Using a simple and enjoyable teaching style, this course introduces the novice listener to the wonders of classical music, from Bach fugues to Mozart symphonies to Puccini operas.
7.7 - Dance Music of the Court
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From the course by Yale University
Introduction to Classical Music
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From the lesson
Music Back in the Day
We will cover a thousand years in musical evolution during this modules lectures! We'll start with the Middle Ages taking a look at its functional chants and dance music, then we’ll move to the period of the Renaissance, and finish off by listening to the ornate melodies of opera heard throughout the early Baroque period. From this, you’ll begin to see how advances in musical notation allowed compositions to become both more specific and more complex. These advances are ultimately responsible for focus being shifted away from the performers and towards the composers themselves.Along the way, we’ll highlight some of these musical inventors and innovators, such as Hildegard of Bingen and Johann Pachelbel. We’ll also have the unique opportunity to see (and in some cases even hear) many of the instruments that were popular during these different time periods. This will be a real treat, made possible with help from Yale instructor, Grant Herreid. Many thanks are owed to him!
Meet the Instructors
Craig WrightHenry L & Lucy G Moses Professor of Music
Department of Music
[MUSIC]
>> So far, our investigation of music during the Middle Ages has centered on
religious music.
Music of the Roman Catholic Church.
Then the only Christian religion in the European west.
But, there was also secular music, non-religious music, and for
that, there was popular secular music.
Well what was this pop music like?
We really have no idea.
Or at least little idea, why?
Because the people who created the pop music were illiterate,
couldn't read or write.
In the middle ages,
almost everyone was illiterate, the only people who were literate.
Who could write things down, well they were the clergy, and
they tended to write down religious music.
So pop musicians made, but had no capacity to record their music.
And thus, almost all of it has disappeared.
But, some secular, non-religious music, does survive from the aristocratic courts.
This music was created by the troubadours and trouvères, and sometimes by the same
priests who were composing sacred music for the church, but also appearing in
court from time to time, and in that context, wrote down secular music.
Machaut, for example, worked at the court of several kings around Europe.
The King of Bohemia, the King of [INAUDIBLE] and
The King of France in the course of his long career.
So let's look now at the secular song and dance centered at the courts.
And to do this, we have to call on a true expert, our guest for the day.
So welcome again to another segment of Introduction to Classical Music.
I'm delighted to have with us today, my good friend and
colleague here at Yale, Grant Herreid.
Grant not only teaches music at Yale,
he is a world-renowned professional early music performance specialist.
And indeed, Grant just got off an airplane a day or so ago.
Now, where were you, Austria, something like that?
>> I was in Austria, in Melk, and in another little town in a little mini tour.
>> So he works out of New Haven, he also works as many professional musicians do
these days, out of New York City and travels around the world,
playing in a professional group called Pifero, and one or
two others that we don't have time to go into today.
But what we're gonna do is take you through some of these instruments
that were the primary media of performance in the Middle Ages.
And we're going to look at some slides here, and Grant and
I are going to comment on those slides, and you will be seeing those slides too.
I showed this to Grant a couple of moments ago, and this is entirely unscripted and
unrehearsed, and he recognized it immediately.
So, what is this?
>> It's from the, a large work in Sienna,
called the effects of good government, from the 14th century, right?
>> Yeah.
I remember I actually took this photo,
I remember being way up kind of high on a wall, it occupied an entire wall of that.
And in terms of looking at this,
what do you see by way of performance activity here?
>> It's one of two examples in iconography of, at least, of ladies dancing.
And you can see here, the dancers doing some sort of a circle dance,
which would have been called a Carole,
to the accompaniment of one of the ladies playing a drum.
And since her mouth is open, it is possible that she is also singing.
So a dance song.
>> Yeah, so the whole idea of singing, and our English word Carol,
is probably related to this, in one way or another.
Let's look at another one.
This particular image comes from France.
That much I know for sure, 14th century in the bibliotheque nationale,
in the collection Franc Francais there.
And we have a group of figures to the right, and then another dance there,
but once again, most likely this was being sung.
The text [FOREIGN].
>> Oh, you can read that.
>> Yes.
>> You're a better man that I.
>> [FOREIGN] And in fact, this is from his [FOREIGN],
at a moment where the poet, Machaut himself, encounters his lady.
Much younger than himself, dancing with her friends.
And it says clearly in the text,
that they're dancing without musical instruments.
>> Oh, really?
>> And they're providing all the music themselves with their voices.
And I think at one point, she raises her little finger and
beckons him to join the group.
And it's his turn to sing, and so he sings this song [CROSSTALK].
>> Fascinating.
Well, let's look at, now,
you mentioned that this one would have been danced to simply song.
But people sing and dance, obviously, today.
Let's look at another image here.
And on the right side of the screen,
we actually have one of these dance manuscripts.
This again from the collection at the Biblioteca Nacional.
And then on the left, more importantly, if we've had the full image here,
we would have dancers and the instrument that is accompanying here.
So tell us, Grant, about this particular instrument please.
>> This is known as the vielle.
And it is the, sort of, the work horse of the medieval minstrel we feel.
Probably one of the main instruments to accompany both Troubadour singing,
to accompany the Trouvere poetry in parts.
And also probably to provide dance music.
>> Yeah, so it might be going a bit too far, but in an odd sort of way,
almost etymologically, or at least organographically,
it's related to the guitar, in some odd kinds of ways.
Distantly, and we'll get into that as we go through some of the Vielles in the 15th
and 16th century.
But it was almost a factotum.
You could a lot of things with this particular instrument.
Let's look at some other slides.
I'm gonna ask Grant to comment on this one in particular,
because here we have a different kind of position for the instrument, the Vielle.
>> It's often hard to tell how large an instrument is, from iconography.
Often the painters seem to take liberties with the dimensions of things.
But we know from practical experience, that a smaller Vielle,
you can play up on your arm, like we play the violin.
The larger ones, you'd have to play down more like a cello or something, so
that seems to be what this fellow is doing, with his crossed leg.
>> Yeah.
So again, this instrument is called the Vielle,
spelled V-I-E-L-L-E, vielle, and
here is another representation from Italy around 1400.
Maybe not too much we can say about that.
Any comments that you wanna add there, Grant?
>> This one is one that seems to have a [INAUDIBLE] string,
a string that's off the fingerboard.
So just a plain drone that gives us a clue as to the sort of droney types
of accompaniment that these early fiddle players may have used.
>> And I think this may be the last one of these that we're going to take a look at.
It's a lot later,
it comes from the times of Raphael in Rome in the early 16th century.
But it's a particularly beautiful example of a Vielle.
And what do you see here?
What strikes you about this?
>> And this is a depiction of Apollo playing the lyre, and
in the early Renaissance, the lira da braccio, the lyre that you played
on your arm like that, was the main representation of Apollo's lyre.
And you can see that it has seven pegs, and therefore seven strings,
and that's also an imitation of the ancient lyre of Apollo,
which was supposed to have seven strings as well.
>> Yeah.
Okay well those are some images of the principle
string instrument of the Middle Ages, the Vielle.
We're now going to back and take a look at some other dance representations.
But before we do that, we want to actually hear the sound of the Vielle, and
I think Grant's going to be able to demonstrate this, on his own instrument.
>> This is a copy
that looks very much like one of the depictions that we just showed.
And the main way that they played it seems to have been up on the arm like this.
[MUSIC]
So, but as the other fella had it on his leg, you could also play it in this style.
[MUSIC]
>> Cool.
So that's the way it sounded in the Middle Ages, although this is a reproduction.
Right? This does not come from the 14th Century.
>> No, there are no Vielles from that.
I think the earliest one that anyone plays is actually played by Jordi Savall, and
it comes from the early 16th Century.
>> I see, yeah, the Spanish early music specialist.
Well, let's go on.
We're gonna look at some more slides now, and you're going to join us.
Here is one from England, as you can see, and we want to focus now on
what we do see here accompanying instruments, clearly, a bagpipe, and
some [INSUDIBE] here, and then our next slide.
Thoughts about this, Grant?
>> The common, sort of dance band of the late 14th or early 15th century or
throughout the 15th century, in fact, was the alte capello, or the loud band.
Comprised of shams, the early sort of oboe type instruments,
oboe and english horn, and often a brass instrument, either a slides trumpet or
an early trombone, which was called Sackbut, in England and France.
>> So we're gonna get to a representation of that little bit later on.
Let's look at a manuscript.
It's not too much that we have to say about,
we're going back to that same manuscript of some of this medieval dance music.
This dates from the 14th century.
And, one can transcribe this material,
if we look carefully, we could actually point at the little stems going up and
down, and they're the precursors of the stems and
flags that we have on notational symbols today, what we call notes today.
And then we can take this early manuscript here, and as my friend, Tim McGee,
who teaches at the University of Toronto, has done and edited in modern notation.
So over to the left, you see a facsimile of the original notation, and I could take
you through that with regard to semibreves and breves and that kind of thing, but
we end up with quarter notes and eighth notes and half notes.
So, now, we're going to hear the instrument that was foregrounded there,
this double reed instrument called the Shewm, S-H-E-W-M, Shewm.
So, Grant, what do we have here?
What's this thing?
>> This is what we call the Alto size.
This again is a modern reproduction.
We don't really know what kind of reeds they played on,
since none of the reeds survived.
But whole collections of different sizes of Shawms do survive from the early
renaissance.
And this is modeled on one of those.
It's also called the Bombard, because it resembled a type of early cannon.
[SOUND] >> [LAUGH] It sounds like one, too.
So are you gonna play it?
>> This is a bit of that.
[CROSSTALK] >> So if all goes well,
we're gonna have a phrase or so of the dance, the Es Stampede, the stomp,
if you will, from the Middle Ages, played on the Shawm.
[MUSIC]
Great, so that's a little taste of music from the middle ages,
specifically instrumental music, specifically dance music,
played on and demonstrated by Grant here on the Vielle and on the Shawm.
And we're gonna pick this up next time, when we come to a session on music and
the renaissance.
Thanks very much.
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