Bach and Newton

"In August 1750, just days after Bach's death, Agricola wrote:

He [Finazzi] denies his [Bach's] music the effect of pleasure for the listener who would not savor such difficult harmony. Yet, assuming the harmonies [that is, musical structure] of this great man were so complex that they would not always achieve the intended result, they nevertheless serve for the connoisseur's genuine delight. Not all learned people are able to understand a Newton, but those who have progressed far enough in the profound science so they can understand him will find the greatest gratification and real benefit in reading his work."

("Prologue: Bach and the Notion of 'Musical Science'". Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician. Christoph Wolff.)

Several interesting things here - the fact that Wolff feels that "harmonies" and "musical structure" are somewhat synonymous in the 18th century German tongue (drawing any tempting conclusions would be unsubstantiated conjecture on my part) and also the fact that, were it a reference to what we'd actually call Bach's harmonies, we wouldn't think of them as complex at all. We've been acclimatized in that respect. If it's a broader "musical structure" that's so complex (such as setting a poetic German text to 9 part choral harmony and two separate orchestras), I see what they mean. Finazzi's still wrong, though. Bach's congregations didn't seem to mind his "difficult harmony" so much, after all.

Exulting in the Three-Fold God

One of the most beloved descriptions of the Trinity by all of its students is Gregory Nazianzus':

"No sooner do I conceive of the One than I am illumined by the Splendour of the Three; no sooner do I distinguish Them than I am carried back to the One. When I think of any One of the Three I think of Him as the Whole.... When I contemplate the Three together, I see but one torch, and cannot divide or measure out the Undivided Light."

Many things have been compared to this dizzying concept of triunity—a family, mosaics, an irreducibly complex biological system—but what better picture of it in corporate worship is there than polyphony? One often hears that, in polyphony, each voice remains independent throughout. Quite the contrary, no voice could be removed from polyphonic music without the rest of the voices losing their aesthetic appeal. The same is not true in homophonic music, where there is simply a melody and chords whose presence or exact manifestation is optional. Polyphony exults in the distinguishability but inseparability of its voices. That same desire to bask in the simultaneous unity and diversity of the Trinity in Nazianzus is present in John Dunstable. Anyone, be he Protestant, Roman Catholic, or Eastern Orthodox, wishing to see an exuberant understanding of the Trinity spill into aesthetics need look no farther than the Burgundian music of the Middle Ages. This is music "exulting in the three-fold God".

What a Classical Education Does To Your Musical Appreciation

"Peter, she felt sure, could hear the whole intricate pattern, every part separately and simultaneously, each independent and equal, separate but inseparable, moving over and under and through, ravishing heart and mind together." (Gaudy Night, Dorothy L. Sayers.)

A convicting quote. He's apparently, by the way, listening to Bach.

Live Performance and Praetorius' Polychorality

"Praetorius' music stems from a tradition of congregational involvement which is at the core of Lutheranism. Although his output includes some of the most elaborate sacred repertoire of the time, most of it is skilfully written to allow for the inclusion of the various musical groups that took part in music within the church: town waits, school children, the Collegium Musicum of amateur musicians, and the professional Kantorei. ...In addtion, Praetorius offers advice regarding the displacement of the musicians, who were frequently positioned around the church, especially in galleries. This basic polychorality allows the music to envelop the congregation in the act of worship." - Paul McCreesh and Robin A. Leaver

Schoenberg on Pre-Bach

"To base the teaching of counterpoint on Palestrina is as stupid as to base the teaching of medicine on Aesculapius. Nothing could be more remote from contemporary ideas, structurally and ideologically, than the style of this composer. Besides, his contrapuntal technique...does not demonstrate the more difficult problems and their solutions discovered only shortly after him." (Some Aspect of Counterpoint in Selected Works of Arnold Schoenberg, Boris William Pillin.)

It may be chronological snobbery, but it's an excellent example of a common, understated attitude amongst academia of (at least) the early 20th century toward Renaissance polyphony.

Live Performance, Part I

Counterpoint comes from two Latin words—contra, meaning "against" or "opposite", and punctus, meaning "point". A punctus was the early ancestor of what we'd call a "note". Placing notes against or in opposition to each other was, in some ways, a visual expression of the idea of melodies that play off each other. Probably the earliest known example we have of counterpoint in this sense was a style that originated around the 11th and 12th century known as organum, where a chant melody formed a static baseline for several more florid melodies that were placed "opposite" each other.

A good example of this is Viderunt Omnes by Perotin. When listening to this, the human ear naturally tends to want to hear the top notes being sung. The rest is secondary. What doesn't come through in recorded performances is the fact that these melodies are constantly switching places, intertwining, popping on top of and dipping below each other. You can see a copy of the score of Viderunt Omnes here. If you follow along with the music, you can see this happening. But you still can't hear it happening. In a recording, like the YouTube link above, it simply sounds like one guy is singing the entire melody, when it's really it's a motley affair, the contribution of several different singers.

In a live performance, things are different. Due to the physical presence of the singers and their distance from each other, you can hear different melodies coming from different places in the room. The result is that you hear X melody coming first from your left, and then, suddenly, the same melody X from your right, while the guy singing on your left is now singing Y melody. And then it switches again. The texture is an enormous—perhaps a fundamental—part of understanding the music. It's something you won't ever get in recorded performance.

This isn't just true of Perotin. It's true of many pre- and post-Reformation composers, including Dufay, Josquin, Palestrina and Byrd, perhaps to a lesser extent, and the Lutherans through Bach. The physical placement of the musicians is totally essential to understanding counterpoint. In many ways, without live performance, we understand the punctus part of counterpoint, but not the contra part.

Contra gives us words in English like "contrarian", "counterclockwise", and "counteract". But contra has some more delicate connotations than simply "against" or "opposite". In Vergil's Aeneid, for instance, he constantly uses the word in his conversations. Sic Venus et Veneris contra sic filius orsus is literally, "Thus spoke Venus, and the son of Venus began opposite." Another denotation is "in turn". The word contra adds a back-and-forth dimension to the conversation. They're speaking contra in the same way you might throw the baseball contra somebody. You're throwing the ball back and forth, opposite each other.

Applying that back to music, the contra of counterpoint is the playful, conversational element of it that can't be expressed through Bose speakers. Your boom box can only give a slight impression of distances between singers and the delineation of lines. A CD can't really express how the singers are interacting and jumping on top of each other and creating notes that are in response to other notes. That's why counterpoint really necessitates live performance. Being present while different melodies come from different parts of the room and hit your ear at different places will only really give you the idea of a conversation between parts.

The Monody Argument

Monody: "all styles of accompanied solo singing practiced in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (as distinct from monophony, which is unaccompanied melody)." (A History of Western Music, B., G., P., pg. 312)

The Argument: that the harmonic direction of Classical music was a direct consequence of Monody and the Florentine Camerata.

Camerata:
(a) founded for "the purpose of rediscovering the manner in which the Greeks had used music with the drama". (A History of Music, Finney, 228)
(b) "The sense of the drama depended upon the words being audible to the hearers, and the early experiments of the Camerata were directed toward the discovery of a style of music which would make that possible." (ibid.)

Consequently, "these men began by discarding the whole polyphonic method" because
(a) "Only a solo melody, [G. Mei] said, could enhance the natural speech inflections of a good orator or actor." (A History of Western Music, B., G., P., pg. 311)
(b) "When several voices simultaneously sang different melodies and words, in different rhythms and registers, some low and some high, some rising and others descending, some in slow notes and others in fast [i.e. polyphony], the resulting chaos of contradictory impressions could never deliver the emotional message of the text." (ibid.)

The Monody Argument asserts that this establishment of melody and accompaniment directed the course of this style of music [i.e. Classical music] towards a primacy of harmony because

(a) harmonic interest is a necessity of the dry recitative
(b) harmonic interest necessity of the primacy of emotion (at least in the mind of the monodists and consequently in the mind of Classical music)