Medieval music: a quick guide to the middle ages

This article is a complete beginner’s guide to secular medieval music. When were the middle ages? What musical information is available in medieval manuscripts? What were the earliest surviving secular songs in English? What was medieval dance like? What forms of music did musicians play? Why does medieval music sound so different to today’s? How did medieval musicians harmonise?

This article features 5 illustrative videos of medieval music and several links to further articles.

When were the middle ages?

The mediaeval or medieval period, or the middle ages, covers a huge stretch of time, from AD 476, following the fall of the Roman Empire, to the start of the renaissance in the 14^th and 15^th centuries – around a thousand years.

Some modern historians have taken to splitting the medieval period in two: the dark ages until the 10^th century, and the middle ages from the 11^th century. This split is ahistorical, ignoring how the term middle ages was originally conceived by those who minted it. Oddly, proponents of the dark/middle ages split will often equate the dark ages with the period before the Norman invasion of 1066, when the language in England was Old English, and equate the middle ages with the period between the Norman conquest and the renaissance, during which the language developed into Middle English, as if the terms dark ages, middle ages and renaissance were based upon events in England: the historical reality is that the terms arose from an understanding of events in Italy.

It was Italians of the 14^th and 15^th century, primarily Francesco Petrarca or Petrarch, Leonardo Bruni and Flavio Biondo, who defined themselves and their generation as bringing about a renaissance or rebirth of classical Roman and Greek wisdom. Thus, for the people of the self-defined Italian renaissance who delineated the middle ages, the term meant precisely and explicitly the same as the dark ages: a millennium of cultural darkness in the middle period between the fall of the Roman Empire and Italy’s supposed rediscovery of ancient Roman and Greek cultural treasures.

The Italian idea of the renaissance was demonstrably false: in reality, surviving manuscripts show that writers of the so-called middle ages were very well aware of classical Rome and Greece. To take just one example, a manuscript of 1289 (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Latin 15158) includes copies of Catonis disticha (Cato’s couplets), an anonymous book of 3^rd or 4^th century proverbial wisdom; Liber Theodoli (Book of Theodulus), a 9^th century dialogue or debate between classical myth and Christian truth; Remedia Amoris (Cures for Love) by Roman poet, Ovid (43 BC–AD 17); and Psychomachia (psychomachy is a conflict between soul and body) by the Roman Christian poet, Prudentius, early 5^th century.

Nonetheless, the idea of the renaissance took hold in Italy before spreading internationally through Europe. This gradual adoption of the idea makes it impossible to give a precise date for the end of the middle ages and the beginning of the renaissance, so a nominal latest date of 1400, 1450 or 1470 is often given.

Written medieval music

Much of medieval secular music is a mystery. Most people were illiterate, therefore most music was passed on and learned by ear and not written down, leaving no trace. The music that was written down was most often church music, as it was largely clergy who could write. This ecclesiastical music is important in itself, but its predominance in surviving manuscripts gives a partial view of music-making.

Medieval music notation is not immediately accessible for a modern musician. There were different systems of music notation, none of which indicated rhythm until the mid-13^th century, when a new and more precise way of writing music was described by Franco of Cologne in his Ars Cantus Mensurabilis (The Art of Mensurable Music), written 1250–80. For surviving written music before then, and also for music that continued to be written without mensuration (rhythm), such as the troubadour repertoire, we have to make educated guesses to discern rhythm.

In medieval music manuscripts, the name of the instrument used to accompany a voice (if at all) or to play instrumental pieces was not indicated. This seems to suggest that, unlike today when a piece of music is written for a particular instrument, in the medieval period musicians played with whatever instrument(s) they chose. (For more detail on the question of instrumentation, see the article Performing medieval music. Part 1/3: Instrumentation.)

Alfonso X, “The Wise”, 1221–84, was King of eight regions in modern day Spain and one in Portugal. During his reign, Alfonso composed, compiled and edited a large number of books translated into Castillian from Arabic originals, with subjects ranging from art and literature to science. Alfonso also composed one of the most notable medieval music collections, the Cantigas de Santa María, 420 songs about the Virgin Mary. Every tenth song sings her praises, and the remainder, the majority, are versified versions of the Marian miracle stories that were circulating around Europe. The melodies of the Cantigas were adapted from sacred sources and popular songs. One of the four Cantigas manuscripts, compiled 1257–83, is beautifully illustrated with pictures of musicians, giving us information about the instruments of the day.

The Cantigas were heavily influenced by the poetry and music of the troubadours, the poets and singers of Occitania, what is now southern France. From the late 11^th century to the end of the 13^th century, the troubadours developed several styles of song, most famously fin’amor, refined or perfect love. For the troubadours, perfect love was unrequited. The typical song of fin’amor follows the themes: I am in love with an unavailable woman; she is perfect physically and in personality; my life would be complete if only she would love me; but she doesn’t know I exist – or – but she knows I exist and cruelly rejects me; therefore I want to die. The cultural influence of the troubadours extended well beyond Occitania and long after the lifetimes of the troubadours. For example, the language of fin’amor was co-opted to describe the Virgin Mary (as the article on the late 13^th century Edi beo þu heuene quene describes), and a large part of the renaissance song repertoire continued the fin’amor theme established by the troubadours (including, for example, John Dowland’s Come again, sweet love doth now invite, and the most well-known renaissance song of all, the anonymous Greensleeves).

The earliest songs in English

No secular medieval music in English has survived before the first half of the 13^th century, when Mirie it is (Merry it is) was written down, a song complaining about the cold winter weather. It is well to remember when listening to this song how dangerous this season was in the 13^th century: inadequate storage of winter provisions meant starvation.

In chronological order, Mirie it is is closely followed by Sumer is icumen in (Summer has come in) from around 1250, another song about the weather, but on a happier note, rejoicing in the sights and sounds of summer: the cuckoo calling, the meadow blossoming, the ewe bleating after lamb, the cow lowing after calf, the bullock leaping, and the buck farting. The manuscript page for Sumer is icumen in has two songs to the same melody, the other being a devotional Christian song, Perspice christicola.

Medieval instrumental and dance music

No clear medieval dance instructions survive, only hints and fragments. The earliest complete choreography is from 15^th century Italy, well past the beginning of the Italian renaissance. (To read more about the earliest surviving choreography, see The first dancing master’s manual: Domenico da Piacenza and the art of dance.) Since we know so little about how medieval dances were performed, we have to bring our own artistic and creative sense to bear, interpreting the scant clues found in iconography and brief scattered references in writing, always knowing that any attempt at medieval dance is a wholly modern invention.

Broadly, there were two forms of medieval instrumental music (whether danced or not).

The first we could call consecutive or linear: each punctus or section has different musical material. In some consecutive or linear pieces, each punctus has the same open and close ending (the equivalent of today’s first and second time bars), in others there is a mix of different open and close endings. Examples of the linear form are la rotta, the French estampie, the royal dance, and the ductia. The nota is also consecutive or linear, with each punctus or section repeated, but without an open and close ending, according to Ars musicae (Art of music), written circa 1300 by Parisian music theorist, Johannes de Grocheio (or Grocheo, or Jean de Grouchy).

The second form we could call cumulative, as new material is added to the repeat of a previous section, followed by an open and close ending. Cumulative forms include the trotto, saltarello, and the istanpitta (the Italian version of the French estampie). An example of the istanpitta is Tre fontane, from an Italian manuscript, British Library Add. 29987, c. 1400. With x as an open ending and y as a close ending, it is in the complex cumulative form: ABCDx ABCDy EBCDx EBCDy FCDx FCDy GDx GDy.

In the video above, Ian Pittaway on citole and gittern uses medieval-style plectrums, made from antler and a gut string, to play a polyphonic instrumental from British Library Harley 978, folio 8v–9r, c. 1261–65. This piece is untitled in the manuscript. It partially fits the description of a ductia given by Johannes de Grocheio in c. 1300. He describes the ductia as an instrumental – “it lacks letter and text” – to be danced to – “they arouse the spirit of man to move decorously according to the art which they call dancing”. Like the piece in the video, Grocheio describes the ductia as light and joyful, composed in two voice polyphony. Contrary to the piece in Harley 978, which has 6 puncta (sections), Grocheio states that “the number of puncta in a ductia they placed at 3 … There are also some ductia having 4 puncta such as the ductia Pierron.” However, on this point, Grocheio is probably not a reliable witness, as he puts the number of puncta in an estampie at 6 or 7, whereas the estampies written in the Manuscrit du roi contemporaneous with Grocheio have variously 4, 5, 6 and 7 puncta. It is therefore still likely that the Harley 978 piece is a ductia.

It is commonly asserted in modern commentaries that the estampie was a dance. However, as the article on La prime Estampie Royal explains, no primary medieval source states this, and indeed the medieval evidence is that the estampie was for listening, not dancing. The estampie was marked out from other musical forms by having sections of varying lengths, as we hear in the example below: La Sexte estampie Real (The Sixth Royal estampie) from Manuscrit du roi, a manuscript of troubadour and trouvère songs compiled 1254–c. 1270, with instrumental pieces such as this estampie added c. 1300.

Why does medieval music sound so different to today’s?

There are several reasons why medieval music has such a distinctive sound, different to modern music.

The instruments were different. Strings were made of gut (sheep’s intestines) or wire (brass, iron, bronze, silver or gold), not steel or nylon as today’s strings tend to be. Many instruments, such as the simfony, citole and the gittern, have no modern equivalents. Even instruments which we still play versions of today – the harp and the recorder, for example, and the modern oboe, which is descended from the shawm – were made to different specifications resulting in a quite different tonal quality.

The scales were different. All modern scales work to the same musical principles, with identical gaps between the 8 notes of the scale, but pitched differently: so C major and D major sound the same, and C minor and D minor sound the same, except that the scale starting on D simply starts a tone higher than C. It is not so with medieval modes. The modes of medieval music lack sharps and flats, which means that the step relationship between notes for a mode ending on D (dorian) is different to a mode ending on E (phrygian). In addition, each medieval mode has a returning note which plays a key role in the melody, this note known as the tenor, tuba, dominant, repercussa, or reciting note; and each mode has its own characteristic figures or melodic clusters of notes. Add to this the fact that some modes started and ended on the same note (at least in theory), known as authentic modes, and others started on one note and ended on another, known as plagal modes, and we see that the medieval conception of sound was very different to ours.

These modes were the building blocks for medieval ecclesiastical music. Secular music did not always follow these modes precisely, or at all; but regardless of being religious or secular, the tonal quality of medieval music is distinct from and historically prior to the modern idea of major and minor scales.

What this means in practical terms is that a medieval psaltery or harp is potentially a problem for a player of modern music since they are diatonic, lacking the permanent availability of sharps and flats. But the medieval soundworld was different, and a diatonic instrument was perfectly suited to medieval diatonic music.

A more detailed examination of medieval modes, and the circumstances under which flats and sharps were added to modes, can be found in Performing medieval music. Part 2/3: Turning monophony into polyphony.

Medieval polyphony

Medieval harmonies were based on different principles to modern music, too. Today ‘harmony’ usually means a single lead melody line with other notes complementing it to form supporting chords. Medieval harmony didn’t work like this, so we give it a different name: polyphony, meaning many voices, with each voice having elements of horizontal independence as well as vertical dependence at key points. Medieval polyphony was based on the contrast between consonance and dissonance. Music begins with a resolved and stable interval, called consonance, then moves harmonically through the other unresolved and unstable intervals, dissonance, and back to stability or consonance at resolving cadences. In his De Mensurabili Musica (Of Measured Music), c. 1240, Johannes de Garlandia delineated consonant or stable intervals as unisons, octaves, fourths and fifths; imperfect consonants or less stable intervals as thirds (minor and major); and dissonant or unstable intervals as seconds (major and minor), tritones (two notes played three whole tones apart), sixths (major and minor), and sevenths (major and minor).

Some medieval music was written monophonically, a single melody line. When music was polyphonic, it was:

(i) a melody with a drone; or
(ii) organum, which variously meant: heterophony, a melody with a second line that tracks the first with some variations; or parallelisms, a second line that is a parallel octave, fourth or fifth to the melody; or two parts in contrary motion; or an additional line with fast-running notes; or … 
(iii) as with Sumer is icumen in, a melody or melodies on top of a pes (foot – called a ground or ground bass in the renaissance), a short repeating phrase which continues through the whole piece. Sumer is icumen in is the earliest surviving example of an English round, where voices sing the same line but start at different times.

For a detailed and practical explanation of medieval forms of polyphony, see Performing medieval music. Part 2/3: Turning monophony into polyphony.

Until the end of the middle ages, polyphonic parts were pitched close together, so that different voices sometimes crossed over in pitch. We hear this in the three pieces in the video below: Miro genere (By a wondrous birth), Astripotens famulos (Kind ruler of the stars), and Mater dei (Mother of God), each sung in two or three voices as in the manuscript (Lambeth Palace MS 457), then played polyphonically on citole or gittern. 

It wasn’t until the compositions of the English musician John Dunstaple (or Dunstable) in the 15^th century that we have voices pitched wide apart, a new practice which was hugely influential and became known in Europe as “the English countenance”, marking the beginning of what was to be a post-medieval, renaissance style of music.

 

© Ian Pittaway. Not to be reproduced in any form without permission. All rights reserved.