Except for the first few chapters in this book, we have told you of music made by men who wanted to improve it. You have seen how the fathers of the Church first reformed music, and gave it a shorthand called neumes; before that, the music laws of the Egyptians, the scales and modes of the Arab, the Greek scales which the churchmen used in the Ambrosian and the Gregorian modes. Then came the two-lined staff, and the beginnings of mensural or measured music by which they kept time. Then you saw how two melodies were fitted together and how they grew into four parts. All this we might call “on purpose” music. At the same time, in all the world, in every country, there was Song ... and never have the world and the common people (called so because they are neither of the nobility nor of the church) been without folk song which has come from the folks of the world, the farmers, the weavers, and the laborers.
The best of these songs have what the great composers try to put into their music—a feeling of fresh free melody, design, balance, and climax, but more of this in the chapter on Folk Song.
This chapter is to be about Troubadours, Trouvères, and Minnesingers, who have left over two thousand songs. In most of these, they made up both words and music, but sometimes they used new words made up for folk tunes that everyone knew, or for melodies from the plain-chants which they had heard in church; sometimes they used the same melody for several different poems, and often they set the same words to several melodies. Many of these troubadour songs and minnelieder became the people’s own folk songs.
But now you must hear of the folk who lived hundreds of years before these poet singers. Unknowingly, out of the heart and soul and soil of their native lands, they made songs and sang poetry and played sometimes other peoples’ song, scattering their own wherever they went.
From these traveling singers and players, in all countries, came the professional musicians who were minstrels, bards, troubadours, etc., according to when, where and how they lived.
The Why of the Minstrel
The people sang and played not only because they wanted to, or because they loved it, but because they were the newspaper and the radio of their time, singing the news and doings of the day. These minstrels who traveled from place to place “broadcasted” the events. No music was written down and no words were fastened by writing to any special piece. The singer would learn a tune and when he sang a long story (an epic) he would repeat the tune many times so it was necessary to find a pleasing melody, or singers would not have been very welcome in the courts and market places. These musical news columns entertained the people who had few amusements. The wandering minstrels with their harps or crwth (Welsh harps), or whatever instrument they might have used in their particular country, were welcomed with open arms and hearts.
This sounds as if these singers and players traveled, and indeed they did! They sprang up from all parts of Europe and had different names in different places. There were bards from Britain and Ireland, skalds from the Norse lands, minstrels from “Merrie England,” troubadours from the south of France, trouvères from the north of France, jongleurs from both north and south who danced and juggled for the joy of all who saw them, and minnesingers and meistersingers in Germany.
Druids and Bards
Centuries before this, Homer the great Greek poet was called the Blind Bard and he chanted his poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, to the accompaniment of the lyre, the favorite instrument of the Greeks. But when we speak of bards in this chapter we mean the poets and musicians of ancient Britain, when that island was inhabited and ruled by the Druids, 1000 B.C. We do not know when the bards first began to make music or when they were first called bards, but it is certain that for many centuries before the Christian era, these rude, barbarous people of the countries we know as Wales, England, Ireland and Scotland, had many songs, dances and musical instruments.