15th-century term for the group of two or three shawms and trumpet or sackbut that constituted one of the standard instrumental ensembles from the 14th century to the 16th. The word is evidently an abbreviation of alta musique (Fr.) or ‘loud music’ as opposed to basse musique, ‘soft music’. The haut instruments included shawms, sackbuts, trumpets, drums, and so on, while the bas instruments were recorders, viols or fiddles, harps, psalteries, and so on.
In his incompletely surviving treatise, De inventione et usu musicae (c1485), Johannes Tinctoris described the alta as a standard combination, and explained that the treble and tenor shawms usually played the superius and tenor parts, and the sackbut (or slide trumpet) the contratenor. Many paintings, miniatures and other art works of the 15th and early 16th centuries show the typical alta; Besseler, for example, reproduced a representative selection of such pictures in his Die Musik des Mittelalters und der Renaissance (Potsdam, 1931–4). Many of these pictorial sources – for instance the well-known spalliera painting known as the Adimari Wedding (see illustration) – include four performers; three play while one evidently rests his embouchure.
Most towns and courts regularly employed a small band of loud minstrels on long-term patronage, and surviving contracts and guild regulations make clear that many independent musicians also formed their own freelance groups to secure whatever engagements they could (civic organizations and confraternities provided ample sources for such employment). The principal instruments were evidently shawms and sackbuts, although their training under an apprenticeship system leading to entry into the musicians’ guild would also have taught players to double on various other instruments as well. Polk’s German Instrumental Music of the Late Middle Ages provides a useful survey of the history of these wind bands in Germany; he also explained how these musicians learned to improvise independent parts over a given melody (his bibliography also provides a convenient guide to work by such scholars as Ross Duffin, Lewis Lockwood, Timothy McGee, William Prizer and Lorenz Welker).
The repertory of the 15th-century alta is not altogether clear; no source reveals precisely which music minstrels performed. In pictures they are almost always shown without music books, but nevertheless they probably did play composed music, motets and chansons and perhaps even mass sections, as well as improvising contrapuntal parts against homorhythmic melodies. At least in courtly milieux, they would most probably have improvised chiefly basses danses. The one composition actually called ‘Alta’ is a textless piece for three voices by F. de la Torre, in the MS Cancionero de Palacio (E-Mp 2–1–5; the piece is printed, among other places, in Barbieri: Cancionero musical de los siglos XV y XVI, and in HAM, i, no.102), and may be taken as a typical example of their improvisatory style. It is a polyphonic arrangement of the widely distributed basse danse tenor La Spagna, in which the cantus prius factus is set out in long notes with a contratenor that moves against it in more or less note-against-note motion, with a highly decorated fast-moving upper part. Since de la Torre’s Alta probably reflects the standard improvisatory style of the late 15th century, we can use it as a model to imagine how the repertory of basses danses, surviving in a number of sources only as monophonic tenors, was realized in actual performance. Heartz, who made use of the extensive modern research into this monophonic repertory, connected the music with its choreography.
In the 16th century cantus firmus dances were replaced by other kinds, improvised or not; the wind bands grew in size to accommodate music in four parts, which by then had become a normal texture. As the century wore on minstrel bands came more and more to include string instruments. Thus the three-man alta gradually gave way to larger and more varied ensembles. The present-day Catalan cobla, a band that plays dances called ‘sardanas’, continues to some extent the 15th-century tradition; at least it features a modern version of the shawm, and the principal melody is traditionally played by the tenor member of the family.
K. Weinmann: Johannes Tinctoris und sein unbekannter Traktat ‘De inventione et usu musicae’ (Regensburg, 1917/R)
A. Baines: ‘Fifteenth-Century Instruments in Tinctoris’s De inventione et usu musicae’, GSJ, iii (1950), 19–26
H. Besseler: ‘Die Entstehung der Posaune’, AcM, xxii (1950), 7–35
A. Baines: ‘Shawms of the Sardana Coblas’, GSJ, v (1952), 9–16
D. Heartz: ‘The Basse Dance: its Evolution circa 1450 to 1550’, AnnM, vi (1958–63), 287–340
W. Salmen: Der Spielmann im Mittelalter (Innsbruck, 1983)
K. Polk: German Instrumental Music of the Late Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1992)
T.J. McGee: ‘Misleading Iconography: the Case of the “Adimari Wedding Cassone”’, Imago Musicae, ix–xii (1992–5), 139–57
HOWARD MAYER BROWN/KEITH POLK