 1767 J. J. Rousseau wrote in his Dictionnaire de musique, ‘It is hard not to suspect that all our harmony is an invention of the Goths or the Barbarians.’ And later: ‘It was reserved to the people of the North to make this great discovery and to bequeath it as the foundation of all the rules of the art of music.’
The kernel from which the complicated science of polyphony sprang is simple to understand. One voice sang a melody, another voice or an instrument, starting with it, wove a counter-melody about it, elaborated by the flourishes and melismas which are still dear to the people of the Orient. Some such sort of primitive improvisation seems to have been practised by the people of northern Europe, and to have been taken over by the church singers. The later art of déchant sur le livre or improvised descant was essentially no different and seems to have been of very ancient origin. The early theorists naturally took it upon themselves to regulate and systematize the popular practice, and thereupon polyphony first comes to our notice through their works in a very stiff and ugly form of music called organum, which in its strictest form is hardly more to be considered polyphony than the magadizing of the Greeks.
The works of many of the ninth century theorists such as Aurelian of Réomé, and Remy of Auxerre, suggest that some form of part-singing was practised in their day, though they leave us in confusion owing to the ambiguity of their language. The famous scholar Scotus Erigena (880) mentions organum, but in a passage that is difficult and obscure. Regino, abbot of Prum in 892, is the first to define consonance and dissonance in such a way as to leave no doubt that he considers them from the point of view of polyphony, that is to say, as sounds that are the result of two different notes sung simultaneously. In the works of Hucbald of St. Amand in Flanders, quite at the end of the century, if not well into the tenth (Hucbald died in 930 or 932, over ninety years of age), there is at last a definite and clear description of organum. The word organum is an adaptation of the name of the instrument on which the art could be imitated, or, perhaps, from which it partly originated, the organ; just as the Greeks coined a word from magadis.
Of Hucbald’s life little is known save that he was born about 840, that he was a monk, a poet, and a musician, a disciple of St. Remy of Auxerre and a friend of St. Odo of Cluny. Up to within recent years several important works on music were attributed to him, of which only one seems now to be actually his—the tract, De Harmonica Institutione, of which several copies are in existence. This and the Musica Enchiriadis of his friend St. Odo are responsible for the widespread belief that polyphony actually sprang from a hideous progression of empty fourths and fifths. Both theorists, in their efforts to confine the current form of extemporized descant in the strict bounds of theory, reduced it thus: to a given melody taken from the plain-song of the church the descanter or organizer added another at the interval of a fifth or fourth below, which followed the first melody or cantus firmus note by note in strictly parallel movement. The fourth seems to have been regarded as the pleasanter of the intervals, though, as we shall see, it led composers into difficulties, to overcome which Hucbald himself proposed a relaxation of the stiff parallel movement between the parts. In the strict organum or diaphony the movement was thus:
Either or both of the parts might be doubled at the octave, in which case the diaphony was called composite.
Just why the intervals of the fifth and fourth should have been chosen for this parallel music, which is excruciating to our modern ears, is not positively known. The simple obvious answer to the riddle is that Hucbald and his contemporaries based their theories on the theories of the Greeks, who regarded the fifth and fourth as consonances nearest the perfect consonance of the octave and unison. But in that case we have to ask ourselves why Hucbald and his followers regarded the diaphony of the fourth as pleasanter than that of the fifth which they none the less acknowledged was more nearly perfect. Dr. Hugo Riemann has suggested a solution to this difficulty which is in substance that organum was an attempt to assimilate elements of an ancient art of singing practised by the Welsh and other Celtic singers. The Welsh scale is a pentatonic scale, that is, a scale of five steps in which half steps are skipped. In terms of the keyboard, it can be represented by a scale starting upon E-flat and proceeding to the E-flat above or below only by way of the black keys between or by a similar progression between any other two black keys an octave apart. In such a scale parallel fourths are impossible, as indeed they are in the Greek scales of eight notes upon which the church music was based; but whereas the progression of the fourths in the Greek scales is broken by the imperfect and very unpleasant interval of the tritone, in the pentatonic scale it is interrupted by the pleasing major third. Such a progression of fourths and thirds seems to spring almost naturally from the pentatonic scales and was very likely much practised by the ancient Welsh singers.[65] A comparison of two examples will make the difference obvious.
The presence in the octatonic scale of the disagreeable tritone, marked with a star in the example, forced even Hucbald and Odo to make some provision for avoiding it. This consisted in limiting the movement of the ‘organizing’ voice. It was not allowed to descend below a certain point in the scale. In those cases, therefore, in which the cantus firmus began in such a way that the organizing voice could not accompany it at the start without sinking below its prescribed limit the organizing voice must start with the same note as the cantus firmus and hold that note until the cantus firmus had risen so that it was possible for the organizing voice to follow it at the interval of the fourth. In the same way the parts were forced to close at the unison if the movement of the cantus firmus did not permit the organizing voice to follow it at the interval of a fourth without going below its limit. The following example will make this clear:
In this case it will be noted that the movement of the parts is no longer continuously parallel, but that there are passages in which it is oblique. Indeed it is hardly conceivable that strict parallel movement was ever adhered to in anything but theory. It is interesting to observe how even in theory it had to give way, and how by the presence of the tritone in the scale the theorists were practically forced into a genuine polyphonic style. The strict style, as we have already remarked, was hardly more polyphonic than the magadizing of the Greeks; for, though the voice parts are actually different, still each is closely bound to the other and has no independent movement of its own; but in the freer style there is a difference if not an independence of movement.
In connection with this example it is also well to note that through the oblique movement the parts are made to sound other intervals than the fourth or fifth or unison, which with the octave were regarded for centuries as the only consonances. At the first star they are singing the harsh interval of a second; immediately after they sing a major third. By the earliest theorists these dissonances were disregarded or accepted as necessary evils, the unavoidable results of the restrictions under which the organizing voice was laid. But if the free diaphony was practised at all it was to lead musicians inevitably to a recognition of these intervals, and of the effect of contrasting one kind with another. In the works of Hucbald and Odo and their contemporaries, however, the ideal is theoretically the parallel progression of the only consonances they would admit, the fourth, fifth, and octave. Oblique movement was first of all a way to escape the tritone, and the unnamed dissonances were haphazard. Thus we find only the mere germ of the science of polyphony. The dry stiffness of the music and the inadequacy of the cumbersome rules must lead one to believe that learned men, true to their time, were doing what they could to define a popular free practice within the limits of theory. The sudden untraceable advent of a new free style some hundred years or more later goes to prove that the free descant of a genuinely musical people was never actually suppressed or discontinued by the influence of the theorists.