I had a few ideas for how I might focus my work in the group, drawing on our initial discussions.
I thought that it would be very interesting for me to investigate the general ideas of words and music, and performing vs. listening, in relation to Conversion.
One point is that with the reformation, and the missionary movements around the world, persuasion becomes very important, and music is a means of persuasion.
Sometimes it’s text that is understood to do the persuasion — so that would point to intelligibility of text, syllabic text setting, very simple music. Music in this case functions as a bearer of text, or possibly a mnemonic aid. Often complex music is thought of as sinful, seductive, too sensual. The act of participatory singing in a group may be very important here; it’s not about the music itself, but about the synchrony that music enables or even enforces; a group of people singing “with one voice” become a community. Also the act of repeating the text to music (singing it, rather than just listening to it) has persuasive force. Other interesting issues here — are people singing from memory, or from a printed text or text with music notation? How does that change things?
Sometimes it’s more the music itself that would do the persuading. This could be instrumental music without text, or vocal music where the text is not very intelligible. Improvised polyphony music in church (usually over a chant) might not have very intelligible text (and I know about accounts of astonishment and wonder at improvised polyphony in Spain). One of my students once wrote a paper where she looked at Palestrina’s Song of Song settings (which are complex 5-voice imitative polyphony, where the text is not very intelligible) and connected it to writings by St. Teresa and John of the Cross who talk about not understanding things as a kind of mystical aspect of faith.
It may be that the reasons catholic composers paid lip service to intelligibility of text in the Council of Trent, but in fact did not do it, was that if they had, they would have given up the competitive advantage of Catholic music — it’s ability to move, astound, astonish, even if you don’t understand the text.
And then there’s the combination of text and music — which could work together in ways that surpass text or music alone. Here we get into Monteverdi’s “Seconda prattica” (which he pushes back to Rore’s madrigals of the 1550s), madrigalisms in general, motets like the one I played where the music expresses the text — and emphasizes certain phrases (like descendere and verbera tanta pati) so that you can’t miss the text. Spiritual chansons and madrigals would fit in here too. Byrd also has a beautiful phrase in the Gradualia about finding the right music for the text …
So I will try to pull together writings on text and music across the 16th c. in order to think about these issues.
Julie, I think this all looks really interesting. Psalm-singing in particular is an interesting phenomenon — below is a paragraph from a section about music in my Cognitive Ecologies book:
Diarmiard MacCulloch has described psalm-singing as the secret weapon of the Reformation” (MacCulloch 138). From the perspective of Distributed Cognition/ Extended Mind, the history of the psalm in Reformed worship is especially interesting, offering significant differences from other distributed practices such as the memorization of sermons, the Bible, and of catechisms. In the first place, it is arguable that unison congregational singing was the least top-down of all reforms; had the longest history, even in the face of profound dislike by many of the elite; and was probably one the most successful mode of achieving a familiar and widely disseminated attachment to Protestantism. Yet in England (unlike in Germany), much of this success cannot be attributed to the direct action of Church leaders. To be sure, psalm-singing was supported by the production of a very large number of editions of the psalms, just as Bible-reading and catechisms were supported by those books and treatises. However, the enthusiasm of congregations for uniform singing resulted in an evolution of the practice that developed its own set of practices and conventions, significantly drifted from the printed books designed to support it, and completely ignored attempts to inculcate basic music literacy (i.e. music notation). As one of the leading historians of church music argues: “Of all the factors in worship that are subject to any kind of control, music is the one that has had the greatest freedom and scope in the Church of England . . . a characteristic style of singing developed entirely spontaneously by oral transmission from generation to generation, without effective interference by church authorities or professional musicians” (Temperley 3-4).
Evelyn, sorry for the slight delay getting your comment up. I think I have fixed the problem.
Stephen
I haven’t looked at it yet, but I know there’s a recent collection of essays on _Psalms in the Early Modern World_, edited by Linda Austern, Kari McBride, and David Orvis. Might be a good title to add to our bibliography.