8.6 - The Madrigal

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From the course by Yale University

Introduction to Classical Music

1442 ratings

Yale University

Introduction to Classical Music

1442 ratings

Using a simple and enjoyable teaching style, this course introduces the novice listener to the wonders of classical music, from Bach fugues to Mozart symphonies to Puccini operas.

From the lesson

Music Back in the Day

We will cover a thousand years in musical evolution during this modules lectures! We'll start with the Middle Ages taking a look at its functional chants and dance music, then we’ll move to the period of the Renaissance, and finish off by listening to the ornate melodies of opera heard throughout the early Baroque period. From this, you’ll begin to see how advances in musical notation allowed compositions to become both more specific and more complex. These advances are ultimately responsible for focus being shifted away from the performers and towards the composers themselves.Along the way, we’ll highlight some of these musical inventors and innovators, such as Hildegard of Bingen and Johann Pachelbel. We’ll also have the unique opportunity to see (and in some cases even hear) many of the instruments that were popular during these different time periods. This will be a real treat, made possible with help from Yale instructor, Grant Herreid. Many thanks are owed to him!

8.1 - Introduction to the Renaissance4:30

8.2 - Humanism in Music5:44

8.3 - Musical Instruments and Dances20:49

8.4 - The A Cappella Motet12:51

8.5 - Reformation and the Counter-Reformation15:22

8.6 - The Madrigal14:18

Meet the Instructors

Craig Wright
Henry L & Lucy G Moses Professor of Music
Department of Music

[MUSIC]

We said that in the Renaissance, written composed music became

available in written form, to a broader segment of society.

This was part of the humanizing of the Renaissance, and

it was driven in large measure by technology.

Technology changed what art was and how people experienced the world,

just as technology determines what art is today, and

how we experience the world, how we hear music.

The technological revolution of the Renaissance was, of course, the printing

press, invented in Germany on the banks of the Rhine River about 1450 or so.

And from there it spread to Italy, first to Venice and then Rome and

then to France in Lyon and Paris.

These became the music publishing centers of Western Europe.

On the screen you see the finished product.

This is just one part, here again, a tenor part book for a mass.

A singer would buy the book for just his part book, or possibly for secular music,

her part book, the soprano voice, the alto voice, the tenor voice, whatever.

Why would you need the other parts?

You just needed your own music, except if you got lost,

you needed to peg off of or reference off of the other parts.

Here on the screen now we see an image of a printing press in action,

we see men working with movable type.

Pressmen creating multiple sheets that had to be cut and

these sheets had to be bound.

And the proofreader had to vet all of this,

had to vet guarantee the finished product.

This is from a French image from Paris.

And we know that there was an important music printing working in Paris at

this time in the 1530s, one Pierre Attaingnant.

Let's look at the title page from one of his prints.

Here you can see one that reads,

30 Musical [FOREIGN] In Four Voices, etc., etc.

New pieces printed by Pierre Attaingnant,

A-T-T-A-I-N-G-N-A-N-T, living at,

[FOREIGN] and so on near the church of such and such.

And here are the 30 or so pieces in this collection and

it is simply a part broke, the Superius part broke.

But he tells us who he is and where he's living.

And based on this and the location of that church, we can actually see where

he was working here on the left bank, within a block or so of the Sorbonne.

And interestingly enough, there's still a bookstore, [FOREIGN], on that very spot.

Now let's see some of these part books as they were actually viewed.

Here we see a trio, the young lady playing on a flute from a soprano part book,

while another singer sings, presumably from another part book in the back and

a lute fills out the harmony.

Of course, this was communal music.

It was fun, but everybody was to be a participant.

It wasn't any such thing as an audience as we think of it,

a large gathering of people who just listened.

Now let's see a slide from Paris, actually downtown Paris.

If you look in the background here, you can see the spires of Notre Dame.

We saw that from the other side in our session 7.

Again, here is the park book with someone singing out of it,

conducting and a flute is playing the soprano part.

Generally speaking, much of this secular music was sung just one to a part.

Sometimes with instruments but often times, a capella.

So here we have a group all singing out of a part book, three ladies and a gentleman.

He seems to be conducting given the hand position that he's gesturing with.

Let's listen to this.

It's a chanson by Attaingnant Tant que vivrai performed here by Voices and Lute.

[MUSIC]

Now Pierre Atoniogne was an enterprising fellow, and

arranged for these songs in every sort of different way.

He wanted to make, to be bumped as much money as he could on this enterprise.

So he raised them for voices, for voices and instruments, for lute, for

lute and voice, recorders, keyboard, alone, and so on.

Here's a harpsichord, from slightly later after 1600.

It's in the Yale Collection.

Let's listen to the same chanson,

Tant que vivrai, but now arranged for harpsichord alone.

[MUSIC]

And this brings us to the most popular kind of vocal music of the Renaissance,

the madrigal.

The madrigal is a genre, again a type of music, involving several solo voices,

usually four or five, that sets to music a poem.

Most often a poem about love or of love frustrated.

Usually only one singer sings each part.

And most often the madrigal was performed acapella, no accompanying instruments.

More than 2,000 separate books

of madrigals published during the Renaissance, first in Italy and

then in the low countries, and in Germany and in England.

Usually there were 20 madrigals or so in each volume.

So you can see that they're somewhere between 30,000 and

40,000 of these madrigals created.

I suppose singing the madrigal was something of a rage,

perhaps the way doo-wop was, or maybe folk singing in the 1960s.

Let's review all this by means of this slide.

Madrigal, what is it?

Well, it's a genre of vocal music sung, not in Latin, but

in the vernacular language.

It could be English, it could be Italian.

Where was it generated?

Well, first in Italy, around 1530, and then it spread to the rest of Europe.

How many? Well, as we said, thousands.

Maybe as many as 40,000.

By the time it reached England, we were in the Elizabethan Age,

the age of Queen Elizabeth I.

There were a number of important musicians working at her court,

associated with her and with London generally.

Thomas Morley, William Byrd, Orlando Gibbons, John Wilbey, Thomas Weelkes and

collectively they formed what's call the English Madrigal School.

So we're gonna take a listen to now, just one Madrigal

out of an important collection called the Triumphes of Oriana 1601,

a collection of, again, roughly 20 or so of these Madrigals.

This collection is interesting because each one of them,

in order to be included in this collection, you had to end your Madrigal

with the salutation, long live fair Oriana.

Oriana was the favored nickname of Queen Elizabeth.

So each of these madrigals ends this way.

We're going to turn our attention now to the madrigal

As Vesta was from Latmos Hill Descending, by Thomas Weelkes.

Again, you can see on the screen here six vocal parts to six part madrigal.

Each of the parts would be sung only by one voice.

And only four of the voices, the top four voices start out.

But let's move on now to three images.

One of the composer Wilkes who wrote this madrigal in 1601.

Second, in the middle of course, Queen Elizabeth the first,

the dedicatee of this madrigal.

And third, my friend and former colleague here at Yale before,

his regretted retirement, Simon Carrington who is the founder and

conductor for years and years of the King Singers.

So we're gonna turn now to a recording of the king singers.

And in it we're going to hear the following.

We're going to listen to this madrigal As Vesta was from hill descending.

It's full of what we call word painting or madrigalisms.

Moments when the music underscores the text in a direct

Onomatopoeic way, music in the service of text.

So, I'll talk a bit as we proceed.

Let's see this music now sung by the King's Singers.

[MUSIC]

Descending now.

[MUSIC]

That music of course is graded down, so everybody's coming down.

Latvis hill, what do they see?

They see the Queen ascending, so the music has to go up here.

[MUSIC]

Attended on by all.

Well we'll have a lot of voices here cuz everybody's in.

[MUSIC]

All six voices singing in [INAUDIBLE]

[MUSIC]

So Diana's darlings, those attending the goddess Diana,

they came running down a-mains.

So, it's going to go fast and downward.

[MUSIC]

Two by two?

Yes, two voice.

Three by three?

Yes, three voices.

[MUSIC]

You guessed it.

[MUSIC]

All alone.

[MUSIC]

And mingling with the Shepard's, well, we're gonna

mingle here poly-phonically with lots of imitation, busy music.

[MUSIC]

Then sang, well everybody together now, announcement.

[MUSIC]

All the nymphs of Diana sang.

Long live Oriana.

[MUSIC]

And they sing this for a very long time in imitation with

the bass singing in very long notes.

[MUSIC]

Sometimes the memetic nature of the music,

the memetic nature of the music, underscoring each word or

phrase with an appropriate music gesture gets down right silly.

But this development is hugely important in the history of music.

It developed a vocabulary of musical expression.

We can talk about the different periods in the history of music, Medieval,

Renaissance, Baroque and so on.

But the two most important changes in the history of Western music arguably,

were the switch from oral to written music,

which occurred during the Middle Ages, and the switch from abstract music, chant,

mass, motet, to memetic music here again in the Renaissance.

Music became a memetic language that we all speak, or at least can all understand.

Happy music, well what are we gonna do with that?

We're happy, we're gonna put it in major and probably in an upper register.

She falls down, struck down with grief.

Well that's going to be slow in tempo.

It's gonna be minor in key and the music undoubtedly will go downward.

These are sorts of gestures that make up this language.

In the next period in the history of music, the Baroque period,

this language of music which originated in vocal music, will become so

commonly understood that it can be sounded by instruments alone, and

we all will understand it.

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