CHAPTER VII
SECULAR MUSIC OF THE MIDDLE AGES

However slim the records of early church music they still suffice to give some clews to the origin and nature of the first religious songs. But, when we turn to the question of secular song at the beginning of our era, we are baffled by an utter lack of tangible material. For the same monks to whom we are indebted for the early examples of sacred music were religious fanatics who looked with hostile eyes upon the profane creations of their lay contemporaries. Yet we may be confident of the continued and uninterrupted existence not only of some sort of folk music, but also of the germs at least of an art music, however crude, throughout that period of confusion incident to, and following, the crumbling of the Roman empire.

We need but point to our discourse upon the music of primitive peoples (Chap. I), the traces of musical culture left by the ancients (Chap. II), and especially the high achievements of the Greeks (Chap. IV), as evidence that, whatever the stage of a people’s intellectual development, music is a prime factor of individual and racial expression. Furthermore, at almost every period there is recognizable the distinction between folk music proper—the spontaneous collective expression of racial sentiment—and the more sophisticated creations which we may designate as art. Thus the music transmitted by the Greeks to the Romans, if added to ever so slightly, no doubt was continued with the other forms of Greek culture. The symposias, scolia, and lyrics of Hellas had their progeny in the odes of Horace and Catullus; the bards, the aœds, and rhapsodists had their counterpart—degenerate, if you will—in the histriones, the gladiators, and performers in the arena of declining Rome. Turning to the ‘Barbarians’ who caused the empire’s fall, we learn that already Tacitus recorded the activities of the German bardit who intoned war songs before their chiefs and inspired them to new victories; while Athenæus and Diodorus Siculus both tell of the Celtic bards who had an organization in the earliest Middle Ages and were regularly educated for their profession.

I

Because of the fact that our earliest musical records are ecclesiastical, the impression might prevail that modern music had its origin in the Christian church. But, although almost completely subjected to it as its guardian mother, and almost wholly occupied in its service, the beginnings of Christian music antedate the church itself. Pagan rites had their music no less than Christian. Just as we find elements of Greek philosophy in the teaching of Christianity, so the church reconciled Pagan festivals with its own holidays, and with them adapted elements of Pagan music. Thus our Easter was a continuation of the Pagan May-day festivals, and in the old Easter hymn O filii et filiæ we find again the old Celtic may day songs, the chansons de quête which still survive in France. We here reproduce one above the other:

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The midwinter festival, merged into our Christmas, and the midsummer festival, corresponding to the feast of St. John the Baptist, both became connected with masses and songs common to both beliefs; the Tonus Peregrinus, sung to the psalm ‘When Israel came out of Egypt,’ already an old melody in the ninth century, is almost identical with old French secular songs, and we have already observed the adoption of vulgar melodies into ‘sequences’ and motets.

It must be remembered that for a considerable period Christianity and Paganism coexisted as tolerant companions. The former could not totally blot out the traditions, customs, conventions, ideas, and myths of classic Paganism which were rooted in the popular consciousness. ‘All through the Middle Ages,’ says Symonds, ‘uneasy and imperfect memories of Greece and Rome had haunted Europe. Alexander, the great conqueror; Hector, the noble knight and lover; Helen, who set Troy town on fire; Virgil, the magician; Dame Venus, lingering about the hill of Hörsel—these phantoms, whereof the positive historic truth was lost, remained to sway the soul and stimulate desire in myth and saga.’[69]

Associated with these myths were the traditions native to the Celtic and Germanic peoples. The very bards of whom we spoke are known to have entered the service of the church in great number, though this did not prevent their travelling from castle to castle to sing before the princes ballads in praise of their heroic ancestors. Of these epics, hero tales, strange stories of conquest and adventure the nations of central Europe possessed a rich treasure, and we hear that about A. D. 800 Charlemagne, the sovereign patron of liberal arts, ordered a collection of them to be made.

Tolerant though he was of the traditions of his people, the profane songs of love and satire, sometimes indecent, which were sung about the churches, became subjects of his censure; and no doubt the trouble they caused was but one indication of the growing antagonism between Christian and non-Christian, the intolerance of the later Middle Ages. Already Charles’ son, Ludwig the Pious, looked with disfavor upon the heathen epics. As time went on and clerical influence broadened, the personalities of Pagan tradition became associated with the spirit of evil; Dame Venus had now become the she-devil, the seductress of pious knights.[70] This again gave rise to new ideas, traditions, and superstitions; the mystic and the supernatural caught hold of the people’s fancy and were reflected in their poetry and song.

Among the earliest epics, of which the verses are extant, are fragments such as the song on the victory of Clothar II over the Saxons in 622 A. D. Helgaire, a historian of the ninth century, tells us that, ‘thanks to its rustic character, it ran from lip to lip; when it was sung the women provided the chorus by clapping their hands.’ Its Latin text is said to be merely a translation of a popular version, which would antedate the earliest known vernacular song by over two centuries. Of a more advanced type is the Song of Roland, that famous chronicle of the death of the Count of Brittany in the Pass of Roncesvalles, during Charlemagne’s return from the conquest of the Spanish march. Its musical notation was lost, but it was sung as late as 1356 at the battle of Poitiers. Though this great epic consists of no less than four thousand verses, Tiersot points out that its hero had long been celebrated in innumerable short lyrics, easy to remember, which all the people sang. Many were the epics describing the valiant deeds of Charlemagne himself, and posterity deified him as the hero of heroes in numerous strains that are lost to us. But one of which the music has been deciphered, though with varying results, is the Planctus Karoli, a complainte on the death of the great emperor (813 A. D.).[71] Then there is the quaint vernacular song in praise of King Ludwig III, celebrating his victory over the Normans (832 A. D.):

But with isolated exceptions like this one all the early epics were written in Latin; even the early songs of the first crusaders (eleventh century) are still in that language. Their origin may in many instances have been ecclesiastical; written by some monk secluded within his monastery walls, they may never have been sung by the people; their melodies, akin to the plain chant of the church, may never have entered into the popular consciousness. Yet it is in the popular consciousness that we must look for the true origin of mediæval secular music. In folk song itself we must seek the germs of the art which bore such rich blossoms as the Troubadour and Minnesinger lyrics and which in turn refreshed by its influence the music of the church itself.

II

As folk songs we are wont to designate those lyrics of simple character which, handed down from generation to generation, are the common property of all the people. Every nation, regardless of the degree of its musical intelligence, possesses a stock of such songs, so natural in their simple ingenuity as to disarm the criticism of art, whose rules they follow unconsciously and with perfect concealment of means. Their origin is often lost in the obscurity of tradition and we accept them generally and without question as part and parcel of our racial inheritance. Yet, while in a sense spontaneous, every folk song did originate in the consciousness of some one person. The fact that we do not know its author’s name argues simply that the song has outlived the memory of him who created it. He was a man of the people, more gifted than his fellows, who saw the world through a poet’s eye, but who spoke the same language, was reared in the same traditions, and swayed by the same passions and sentiments as they who were unable to express such things in memorable form. This fellow, whose natural language is music, becomes their spokesman; their heartbeats are the accents of his song. His talent is independent of culture. A natural facility, an introspective faculty and a certain routine suffice to give his song the coherence and definiteness of pattern which fasten it upon the memory. Language is the only requisite for the transmission of his art. Once language is fixed and has become the common property of the people, this song, vibrating the heart-strings of its makers’ countrymen, will be repeated by another who perchance will fashion others like it; his son, if he be gifted like himself, will do likewise and so the inexhaustible well of popular genius will flow unceasingly from age to age.

In the sentiments and thoughts common to all, then, we will find the impulses of the songs which we shall now discuss. Considering the different shades of our temperament, sadness, contentment, gladness, and exuberance, we find that each gives rise to a species of song, of which the second is naturally the least distinctive, the two extremes calling for the most decisive expression. Now sadness and melancholy have their concrete causes, and it is in the narration of these causes that the heart vents its sorrow. Hence the narrative form, the complainte, whose very name would confirm our reasoning, is the earliest form of folk song in the vulgar tongue. In a warlike people this would naturally dwell upon warlike heroic themes, and we have already pointed out the early origin of the epic. The musical form of epic was perhaps the simplest of all, taking for its sole rhythm the accent of the words, one or two short phrases, chanted much in the manner of the plain-song, sufficing for innumerable verses. It is notable, too, that the church, adroitly seizing upon popular music as a power of influence, adopted this form to another genus, the légende, which, though developed by clericals, struck as deep a root in the people’s imagination. Thus we see in the ninth century the ‘Chant of St. Eulalia,’ and in the tenth the ‘Life of St. Leger,’ which already shows great advance in form, being composed in couplets of two, four, and six verses, alternating. Possessed of better means of perpetuation this religious epic flourished better and survived longer than the heroic complainte.

Still another genus was what we might call the popular complaintes, the chansons narratives, which dealt with the people’s own characters, with the common causes of woe; the common soldier and the peasant; the death of a husband or a son. Such a one is the Chanson de Renaud, which is considered the classic type of popular song. It is sung in every part of France, and its traces are found in Spain, Italy, Sweden, and Norway. It is unquestionably of great age, though its date cannot be fixed.

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This strain is sung through thirteen stanzas, recounting Renaud’s return from the wars to his home, where mother and wife await him, only to die upon the stroke of midnight. The mother artfully conceals the fact from his young spouse till finally she hears the news from the boys in the street and sees the catafalque in the church. Her grief is expressed in two final stanzas upon this melody:

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the last stanza very naïvely telling of her own death:

‘She had said for him three verses; at the first she confessed,
At the second she took sacrament; at the third she expired.’

The music is notable not only for its perfect symmetry and the fidelity with which it expresses the sentiment, but also its discriminating use of the natural and flatted B to produce a plaintive effect. (To both the employment of ‘modern’ tonality and the chromatic element in popular song we shall have occasion to return.) The 6/8 rhythm is no less remarkable, giving the piece a crispness and definiteness never attained by mediæval church music.

Parallel to the narrative song there developed a lighter genre, as old as the complainte itself, which corresponds to comedy as the latter does to tragedy. Its personages are the same, but stripped of all their sombre aspect; its story has a happy conclusion; its subject is not infrequently comic and satirical. Tiersot quotes, in contrast to the Chanson de Renaud, an example which is still heard in the provinces of France.[72] Like the song already quoted, it narrates the return of soldiers from the war, but, where the first has the mark of death upon him, the other returns with a ‘rose between his lips.’ It is perhaps not so old as the Chanson de Renaud, but equally characteristic and particularly ‘Gallic’ in flavor:

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Note the crisp rhythm, the decided major tonality, and the exuberant spirit of the song. Many early melodies show these same characteristics, which at once remind us of that other elemental form of folk music—the dance song, in which rhythm is the essential element.

Rhythm is the feature which most of all distinguishes popular song, and secular music in general, from church music. It is the essentially emotional quality of music which the Christian church carefully excluded from its chant. We have seen, however, how people’s primitive instinct causes them to mark the rhythm of a melody (Chap. I) and beheld the women clapping their hands to the tune of the complainte of Clothar II. Dependent upon simple formulas which could be easily grasped and remembered, folk song naturally chose the simplest rhythmic and melodic types. Hence the dance became one of the principal root-stocks of secular music. An element which was never admitted into the narrative form, the refrain, is a distinguishing characteristic of the dance song, and in it we see the germ of the earliest of our modern instrumental forms, the rondeau, originally the name of a dance. The dance song was perhaps the most varied in melodies, for the wayfaring musicians of the Middle Ages carried them from village to village and from country to country, so that there was a continuous international exchange.

The rhythmic nature of folk song carries us into another field of speculation, namely, the influence of the people’s daily occupations, the close relation between daily life and song in ages when life in its individual and social manifestations could be reduced to simple formulæ. Occupational songs have from earliest times (cf. Chap. IV) been an important factor in folk music, and it is obvious that early in the Middle Ages such songs were closely associated with the movements of the human body in various occupations. Dr. Bücher[73] calls attention to the fact that the blacksmith at his anvil, the navvy in the street, are striking iambi, trochees, spondees, dactyls, and anapests. He has collected an enormous amount of folk songs that were sung by the woodman as he wielded his axe, by the boatman plying his oars, by the peasant as he plowed his acre, scattered the seed, mowed the field, and reaped the harvest. This, however, pertains particularly to Germany, where Bücher’s investigations were chiefly carried on, and whither we must now direct the reader’s attention.

To trace and formulate distinctions between the folk songs of the northern and southern nations is a hazardous undertaking, since the Celtic element which so largely determines the music of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales is also present in France and Spain, and since the wars between the various races, as well as the great international movements of the Crusades, tended to modify national distinctions. All these meetings and collisions between the different nations have left traces in the songs of the individual peoples. However, northern folk song may in general be said to be simpler and more regular in outline and striving for greater continuity of design or pattern than southern. Rhythm is simpler, firmer, and less given to eccentricities. The tonality is usually clearer and minor scales seem to predominate. In the dance songs the passionate and boisterous element, characteristic of the dances of the Slavic and Latin races, is lacking.

The folk song of Northern Europe draws largely upon the stock of topics held in common. Ever since Johann Gottfried Herder, in his Stimmen der Völker in Liedern (‘The Voices of the Peoples in Song’), called attention to the treasures of folk song, the patient research of painstaking scholars has brought forth proof upon proof to show how closely the nations of the North are related, in spite of political boundary lines and other barriers. The recurrence of the same saga or story of ancient myth or hero-lore in Scandinavian song and in German, the resemblance between the German Tannhäuser, the Swedish knight Olaf, the Scottish Thomas the Rhymer, and the Flemish Heer Daniel or Heer Halewyn, make the question of priority seem irrelevant. North and south of the Channel, and even east and west of the Rhine, the contents of legendary song are curiously alike.

In manner, too, northern folk songs have many features in common; an instinctive simplicity of language, a freedom from obscurities and far-fetched allusions, the prevalence of a four-line strophe and alliteration and assonance which only in time yield to rhyme. The singing of the same tune to an indefinite number of lines or stanzas is common to Celtic bards, Norse skalds, and German singers, and links them to their forerunners in classical antiquity, the Greek rhapsodists. In following the outline of the poem, the melody is usually cast in lines, each closing with a cadence or ‘fall’; the lines form groups or couplets, either similar or dissimilar, in the manner of rhyming verse-lines. The first couple of phrases is repeated to give the structure stability; the middle portion forms the contrast, either by being broken up into shorter lengths or founded upon different notes of the scale. The dominant in the middle cadence is of frequent occurrence. The rhythm is simple.

Impressionable and receptive by nature, the German people have always been given to imitation of foreign models and there is no doubt that the international movements during the Crusades and the visits of wandering minstrels of foreign birth introduced alien elements and obliterated some of the original features of German folk song. The pathetic rise of a tune through the fifth to the minor seventh suggests Scandinavian influence; the alternation of major and relative minor may be traced to the same source. Still the German Volkslied has some traits that distinguish it from the folk song of other northern nations. It is more firmly knit, more formal, and less emotional. Unlike English song, which favors a repetition of short phrases, a single figure which, repeated on different degrees of the scale, sometimes makes up the whole tune, German folk song repeats short phrases only to establish balance after contrast or to make the essential parts of the structure correspond. There is a marked tendency to make the formal climax coincide with the emotional, but in this respect the Volkslied does not reach the admirable symmetry of the Irish folk song. A distinctive form is the ‘Jodel’ or ‘Jodler’ of the mountaineers of Germany, the Tyrol, and Switzerland. Based upon broken chords or arpeggios, it suggests, as do some other folk songs built upon a harmonic foundation, that the German people had an innate sense for diatonic harmony long before harmony as such became an element of musical composition.[74] With the exception of the Jodler, which is unique for its exuberance of spirit, the Volkslied is rather reserved and contained in manner. It reflects the serious, contemplative character and the healthy, well-poised temperament of a physically and spiritually strong race.

Song and dance entered largely into the life of mediæval German villages and towns. When village communities depended upon their own resources for work and play, every village had its own musicians. The peasant boys usually played the fiddle, the shepherds the Schalmey, while the flute was hardly less popular. In the towns there were several functionaries identified with certain forms of song. The watchman on the town wall (Türmer) was blowing a tune on his horn; the ‘wait’ or Nachtwächter admonished the people to observe the curfew hour and repair for the night; and, when the Postillon or courier came through the gates with clatter of hoofs and cracking of whips, the rousing notes of his horn brought young and old into the street to greet the bringer of news. The smallest community had its ‘town piper.’ There was no festivity without song or dance, and the instrumentalist playing for the dance was accompanied by a precentor for the singing and a leader for the steps. The great variety of occupations and pastimes accompanied by song and dance made for a great variety of folk tunes. From this folk song of mediæval Germany, dealing with the realities of life in their manifold manifestations, one could almost reconstruct the whole life of the race, its history, beliefs, superstitions, activities, social and domestic customs, its intimate domestic relations and its important public functions. The Tage, Leichen, Tanz, Spruch, Zauber, and Wünschelieder, the harvest, spinning, soldiers’, and other trade and labor songs are a musical commentary as illuminating to the historian as any other relics of the past.

Many beautiful melodies still heard by the traveller in Brittany, Normandy, Provence, or the rural sections of Germany, date from the Middle Ages. Their charm and their vitality are such that they have survived the onslaught of advancing civilization for eight centuries or more. They take us back to the time when agriculture was the one great pursuit of man, when in solitude song lightened his labor and in company song cheered his rest; when every custom, ceremonial, occupation, had its songs; when music was a solace to all alike; when that terrible distinction between the lettered and unlettered did not exist. ‘For neither in Greece nor in the Middle Ages did it exist; the same poetry pleased all, the prince and the burgher, the knight and peasant.’ ‘In certain Breton provinces,’ says Tiersot, ‘following an old feudal law, established in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, certain revenues were paid in song. In one place the prior exacted the tax of “nuptial song” from the newly married on the Sunday after the wedding; in another, every new bride was obliged to perform a song and dance, whereupon the lord would decorate the bride with a flower bonnet, while all the women married during the year danced and sang a song—eloquent testimony indeed of the love of music among our early forefathers.

C. S.

III

We have had occasion to mention the vagrant musicians, that singular adjunct to Middle-Age society, which appeared in every country of Central Europe, in Germany as Fahrender, in France as fableor or contraire and later as jongleur or ménétrier, in England as minstrel. Gustav Freytag has speculatively traced their origin back to the Roman gladiators, actors, and performers mentioned above, a despised race, who were, like their supposed posterity, beyond the pale of the law. When the Germanic hordes swept away the degenerate opulence of Rome, this class may well be supposed to have scattered among the barbarian conquerors. As once in the arena, they now stood before the huts of Frankish chieftains, performing their tricks and piping strange tunes. To the populace of the Middle Ages they were welcome guests, for they provided the one means of artistic entertainment outside the church.

In Germany the fahrende Sänger or Spielmann, whether a native who had travelled in many lands or a singer of foreign birth, was sure to find his way into the remotest huts of the countryside. He brought with him new tunes and took with him those that he heard at the fireside that had given him hospitality. In this way the stock of tunes handed down from father to son and from mother to daughter was in every generation enlarged by acquisitions from without. The minstrel was the medium of musical exchange between the town and the country, between the several provinces and between different nations. He was the middleman and the teacher, through whom echoes of the songs of Norse skalds, Welsh and Irish bards, and French and Provençal singers reached the German people and vice versa. He was especially popular in England, where numerous instances are quoted of minstrels appearing at royal weddings and other great functions, not only individually but in large numbers, and being so richly rewarded for their services that the church complained because they were better paid than priests. Individual German sovereigns also seem to have appreciated their skill and distinguished them by marks of favor. In 1355 Emperor Charles IV appointed one Johann der Fiedler ‘rex omnium histriorum’ for the archbishopric of Mayence, and thirty years later another minstrel, the piper Brachte, bore the official title Künig der farenden Lüte (King of the wayfarers).

In France, too, the vagrant appears as the original type of popular singer. He ran from one end of the land to the other. Received and even invited by the great lords he went from castle to castle, his head filled with songs, or his pockets with parchments—if, indeed, he could read. Perchance he would stop in the common of some village, play a few stray arpeggios on his viol, and, having collected an enthusiastic audience, sing a complainte, the adventures of a favorite hero, or perhaps recount the story of a celebrated crime, embellished with horrifying details. Again he might sing a love romance, or even a scriptural légende—the ‘Prodigal Son’ or some other parable, the life of a saint, or the Passion of our Lord.

With the growth of the cities and the development of the middle class the wandering minstrel lost popularity in Germany, even among the people. His itinerant life bred a disregard of social customs and conventions which caused no little concern among the respectable burghers of larger communities, and both the Sachsenspiegel and the Schwabenspiegel, chronicles of the thirteenth century, record the fact that minstrels were outside the social pale and even excluded from membership in the church. Yet these same outcasts of the church, excluded from its sacraments, would gather the faithful in the cathedral square and, exciting the people’s fancy with sacred legends and miracles, would, as it were, become the self-appointed allies of the clergy. But at last, in uncompromising opposition to them, the resident musicians of the towns associated themselves in the manner of guilds and monopolized the privilege of furnishing music for public functions, being employed and paid by the city councils. The earliest musicians’ guild of this kind was the Nikolaibrüderschaft (Brotherhood of St. Nicholas), organized in Vienna in 1288. Its management was entrusted to a high official, the Musikantenvogt, later Oberspielgraf, who represented the highest tribunal in matters of music. The policy of these musicians’ guilds was similar to that of musicians’ unions of the present day. In a district covered by the guilds only persons enrolled as paying members were allowed to play or sing for money.

It was different in France. Here the jongleur, by virtue of special circumstances, became a privileged character and enjoyed the continued patronage of the aristocracy, for he was an all-important factor in the musicianship of chivalry, which we shall presently discuss.

We have left out of our consideration of folk music so far that all-important element of modern song, the mainspring of lyricism—romantic love. In an age when man’s entire spiritual life was dictated by religious dogma, his natural instincts, branded as profane and unworthy, were naturally excluded from the objects of his poetic expression. ‘But the church could not completely triumph over Nature. The fundamental human sentiments—above all, profane love—after having for more than ten centuries been excluded from the expression which musical science might have vouchsafed to them, now seemed to take their revenge, to free themselves from long subjection, to let voices hitherto condemned to silence be heard at last. By the side of the altars where psalms were sung, where the things of the world were condemned, the free and subtle stories of exalted love arose, like irresistible protests of the human heart. The cult of the ideal woman, the mother of the Saviour, the Virgin immaculate, continued; but beside it was heard the praise of the woman of France [of Germany, of Italy]; the subject of another sort of devotion, as exalted and often as pure. The chivalrous qualities of the race, disciplined and refined by Christian dogma, but rebelling against asceticism, reappeared and reclaimed their rights with a new vivacity.’[75] This new spirit pervaded all classes of society. The nobility, especially, now affected a finer, more spiritual manner of life. Christian metaphysics, superior education, and the advanced social position of women were the things which prepared the way for chivalry, that new moral code propagated by formal orders of knighthood. The Crusades and contact with Eastern culture confirmed its establishment.