Humanism ::

• Although the term 'humanism' was coined in 1808 by F.J. Niethammer, to describe a program of study distinct from science and engineering, umanista, or 'humanist', as employed in the fifteenth century, described a professional group of teachers whose subject matter consisted of those areas that were called litterae humanitatis or studia humanitatis. The studia humanitatis originated in the middle ages and comprised the trivium and the quadrivium, educational disciplines that lay outside theology and natural science. Humanism was opposed to a particular brand of logic known as Scholasticism (where language was used to produce certainty, focussing on syllogism, which is the construction of a truthful conclusion from truthful premises); rather, it developed a science of logic based on discovering arguments that would persuade people of the truth of what they were saying rather than convincing them of the certainty of that truth. While the 'humanist' scholars of the Renaissance made great strides and discoveries in this field, humanistic studies were really a product of the middle ages, of what others have called the Italian proto-Renaissance, of those who looked to Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch) (1304-1374) as their inspiration.

  The movement spread throughout Europe. Steven Kreis writes:

  "Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536), one of the greatest humanists, occupied a position midway between extreme piety and frank secularism. Petrarch represented conservative Italian humanism. Robust secularism and intellectual independence reached its height in Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) and Francesco Guicciardini (1483-1540). Rudolphus Agricola (1443-1485) may be regarded as the German Petrarch. In England, John Colet (c.1467-1519) and Sir Thomas More (1478-1535) were early or conservative humanists, Francis Bacon (1561-1626) represented later or agnostic and skeptical humanism. In France, pious classicists like Lefèvre d'Étaples (1453-1536) were succeeded by frank, urbane, and devout skeptics like Michel Montaigne (1533-1592) and bold anti-clerical satirists like François Rabelais (c.1495-1533)."

  We paraphrase below part of Ilona Berkovits' Illuminated Manuscripts from the library of Matthias Corvinus (1964): Extract. pp. 9-53:

  "Like the Italian Renaissance princes, [Matthias Corvinus (1458-1490)] recognized that by surrounding himself with scholars and artists his reign acquired a superb brilliance. However, the roots of Hungarian humanist learning can be traced to the era of Matthias's father, Governor Johannes Hunyadi, the valiant general who defeated the Turks, and to the period of the Hungarian King Sigismund of the House of Luxembourg (1387-1437). Hungarian humanism served the interests of royal power and the policy of centralization; its zealous advocates were for the most part foreigners and members of the ecclesiastic intelligentsia who usually rose to occupy high offices. The foundation of Matthias's famous library at Buda was chiefly due to the influence which Johannes Vitéz exerted over the King. Vitéz was the founder, organizer and guide of Hungarian humanism. During Sigismund's reign Italian humanists had already presented themselves at court: Ambrogio Traversari, Antonio Loschi and Francesco Filelfo had all dedicated works to him. The arrival of the eminent Italian humanist, Pier Paolo Vergerio, marked the (real) beginning of Hungarian humanism, for he was the first Italian humanist to stay for several decades in Hungary, where he became very friendly with Vitéz."

  Francis I (1494–1547) called the Father and Restorer of Letters (le Père et Restaurateur des Lettres), crowned King of France in 1515 in the cathedral at Reims is considered to be France's first Renaissance monarch. A number of his tutors, such as Desmoulins, his Latin instructor, and Christophe de Longeuil were schooled in the new ways of thinking and they attempted to imbue Francis with it. Francis' mother also had a great interest in Renaissance art, which she passed down to her son. One certainly cannot say that Francis received a humanist education; most of his teachers had not yet been affected by the Renaissance. One can, however, state that he clearly received an education more oriented towards humanism than any previous French king. Francis became a major patron of the arts. He lent his support to many of the greatest artists of his time and encouraged them to come to France. Some did work for him, including such greats as Andrea del Sarto, and Leonardo da Vinci, who Francis convinced to leave Italy in the last and least productive part of his life. While Leonardo did little painting in his years in France, he brought with him many of his great works, such as the Mona Lisa, and these stayed in France upon his death. Francis was also renowned as a man of letters. When Francis comes up in a conversation among characters in Castiglione's Book of the Courtier, it is as the great hope to bring culture to the war-obsessed French nation. Not only did Francis support a number of major writers of the period, he was a poet himself, if not one of immense quality. Francis worked hard at improving the royal library. He appointed the great French humanist Guillaume Budé as chief librarian, and began to expand the collection. Francis employed agents in Italy looking for rare books and manuscripts, just as he had looking for art works.

  In England, the neo-Platonist 'School of Night', led by Thomas Harriot (1560–1621), English mathematician and astronomer, and former tutor to Walter Raleigh, included John Florio (1553?-1625), the translator of Montaigne, and a friend of Giordano Bruno (1548-1600). Bruno's exceptional intellect and powers of memory brought him to the attention of Rome. He was called upon to demonstrate his abilities to the Pope. During this period he may also have come under the influence of Giovanni Battista Della Porta (1536-1615), a Neapolitan polymath who published an important work Magiae naturalist on popular science, cosmology, geology, optics, plant products, medicines, poisons, cooking, transmutation of the metals (not however confining transmutation to the alchemistical signification, but including chemical changes generally), distillation, artificial gems, the magnet and its properties, known remedies for a host of ailments, cosmetics used by women, fires, gunpowders, Greek fires (including preparations of Marcus Gracchus) and on invisible and clandestine writing. Much of this he derived from ancient texts from the time of Theophrastus and Aristotle. Bruno was attracted to new streams of thought, among which were the works of Plato and Hermes Trismegistus, both resurrected in Florence by Marsilio Ficino in the late fifteenth century. Hermes Trismegistus was thought to be a gentile prophet who was a contemporary of Moses. The works attributed to him in fact date from the turn of the Christian era. Because of his heterodox tendencies, Bruno came to the attention of the Inquisition in Naples and in 1576 he left the city to escape prosecution. When the same happened in Rome, he fled again, this time abandoning his Dominican habit. For the next seven years he lived in France, lecturing on various subjects and attracting the attention of powerful patrons. From 1583 to 1585 he lived at the house of his patron, Michel de Castelnau, seigneur de Mauvissiere, the longest-serving French ambassador to Elizabeth I. During this period Bruno published Cena de le Ceneri and De l'Infinito, Universo e Mondi (both in 1584). In Cena de le Ceneri, Bruno defended the heliocentric theory of Copernicus. It appears that he did not understand astronomy very well, for his theory is confused on several points. In De l'Infinito, Universo e Mondi he argued that the universe was infinite, that it contained an infinite number of worlds, and that these are all inhabited by intelligent beings.

  Other members of the 'School of Night' included the explorer Richard Hakluyt (c.1552-1616) and Shakespeare's patron Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton (1573-1624). Bruno's presence may in fact have catalyzed the formation of the 'School of Night'. To those memorable dinners at the French embassy came Walter Raleigh (1552-1618), Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), Philip Sidney (1554-1586), and Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke (1554-1628); Florio, Bruno and Mauvissiere played host. The conversation, according to Bruno's Cena de le ceneri, dwelt on the new Copernican system of astronomy, and its philosophical implications. Florio's Montaigne was on William Shakespeare's shelves, we know, for there is a copy with his hooked-S signature in it. Another member was Florio's publisher, Edward Blount (c.1565-1632?), one of the stationers in Paules churchyard implicated with Marlowe in Thomas Kyd's accusations of atheism. Together with Isaac and William Jaggard, Blount was the publisher of Shakespeare's First Folio (1623). Matthew Roydon (1580-1622) the poet and William Warner (1558?–1609), a scientist who probably anticipated Harvey in his discovery of the circulation of the blood, were associates of Marlowe's and also of other members of the 'School of Night'. The 'wizard' John Dee (1527-1608/9), whose magical entertainment of the emperor Rudolf II at his court at Prague in the late eighties probably formed the basis of the corresponding scene in Doctor Faustus, was also closely connected with the group. Although Dee himself published little, the work of his disciple Robert Fludd gives us a good idea of the nature of his thought. Fludd developed a remarkable memory system called the Theatrum Mundi, the Theatre of the World. Frances Yates believes that the architecture of the Globe Theatre was partly inspired by this system. George Chapman, the translater of Homer, was another member of the 'School'. Some have speculated that Chapman was Shakespeare's 'rival poet', though others, notably A.L. Rowse, believe Marlowe himself better fits the part. In either case, the rivalry might explain the peculiar relationship of Shakespeare to the group, one of close interest, admiration, and intimate knowledge, but also a certain personal distance and even hostility. Chapman's close relationship with Marlowe is attested by his completing of Marlowe's Hero and Leander, which had been interrupted by Marlowe's death.

  During the late fouteenth and early fifteenth century, humanism emerged in Florence. With the patronage of the powerful Medici family, Coluccio Salutati (1331-1406) and Leonardo Bruno (Aretino) (1369-1444) defined the studia humanitatis as an educational program based on the study of Greek and Roman authors. The goal of their civic humanism was to train aristocratic men for public affairs, philosophy, history, and poetry. Men and women alike could study these subjects, but only men could take up rhetoric, science, and mathematics. The humanists looked to the Greek and Latin classics for the lessons one needed to lead a moral and effective life and the best models for a powerful Latin style particularly Cicero. They developed a new, rigorous kind of classical scholarship, with which they corrected and tried to understand the works of the Greeks and Romans, which seemed so vital to them. Both the republican elites of Florence and Venice and the ruling families of Milan, Ferrara, Mantua and Urbino hired humanists to teach their children classical morality and to write elegant, classical letters, histories, and propaganda. Two foundational figures in this project, as it developed beyond Florence, were Guarino Veronese (1374-1406) in Ferrara and Vittorino da Feltre (1373-1446) at Mantua.

  Although the recovery of Greek texts began at the start of the middle ages in Europe, Renaissance humanism is seen as the movement which introduced Europeans, in particular Italians, to a vast range of quantity of classical Greek texts particularly associated with the arrival of Byzantine scholars, initially to teach but, from 1453, in response to the Fall of Constantinople. Until this calamitous event, Italian humanists could travel to Byzantium and they brought back Greek texts. In 1423, Giovanni Aurispa travelled to Byzantium and returned with almost 240 manuscripts, including the first copies of Sophocles and Thucydides seen in Europe. As important as the recovery of these Greek texts was the development of new modes of literary analysis that would be employed to verify or falsify important documents in European history. It was not long, however, before humanistic literary scholars turned their attention to Christian scriptures, especially the New Testament and armed with their new skills in Greek language and composition, they set about reading the original Greek texts hoping to recover the original spirit and meaning of these early Christian texts. They argued that the Latin translation of the New Testament had corrupted the sense of the original, work that would lay the foundations of the European Reformation. The moral philosopher Lorenzo Valla (1407-1454) investigated what it was constituted 'man'. He came to the conclusion that humans always acted out of self-interest. This argument would eventually become the foundation of the Enlightenment view of humanity and form the central argument of the ideology of capitalism, individual rights, and democracy.

  Civic humanists like Leonardo Bruni (1370-1444) and Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) stressed political science and political action over everything else while the educational humanists centered their attention primarily on grammar, rhetoric, and logic. Alberti, who is more famous for his treatise on architecture as well as being a member of the Platonic Florentine Academy (1459-1522) founded by Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), the father of Renaissance neo-Platonism, argued that the best form of government was a republic built on the Florentine model. Every citizen should be responsible for one another and should define themselves primarily in relation to the duties to their family and their city-state.

  The major influence of 'humanism' on the arts was the Platonic concept of beauty. Humanism was, above everything else, an aesthetic movement. Human experience, man himself, tended to become the practical measure of all things. The ideal life was no longer a monastic escape from society, but a full participation in rich and varied human relationships. Alberti defines beauty thus:

  "Such a Consent and Agreement of the Parts of a Whole in which it is found ... as Congruity, that is to say, the principal law of Nature, requires. But the Judgement which you make that a thing is beautiful does not proceed from mere opinion, but from a secret Argument and Discourse in the Mind itself."
  [Leone Battista Albert, Ten Books on Architecture, trans. Leoni, London 1955]

  Plato built a cosmology on Pythagoras' association of mathematics with music. Harmony was its underlying principle and, through mathematics and music, we could comprehend nature and beauty. If beauty in art was to be a reflection of beauty in nature, it too had to subscribe to the same mathematical ideas of proportion and perspective for "the same numbers that pleese the eare pleese the eie."

  The 'humanist' preoccupation with Platonism finds itself alluded to in Ben Jonson's anti-masque Love's Welcome at Bolsover performed to celebrate the visit, to Bolsover Castle, of Charles I and Henrietta Maria in 1634.

  "Well done, my Musicall, Arithmeticall, Geometrical gamsters! ... It is carried in number, weight and measure, as if the Airs were all Harmonie and the Figures a well-timed Proportion"

  References:

  • The Bibliotheca Corviniana by Ilona Berkovits
  • Francis I of France from which material about Francis I has been taken
  • The School of Night by Frederick Turner
  • The Italian Renaissance
  • Humanism
  • Humanism
  • Renaissance Humanism by Steven Kreis
  • Library of Humanist Texts published under the auspices of The Shakespeare Institute of the University of Birmingham

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Music Theory ::

• The sixteenth century saw the revival of certain aspects of ancient Greek musical practice. The application of Greek thought to music lingered behind other fields because the Greek writings on music were generally rather technical. The situation was not helped either by the lack of existing translations from the Greek into either Latin or the vernacular. The only widely available text that preserved Greek music treatises in Latin was the De institutione musica of Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (c.480-c.525). This text played a central role in shaping the thought of Nicola Vicentino (1511-1576), the author of L'Antica Musica ridotta alla moderna prattica, first published in Rome, 1555, and reprinted in 1557, that attempted to revive the Greek musical system, reconcile it with contemporary practice, and demonstrate its applicability to contemporary composition. Vicentino adapted the three genera (diatonic, chromatic, and enharmonic) of the tetrachord to the Western musical system. Each genus consists of four notes (hence, tetrachord) spanning the interval of a perfect fourth (e.g. C-F), of which the two outside notes are fixed, and the two interior notes move according to the genus. The diatonic and chromatic genera can be accommodated within the prevailing musical system in the West; the enharmonic genus, however, requires a division of the semitone, which is normally the smallest interval in the Western system. Consequently, Vicentino devised a special keyboard instrument, the archicembalo, that used thirty-one keys for the octave (instead of the usual twelve in conventional keyboards). His motivation in reintroducing these genera was to recapture the legendary power of ancient music to affect the soul, particularly, in the modern application, through the expression of the sentiments of sung literary text. Plato and Aristotle insisted that various modes had different ethical effects. Renaissance theorists and composers mistakenly assumed that the old Greek modes were identical to the similarly-named Church modes and that the legendary powers of the former could be attributed to the latter. Vicentino seems to have been unaware of the principal ancient sources for tetrachord theory, Aristoxenus (fl 300 BC) and Ptolemy (fl 120 AD). Rather, Vicentino's account is adapted from that of Boethius Book 1 which is probably a translation of a longer treatise of Nicomachus (fl 100 AD), which has, otherwise, not survived. The influence of other works, for example, the Lucidarium (1317-18) of Marchetto of Padua, a work widely read in Italy until at least the end of the fifteenth century, (latest extant source from the sixteenth century was copied in Venice in 1509), remains to be demonstrated.

  In the treatise Musica practi (1482) by Spanish-born Bartolomeo Ramis (c.1440–1500), which may have been influenced by earlier treatises by Al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, and Safi Al-Dinm, Ramis writes:

  "The regular monochord has been subtly divided by Boethius with numbers and measure. But althought this division is useful and pleasant to theorists, to singers it is laborious and difficult to understand. And since we have promised to satisfy both, we shall give a most easy division of the regular monochord."

  He then goes on to give the earliest description of a 12-note chromatic scale.

  Franchino Gaffurio (1451-1522) incorporated the tuning system devised by Ptolemy into his treatises, Theorica musice (1492), Practica musice (1496) and De harmonia musicorum intrumentorum opus (1518), the most influential of the late 15th and early 16th centuries. Jonathan Walker writes:

  "Ptolemy rejected both the dogma of Pythagoras and the pure subjectivism of Aristoxenus, describing the Greek genera in terms of the lowest-numbered ratios he could judge, by ear, to correspond to the intervals used by musicians; for example, he replaced the Pythagorean description of the major third (to use our term) (81:64) with the simpler ratio (5:4), which he judged to be in accordance with practice. His approach was therefore to account for practice without abandoning the precision of ratio terminology, but to use this terminology without the prescriptivism of the Pythagoreans."

  By the early sixteenth century, instrumental tunings were adjusted to make thirds and sixths sound acceptable; as a result, the use of triads became more frequent, even in the final note of cadences. A sharper distinction was made between dissonance and consonance, and the masters of counterpoint invented new rules for controlling dissonance. Johannes Tinctoris (1435-c.1511), a Flemish composer at the Naples court of King Ferrante, wrote and published the Liber de Arte Contrapuncti in 1477. Heinrich Glarean or Glareanus (1488-1563), the Swiss humanist, published his Dodekachordon in 1547. In establishing his theory of twelve modes he added four new modes to the eight already adopted, and misnamed, from the Greeks. Tinctoris' rules for introducing dissonances were further refined in later treatises by other authors, including Lodovico Fogliano (?-c.1538) in Musica Theorica (1529), and Gioseffo Zarlino (1517-1590) in Le istitutioni harmoniche (1558).

  Reference:

  • Tuning into the Renaissance
  • Western Tuning Theory and Practice - Just Intonation
  • The Just Intonation System of Nicola Vicentino
  • Johannes Tinctoris
  • Heinrich Glarean(us)
  • Intonational Injustice: A Defense of Just Intonation in the Performance of Renaissance Polyphony by Jonathan Walker

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Music Printing ::

• Francisco de Peñalosa (c.1470-1528) was one of the most famous Spanish composers of his generation. His compositions were highly regarded at the time. Unfortunately for him, his music was not widely distributed; he did not benefit from the invention of printing, since he remained mostly in Spain, away from those cities, Venice and Antwerp, that would become the first centres of music printing. Later generations of Spanish composers — Francisco Guerrero (1528-1599), Cristóbal de Morales (c.1500-1553), Tomás Luis de Victoria (1548-1611) — who went to Italy for parts of their careers, arranged for the printing of their compositions, and as a result their compositions were as widely distributed as that of the Franco-Flemish composers who dominated music in Europe in the sixteenth century.

  Johann Gutenberg perfected the art of printing from moveable type in 1450. The first printing press in Hungary was established in Buda in 1473 during the reign of Matthias Corvinus (1458-1490); a German named Andreas Hess printed the Chronica Hungarorum which he dedicated to his patron, László Karai. In the 1470s, printing was applied to monophonic music, coinciding with a new blossoming of native composition in Italy. Ottaviano de' Petrucci's anthology of chansons from ca. 1470-1500 called the Odhecaton was the first polyphonic music printed using triple impression. Michel de Toulouze had, in fact, printed at Paris, some time between 1488 and 1496, and without attribution to an author, L’Art et instruction de bien dancer, the text and musical content of which are largely the same as the famous Brussels MS 9085 that is supposed to have belonged to Margaret of Austria. Petrucci, however, occupies a position analogous to Gutenburg as a printer of books, for, though Petrucci was not the first to print music or even the first to do so from movable type, he was the earliest to accomplish printing in an important way with respect to music other than plainsong. Printed music naturally gained wider circulation than manuscripts.

  Using wood blocks, metal blocks or movable type, the last probably invented in Italy, early music printers had to represent a wide range of musical material whether monophonic Gregorian Chant, polyphonic music, or short musical examples in theoretical or other works. In the first known printed book that is meant to include music, the Psalterium, printed by Johann Fust and Peter Schöffer, Gutenberg's associates, at Mainz, in 1457, only the text and three black lines of the staff were printed; the fourth line was drawn by hand in red, and the notes were also written in manually. Hand-written insertions continued to be made in many liturgical works, even after the general adoption of music printing, since individual copies from large editions could thus be made to conform with local traditions.

  The earliest attempt to depict actual music in print appeared in the Collectorium super Magnificat of Charlier de Gerson, produced at Esslingen in 1473 by Conrad Fyner. Here, sol, la, mi, re, ut, mentioned in the text, are represented, without staff lines, by five black squares placed in a diagonally descending row and preceded by the letter f as an F clef.

  In Italy, a Roman Missale completed at Milan by Michael Zarotus of Parma on April 26, 1476, is the earliest known instance of the printing of music from movable type. Gothic-style (lozenge-shaped) notes are used; however, the printing of the music is not continued throughout. Six months later another Missale, also employing movable type but using Roman-style (square) notes, was produced by Ulrich Han (or Hahn) at Rome. In both books, double-impression printing was employed: the staves were printed in red in one impression, the plainsong notes in black in another.

  Mensural note-shapes seem to have been printed for the first time in Franciscus Niger's Grammatica brevis, produced at Venice in 1480, by Theodor von Würzburg. It is not clear whether these were printed from type or from a metal block. Three note-shapes are drawn upon to illustrate five poetic meters. There are no staves, but the ascending and descending spacing of the note-heads probably indicates that melodies were intended. In 1487 there appeared, in Nicolo Burzio's Musices Opusculum, produced at Bologna by Ugo de Rugeriis, the first known, complete, printed part-composition. This was made from a wood block. It is noteworthy that printing from movable type, a more advanced technique, preceded printing from blocks.

  Among the liturgical incunabula printed in Italy are several examples by Ottaviano Scotto. The presses yielded also various books on theory.

  A petition, addressed by Petrucci to the Signory of Venice and dated May 25, 1498, requested the exclusive privilege for twenty years of printing music for voices, lute, and organ. Not until May 14, 1501, however, did Petrucci's first publication appear. This was the famous Harmonice Musices Odhecaton A, which is the earliest printed collection of part-music. It includes compositions by Ockeghem and Busnois, as well as by several later Franco-Flemish composers. It was followed by Canti B and Canti C, published in 1502 and 1504, respectively. Together with the Odhecaton, these form a series particularly rich in Franco-Flemish chansons. All three are in choirbook form, like most of Petrucci's later prints of secular part-music. His aim was evidently to offer "raw material," from which copies for specific performance requirements could be derived. He printed sacred music in partbook form, however, for direct practical use.

  Ten out of a series of eleven Petrucci books (1504-1514) preserve a treasury of frottole (Book X is lost). The earliest piece of the type to find its way into print, however, is the Viva el gran Re Don Fernando, a barzelletta (= frottola) celebrating the Spanish conquest of Granada and rejoicing that the powerful city de la falsa fè pagana è disciolta e liberata. Probably first sung at Naples, it was included in a Roman publication of 1493 that was devoted primarily to a play commemorating the event. A few of Petrucci’s pieces are by Andrea Antico, who not only composed, but also worked as a type cutter, printer and publisher. In association with Giovanni Battista Columba, an engraver, and Marcello Silber (alias Franck), a printer, he produced in 1510, at Rome, his first published collection of frottole, the Canzoni nove con alcune scelte de varii libri di canto. Venice had temporarily become an unfavorable scene for artistic enterprise, owing to the serious defeat inflicted upon the republic by the League of Cambrai in 1509. However, shortly before 1520 Antico apparently returned to Venice, where he later brought out some prints in partnership with Ottaviano Scotto. In connection with works produced by partners, it is often hard to determine the exact role of each. Some printers not only did their own work, but also commissioned the printing of certain editions from other shops and printed for others as well. In 1513, Antico secured papal privileges for the printing of music and soon thereafter emerged as a serious competitor of Petrucci.

  In 1525, an important advance in printing was made by Pierre Haultin of Paris (d. 1580). Whereas Petrucci had printed the staff and the notes separately, Haultin achieved one-impression type-printing: he made type-pieces in which small fragments of the staff were combined with the notes, and with these pieces the whole composite of staves and notes was built up. His method fathered, in principle, the kind of music type-printing still occasionally employed. However, it was not at once universally adopted: double printing re-emerged sporadically for more than 250 years.

  Haultin's type was used by the Parisian publisher Attaingnant, among whose important publications (1528-1549) 'sacred and secular, vocal and instrumental' there are about seventy collections that contain nearly 2000 chansons (including, however, some duplications). It is significant, particularly in relation to chansons and madrigals, that Attaingnant was probably the first printer to insist on the careful placing of words under their appropriate notes. Haultin's system was applied also in the type made by Guillaume Le Bé for the famous house of Ballard that Robert Ballard together with his half-brother Adrian Le Roy established in Paris in 1551 and which would go on to print Lully in the seventeeth century and Couperin in the eighteenth and retained its privileges until the revolution of 1789.

  The printing of new music was carried on side by side with attempts to preserve the best of the past. In 1537 and 1538, Hans Ott published Novum et insigne opus musicum (Nürnberg: Formschneider, 1537-1538), a two-volume anthology of 100 motets, 25 of which are attributed to Josquin des Prez. Le Roy & Ballard published Livre de meslanges (1560) in which the court poet Pierre de Ronsard justified the print's melange of old and new songs: "There is... no reason for your Majesty to be surprised if this livre de mellanges... is composed of the oldest chansons that can be found today, because the music of the old (masters) has always been considered to be the most divine, the more so, since it was composed in a century happier and less tainted by the vices which prevail in this vilest Iron Age. ...Among such men in the last six or seven score years are exalted Josquin des Prez, native of Hainaut and his disciples Mouton, Willaert, Richafort, Janequin, Maillard, Claudin, Moulu, Jaquet, Certon, Arcadelt, and at present, the more than divine Orlando....".

  Another innovation is attributable to the type-founder Etienne Briard (working at Avignon, ca. 1530). Instead of the square and lozenge-shaped noteheads generally used for mensural music at that time, he employed oval ones. The first printer known to have adopted this reform was Jean de Channey of Avignon, who employed Briard's type when printing Carpentras's four publications of Lamentations and other sacred music between 1532 and 1537. Important, in addition, was Jacques Moderne (known, because of his obesity, as "Grand Jacques") who founded a music house at Lyons and among whose famous publications is the Parangon des chansons (eleven books, 1538-1543). He was probably the first to print choir-books in which two voice-parts face in opposite directions on each page, to enable people sitting on either side of a table to sing from the same volume. Noteworthy, too, is Nicolas Du Chemin (ca. 1510-1576), whose issues appeared in Paris from 1540 to 1576 and included a seventeen-volume chanson collection.

  Music publishing flourished also in the Low Countries, notably in Antwerp and Louvain. Tielman Susato, one of the best-known Belgian printers, established himself in Antwerp, ca. 1529, as music copyist, flutist, and trumpeter, and later as publisher. In 1543, he produced the Premier Livre des chansons à quatre parties . . . . including eight chansons by himself. Hubert Waelrant, an important composer, and the printer Jean Laet in 1554 established a publishing house, which continued to operate until Laet's death in 1597.

  The collections issued by Pierre Phalèse of Louvain include both French and Flemish chansons, as well as lute music. At first a publisher employing independent printers, he undertook his own printing in 1552. After his death, his son moved the firm to Antwerp.

  The reign (1515-1547) of that typically Renaissance monarch, François I, corresponds closely to the first period of the sixteenth-century chanson. Then and later the chanson drew on Italian and Netherlandish elements, spicing them with native French grace and wit. Its textual charm-of varying shades of respectability-was calculated to delight the courtiers of Fontainebleau and Paris. Despite the extremely broad humor evinced, many of the chanson composers wrote serious motets and Masses and even held positions in the Church.

  The two earliest collections published by Attaingnant, apparently the first prints of polyphonic chansons, indeed the first prints of polyphonic music in France, appeared in 1528. The older one is actually dated April 4, 1527, but under a calendar in which the year began on Easter eve. Of this collection, only two parts remain. Nevertheless, its contents can be largely reconstructed from later sources in which some of the same pieces recur. The second collection survives complete but bears no date; this, however, can be approximated through circumstantial evidence.

  One of the first Attaingnant collections that are not only dated but also extant in complete form is the Trente et une chansons musicales (1529). The two main composers included in it are Claudin de Sermisy, whom the music books usually name just Claudin, and Clement Janequin, to whom the entire second collection had been devoted. Despite the latter's greater fame today, and probably in his own time, we may well consider Claudin at least his equal among chanson composers of the type which, with certain differences, they both represent. These composers have been said to comprise a Paris school.

  Reference:

  • Early Music Printing from which part of this extract has been taken
  • Sixteenth Century Ballads

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The Renaissance and the French Court ::

• The story of the musical Renaissance at the French Royal court must be read between the lines. Scholars have long noted the absence of sources emanating from this illustrious court, as summarized by Richard Sherr:

  "The French court has always been recognized as one of the major musical centers of the early sixteenth century, but study of it is difficult; there seem to be no extant court records . . . and very few extant musical sources can be claimed as originating in the court of the French king. However, enough can be surmised to show that composers active in court circles were influential (perhaps even more influential than is at present believed) in creating and spreading a new style of polyphony . . . that quickly became part of all sacred and secular genres as the sixteenth century progressed."

  The dearth of sources and documentation not only hides our view of what must have been one of the most splendid cultural centers in Europe, it also prevents us from establishing a clear concept of the career of the most celebrated and elusive composer of the sixteenth century, Josquin Des Prez. As scholarship increasingly points to the French court as one of the places that employed him, the frustration at these lacunae increases. The dearth of sources for Josquin as well as for the French court forces us to view the musical Renaissance only peripherally.

  French documents and musical sources succumbed not only to the normal accidents of loss and decay, but also to the deliberate destruction that took place during the French Revolution. Some anecdotes and legends survive, however; some of these suggest that Josquin was a pupil of Ockeghem, that numerous composers were pupils of Josquin, that Mouton was a colleague of Josquin, that Josquin was seen at the French court at Lyons, that Josquin musically chided Louis XII (1498–1515). Poetic texts add another layer of suggestion, listing Josquin among the composers who mourn the death of Ockeghem, the French chapel’s premier member for nearly fifty years.

  Reference:

  • The Shadow of the French Court in the Renaissance by Jennifer Thomas (University of Florida) from which this extract has been taken

Origins of Early Opera and Ballet ::

• The jongleurs of the Middle Ages moved from presenting court entertainments to organising them. They became 'dancing masters' to the nobility, teaching the steps and deportment. Many were well educated and some were descended from the Klesmorim, medieval Jewish entertainers. Domenico da Piacenza, who published the first European dance manual, De arte saltandi et choreas ducendi (1416) was the teacher of Antonio Cornazano, a nobleman by birth, who became an immensely respected minister, educator of princes, court poet, and dancing master to the Sforza family of Milan, where in about 1460 he published his Libro dell'arte del danzare. Books like these contain neither melody nor choreography, but they do detail the work of the dancing masters themselves.

  Dancing served as an opportunity for lively social intercourse, as a late sixteenth-century German chronicle describes:

  "After the pipers and players have been asked to play the dance, the dancer steps forward in a most elegant, polite, proud, and splendid manner, chooses a partner for whom he has a special liking among the girls and ladies present, and making his reverences, such as taking off his cap, kissing her hands, bending his knees, using friendly words and other similar ceremonies, invites her to have a lively, joyous and honest dance with him. When she has consented to dance, they both step forward, join hands, embrace, and kiss each other (sometimes even on the mouth) and further give show of friendship with suitable words and gestures. Thereafter, when the dance itself is about to begin, they first perform the preliminary dance. This is rather solemn, and gives rise to much less improper noise and activity than the after-dance does. During the preliminary dance, those couples who are in love have a better chance to make conversation than during the after-dance, where everything is somewhat disorderly, and there is no lack of running, scrambling, pressing of hands, secret pushing, jumping, shouting, and other improper goings-on. When the dance is over, the dancer takes his partner back to her seat, and with the same reverence takes leave of her, or else stays, sitting on her lap and talking to her."

  Many court dances had their origins outside the enclosed world of the nobility. In France the branle, a round dance of peasant origin became fashionable in the courts. Another, the morisca, or moresque, which was derived from the dances of Moorish Spain, was first mentioned in 1446. Sumptuous spectacles with mythological, symbolical or allegorical content became increasingly popular at court entertainments throughout Savoy and northern Italy. The story of Jason and the Golden Fleece featured both at the marriage of Philip the Good of Burgundy in 1430 and in the balli staged for the wedding of the Duke of Milan in 1489. European dance's most exotic influences, however, would come from Spain, which in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, was enjoying a cultural renaissance, and a mixing of its own native dances with those of Afro-American origin. For example, both the sarabande and the chaconne came from Central America sometime before 1600, but within a short time they are to be found integrated into French court dance.

  Early sixteenth-century Tudor England had similar pageants, with the participants disguising “after the manner of Italie.” Robert Copland's Maner of Dauncynge of Bace Daunces after the Use of Fraunce (1521) as an appendix to a French grammar, demonstrates without doubt that the English were familiar with continental dance, the nobility preferring dances of a slow, measured and dignified stature, stylishly performed and modelled upon the standards of the French court, while the peasants continued their more boisterous dancing, very much as they had for centuries. Queen Elizabeth I, a skilled dancer herself, enjoyed watching the traditional English country dances, such as the jig, which came to infuse a new vitality into court dances.

  The masque developed from annual chivalrous spectacles staged by Queen Elizabeth's knights on her Accession day and from the fêtes, essentially piéces d'occasions, presented by nobility and gentry in her honour while the Court was making its summer progess. It retained many features of its predecessors including elaborate symbols expressing arcane meanings, the mingling of actors and spectators and the mask. The only known visual representation of an Elizabethan masque is to be found in the Memorial Portrait of Sir Henry Unton (c.1596). Musico-dramatic elements can be seen also in sixteenth-century suites of madrigals that were strung together to suggest a dramatic narrative. Reaching its height in the early seventeenth century, the masque became a magnificent and colourful spectacle with great emphasis placed on music and dance.

  The foremost writer of the masque was Ben Jonson (1573-1637), the great dramatist, poet, and wit, with whom, for more than twenty-five years, Inigo Jones (1573-1652) would collaborate. Jones had, sometime between 1597 and 1603, traveled in Italy, probably with the brother of the 5th Earl of Rutland, where he became fluent in Italian and with the architectural ideas of Italy. An important influence was Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo (1538–1600) the author of Trattato dell'Arte della Pittura, Scultura et Architettura published in Milan in 1584.

  As a theatrical architect, Jones became famous for his elaborate costume designs, settings, and scenic effects, which gave the masque its great popularity. Nearly 500 designs by Jones survive for costumes and scenery related to the entertainments he produced for the Stuart court between 1605 and 1640. Among the sources for Jones designs was Hieroglyphica by Giovanni Pierio Valeriano (1477-1558) first published in 1556, conceived as a manual of Egyptian and neo-Platonic hieroglyphs but which became, for the Renaissance, the lexicon of visual meaning and key to a mode of expression, thereby linking the past with the present. For Jonson and Jones' first collaboration, 'The Masque of Blackness' (1605), the costumes were drawn from Cesare Vecellio's celebrated costume book Habiti antichi et moderni di tutto il mondo (Venice, 1598). The masque was written for James I and his Queen, Anne of Denmark. The Queen and eleven other aristocratic ladies performed, wearing dress shortened to the ankle for dancing, and the staging featured elaborate lighting effects, complex stage machinery (some derived, possibly, from Book X of Vitruvius) and an artificial sea with great sea-beast and mermaids. Professional actors were, however, engaged to speak the lines. Later productions included an anti-masque performed entirely by professionals which was followed by the masque itself in which dancers in splendid costumes would descend from the stage and take partners from the audience.

  Later, in the summer of 1609, Jones travelled to France where he assimilated the taste of the French court, and the theatrical spectacle of the new genre of balletti or ballet de cour, involving music, songs, poetry and dance, as well as sumptuous costuming, staging and visual effects. French humanism was strongly influenced by the Pléiade, a group of sixteenth-century French poets, named after the original Pleiade, a group of seven Alexandrian poets (third century B.C.), corresponding to the seven stars of the Pleiades constellation. Their 'manifesto' was penned by Du Bellay in his La Deffense et illustration de la langue françoyse (1549), in which an unashamedly elitist literary philosophy was detailed. The group aimed to break with earlier traditions of French poetry, especially Marot and the grands rhétoriqueurs. Du Bellay recommends vernacular innovation of Greek and Roman poetic forms, emulation of specific models, and the creation of neologisms based on Greek and Latin, not so much through slavish imitation, but, using the metaphor of 'digestion', by converting it into an entirely new and rich poetic language in the vernacular.

  The classically inspired Le Balet Comique de la Reyne (1581) was presented by Queen Louise de Lorraine-Vaudémont (1553-1601) and directed by the Piedmontese violinist, Balthazar de Beaujoyeulx (Baltazarini Di Belgioioso), lasted 5 and a half hours and cost 3.5 million gold francs. All the European courts were invited, as well as Italian artists, and it formed part of the celebrations held in honour of the wedding between Louise's half-sister, Marguerite, and King Henri III's favourite, Anne, Duke de Joyeuse. The Balet Comique was published in February 1582 and it was made even more accessible to readers through the engraving by Jacques Patin (shown left) which depicted the opening scene of the performance. The engraving shows the Salle de Bourbon in the Louvre, with the royal party seated at the end closest to the viewer, and the king, Henri III, in the middle, flanked, on his right by his mother the Florentine-born Catherine de Medicis (1519-1589), and by the Duke de Joyeuse on his left. They are watched over by four Swiss guards with pikes; to the right are foreign ambassadors and behind them the ladies of the court. On the right side of the hall beneath the galleries crammed with viewers, there is an oak wood, in which the figure of Pan can be seen. From the trees hang silver lamps made in the form of ships; while behind the trees, musicians were apparently concealed. On the left at ground level, billowing clouds, gilded and covered with stars, form a long vault (the voûte dorée), and in it groups of musicians and singers were placed. In 1632, Jones would use Le Balet Comique de la Reyne as a basis for his masque Tempe Restored, memorable also for the first production in which professional women singers Madame Coniack and Mistress Shepherd, appeared on stage. In the first year of Charles I's reign, his Queen, Henrietta Maria, had commissioned from Inigo Jones three pastorals, in the first two of which she herself would play the lead. Her participation was to cause the King severe embarrassment; no lady had taken a speaking part on the British stage before. In 1633, another production, by Walter Montague and entitled The Shepherd's Paradise, was undertaken, again with the Queen's involvement but this time the general sense of outrage found itself expressed in the lawyer William Prynne's Histrio-Mastix, or the Scourge of Players and its famous index entry "Women-Actors - notorious whores". Despite protestations that his comments were not directed at the Queen, Prynne was sentenced to life imprisonment, fined £5,000, disbarred, deprived of his academic degree and had his ears cut off by the public executioner. During the fifteenth century, while humanism was influencing the graphic arts, the sciences, politics and religion, Italian composers continued to produce sacred and secular music in medieval polyphonic styles. However, in the sixteenth century, intermezzi, initially composed as interludes during plays, emerged as a distinct form. Jones' masque Love Freed from Ignorance and Folly, planned for 1610, but not actually performed until the following year, shows the influence of the engravings by Agostino Carracci and Epifanio d'Arfiano which depict the Florentine intermezzi of 1589 organised by Bernardo Buontalenti (1536-1608) for the marriage of the Grand Duke Ferdinand de' Medici and Christina of Lorraine, niece of the Queen of France. By the 1630s he had turned to another source of inspiration. In the early 1620s, following his return to Nancy from twelve years in Italy, Jacques Callot produced his Balli di Sfessania, a work consisting of a frontispiece and twenty-three pages of paired figures. These figures are not standard players from the commedia dell'arte, although some of them, such as Metzetin, Scaramuccia, and Scapino, have namesakes in the impromptu theater. Rather, they are fair or carnival performers, most of whom are dancing the high-spirited moresca, a form of which was known in Naples as the sfessania. These figures in their characteristic costumes would, from 1630 onwards, appear in Jones anti-masques.

  The Latin word 'opera' is the plural of opus meaning work. It suggests a combination of the arts of solo and choral singing, declamation and dancing in a staged spectacle. Although music had been part of medieval mystery plays (for example, a surviving musical work, Philotea, set to a religious text, by a priest called Silberman, and the music of Hildegard of Bingen may have been associated with dramatic staged performances), the earliest work considered an opera, in the sense the word is usually understood today, dates from around 1597. It is Dafne, now lost, written by Jacopo Peri for an elite circle, the Florentine Camerata (1573-1589), who took as their inspiration Ficino's Academy. This group of Italian humanists, attempting to revive classical Greek drama, felt that if the words set to music were to have their full effect on the listener then the music must not obscure them, that the music should be there simply to support them. This radical departure from the Renaissance concept of the way text should be set to music resulted in a completely different musical texture from the polyphony common during the Renaissance. Although there were precedents in accompanied song, nothing that had existed previously was quite the same as the genre of monody. A later work by Peri, Euridice, dating from 1600, is the first opera score to have survived to the present day. Spoken or declaimed dialogue accompanied by an orchestra, called 'recitative' in opera, is the essential feature of melodrama, in its original sense.

  When Louis XIV was crowned, his interest in dancing was strongly supported and encouraged by Italian-born Cardinal Mazarin, (formerly Mazarini), who assisted Louis XIV. The young king made his ballet debut as a boy, but it was in 1653 as a teenager that he accomplished his most memorable feat as a dancer. He performed a series of dances in Le Ballet de la Nuit and for his final piece he appeared as Apollo, god of the sun. Wearing a fancy golden Roman-cut corselet and a kilt of golden rays he came to be known as the Sun King. Cardinal Mazarin promoted Italian influences in the French spectacle. The ballet master he imported from Italy was Giovanni Baptista Lulli, who was rechristened Jean Baptiste Lully. Lully became one of the king's favorite dancers and rivaled the king as the best dancer in France. In 1661 Louis established the Académie Royale de Danse in a room of the Louvre, the world's first ballet school.

  References:

  • Women in Music, ca. 1450-1600 by Karin Pendle
  • Henry III of France
  • Henry IV of France
  • Florentine Academy (1459-1522)
  • Music from the Renaissance to the Baroque
  • The Writing Of Dance History
  • At the Vanishing Point: Images of Dance in Archives and on Stage
  • Medieval and Renaissance Dance
  • Florimène at the Court of Charles I
  • "Native Dyes": Race and Politics in the Jacobean Masque

Music in New Spain ::

• Although little music has survived from the period when Spain was exploiting the wealth of its American possessions, it has been possible to recover some of what had accumulated during three centuries of colonial life. In Spain, music had been developed in organized musical chapels since before the sixteenth century; different musical forms were developed for liturgical ceremonies and for the court. The music created in Mexico, however, was a fusion of local, European and African cultures.

  The motet, the mass and the hymn were brought from Europe and monks taught the indigenous population to play and sing them. In 1523, two years after the fall of Tenochtitlan, Juan de Ayora, Juan de Teclo and Pedro de Gante, three Franciscan monks, arrived in Mexico. As part of their work spreading the gospel, they founded a school for Indians in Texcoco, where music, including Gregorian chant, organum and polyphony, was taught and instrument building was encouraged. The vocal and instrumental groups formed in schools like the one at Texcoco or in Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, performed sacramental plays like the story of Adam and Eve by Brother Toribio de Benavente that was sung in Tlaxcala in 1538, and mention is made, in documents of the period, of talented Indian musicians thus providing the earliest evidence for polyphony in America.

  Religious music was not only performed in churches or schools. Hymns were sung at weddings, baptisms, birthdays and other social occasions. In this way liturgical music percolated through local society, the result of the evangelization process of the sixteenth century. This provides the first manifestation of a mestizo (half Indian, half Spanish) genre which went on to assimilate African forms as well. Dance music too provided entertainment at private and public parties.

  From the beginning of the eighteenth century, we know of public performances of works like the drama El Rodrigo, the opera La Parténape by Manuel de Sumaya, baroque musical comedies and Italian-style operettas. Instrumental music appeared from the seventeenth century onwards. The most important secular genre was vocal: romantic arias, simple songs and madrigals. For example, Disguised as a shepherd in love by Juan Hidalgo and sung during the play, The Olympic Games by Agustín de Salazar y Torres, and the solo song, Zagales, Listen to my anguish, by an anonymous author, both of which are kept in the Sánchez Garza collection (some 300 compositions by Spanish and New Spanish composers) of the Santísima Trinidad monastery in Puebla. Other works from the period include the hymn Guarda la fiera by Antonio de Salazar, the collection of unaccompanied song by different authors in the Sutro Library in San Francisco, and instrumental music consisting of dances, guitar pieces, baroque guitar pieces, violin and flute sonatas, pieces for organ and piano, symphonies, toccatas and overtures.

  The majority of players we know of from the period were Spaniards who emigrated to New Spain and set up schools in Mexico for dancing or for the teaching musical instruments. Teachers of guitar, harp, flute, the bugle, the flageolet and the sackbut were soon busy working with the local Indians. Indeed, the use of music expanded so rapidly that Felipe II had to order the priests in the religious orders to regulate the use 'of all musical instruments and singers'.

  At this time, the main religious musical centres were the cathedrals, the monasteries, the seminaries, religious schools and the missions. Music from the cathedrals in Mexico, Puebla, Oaxaca, Morelia, Durango and Guadalajara still survive in copious archives. There is also music from the missions in Baja California, from the del Carmen and the Encarnación monasteries in Mexico City (several choir books at the Monastery of the Incarnation that are currently being kept at the Newberry Library in Chicago); from the Convent of the Holy Trinity in Puebla and the Las Rosas college in Morelia; even from smaller churches such as the San Pedro Metepec chapel in Tlaxcala, the basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico City (Las Rosas college in Morelia and the college at the basilica of Guadalupe both have archives comprising more than 300 works from the eighteenth century onwards) and from a town called Huamelula in Oaxaca.

  The first archbishop of Mexico City, Juan de Zumárraga (1528) requested funds from Carlos V for his ambitious musical program with professional singers and musicians for the cathedral. He named Canon Juan Xuárez the choir master and Antonio Ramos as the organist in 1539. The main composer in sixteenth century New Spain was Hernando or Fernandus Franco, who became the choir master of the cathedral of Mexico City in 1575 and in 1585. Among his surviving work, the famous Franco codex contains a collection of the Magnificat which is kept in the Vice Regal Museum in Tepozotlán. The music of Spanish composers was also sung in the cathedrals of Mexico, Puebla, and Oaxaca where original editions of music by Cristóbal de Morales, Sebastian Aguilera de Heredia, Tomás Luis de Victoria , Francisco Guerrero, Rodrigo de Ceballos and Alonso Lobo are kept. Other composers who played an important role in cathedral music include Juan Xuárez, Lázaro de Álamo, Juan de Victoria, and Hernando Franco. Pedro Bermúdez played his own works in Puebla Cathedral.

  It is still not known how much colonial society appreciated purely instrumental music, such as sonatas, symphonies and concertos. There are few examples of instrumental music written in New Spain. There is a surviving organ piece (1620), a zither piece from the middle of the seventeenth century by Sebastian de Aguirre, a guitar piece (1747), the Saldívar Codex IV (guitar) that came from León, Guanajuato; the Hague manuscript dated 1722 (dances and pieces of music by different authors), a method for learning violin by José Herrando, a book containing 11 pieces for the organ, an explanation of how to play the guitar dated 1776, the MNA manuscript (1759) comprising 13 sonatas, Guadalupe Mayner’s notebook for piano, 1804, the notebook with 34 anonymous sonatas from the cathedral in Mexico City, the Angulo Codex (dances and transcripts of 15 Hayden symphonies), the Verses for orchestra by Ignacio Jerusalem and José M. Aldana and the symphony from the Las Rosas college in Morelia written by Antonio Samer and Antonio Rodil, the complete works of Don Manuel Antonio del Corral, the Concerti grossi del Persieri Adriarmonici by Giacomo Faco and some piano pieces for ballet, pieces for the guitar and for two guitars (Sutro Library, San Francisco).

  Reference:

  • Music in New Spain - from which this material has been taken

Sixteenth Century Chinese Opera ::

• Beijing Opera, one of China's most recent theatrical forms, draws from a tradition extending back at least as far as the twelfth century, when opera was performed in the huge public theaters of Hangzhou, then capital of the Southern Song dynasty (1179-1276). The most popular theatrical form at the time was the southern play (nanxi) in which the dialogue, written in rhymed verse, was either sung or spoken. The three extant southern play scripts, composed by anonymous writing societies, have no internal divisions, such as acts or scenes, and, according to contemporaneous descriptions, were performed with a string and wind orchestra, and an offstage chorus which accompanied the major arias, evidently along with the audience.

  Beginning in the thirteenth century, the Mongol conquerors patronized a northern form of opera called zaju, or "multi-act" play, usually divided into four acts. In contrast to southern plays, the main character alone sang a lyric verse, using a single major rhyme scheme throughout the entire act, while the other characters spoke their lines. Zaju typically featured three major roles: a woman (dan), an older, usually venerable man (mo), and a young man (sheng). "Comics" (chou) also played a role, providing ironic commentary on the events taking place.

  While high society enjoyed zaju in the capital in the north, a folk tradition of opera known as marvelous tales (chuanqi) flourished in the south, particularly in the refined provinces of Zhejiang and Jiangsu. The marvelous tales opera tradition produced one of China's finest operas by Gao Ming (c. 1301-1370), The Lute Song (Pipa ji), which portrays the irreconcilable tension between filial piety and loyalty to the throne, two cardinal relations in Confucian social thought. The sixteenth century saw fundamental changes in Chinese society. It was a period of relative peace, and sustained economic prosperity. Classical literacy could be translated into social prestige and political power through the civil service examination system. General literacy was growing, reaching heretofore excluded sectors of society, particularly urban merchants and women. This was also a time of the proliferation of the vernacular novel and certainly what is the most elegant form of Chinese opera, Kunqu, which originated in Kunshan near Suzhou, Jiangsu. After innovations introducted by Wei Liangfu (c. 1522-73), Kunqu was characterized by soft singing and minimal orchestral accompaniment, typically the clapper or drum and a bamboo flute. Kunqu rose to the status of national opera in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, even in Beijing, then ruled by foreign rulers from Manchuria. Kunqu playwrights focused on prosody and novelty of expression, producing increasingly ornate operas.

  It was precisely this ornate and allusive language that brought on Kunqu's demise. And perhaps it was never quite boisterous enough to suit popular tastes. In the late eighteenth century, a new form of opera was formed in Beijing. At the risk of oversimplifying a complex set of circumstances, Beijing opera as it is known today largely began on the occasion of the Qianlong emperor's (r. 1736-96) seventieth birthday celebration in 1779 which brought, among the throngs of people to the capital, an accomplished clapper opera dramatist named Wei Changsheng (1744-1802) from Sichuan, who introduced a number of innovations into the opera of the capital that left an indelible mark that lasts to the present. Clapper opera (bangzi qiang), came from the province of Shaanxi and moved southward through Hunan into Sichuan. The sound of the wooden clappers sets the rhythm of the music as well as some of the actions of the performers. Clapper opera was one of many local opera traditions, though not all influenced the national opera. By the end of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) there were several hundred local opera traditions, differing in the dialects of the librettos, stage settings, acting techniques, and music; most drew materials for stories from Kunqu or popular novels.

  References:

  • Chinese Opera - a brief history - the material above is a paraphrase of Professor Thomas A. Wilson's article
  • Types of Roles in Beijing Opera

  'The Palace of Eternal Youth' is a famous piece of Kun opera, a story of love, betrayal, self-sacrifice and reward.

  An emperor and his concubine fall in love. Treacherous courtiers wreak havoc on the county. A general launches a rebellion. To save her emperor, the favoured concubine commits suicide. The rebellion is suppressed. Their love transcends death with the help of the gods in heaven.

  Over the centuries, Kun opera experienced ups and downs in popularity. In the middle of the Ming Dynasty (mid-sixteenth century) Kun opera rapidly became popular with the intellectual elite, and members of the literati produced scripts designed to highlight this elite form of opera. Later, historical events conspired to disrupt the continuity of Kun. In the middle of the nineteenth century, political uprisings devastated the region in which Kun was most popular. The style also suffered from dilution, when it was mixed in performance with other types of Chinese opera. It became the norm to perform traditional plays only in excerpts. More recently, the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) brought the cultivation of most traditional forms of Chinese art to a halt. 'The Palace of Eternal Youth' was originally in 50 acts, indeed on a grand scale. A recent reconstruction of the original work, stripped of its later Beijing Opera additions, concentrated on reproducing the traditional opera, but it also tries to stay in tune with modern times. For this reason, references to the political and social concerns of the literati of the time, were removed and the 50 acts were reduced to a manageable 27.

  Reference:

  • Sixteenth Century Chinese Opera - from which this material has been taken

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  References:

  • New Currents in the Sixteenth Century (an outline)
  • Lutheran Music - Music and the Reformation
  • Music of the Reformation Era
  • Music of the Reformation
  • Church Music and the Counter-Reformation
  • 16th and 17th Century - Court Music in Denmark
  • Elizabethan Authors Home Page
  • Renaissance Electronic Texts
  • Sixteenth Century Ballads
  • Andrea Alciato's Emblematum liber or Book of Emblems
  • Perseus Collection - Renaissance Materials
  • Edmund Spenser (1552-1599)

  

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