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!

The Foundations: Early Greek to Early Church

This last week has been a fairly scattered one for me. Between packing up and moving to a new place and the daunting task of trying to find my theory workbook and sheet music in all the boxes, I haven’t had a lot of time to spend meticulously organizing this article.

That said, it’s been a fascinating couple of weeks in MUSC 2290, once I managed to get ahold of the textbook that UPS conveniently misplaced. We started with very early Greek music and have just barely made it past 1000 A.D (or C.E. for those of you who like to be politically correct). As I go, I’ll very likely be throwing some odd terms at you. If you see a word in boldface, you should be able to find its definition pretty close by.

The ancient Greeks were some of the very first to actually notate music. What it looked like at that points was just a normal wall of text (literally, sometimes) with little dashes or triangles over the various syllables to indicate pitch and/or rhythm. The melodies were very simple, and completely monophonic. Until 500 years ago or so, all music was made up of a single line of melody, no harmonies and definitely not more than one moving part.

One very unique thing about this early music was that it more than likely included quarter-tones. For those of us who have been struggling for years to get half steps and whole steps in tune, can you imagine having an even smaller interval to fine tune! This is also the point in history when writers began dividing music into modes. In modern western music, we only have 2 common modes, the major scale and the minor scale. But in the early Greek and Roman music, there were over a dozen.

Not all modes are created equal, however! Philosophers of the day had very strong opinions about which modes made you lazy, which ones inspired warfare, and which ones were only suited for children. I guess this was the beginning of music genre racism?

As the early church organized and became a larger part of the culture, it also became the catalyst for the evolution of music. By 600 A.D., Pope Gregory was in charge, and although he did not actually compose any music, his consolidation and codification of the church music gave rise to the term Gregorian Chant. At this point, the number of modes had dwindled down to 8, in pairs of 2. Each mode covered a single octave, and had a specific final and dominant. The final referred to the cadential tone, or the note used to finish a piece written in that particular mode. Dominant, in this case, isn't linked to the dominant chord function. Instead, it's the main note that the chant revolves around.

One of the reasons that early music was so simple was because of the fact that it was mostly a setting for religious text. The church believed that the text was supreme, and any elaborate accompaniment would be a distraction. St. Augustine even included this discussion in his famous Confessions. He praised the music for stirring up greater feelings of devotion but lamented the fact that if the music was particularly pleasing, it took his mind away from the subject matter.

                                                                                         Image credit: www.mscperu.org

This is also the reason that instruments were forbidden for church music. However, although there is no record that instruments were ever used in services, we have reason to believe that it was actually quite common. What we do have records of is more than a few edicts censoring the use of instruments. Somebody had to have been breaking the law for it to have been restated so often!

Most of the early chants were melismatic. This means that they were actually very short texts set to long meandering melodies. Certain syllables of the words were drawn out over sometimes a dozen notes. The perfect example of this is the Kyrie. The text was as follows: "Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison, Kyrie eleison." (Lord, have mercy; Christ, have mercy; Lord, have mercy.) This short prayer would be set to any number of longer chant melodies. 

These chants were mostly step-wise, with maybe 1 or 2 jumps of a 4th or a 5th in the whole song. These rules persisted for quite a long time. Notation was at first similar to the Greek method, with symbols placed over the text. These days, they're often seen in a 4 staff notation cobbled together from several various medieval notation styles. The Kyrie is an example of this notation.

Eventually, the monks and congregations got tired of singing Ky-ri-e---------------, and decided that it was time to make the texts more interesting. That however, is a story for another day. As always, if you have questions or input, or something you'd like to hear more about, send us a message or leave a comment! Don't forget--the contest is still running. Read about it here! Faith, signing off.