[Chapter V]
Progress of Popular Music
Troubadours, jongleurs, minnesingers, and meistersingers—Wagner's "Tannhäuser" and "Die Meistersinger" as historical pictures—The German volkslied—The musical guilds—The waits and the minstrels.
WE saw that as far back as Dufay's time composers began to introduce secular melodies into the mass. This was an evidence that the ecclesiastical composers had been forced to make attempts to popularize their works by a rude adoption of the melodies of the people. The question, therefore, naturally arises: Who were the composers of the secular music? Of course that is a question that cannot be answered very definitely, but we do know who were the secular musicians of the time, and we know that they were nearer the fundamental principles of modern music than the churchmen were. The enormous mass of ecclesiastical music produced in the middle ages was fit only for the worship of cathedrals. It could never have been made to utter the notes of human passion, and until some other style was found, the modern symphony, song, and opera must have remained impossible. Church counterpoint survives today only in church music and in the German fugue, a form of music which is conspicuous for its intellectual rather than its emotional qualities. The early secular musicians had no science at all, and very little art. Their music was, therefore, simple and unpretentious, but it contained the germs of our modern art forms, and it was bound in time to force its way into the studies of the fathers.
The secular musicians of the early time were wanderers on the face of Europe. They were the troubadours, jongleurs, minnesingers, meistersingers, and minstrels.
The whole race of strolling musicians in the middle ages almost certainly descended from the Roman comedians who were driven out of the seven-hilled city when Alaric swept down upon it with fire and the sword. They wandered into foreign lands to sing and pipe before the Frankish chiefs, now their lords and masters. In the earliest days they were simple vagabonds, whom the law did not allow redress for bodily injury wantonly inflicted. In the latter half of the twelfth and the early part of the thirteenth centuries these strolling musicians began to be employed in the mysteries and miracle plays, and thus gradually arose in the public estimation. Even before that time they had begun to be taken into the service of the knightly troubadours and minnesingers as accompanists, their French title being jongleurs.
Subsequently it became their business to go about singing the songs of their masters, in short, to become their publishers. The troubadours themselves were nobles, originally those of southeastern France. They got their first inspiration from the folk songs, but their own songs were distinguished by refinement and improved melody. These knightly singers existed simultaneously with the jongleurs, who sang and played for money. The most celebrated troubadours were King Thibaut, of Navarre (1201-1253), and Adam de la Halle (1240-1286). It is a notable and significant fact that the songs of the troubadours, like most of the folk songs, ignored the church modes and moved in the modern major and minor keys.
The last of the German minnesingers, Heinrich von Meissen, died in 1318, but the celebrated Confrèrie de St. Julien des Ménestriers, of Paris, lasted at any rate till 1741, for it is recorded that in that year Louis XV. made Jean Pierre Guignon "le Roy des Violons." The songs of the troubadours and wandering minstrels were the popular songs of the day of Columbus, and in Spain the troubadours still survived. The character of the music sung by these persons is well described by Fanny Raymond Ritter in her "Essay on the Troubadours." She says:—