Motets to Madrigals: The Shift from Sacred to Secular

As promised in my previous article in this series, there is one more expansion of the troping principle that became more or less the final elaboration of the many forms of chant. If you recall, troping refers to the practice of adding extra notes, or even extra text to a pre-existing chant. This was very important to the Church, as they held the original texts sacred, untouchable. It was perfectly fine to expand upon or embellish the text, but in no way could you remove the original content.

Before the 13th century, there was polyphonic (multi-voiced) music but it was all done by all embellishing original chant melodies, with the original sacred Latin texts. However, as music became more accessible to the common man, somebody decided that they wanted things to get a little more interesting. So, instead of a single text with multiple voices, they set a different text to each voice. Motets were often three-voice compositions, with one chant text, and the others simply contemporary poetry. They even went so far as to mix languages. It was not uncommon to have a sacred Latin text being sung in the tenor voice--the voice closest to the original chant, while the other voices were set with secular, sometimes even bawdy, French poetry.

These were wildly popular and used for both sacred services and secular entertainment. This shift continued in conjunction with the shift in worldviews. Up until this time, the Church had been the center of religious, political and social life for much of the world. But as history moved from the medieval times, or the Dark Ages, into the Renaissance, culture changed. Humanism became an acceptable school of thought, and, as in any major cultural revolution, music was right there in the thick of things.

Sacred music was still necessary, and most popular composers wrote masses for the Church. However, they no longer were bound by the original chant melodies. They would take their own secular songs and recycle the melodies for sacred compositions. Melody and harmony also took on new characteristics. No longer were the perfect consonances--the fifth and the octave--the ideal sound. Instead, the people learned to love the rich sound of thirds and sixths. This was particularly prevalent in music of English composers such at John Dunstable, so much so that a French writer termed this sound "contenance angloise" or, "countenance of the Englishman."

Influential composers from this time of exploration and advancement include Guillaume du Fay, who was an important composer of the Burgundian school of thought in the early 1400s. He wrote mostly sacred music but did not hesitate to steal themes and motives from his secular compositions. Another of his contributions was the idea of a very complex rhythmic continuity in his works. He would take a basic rhythmic idea, and use it throughout a mass in either expanded or compacted versions. This practice is called isorhythm, and became a staple of compositions for next hundred years.

As the century progressed, the focal point of compositional ideas moved from the Burgundian region of France to the northern Europe, known as the Franco-Netherlands school of composition. This included greats such as Johannes Ockeghem from Paris and Josquin des Prez from northern France. These composers wrote complex secular pieces, for the entertainment and enlightenment of the well-educated. The idea that their music was so complicated that only a scholar could understand it become known as musica reservata, or music reserved for those who can appreciate it.

One of the most popular song forms of the day was the madrigal. These were often written in 5 or 6 voices, with popular poetry (often sonnets) as the text. Word painting was one of the characteristics of this style. Melody passages or harmonic ideas were used to reinforce the text. For instance, quick rising passages for a line about a sunrise, or low intense harmonies for despair.

This video gives an example of a madrigal from the mid-1500s, titled "Da le belle contrade d'oriente" by Cipriano de Rore, a native of Flanders. The text of this particular work is a Petrarchian sonnet declaring undying love before a painful farewell.

This style, with its complex rhythms and intricate symbolism became the pinnacle of Renaissance music. It also set the stage for further development as cultures and ideas continued to evolve. Next episode, we will meet of one of the most influential composers of all time. Looking forward to it!