The period from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries was, therefore, not one of expressive art work, but rather of slow and arduous experiment. The problem was so to adjust the semi-independent melodious parts that an unimpeded life might be preserved in all the voices, and yet the combined effect be at any instant pure and beautiful. The larger the number of parts, the greater the skill required to weave them together into a [143] varied, rich, and euphonious pattern. Any one of these parts might for the moment hold the place of the leading part which the others were constrained to follow through the mazes of the design. Hence the term polyphonic, i.e., many-voiced. Although each voice part was as important as any other in this living musical texture, yet each section took its cue from a single melody—a fragment of a Gregorian chant or a folk-tune and called the cantus firmus, and also known as the tenor, from teneo, to hold—and the voice that gave out this melody came to be called the tenor voice. In the later phases of this art the first utterance of the theme was assigned indifferently to any one of the voice parts.
After confidence had been gained in devising two or more parts to be sung simultaneously, the next step was to bring in one part after another. Some method of securing unity amid variety was now necessary, and this was found in the contrivance known as “imitation,” by which one voice follows another through the same or approximate intervals, the part first sounded acting as a model for a short distance, then perhaps another taking up the leadership with a new melodic figure, the intricate network of parts thus revealing itself as a coherent organism rather than a fortuitous conjunction of notes, the composer’s invention and the hearers’ impression controlled by a conscious plan to which each melodic part is tributary.
When a number of parts came to be used together, the need of fixing the pitch and length of notes with precision became imperative. So out of the antique mnemonic signs, which had done useful service during [144] the exclusive régime of the unison chant, there was gradually developed a system of square-headed notes, together with a staff of lines and spaces. But instead of simplicity a bewildering complexity reigned for centuries. Many clefs were used, shifting their place on the staff in order to keep the notes within the lines; subtleties, many and deep, were introduced, and the matter of rhythm, key relations, contrapuntal structure, and method of singing became a thing abstruse and recondite. Composition was more like algebraic calculation than free art; symbolisms of trinity and unity, of perfect and imperfect, were entangled in the notation, to the delight of the ingenious monkish intellect and the despair of the neophyte and the modern student of mediaeval manuscripts. Progress was slowest at the beginning. It seemed an interminable task to learn to put a number of parts together with any degree of ease, and for many generations after it was first attempted the results were harsh and uncouth.
Even taking into account the obstacles to rapid development which exist in the very nature of music as the most abstract of the arts, it seems difficult to understand why it should have been so long in acquiring beauty and expression. There was a shorter way to both, but the church musicians would not take it. All around them bloomed a rich verdure of graceful expressive melody in the song and instrumental play of the common people. But the monkish musicians and choristers scorned to follow the lead of anything so artless and obvious. In a scholastic age they were musical scholastics; subtilty and fine pedantic distinctions were their pride. They had become infatuated with the formal and technical, and they seemed indifferent to the claims of the natural and simple while carried away by a passion for intricate structural problems.
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The growth of such an art as this, without models, must necessarily be painfully slow. Many of the cloistered experimenters passed their lives in nursing an infant art without seeing enough progress to justify any very strong faith in the bantling’s future. Their floundering helplessness is often pathetic, but not enough so to overcome a smile at the futility of their devices. Practice and theory did not always work amiably together. In studying the chorus music of the Middle Age, we must observe that, as in the case of the liturgic chant, the singers did not deem it necessary to confine themselves to the notes actually written. In this formative period of which we are speaking it was the privilege of the singers to vary and decorate the written phrases according to their good pleasure. These adornments were sometimes carefully thought out, incorporated into the stated method of delivery, and handed down as traditions.[65] But it is evident that in the earlier days of counterpoint these variations were often extemporized on the spur of the moment. The result of this habit on the part of singers who were ignorant of the laws of musical consonance and proportion, and whose ears were as dull as their understandings, could easily be conceived even if we did not have before us the indignant testimony [146] of many musicians and churchmen of the period. Jean Cotton, in the eleventh century, says that he could only compare the singers with drunken men, who indeed find their way home, but do not know how they get there. The learned theorist, Jean de Muris, of the fourteenth century, exclaims: “How can men have the face to sing discant who know nothing of the combination of sounds! Their voices roam around the cantus firmus without regard to any rule; they throw their tones out by luck, just as an unskilful thrower hurls a stone, hitting the mark once in a hundred casts.” As he broods over the abuse his wrath increases. “O roughness, O bestiality! taking an ass for a man, a kid for a lion, a sheep for a fish. They cannot tell a consonance from a dissonance. They are like a blind man trying to strike a dog.” Another censor apostrophizes the singers thus: “Does such oxen bellowing belong in the Church? Is it believed that God can be graciously inclined by such an uproar?” Oelred, the Scottish abbot of Riverby in the twelfth century, rails at the singers for jumbling the tones together in every kind of distortion, for imitating the whinnying of horses, or (worst of all in his eyes) sharpening their voices like those of women. He tells how the singers bring in the aid of absurd gestures to enhance the effect of their preposterous strains, swaying their bodies, twisting their lips, rolling their eyes, and bending their fingers, with each note. A number of popes, notably John XXII., tried to suppress these offences, but the extemporized discant was too fascinating a plaything to be dropped, and ridicule and pontifical rebuke were alike powerless.
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Such abuses were, of course, not universal, perhaps not general,—as to that we cannot tell; but they illustrate the chaotic condition of church music in the three or four centuries following the first adoption of part singing. The struggle for light was persistent, and music, however crude and halting, received abundant measure of the reverence which, in the age that saw the building of the Gothic cathedrals, was accorded to everything that was identified with the Catholic religion. There were no forms of music that could rival the song of the Church,—secular music at the best was a plaything, not an art. The whole endeavor of the learned musicians was addressed to the enrichment of the church service, and the wealthy and powerful princes of France, Italy, Austria, Spain, and England turned the patronage of music at their courts in the same channel with the patronage of the Church. It was in the princely chapels of Northern France and the schools attached to them that the new art of counterpoint was first cultivated. So far as the line of progress can be traced, the art originated in Paris or its vicinity, and slowly spread over the adjacent country. The home of Gothic architecture was the home of mediaeval chorus music, and the date of the appearance of these two products is the same. The princes of France and Flanders (the term France at that period meaning the dominions of the Capetian dynasty) faithfully guarded the interests of religious music, and the theorists and composers of this time were officers of the secular government as well as of the Church. We should naturally suppose that church music would be actively supported by a king so pious as Robert of France [148] (eleventh century), who discarded his well-beloved wife at the command of Pope Gregory V. because she was his second cousin, who held himself pure and magnanimous in the midst of a fierce and corrupt age, and who composed many beautiful hymns, including (as is generally agreed) the exquisite Sequence, Veni Sancte Spiritus. He was accustomed to lead the choir in his chapel by voice and gesture. He carried on all his journeys a little prayer chamber in the form of a tent, in which he sang at the stated daily hours to the praise of God. Louis IX. also, worthily canonized for the holiness of his life, made the cultivation of church song one of the most urgent of his duties. Every day he heard two Masses, sometimes three or four. At the canonical hours hymns and prayers were chanted by his chapel choir, and even on his crusades his choristers went before him on the march, singing the office for the day, and the king, a priest by his side, sang in a low voice after them. Rulers of a precisely opposite character, the craftiest and most violent in a guileful and brutal age, were zealous patrons of church music. Even during that era of slaughter and misery when the French kingship was striding to supremacy over the bodies of the great vassals, and struggling with England for very existence in the One Hundred Years’ War, the art of music steadily advanced, and the royal and ducal chapels flourished. Amid such conditions and under such patronage accomplished musicians were nurtured in France and the Low Countries, and thence they went forth to teach all Europe the noble art of counterpoint.