Calls of vendors in streets and open markets, often involving short melodic motifs. The custom of hawking wares led at a very early date to stereotyped phrases, which became a distinctive part of each hawker’s formula as a kind of musical trademark. Modern commercial communication has helped to make this colourful practice all but obsolete, but street cries may still occasionally be heard in large cities, for example in London (ex.1).
Historically, the chief repository of street cries has been the Quodlibet. From the Middle Ages to the 18th century veritable ‘catalogues’ of vendors’ calls frequently appear among its borrowed materials, thus preserving a kind of music that would otherwise have passed into oblivion. The earliest known examples come from 13th-century motets intended for sophisticated private amusement. One such work in the Montpellier Codex, On parole/A Paris/Frèse nouvele, underscores two poems in praise of Paris with an ostinato tenor consisting of a Parisian vendor’s cry, ‘Frèse nouvele! Muere france!’ (‘Fresh strawberries! Wild blackberries!’). The same cry also appears along with many others in a 14th-century motet, Je commence ma chanson/Et je seray/Soules vieux (I-IV).
Street cries became especially popular in the art music and theatre of the 15th and 16th centuries. In the Farce de bien mondaine Virtue enters hawking a basket of honey cakes with a cry (‘Obly, obly, obly’) that also appears in the chanson Vous qui parle/E Molinet (I-PAVu Ald.362), and in the Farce des cris de Paris the Fool interrupts two gentlemen’s conversation on love with the cry ‘Eschaudez, tous chautz eschaudez’ (‘Cakes, really hot cakes’). Another well-known street cry, ‘Beurre frais’, became the basis for a basse danse (Attaingnant, 1530). Both Janequin (Voulez ouir les cris de Paris, 1550) and Jean Servin (Fricassée des cris de Paris, 1578) composed pieces made up entirely of street cries, the authenticity of which is proved by their appearance in other quodlibets (see Fricassée). One of these cries, ‘Rammonez vo cheminées, jeunes femmes, rammonez’ (‘Sweep your chimneys, young ladies’) appears with obscene connotations in the Farce du rammoneur de cheminées.
Street cries in Italian music, like the Italian quodlibet in general (see Incatenatura), still need detailed research. A caccia by Nicola Zacharie, Cacciando per gustar, quotes a virtuoso series of market cries advertising oil, mustard, vinegar etc., and such cries were also quoted occasionally in 15th-century canti carnascialeschi, as in Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Canto di uomini che vendono bericuocoli e confortini. Isaac’s music for this ‘Song of the Sweetmeat Sellers’ is lost, but a fragment survives in Donna tu pure invecchi, an incatenatura which has a section composed of market cries. Alessandro Striggio’s Il cicalamento delle donne al bucato (156723) offers yet another sort of musical representation of public speech, in this case the conversations and exclamations of a group of women gathered around a well (and overheard by a man in hiding).
The German quodlibet of the 16th and early 17th centuries made considerable use of street cries. Matthaeus Le Maistre’s Venite ir lieben Gesellin (1566) includes ‘Brüe heiss, kauff’, and Nikolaus Zangius’s Ich will zu land ausreiten (1597) quotes a fishmonger’s cry. Two early 17th-century quodlibets by Melchior Franck, Nun fanget an and Kessel, Multer binden, quote cries such as ‘Kauft gute Milch, ihr Weiben’, ‘Schöne Schmalz, gute Buttermilch’ and ‘Kauft gute Schleppehäs’, and similar calls appear in quodlibets by Paul Rivander (1615), Andreas Rauch (1627) and Jakob Banwart (1652). German quodlibets also include a number of works devoted entirely to market scenes. Franziscus de Rivulo, for example, musically depicted the Danzig market (1558), Zangius the Cologne market (Ich ging einmal spazieren, 1603), and Daniel Friderici the market at Rostock (1622). J.E. Kindermann’s Nürnbergische Quodlibet appeared in 1655, J.C. Horn’s description of the Leipzig market in 1680 and G.J. Werner’s Der wiennerische Tandlmarkt in 1750.
Thomas Ravenscroft included many street cries arranged as rounds in his Pammelia (1609) and Melismata (1611), but the most famous English quodlibets are undoubtedly three fantasias for voices and instruments by Thomas Weelkes, Orlando Gibbons and Richard Dering (c1600) that incorporate no fewer than 150 London street cries (Dering also composed a Country Cries in the same vein). The cries of the London hawkers were the subject of several sets of engravings, notably those issued by Pierce Tempest in 1711 (see illustration) and the well-known set by Francis Wheatley at the end of the 18th century. Some cries that were used by Handel in his opera Serse (Act 2 scene i) may be authentic, at least in part.
F. Bridge: The Old Cryes of London (London, 1921/R)
P.A. Scholes: ‘Street Music’, The Oxford Companion to Music (London, 1938, rev. 10/1970 by J.O. Ward)
For further bibliography see Quodlibet.
MARIA RIKA MANIATES/RICHARD FREEDMAN