Guilds.

In musical contexts the word ‘guild’ – like the German words Zunft, Gilde and Bruderschaft, the French confrérie, the Spanish corporación, the Italian arte or the Czechoslovakian cech – denotes the gathering of individual musicians into a professional society. The reasons for forming such musicians’ guilds were twofold: to promote monopoly interests, establishing the privilege of exclusive rights to public performance, from which all musicians who were not guild members were to be banned; and for the musicians themselves to establish and agree on a hierarchy within the profession, to develop an appropriate jurisdiction, to cultivate a professional ethic as well as to draw up principles and rules, orders and prohibitions for the day-to-day work of the profession, and particularly to establish welfare provision for sick and invalid members.

Such musical corporations are found only in areas of high musical culture. External prerequisites are a social structure with class divisions and division of labour as well as a variegated musical life calling for specialization among the musicians – for religious, court, military, theatrical or light music. The existence of musicians’ guilds is accordingly not confined to Europe: similar organizations appear in ancient China, Japan, Egypt and Israel; and historical predecessors of the medieval Bruderschaft or confrérie can be seen in ancient Greece (sunodoi, koina) and Rome (collegia tibicinum et fidicinum romanorum).

The oldest fully formed musicians’ guilds in medieval Europe were the Viennese Nicolai-Bruderschaft (fraternity of St Nicholas, founded 1288) and the Parisian Confrérie de St Julien-des-Ménétriers (documented from 1321). In these, formerly wandering freelance musicians came together in a union modelled on those of the trade guilds and the religious fraternities of clerics and laymen. By forming a corporation that spontaneously placed itself under the power of its rulers or civic authorities, the musicians who as a class were still outside society and the law could procure for themselves social acceptance and legal protection. One of the most important factors for their achieving integration into urban society was that the guilds bound their members to a change in way of life and morals. The guilds acquired gradual recognition from the church by taking on the name of ‘fraternity’, by setting up an altare fistulatorum (Vienna) and adopting patron saints (St Julian, St Nicholas, St Job, St Giles), by active participation in civic processions and through the foundation and maintenance of public hospitals (London, Arras, Paris). As late as 1461 one of the earliest surviving documents of the Bruderschaft der Pfeifer in Elsass concerns a plea that the musicians should be given the holy sacrament and treated as other Christians in spite of their piping (‘daz heylige sacrament geben und tun solle alse andern kristen luten … ungehindert irs pfiffens’). Contingent on the rooting of vagabond musicians in civic minstrel fraternities and settling them on separate minstrel streets, such corporations provided the basis for the beginnings of an organized civic music in many places even before the foundation of official town bands (see chronological table; see also Stadtpfeifer).

The organization of guilds developed primarily in the larger towns of middle and western Europe. The earliest documentation comes from Beaucaire (1175) and Arras (1194); but it is not clear whether these amounted to the formation of musical guilds based on regulations drawn up by the members themselves – the most important evidence of a real guild. One of the earliest organizations of musicians in the form of a guild in England was the City of London Gild of Parish Clerks (also called the Fraternity of St Nicholas) grounded on statutes authorized as early as 1240 by Henry III. In contrast with the secular corporations in Vienna, Paris and Alsace this was a guild of church musicians with its own privileges. In Germany there was another development: the formation of a guild for the socially far superior court trumpeters and drummers who wanted to see their art reserved for the nobility and banned from the towns. According to the privilege renewed by Emperor Ferdinand II in 1623 all court trumpeters and drummers had to belong to a Kameradschaft, which in turn was beholden to the Oberkameradschaft of Dresden. The members were forbidden to pass on their musical skills to those who were not in the guild. In Paris and Nuremberg there were also guilds of instrument builders; and in Prague there was a guild of Jewish musicians (Juden Spielleutezunft) that can be documented from 1558 and even accepted women. A chief minstrel (Oberspielgraf, roi des menestrels), whose position reaches back to 1354, was often responsible for resolving disagreements between Jewish musicians and their Christian rivals. The town council of Luckau ratified the statutes of its own guild of Wendish musicians in 1702. The guilds took over the duties of town musicians in places like Alsace where they had jurisdiction stretching over an extensive area. In Saxony and Württemberg this led to regional meetings of the various Stadtpfeifer working in the area, and corresponding statutes were laid down and ratified in 1653 and 1721. In England the Worshipful Company of Musicians (founded 1604) was also responsible for the regulation of civic music: its special privilege comprised the ‘control and government of all minstrels and musicians in the City of London and within three miles thereof’; but this legislation was voided under Charles I because of the disadvantage to his own musicians.

In the large and prosperous cities of northern Germany that had a bourgeoisie with its own internal class distinctions there were often corresponding class divisions among the musicians. As well as official town musicians the leading Hansa towns possessed guilds of Rollmusikanten (Hamburg), Chor- und Köstenbrüder (Lübeck) or Gilde Spielleute (Danzig). These corporations, which can be traced back to the 16th century and were mostly confined to a fixed number of ten, 15 or 30 members, were distinguished from the town musicians primarily in having no firm contractual relationship with the town officials and in therefore enjoying no fixed salary. Their income was earned on a cooperative basis: each member received jobs according to a precisely established order; the receipts then went into a common fund and were distributed among the members every week, with reserves kept to support sick members or to look after widows and orphans of members. Performing without permission was punishable, and the penalties were normally determined by elected elders. Special regulations controlled the education of members and apprentices: more than mere competence was necessary for admission to membership, and even apprentices were required to bring evidence of their Ehrlichkeit and legitimate birth.

Guild musicians were distinguished from non-members in that musical employment was contractually assured them by the town authorities through an Ordnung or Rolle; this contractual basis often lent them the designation Rollmusikanten. Ordnungen or Rollen survive from Danzig (1532, 1579, 1618), Rostock (c1540, 1600), Lübeck (from 1598), Hamburg (c1590 and from 1691) and Lüneburg (1671) and in modified form also from Brunswick, Stettin, Königsberg, Marienburg and Riga. Guild musicians were thought of as lower in rank than the civic musicians in respect of social position and of technical skill: this is clear enough from the duties that are described in the Ordnungen. The Grünrollbrüder of Hamburg – a second guild subordinate to the Rollbrüder – were allowed to render their services only where the civic musicians and Rollbrüder did not play (‘allwo hochgedachte Hochweis. Rahts Musicanten oder die von der Rolle nicht selbst auffwarten’). According to the regulations at Rostock only the civic musicians were allowed to play at weddings of the upper-class citizens; weddings of middle- and lower-class citizens were reserved for the guild musicians. Even so, the guild musicians were in no sense the ‘pariahs among musicians’ that Stiehl (1885) asserted the Lübeck Chor- und Köstenbrüder to be: Stiehl measured them only against the superior civic musicians and overlooked their relatively elevated position within the total hierarchy of the privileged musicians in that Hansa town. Capable and gifted Rollbrüder could ultimately rise to become civic musicians in most of those towns after having first been made Expectanten. Moreover, while there were two main classes among the town musicians of Rostock, Lübeck had as many as four: Ratsmusikanten, Chor- und Köstenbrüder, Bürger-Musikanten and Hoboisten. This remained in force until 1815 when in the course of the general abolition of guild organization the musical guilds were also deprived of their former privileges.

The undermining and eventual dissolution of privileged guilds, the introduction of free enterprise even within the musical professions, which brought about the end of the civic musical establishments as well, took place throughout Europe about the time of the French Revolution (1789), the establishment of Gewerbefreiheit in Prussia (1810) and the Municipal Corporation Act in England (1835). Nevertheless the musicians’ unions that have come to life in subsequent years (Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikerverband, 1872; Society for Professional Musicians, 1882) show the further preservation of many of the ends and the means of the former guilds.

See also Minstrel.

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EARLY HISTORY OF CIVIC MUSIC

BIBLIOGRAPHY

HEINRICH W. SCHWAB

Guilds

EARLY HISTORY OF CIVIC MUSIC

Guilds

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGG1 (H.W. Schwab)

Vander StraetenMPB

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