And here's another thing: not only does MUSIC = CHURCH at this point, but also, MUSIC = SINGING. Now why is that? Why was more or less all music composed by these Church-loving composers at this time vocal?
I'm glad you asked me that, as politicians are prone to saying, because I'm not going to answer it. I will in a moment, but first back to Palestrina.
FILL THE SPACE
,3 adly for Palestrina, within a few years of being given the top job in Rome, he was out on his ear, kicked out by the incoming new top doge, Pope Paul??, who clearly didn't like the cut of his cassock. Happily for Palestrina, though, his time would come again, a few years later, reinstated by yet another different Pope. I don't know. How did they cope with all this coming and going? Maybe this was the model for Italy's political system. Anyway, regardless, Palestrina enjoys his new period of favour, and immediately starts doing what everyone around him was doing too. Lassus^ was doing it, Byrd was doing it in England - everybody was doing it - and that was writing music for the amazing spaces that were these huge cathedrals. Yes, I know, this might sound obvious, but it needs saying. These cathedrals, in their own way, changed the face of music for a time, because everyone wrote in order to sound good in them. And just the smallest knowledge of acoustics will tell you that writing music for, say, a concert in your local village hall and writing music to fill the enormous caverns of St Peter's in Rome are two very different exercises.
The cathedrals had gone up as huge, unmissable symbols of how great it was to be a Christian, and the Church went around throwing fi Orlande de Lassus, a well-travelled and much favoured composer. Worked all over - Naples, Sicily, Antwerp, Bavaria, Munich - the boy done well. Wrote some 1,200 works in all, including some of the most important Masses of his day. money at the sweet problem of getting the best people possible to fill them with beautiful sounds. Palestrina no doubt felt like the cat who'd got the cream, the cream being St Peter's. And this is important, because Palestrina (whose real name, by the way, wasn't Palestrina at all - Palestrina was the small Italian town he came from; all we know of his name is that he was called Giovanni Pierluigi) was NOT an innovator. He was NOT a pioneer. Admittedly, throughout this book, we will celebrate many people who were innovators and pioneers, but Palestrina was not one of them. He was more concerned with writing sheer, beautiful noises that would sound fantastic in the Pope's local church. Music like his glorious Missa Papae Marcelli - the Mass for Pope Marcellus, a gorgeous piece of polyphony written specifically not to advance music into the next century, not to shock people into the next era, but simply to sound unutterably gorgeous as it bounced off the walls of the Vatican, taking, no doubt, minutes to fade as it did so. Divine.
Onward, now, to the Lennon and McCartney of the sixteenth century. Who were they? How did they manage to run the biggest musical monopoly since the last dodo learnt to whistle? Well, get your Renaissance head on, I'm going in. Cover me.
RENAISSANCE MAN
I
magine, if you will, it is 1572 - just over twenty years since Palestrina landed the top job in Rome. In Inghilterra, Elizabeth I has been on the throne for some thirteen years. In fact, speaking of the two in more or less the same breath, only a couple of years earlier, Pope Pius V had issued a jolly little excommunication 'bull', as they're called, which went by the cute little name of'Regnans in Excelsis'. It's quite a lengthy document, but if I might summarize it for you, it would be to say, 'We're not going to talk to you any more.' The Pope, that is, isn't going to talk to Elizabeth. Sad, really. I imagine Elizabeth would miss their little chats.
However, it was a good year for other forms of communication. In literature, we'd witnessed the births of John Donne and Ben Jonson, and in pigeonry - well, it was pretty high tech, back then - we had witnessed the first use of Nelson's favourite birds to send messages. It was from the Dutch town of Haarlem, which was under siege from the Spanish.
So: are you there yet? In the sixteenth century, I mean. Because it was against that background that things were really starting to bubble. In the Italy we've just left behind, the Gabrieli family were quite big noises now. Andrea Gabrieli, composer and organist at St Mark's Venice for the last six years, was busy adding all sorts of brass parts to his vocal music. More importantly, perhaps, was his nephew Giovanni, who took over from him at St Mark's, and who could be said to have preceded Dolby by some 400 years.
Giovanni Gabrieli was another organist/composer (I suppose you would say 'singer/songwriter' these days) who started to do the first experiments in stereo, effectively, writing music that had choirs and voices pitted against each other at either side of the huge St Mark's, making for some glorious antiphonal effects which must have really surprised his audience at the time. It must have been less like being at a concert and more like being at a tennis match. Stiff necks all round at St Mark's, maybe.
But back to good old England, and the Lennon and McCartney of the time. For it was in 1572 that the composer William Byrd was sent to work alongside fellow composer Thomas Tallis, forty years his senior and operating out of the Chapel Royal. Tallis had already been there some thirty years before the two joined forces, and, together, they became one of the biggest things in music since Pope Gregory first started to hum in the bathroom of a morning.
JOHN, PAUL, GEORGE, RINGO, WILL AND TOM
B
yrd was from Lincoln, Tallis possibly from Waltham Abbey. Apart, they were good musicians in their field - Tallis, particularly, respected as one of the grand old men of English music. But it was Queen Elizabeth who was to make their names still legendary today. She it was who, some three years after they joined forces, gave them the sole right to print music in England. Imagine it. Every note issued across the land belongs to them.
How could you fail? Their first venture was the 'Cantiones Sacrae' of 1575, a collection of motets^ written by the two composers themselves. Of course, I wouldn't want you to think that they took the opportunity of having cornered the market in the world of music printing to release only their own stuff. No, no, no! I mean, it's true, of course, but I just wouldn't want you to think it. The good thing was that at least it was in the hands of masters. I mean, the 'Cantiones Sacrae' was some of the most exquisite published music of 1575, albeit, to be fair, some of the ONLY published music of 1575.
What would happen now, then? I mean now that music was going to be printed on a regular basis? Well, despite the fact that it was still expensive and rare, it was, at least, getting out there. People with money could read it and get together and sing it, because, after all, it is fi A motet is a short church choral piece, or mini canal encircling a castle. still almost all vocal, remember. And here's where a lovely, serendipi-tously head-on collision of events and fashions comes together.
PRESS ON
P
rinting. We take it for granted now. We take it for granted that it's our inalienable right to arrive at work with thumbs covered in rubbed-off black ink, and eyes like Ching Ching the giant panda. But just imagine what it did to music! Music was suddenly… available.
It was 'in print'. Scores were available. Musicians and singers were available. And, against that backdrop, the next 'chance fashion' that came along would certainly find that the land was lying differently. Everything had changed. Everything was to play for. And what was the next big thing?