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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Descending now.
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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.
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Attended on by all.
Well we'll have a lot of voices here cuz everybody's in.
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All six voices singing in [INAUDIBLE]
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So Diana's darlings, those attending the goddess Diana,
they came running down a-mains.
So, it's going to go fast and downward.
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Two by two?
Yes, two voice.
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Three by three?
Yes, three voices.
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You guessed it.
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All alone.
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And mingling with the Shepard's, well, we're gonna
mingle here poly-phonically with lots of imitation, busy music.
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Then sang, well everybody together now, announcement.
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All the nymphs of Diana sang.
Long live Oriana.
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And they sing this for a very long time in imitation with
the bass singing in very long notes.
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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.
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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.
Craig WrightHenry L & Lucy G Moses Professor of Music
