an infodump about medieval and renaissance music and the ars nova

hello! i am currently, as always listening to the radio: right now, it is france bleu paris and they are playing a song by the band louise attaque, which i really like (i especially liked their most recent album! i feel that the entire french music scene has brought some really good music in the past few years and their new work is no exception, even though they are an older band!) as i am continuing to listen (right now, it is the show where they interview a french person with an unusual career or talent and they are talking to a french champion speed reader), they are now playing the song “just the two of us” by bill withers and grover washington junior. despite it being a very famous song practically worldwide, i now know from the host that the song is mainly famous in france due to an advertisement for the cheese “caprice de dieux”. i truly learn the most random facts from french radio!

in terms of what i heard on cypriot radio this week, there was not anything particularly interesting on except for one programme on the fourth cybc channel (which plays classical music and, for some reason, football commentaries too!) almost every day, there are replays of classical music concerts recorded by the european broadcasting union on that station and i usually find them uninteresting (though, there was one time they played a concert of classical renditions of modern music and there was a lovely version of radiohead’s “exit music (for a film)” except, this week, they played motets and other vocal compositions from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which interest me greatly! one of the composers they played was heinrich schutz, whom i have read about, and that reminded me of the fact that i have always wanted to explore christian music more outside of the orthodox mass that is transmitted live from a monastery between seven and nine’o’clock to the first cybc station, as he is considered a saint in some lutheran churches and has composed some religious music. there are most definitely some other intriguing facts i know of that i want to elaborate on contextually, for example, the fact that the dutch reformed church completely banned the use of music in their services in the fifteenth century. i know that that happened, but i do not exactly yet know why!

i also genuinely enjoy a lot of motets outside of the sixteenth century too! a lot of medieval motets are really interesting: my favourites are this one from the fourteenth century (partly because of these unnecessarily funny lyrics) and this one (from the ars nova period, which i greatly appreciate! this was when the prototype for today’s sheet music first came into widespread use in europe, so there was a lot of rhythmical experimentation during this period too. quite obviously, it was quite different from what we have today: a semibreve could not only be divided not into two minims, as is conventional today. there was also an option to divide it into three and these options also existed for the minim itself: these divisions is what essentially led to some early “time signatures” (as they are divisions of beats, basically!) and also some interesting early pieces in more than one time signature (as one could have the minim divided into three and the semibreve into two in some parts of the piece and have the minim divided into two and the semibreve into three in some parts. the way composers marked this is interesting: i have seen pieces where the composer marked the different time signatures parts in different colours of ink!) the division into two was called “imperfect” and the division into three “perfect”: there is significant debate as to why this was, though it is, most probably, due to the associations of the number three with the holy trinity. of course, pieces in free time and, as modes have existed from even earlier on, atonal ones developed out of this later: here’s a fifteenth-century mass with polyrhythms and and here is the kyrie from a mass by the same composer where the singers decide on the key changes in the mass themselves. i love johannes ockengehm.

the last piece i would like to mention today is this one, which i find really funny as it is an extremely exaggerative development of renaissance madrigals, which employed lots of word-painting (this piece having no lyrics and directly imitating a battle scene through onomatopoeia, except for one line, which states what battle the song is about). it is still very common for many vocal ensembles to perform it and i also find the way the oxford history of western music talks about it here and here really funny!