The Many Uses of Troping

Last we left them, the monks were ready to try something new. Very short texts set to very long chants were rather difficult to memorize. One fellow in particular, a monk named Notker the Stammerer who lived in the Abby of St. Gall around 800 A.D, just couldn't manage to remember the Alleluias. So, in order to help him remember the long melodic passages, he wrote a poem to match the melody. If every note had its own syllable, it was much easier to memorize. Then, when it was time to sing the liturgy, all he had to do was drop the words and replace them with "Al-le-lu-ia-----------"

Funny enough, other people liked the idea. They didn't just use his poems for practice and memory work. They started singing them along as part of the service. And so troping was born. This practice--adding to or expanding an existing chant--became extremely popular and saw many variations over the next 400 or so years.

See, in the church music scene in the early years, the original liturgical text was sacred. Paramount, untouchable, sacred. You couldn't get rid of it. You couldn't change it. But there was a catch--you could expand it, add stuff around or on top it, and pretty much do whatever you wanted, as long as the original text could still be found in there somewhere. So troping was the perfect technique as musicians began to expand their horizons.

It was also around this time that musical theatre was born. Liturgical dramas were staged for special days, such as Christmas or Easter. Most of the text was straight from Biblical accounts, but there were elaborate stage directions included in the manuscripts. This art form slowly evolved away from the liturgy and the church, and moved to the towns and villages. As did music.

By the time the new millennium had rung itself in, a group of monk school dropouts had formed and called themselves the Goliards.  They traveled around doing what most college students do--drinking, partying, and finding girls to join them. And because they were at least partially educated in the monasteries, they could write and they could sing. By the 1200s, there was at least one manuscript of secular Latin songs. Some were course, some were poetic, and some tried to be at least a little bit moral.

Of course the trend spread, giving rise to the troubadours of southern France, the trouveres of northern France, the minstrals of England and the minnesingers of Germany. They all wrote and sang about pretty much the same things: wine, women, and war. Like as not, they accompanied themselves on instruments such as early forms of the violin, the recorder and of course percussion.

The church still did its best to keep instruments out of the services. This didn't stop them from experimenting with new ways to expand their music without losing the foundation of the chant. About the same time secular music was on its rise, somebody came up with the novel idea of two groups singing at the same time, called organum. It started out very simple--two voices singing the same old chant, but one moving completely parallel to the first at a fourth or fifth below. Then they learned how to move in contrary motion but avoid any nasty intervals. Mostly consonances were used--unison, octave, fifth and fourth, with a couple sixths or thirds thrown in at the cadences.

Slowly but surely, the musicians became comfortable singing different rhythms simultaeously. The choir would sing the original chant with its original melody, while the soloist improvised the organum voice with a separate rhythm on top of the cantus firmus (fixed song). The next obvious step was adding more voices. Some chants had up to four. These upper parts were rarely written out. Instead, they were improvised following a very specific set of rules laid out in a grand treatise written around 1100 A.D.--"Ad Organum Faciendum" Or, On Making Organum.

There were two specific types of organum, and each was paired to a specific type of chant. Each note of the very long, melismatic passages in the original chant corrosponded to maybe two or three notes of organum. This was called discant organum. The simpler, long tones of a chant would be set to more melismatic organum parts, called florid organum. Leonin, who worked at the Cathedral of Notre Dame, collected a book of transcribed organum parts, and aptly titled it "The Big Book of Organum." This particular chant comes from Leonin's anthology.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bganS0KBsEY


So it happened, that without even realizing it, polyphony--music with more than one voice--was born, evolved and gradually became the accepted method of composition. There was one more development to the chant, one more application of troping, that we will discuss next time. So make sure to come back in a couple weeks and check it out!

On a completely separate note, if you live anywhere near the UNC Charlotte campus, and have nothing to do on Thursday, February 13th, you might consider coming to hear me play in the UNCC Chamber Orchestra concert at 7:30 in Rowe Recital Hall. Admission is free, and it will be a pretty awesome program--Beethoven, Lully and Finzi (with an amazing tenor solo by the esteemed Dr. Brian Areola). Need details? Just ask!