A piece of music for voice or voices, whether accompanied or unaccompanied, or the act or art of singing. The term is not generally used for large vocal forms, such as opera or oratorio, but is often found in various figurative and transferred senses (e.g. for the lyrical second subject of a sonata, in J. Stainer and W.A. Barrett: Dictionary of Musical Terms, 1875).
3. Liturgical song to the 9th century.
4. Medieval Latin song from the 9th century.
GEOFFREY CHEW (1, 7–10), GEOFFREY CHEW/THOMAS J. MATHIESEN (2), GEOFFREY CHEW/THOMAS B. PAYNE (3–4), GEOFFREY CHEW/DAVID FALLOWS (5–6)
Song may well represent an attribute of all human beings in every age; but the present article is restricted to the song repertory of Renaissance Europe and those repertories that preceded it and developed from it. (For discussion of song in other places, see the articles on the relevant geographical areas.) The area thus defined is very wide and disparate and evidently not in every sense self-contained. Yet there seems some justification in treating it as a unit: nearly all post-Renaissance song may be judged according to its fidelity to the declamation of the text and according to its expressiveness, and these criteria are not generally relevant to any other song repertories.
It would not be true to claim that no attention was paid to word-setting during the European Middle Ages. Nevertheless, a new attitude developed during the 15th and 16th centuries towards declamation (i.e. the mirroring in the musical setting of the rhythm of the text as it would be declaimed), which tended to make song texts more comprehensible to listeners; this occurred in isolated pieces as early as the first half of the 15th century (e.g. in the motet Quam pulchra es, attributed to Dunstaple but unusual within his output). Some late 16th- and early 17th-century musicians championed a declamatory style and claimed for it the authority of Greek antiquity; and attention to declamation has since that time never been far from European song theory.
Similarly, expressiveness in song has been a constant concern for musicians since the Renaissance. Songs in the tradition are capable, for instance, of being criticized on the grounds that the music constitutes a misreading of the text. Steiner (1975) has drawn out some of the implications of this view, placing it within a larger ‘theory of translation’. He pointed out that ‘the composer who sets a text to music is engaged in the same sequence of intuitive and technical motions which obtain in translation’, and that, while a poem is fully eclipsed in a verbal translation, a poem and its musical setting together establish ‘a new whole which neither devalues nor eclipses its linguistic source’.
Views of song dependent, like this one, on ideas that music is a language, or at least an expressive medium, bind together the repertory covered in the present article from the 16th century onwards. (The article is not concerned with the difficulties inherent in such ideas: they raise issues too wide to be discussed here.) These views originated in the song repertory in the desire of some 16th-century composers to ‘imitate’ the text in musical settings, often in small-scale word-painting: the adoption of stereotyped musical figures associated with certain words. Towards the end of the 16th century this interpretation of the idea of imitazione della parola seemed to some to be increasingly inadequate. Accordingly, theories were constructed requiring the music to be subservient to the text and advocating solo song accompanied by the lute (seen as a parallel to ancient Greek lyric monody) and in some cases a return to homophony or even monophony. The results in practice, like the theories themselves, varied both in their nature and in the success with which they were applied; but a general tendency may be observed to match texts to music as a whole rather than word by word and to make settings generally more expressive and ‘emotional’ in their impact on the listener. Of the various theories, that of Zarlino was perhaps the most impressive and influential, both at the time and subsequently. It is arguable that the limitations placed on song by 16th- and 17th-century Italian theorists paradoxically freed composers in an unprecedented way to realize the full potential of post-Renaissance song.
The persistence of word-setting theories ultimately deriving from 16th-century Italy represents the chief reason why the Renaissance holds central historical importance in European song. (A view of this type still underlies Hugo Riemann’s definition of song as ‘the union of a lyric poem with music, in which the sung word replaces the spoken word, while the musical elements of rhythm and cadence inherent in speech are heightened to … rhythmically ordered melody’ (Musik-Lexikon, Leipzig, 1882, ‘Lied’).) It also, however, suggests a powerful reason for beginning this article with an account of ancient Hellenic song, for this was regarded as the period of the ‘origins’ in the Renaissance, and Renaissance theorists constantly appealed to the authority of Greek antiquity. 16th- and 17th-century theorists did not of course always shed light on ancient Greek practice: little is known about the latter even today, less was known in the 16th century, and even the evidence available to them was not always approached critically by the theorists.
Renaissance or Renaissance-derived theory does not suffice to appreciate all song in the repertory – even since the 17th century – however, and it is useless for judging medieval song; some alternative criteria are suggested in the course of the historical account below, where they seem appropriate. Certain areas of song have sometimes seemed inadequate when judged by it; one such is 18th-century song, much of which may be termed ‘absolute’ song – i.e. song in which the melody follows a strict musical logic without necessarily reflecting the features of the text, such as dance-songs. The latter are an inheritance from the Middle Ages at least and have never been superseded completely by ‘declamatory’ songs.
Another problematic category is that of the strophic song. Even if the music is carefully fitted to one strophe, it may fail to suit other strophes equally well. Strophic songs, nevertheless, may well represent the most fundamental song type of all, and they have been cultivated by every type of song composer, even the most literary-minded. Moreover, they have for centuries formed a basic part of the repertory of popular song, notably of the (often sizable) part of the popular repertory originating in the theatre.
A rather different area of song, which presents difficulties in the light of Renaissance standards, is 20th-century experimental song, such as Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire. Those who experimented in this way later turned away from song; and in the 20th century, song has flourished mainly among conservative composers. So far, indeed, non-tonal music would not appear to have produced a medium for song of equal potential to that of the Renaissance; that, however, would be much to ask.
It is generally agreed that words, rhythm, melody (in the most general sense) and movement were closely associated in ancient cultures. Taken together, these elements formed song, which is ‘an essential, inseparable element in primitive life and cannot be isolated from the conditions that are its cause, its sense, and its reason of being’ (Sachs, 1961, p.16). The relationship between, song, magic, science and religion (and, by extension, state ritual) was very strong in all known ancient cultures, and this considerably complicates the study of ancient song as a discrete entity.
Most evidence for ancient song comes from pictorial and literary sources, some of which are specifically devoted to the theory or science of ‘music’. These sources are complemented by some archaeological remains of musical instruments and a relatively small amount of musical notation that survives on materials such as clay tablets, stone and papyrus. Some later manuscripts also contain the notation for earlier pieces of music, generally though not always considered to be authentic.
Ancient cultures in, for example, Egypt, Greece, Rome, the Middle East, Mesopotamia, India and China developed a variety of musico-poetic types of song to be used on specific religious occasions and to accompany processions, lighten routine tasks of the day and celebrate or solemnize events such as weddings or funerals. Ancient song eventually developed into the highly complex forms found in epic, in the national festivals of the Greeks and in Chinese and Indian court entertainments. The available evidence does not permit generalization of detail across all these cultures, but for further details see China, §§I; II and IV; Egypt, §I; India, §I; Mesopotamia; Ode (ii), §1.
Almost all surviving ancient song is Greek and of the Hellenistic period, and the quantity is very small. Literary and pictorial sources, however, permit certain limited conclusions about the categories of song cultivated in antiquity, and the instruments used to accompany them; in Greece further information is sometimes available concerning the metre and modality favoured in them.
An oral bardic tradition of epic song accompanied by the phorminx in the archaic Greek period, perhaps sung to simple traditional formulae, no doubt underlies the Homeric epics, and may have been the chief type of song cultivated in Greece before 700 bce. Besides epic, simple functional songs, perhaps unrehearsed and often sung by a leader with choral refrains, are attested throughout Greek and Roman literature, and also in the Old Testament. They include work songs, lullabies, victory songs, songs for weddings and funerals, mocking and satirical songs and so on. These simple songs were later taken up into the art music of ancient Greece.
An extensive development of accompanied song began in the 7th century bce in Greece. Solo lyric or monody (e.g. of Sappho and Alcaeus) may have corresponded to modern strophic songs: it expressed the personal feelings of the composer in a series of shortish stanzas identical in metre. By contrast, choral lyric, which included dancing and was mainly religious in character, expressed the communal feelings of a group, which might be as large as the whole city-state. Solo and choral lyric were important also in Greek drama from the 5th century bce, and were originally the main element in it. Both lyric song as such and drama were the subject of competition at Greek festivals such as the Pythian Games, and lyric song also formed part of the general education of 5th-century Greeks, so that amateurs as well as professionals were able to participate in choral lyric. A new musical style of the late 5th century bce, the ‘new music’, had, according to contemporaries, far-reaching effects on song: for example, unprecedented modal and rhythmic variety was tolerated, instrumental interludes were introduced and texts were set melismatically, in contrast to previous practice, where the music was subservient to the text.
During the Hellenistic period, the song of the Greek theatre spread to Rome and elsewhere, and song composition reached a highpoint in the cantica of the comedies of Plautus. New categories of song, including mime and pantomime, were introduced, some under foreign influence.
Of the music mentioned here, it is the song of the period up to the early 5th century bce which, understood or misunderstood, exerted the greatest influence on European and European-derived music of later centuries, the music of the Hellenistic age usually being stigmatized as decadent, as it had been by some Hellenistic writers. The apparent cultivation of originality by Greek poet-composers (although there is no way of assessing how far Greek composers remained faithful to musical tradition, even in 5th-century ‘new music’, when the melodies have not survived) and the concern with the relationship between text and music expressed by Greek writers (e.g. Plato) have often suggested new lines of departure to later composers.
For further details see Aoidos; Bacchylides; Bard, §I; Cantica; Chorēgia; Epics, §I; Epithalamium; Euripides; Fescennini; Hesiod; Homer; Hymenaios; Hymn, §I, 1; Melanippides; Monody; Nenia; Pantomime; Partheneia; Pherecrates; Pindar; Plato, §§4, 5 and 6; Plautus; Prosodion; Pyrrhic; Rome, §I; Thrēnos; Timotheus; Tragōidia.
Any assessment of the relationships of early liturgical musical practice, whether Jewish or Christian, is fraught with problems. Ancient Jewish song is represented chiefly by the texts of the book of Psalms; and though various styles of performance seem to be implied by their textual structure, corresponding to the direct, responsorial and antiphonal psalmody, and the litanies with refrains, of later Christian practice, any notion of direct connections is hazardous at best. Nonetheless, psalmody eventually formed a staple part of the liturgies of Jews and Christians; and it is possible that the skeletal forms of the psalm tones may contain some of the most plausible links between Jewish and Christian practice.
In the early Christian church, hymns (in this context, sacred songs other than those with Old Testament texts) appear to have been sung from a very early date. A fragmentary Christian hymn survives uniquely with melody in Greek notation in a late 3rd-century papyrus, but its ritual significance remains unclear, and its singular survival does not allow us to judge how representative it may be. In any event, links between Christian and ancient Greek song are likely to have been tenuous. Apart from the hymns whose texts are in the New Testament itself, the earliest surviving hymn texts were mostly in Syriac but were soon translated into Greek (e.g. the psalm-like Odes of Solomon, 1st century, and the heretical hymns of Bardaisan, d 222, and Ephrem Syrus, d 373, who wrote orthodox contrafacta to Bardaisan’s melodies). The isosyllabic, strophic principle underlying Ephrem’s hymns appeared in subsequent Greek hymnody and thence in the Hebrew religious songs or piyyutim cultivated from the 6th century, though these were later influenced by Arabic songs. From the 5th century a rich variety of hymnody developed in the Byzantine and the other eastern churches (for details see the articles on the various eastern rites).
The texts of Christian liturgical song often reflect the structure of prototype hymns, such as those from the Bible, regarded as of divine origin (e.g. the Psalms, Sanctus, Trisagion etc.). They function as ‘types’ (paradigms) of heavenly praise within the liturgy which is itself representative of heaven. It is not known how this idea of hymnody may have affected the melodies in the early Christian centuries, but the use of a limited number of melodic archetypes was a characteristic of later Byzantine hymnody, and legends of divine origin were later attached to Christian chant traditions such as the Gregorian and Ethiopian (there are modern parallels to these legends, for example in the Kimbanguist church).
Various categories of chant developed subsequently, possibly through contact with regional musical styles. Some liturgical song may have been influenced by popular song, but even if this is so, the popular style was so thoroughly assimilated in time that the evidence of surviving melodies is useless for reconstructing it. Most of the categories of song found in the later Gregorian repertory, whose texts are attested from sources earlier than the 9th century, developed ultimately, however, from psalmody.
From the 4th century, quantitative metrical hymnody is attested in the Latin West; the texts survive of hymns by Hilary of Poitiers, St Ambrose and many later hymnographers. A vast repertory of monophonic hymn melodies survives from later centuries, which no doubt influenced other Latin and vernacular song in the Middle Ages.
For further details see Alleluia, §I; Bardaisan; Christian Church, music of the early; Ephrem Syrus; Gregory the Great; Hymn, §II; Jewish music, §III; Psalm, §II.
The first notated song melodies, sacred and secular, since Hellenistic antiquity, in both East and West survive from the 9th century. The introduction of notation seems to have coincided with far-reaching attempts to impose as well as to reorganize and classify several of the repertories of liturgical song: in Latin, Greek, Syriac and Armenian chant this classification was done according to systems, varying from repertory to repertory, of eight modes. The Gregorian repertory, as a result, was also subjected to a stylistic revision that decisively established the special characteristics of Gregorian word-setting and melodic style, not necessarily found in other chant repertories, even those of the Latin West. Some of them remained current for centuries and may therefore seem essentially to represent ‘medieval’ song characteristics; but paradoxically the interest in flexibility of melody and the increased attention to word-setting commonly thought to distinguish the Renaissance coincided at first, in the first half of the 15th century, with a renewed interest in Gregorian style rather than a preoccupation with Greek lyric song.
Factors affecting the style of Gregorian word-setting and melodic contour include the liturgical function of the particular chant: thus the antiphons of introits, for example, share certain stylistic features that set them apart from other categories such as graduals. The melodies largely consist of carefully shaped melodic curves of great sophistication. Higher notes may generally be regarded as having more weight than lower, and melismas as carrying more weight than single notes, and frequently the text was set with these factors in mind; yet the attention given to the relationship between text and music may be obscured for modern listeners by the tendency to place melismatic passages also on unimportant syllables, where they will not obscure the text, or in places with a structural significance for the chant form (such as sectional endings): in recent centuries the opposite principle has generally been adopted. Repetition of words or phrases within the text, and word-painting, were almost wholly avoided; no attempt was made, of course, at ‘expressing’ the text, which was a much later concern. The greatest elaboration in terms of melismatic style occurs in the responsorial chants following the reading of lessons; these chants are in a sense ‘meditative’.
New categories of liturgical song besides the classic original corpus of Gregorian chant, such as sequence, trope and rhymed Office, also arose in the Frankish monasteries and elsewhere from the 9th century, and throughout the Middle Ages the chant repertory continued to be extended with new pieces, sometimes differing in style from that described above. Sometimes the changes tend towards less systematization than is found in true Gregorian chant, as when there is an apparently arbitrary juxtaposition within the same piece of melodic styles kept separate in Gregorian chant. Sometimes, on the contrary, they represent new systematic chant dialects different from the Gregorian dialect, as in some 13th-century versified Offices composed in accordance with the poetic and melodic modal theory of the time.
Together with the composition of new chants, there took place occasional systematic changes to the chants in the existing Gregorian repertory in accordance with reforming movements, such as that of the Cistercians in the 12th century. The revision of songs or song repertories in order to bring them up to date or to purge supposed excesses of range and melismatic ornamentation, with the underlying implication that songs do not exist in an absolute sense independent of fashion or function, even when they are of as much value and authority as the songs of the Gregorian repertory, is characteristic of medieval European music. It tended to disappear in art music in the Renaissance.
In post-9th-century chant, repetition structures were created comparable to those of secular song, especially in the alleluia and sequence repertories. The sequence, with its ABB1CC1… structure, offers parallels with certain types of secular music such as the lai and estampie of the Middle Ages, which were built on the same principle; this type of structure may be much older still.
Much of the secular song of the Middle Ages, as well as much non-liturgical religious song, has disappeared, although it is sometimes attested by passing literary references; not only was notation the preserve of clerics, but its introduction is directly tied to the imposition of the liturgical corpus over most of Europe, rather than arising as a means of preserving extant utterances. The distinction between sacred and secular is, however, not easy to carry through logically, and the same styles and forms appear in settings of both kinds of text. Even a distinction between Latin and vernacular song is not watertight, for a number of medieval songs are contrafacta – songs in which new texts are joined to old melodies, either by associating sacred Latin texts with melodies originally conceived for secular vernacular texts or the reverse.
A small quantity of non-liturgical Latin song survives, mostly in non-diastematic neumes, in 10th- and 11th-century manuscripts, and comprises settings of ancient Latin poets (one such is a contrafactum of the liturgical hymn Ut queant laxis), planctus in honour of Carolingian and Visigothic royalty, dating in part perhaps from as early as the 7th century, and other types. Larger repertories are those associated with the goliards of the 12th century (e.g. in the famous 13th-century Benediktbeuren manuscript known as the Carmina burana) which are also, however, notated in non-diastematic neumes, and the contemporary conductus repertory of the late 12th century and the 13th; the evidence suggests that these songs, like many monophonic hymns, are settings of Latin verse now scanned according to the number of syllables per line and the placement of the final stress rather than, as in the ancient world and again in Carolingian Renaissance times, by length of syllable (quantity). Conductus, whether sacred or secular, came to signify strophic or through-composed songs generally with Latin texts; the simpler conductus resemble syllabic hymns, but the most elaborate examples have stanzas whose poetic structures are very complex and which may be considerably melismatic in musical style.
In nearly all medieval song (Latin or vernacular) the modern listener or performer is hampered in gaining a complete idea of the music above all because of the problems of rhythm, which was not notated without ambiguity until the latter part of the 13th century. Some of the earlier melodies appear in a rhythmic interpretation in late sources, yet even here certainty of interpretation cannot be absolute, since the melodies may in these sources have been remodelled according to later taste (see above). Another contested point is instrumental accompaniment: the variety of evidence suggests that a single, overriding practice for all such songs did not exist.
From the 12th century, conductus were set also in two-, occasionally three- and rarely four-voice polyphony; some of these polyphonic conductus represent some of the largest-scale achievements in the whole of medieval song. Polyphonic conductus are generally distinguished from other categories of polyphonic song by their use of the same text sung simultaneously in all voices and the lack of a plainchant tenor, although some conductus drew on various types of pre-existing material.
By the mid-13th century the composition of conductus in active centres such as Paris and the Artois gave way to a concentration on the motet. The latter is the other chief category of Latin medieval song, apart from the Notre Dame organum, i.e. large-scale polyphonic settings of the solo parts of responsorial chants sung at Mass and at the Divine Office on certain high festivals. Unlike the conductus, the motet was based on plainchant or other tenors and its constituent voices are very often distinct from one another in their rhythmic, melodic and verbal context.
13th-century motets are generally of small but concentrated dimensions; the rhythms used in them often recall those of the rhythmic modes, even though these no longer served as a basis for the notation. In the 14th century, however, the introduction of isorhythm expanded the rhythmic palette as well as the structural dimensions and complexity of the motet. Some late 14th-century motets display the rhythmic subtleties of the Ars Subtilior.
For further details see Alleluia, §I; Antiphon, §5; Ars Subtilior; Cantional; Conductus; Early Latin secular song; Echos; Goliards; Isorhythm; Mode, §I–III; Motet, §I; Organum; Planctus; Versified Office; Rhythmic modes; Sequence (i); Tonary; Trope (i).
In the early Middle Ages, traditions of heroic and historical epic song appear to have been more widespread among the Germanic and Celtic peoples than would appear solely from the few surviving epic texts (e.g. Beowulf, the Hildebrandslied, the Nibelungenlied and the Scandinavian sagas). One such Old High German epic, the Petruslied, which may date from before 850, survives with musical notation (D-Mbs lat.6260, f.158v) and is the oldest known song from Germany. Musical evidence in unambiguous notation, though slight and late, survives for the comparable chanson de geste in France: simple musical formulae were repeated over and over again.
Vernacular religious songs existed from an early date, although no large coherent repertory survives until after the rise of the cantional and the carol. Bede, for example, mentioned a Christian epic (of which a fragment of text survives) sung by Caedmon in the 7th century; the text survives of a 9th-century German lyric by Otfrid von Weissenburg, apparently connected with the sequence; the earliest vernacular song of Bohemia, Hospodine, pomiluj ny (ascribed to Adalbert of Prague), may have been sung as early as the 11th century, although it survives only in a much later source; some English songs were ‘composed’ in the 12th century by St Godric.
Vernacular secular lyrics also survive in small numbers before the 12th century; an example is the alba (dawn song) Phebi claro with Latin and Provençal text, surviving, with melody, in a late 10th- or 11th-century manuscript, I-Rvat Reg.lat.1462. A parallel has been drawn between this melody and that of a liturgical hymn. From the 12th and succeeding centuries a large body of secular lyric song survives, which was probably transmitted orally at the time and codified in later sources. This, the repertory of the troubadours, trouvères and Minnesinger, comprises songs with Provençal, French and German texts respectively. Its origins are problematic: few clear links are discernible with earlier secular lyric. Some scholars have suggested Arabic influence, but without evidence (Arabic music survives only from the 13th century); Chailley suggested an origin in Aquitanian versus (‘Notes sur les troubadours, les versus et la question arabe’, Mélanges de linguistique et de littérature romanes à la mémoire d’István Frank, Saarbrücken, 1958, pp.118–28).
The repertory comprises settings of ‘courtly love’ lyrics. Some 2600 troubadour poems survive, but only 264 melodies; of the slightly later trouvère repertory, however, some 2000 melodies are known. Despite the difference in the language of the texts of the two repertories, there was much give and take between them and they have much in common. The songs vary in structure from great simplicity, with repeated formulae almost as simple as those of surviving chanson de geste melodies, to forms in which flexible repetitions are incorporated to create a subtly balanced structure.
These songs differ from any earlier medieval song especially in their cult of originality, leading sometimes to the creation of novel and unprecedented formal structures and the cultivation of abstruse styles and obscure vocabulary in the poetry. Gregorian modal theory has little direct bearing on the modality of troubadour and trouvère melody. Possible relationships with, or at least resemblances to, liturgical song exist, however: the form of the sequence is reflected not only in the Lai repertory but also in the repetition of half-stanzas of some troubadour songs; and structures resembling psalm recitation occur in troubadour and trouvère song. The influence of folksong has often been claimed, largely owing to the simplicity and lilt of many of the songs when interpreted in modal rhythm, but is of course no more than conjectural.
The repertory of Minnesang – a term generally referring to all settings of German courtly love poems from their beginnings in the 13th century until the early 15th century – was in turn influenced by the trouvère repertory and, like it, was probably at first orally transmitted. The so-called bar form frequently found in this repertory (AAB and variants) corresponds to a similar form in the trouvère repertory (and indeed appears in much song of all periods); it was the form obligatory for constructing strophes in Meistergesang, the monophonic song cultivated in bourgeois German song schools in the 15th and 16th centuries.
Other categories of late medieval vernacular monophonic song were mostly regional, popular ‘by destination’ and connected with popular religious movements. They include German and Czech vernacular cantiones – the Czech repertory was greatly extended about 1420–30 by the adherents of the Hussite movement, and almost superseded Latin religious song in Bohemia. A repertory survives of 13th-century Spanish sacred cantigas; of the secular cantigas, very little music survives. 13th- and 14th-century flagellant movements of popular origin in Italy and Germany gave rise to song repertories; the music of Italian flagellant songs has almost entirely perished, but German Geisslerlieder survive. Italian popular religious songs of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance are generally termed laude; a large lauda spirituale repertory survives, including polyphonic settings from the 15th and 16th centuries. A comparable repertory in England, surviving from the late 14th century and the 15th, was the carol; surviving examples are nearly all polyphonic. A further repertory, apparently dependent on French and German secular vernacular monophonic song, is represented by the medieval Ashkenazi Jewish mi-sinai melodies; after this time, Ashkenazi Jewish song tended to be an eclectic combination of elements drawn from diverse musical traditions. All these repertories generally must have remained unknown, and must have exerted no direct influence, outside their own regions.
In all the monophonic repertories mentioned here dating before the 14th century (later in some cases), there is uncertainty concerning the interpretation of the rhythm. In most cases there is uncertainty also about the use of instruments; van der Werf and Page have pointed out that there is uncertainty on the latter point even in troubadour and trouvère song.
Courtly love continued to influence 14th- and 15th-century French song, but after 1300 composers set mainly the fixed poetic forms (formes fixes) of the ballade, rondeau and virelai. These forms became almost exclusively polyphonic after the work of Machaut, in a structure comprising a freely composed melody with text in the top voice, and two accompanying voices (tenor and contratenor) which generally lack texts in the original sources. The French monophonic secular song appears to have been relegated, after Machaut, to the sphere of entertainment music, as was the chanson rustique (a term found from about 1550, but useful for the earlier repertory). This popular category is distinguished mainly by a simple style with strophic structures and simple repetition schemes; it has much in common with the virelai (see Brown, 1963). Towards the end of the 14th century, in the main chanson repertory, there was a temporary vogue (mainly in southern France) for much rhythmic and other complexity, and virelais were occasionally set as large-scale genre pieces, with imitations of birdcalls, fanfares and so on.
A repertory of polyphonic music comparable to that of France existed in 14th-century Italy, but this was not preceded by an equivalent monophonic repertory as had occurred in France. The chief categories of song were the ballata, caccia and madrigal (the latter category is a formal definition and should be distinguished from the 16th- and 17th-century madrigal). The caccia, corresponding to the less numerous category in France known as the chace, represents the first considerable song category based on canon: the latter device, attested as early as the 12th century, arose first from the technique of ‘voice-exchange’ (Stimmtausch); it is behind the medieval techniques of rondellus and rota (the latter may be seen in the famous Sumer is icumen in) and remained popular, especially in England, in later centuries.
Some of the songs in these repertories seem to owe much to dance rhythms: this is most marked in some of the monophonic virelais of the French repertory, or the ballatas of the Italian repertory. In the most complex songs, the music has a life of its own, seemingly independent of the text, whose distribution over the music might conceivably be different without losing its validity. Although this latter feature is found only in some songs, secular and sacred, of the period, it has sometimes seemed a generally ‘medieval’ characteristic.
Polyphonic songs with texts in languages other than French or Italian occur in only small numbers: there are from the 14th and 15th centuries a small number in Dutch and English (the latter, in the early 15th century, generally simple in style). Since English was not internationally familiar, some English songs such as Frye’s So ys emprentid were copied outside England with French or Latin texts. Throughout the repertory songs were very often turned into sacred Latin contrafacta; thus some motets (in the later loose sense of a non-liturgical polyphonic sacred song) which survive only as sacred songs, but which are cast in the usual three-voice structure of secular songs with the chief melody in the top voice and clearly divided into two sections like secular songs, may be suspected of having originated as secular songs.
For further details see Adalbert of Prague; Ars Nova; Ars Subtilior; Ballade (i); Ballata; Bard; Caccia; Cantiga; Cantional, §1; Carol; Chace; Chanson de geste; Formes fixes; Geisslerlieder; Jewish music, §III, 3; Lauda; Madrigal, §I; Meistergesang; Minnesang; Rondeau (i); Rondellus; Rota; Sources, MS, §III; Troubadours, trouvères; Virelai.
In the second half of the 15th century, leadership in song composition was held by French and Netherlandish composers; during the 16th century it passed to Italians. During the 15th century, three-part secular song settings were slowly supplanted by four-part settings (and in later madrigals etc. by still more voices). Polyphony for choirs had been almost unknown in the Middle Ages, when it was performed by soloists or instrumentalists; after 1450, motets were increasingly sung by small choirs, but secular polyphony was still generally performed by ensembles of soloists or by a soloist accompanied by one or more instruments.
Whereas the voices within a song in the 14th and early 15th centuries had at times been contrasted in rhythm and in melodic material and style, with pairs of voices such as tenor and contratenor often sharing a similar range, from the middle of the 15th century all the voices of polyphonic songs came to be increasingly sharply contrasted in range and tessitura, but decreasingly so in melodic material and rhythm. Imitative textures, attested in some songs as early as the beginning of the 15th century, became increasingly common in song, as did close attention to declamation (see §1 above), particularly in the Italian and English traditions.
Monophonic song became less and less important within art music after about 1450, although collections of sacred contrafacta such as the Souterliedekens (1540), a collection of metrical psalms, and occasional secular songs, show the persistence at a popular level of the monophonic song of courtly love. The medieval tradition of syllabic song based on the dance (as in the virelai or carol) also continued to flourish, at every level of sophistication, as in the frottola and related forms.
The formes fixes and the imagery of courtly love associated with them retained their popularity and importance in the polyphonic songs of French and Netherlandish composers as late as the 16th century but gradually disappeared in favour of free song or chanson. The repertory of the latter part of the 15th century is represented by the song collections published in the early 16th century by Petrucci, with works by such composers as Compère, Alexander Agricola, Japart and Josquin. In the early 16th century, three- and four-part polyphonic arrangements of popular melodies were cultivated at Paris by composers such as Févin and Mouton, and these were succeeded in the second quarter of the century by a new type of Parisian chanson, characterized by a strongly rhythmic, syllabic style. The latter continued to be cultivated even after some chansons had begun to reflect an Italian madrigalian style (c1560–75). From about 1550 the vaudeville repertory began to appear: simple strophic homophonic songs, often performed as lute-songs, which later formed the basis for the air de cour repertory. Towards the end of this period an isolated repertory is represented by the songs composed to vers mesurés à l’antique – attempts to re-create the music of antiquity by pursuing logically theories of poetic rhythm according to syllabic quantity, parallel with some song composition in Italy.
Late 15th-century Spanish song survives chiefly in the manuscript known as the Cancionero de Palacio, a collection of songs mainly with the melody in a soprano or mezzo-soprano register and largely homophonic and non-imitative in texture. The categories of song represented notably include the villancico in its earliest form and the romance. These songs were cultivated in the 16th century in solo settings accompanied by the vihuela de mano; such settings appear first in Luys Milán’s Libro de música de vihuela de mano intitulado El maestro (1536) and lasted until Esteban Daza’s collection El Parnaso (1576). Songs accompanied by single polyphonic string instruments like these became very important in the 16th and 17th centuries (see §1 above and §7 below).
The beginnings of polyphonic song in Germany date from the late 14th and early 15th centuries, with a few polyphonic songs by the Monk of Salzburg and Oswald von Wolkenstein within a mainly monophonic repertory. A more substantial repertory of Tenorlieder, however, survives from the second half of the 15th century and the first half of the 16th, and this began to displace the monophonic repertory in importance. (The Tenorlied may be said to have survived into the 18th century in the form of the German Protestant chorale elaboration.) Tenorlieder are mainly non-imitative, with the melody line in the tenor part. Some were sung as solo songs, with the other parts allocated to instruments, some as partsongs; in those intended to be sung in the latter way all the voices are provided with the text. It is possible that surviving two-part arrangements of songs by 16th-century German lutenists were intended to be performed with the melody sung in the same fashion as in Spanish songs to the vihuela de mano, but there are no published collections of lute-songs in Germany parallel to those from other European countries. A further category of German song of this period is represented by the quodlibet.
The monophonic religious song repertory of Germany was in the early 16th century extended by the creation of the Lutheran chorale, as that of Bohemia had been in the 15th century by Hussite song, and the Lutheran chorale, like Hussite song, was to some extent derived from pre-Reformation song and dependent on the style of plainchant. The chorales in due course gave rise to a very fruitful tradition of polyphonic elaborations by a great variety of composers, as to a lesser extent did the comparable versifications of the psalms in the Genevan Psalter of the Reformed (Calvinist) tradition.
Secular polyphonic song in early 16th-century England included a distinctive tradition of so-called freemen’s (? ‘three men’s’) songs, which superseded the French-influenced English polyphonic song of the 15th century: these are partsongs for three voices, all provided with the text in the sources. Lute-songs, though known to have been cultivated as early as the reign of Henry VIII, scarcely survive in England from before the late 16th century. Partsongs exist also from the mid-16th century, before the rise of the consort song (see §7 below).
Italian song in the late 15th and early 16th centuries is represented by the frottola, a type of light, homophonic song, with the melody usually in the highest of four parts; 11 volumes of frottolas were published in the early 16th century by Petrucci. They appear to have been sung either as partsongs or as solos with instrumental (e.g. lute) accompaniment. The last known collection of frottolas was published in 1531, by which time fashion had turned to villanella, villotta and madrigal. The madrigal, only indirectly influenced by the frottola, appeared in published collections from 1530. It represents the chief form of 16th- and early 17th-century song in general; in it the chief composers worked out the techniques (including word-setting) that most fully realized the potential of the musical language of the age.
For further details see Canti carnascialeschi; Chanson; Chorale; Frottola; Luther, Martin, §2; Madrigal, §II; Pastoral, §3; Psalms, metrical; Quodlibet; Romance, §1; Tenorlied; Vaudeville; Vers mesurés; Villancico; Villanella; Villotta.
The English madrigal repertory was created during some 30 years, from the publication in 1588 by Nicholas Yonge of his Musica transalpina; it was perfected by such composers as Byrd, Weelkes and Wilbye. The English madrigal owed much to the Italian madrigal repertory, but the other categories of secular song cultivated at the time grew out of indigenous traditions, such as the solo song accompanied by a string consort, composed since the middle of the 16th century and dependent on a domestic tradition of consort playing before that time; the largest collection of all is Byrd’s Psalmes, Sonets, & Songs of 1588, and the consort song still survived in Gibbons’s Madrigals of 1612.
The consort song, and also no doubt lute-songs that have not survived, underlie the tradition of published English lute-songs beginning with Dowland’s First Book of Songes or Ayres (1597) and ending with John Attey’s First Booke of Ayres (1622). Dowland is the supreme master in this tradition of music written by professional composers for both professional and amateur performers. Most of the repertory comprises strophic songs; elaborate introductions and interludes are generally avoided. In the best of these songs, the principles of word-setting that had been applied to Italian settings in the madrigal were now worked out thoroughly in terms of English verses.
The progressive tendencies of the period, towards increased expressiveness and heightened emotion, are more fully reflected in the solo songs devised specifically as a vehicle for these tendencies in Italy. Some, like the members of Bardi’s Camerata, believed that these Italian monodies reproduced ancient Greek practice, apart from the language of the texts. Some of the most distinctive features of these songs are apparent as early as the 1580s and 90s, for example in songs from the Bottegari Lutebook (I-MOe C 311). Monodies are mostly for high voice, and the more madrigalian ones have wayward, highly expressive vocal lines over relatively static basses and simple chords on a lute or other instrument; individual expressive words and exclamations in the text are apt to carry elaborate ornamentation and to give rise to unusual harmonies. Aria-like songs are more flowing and diatonic. Monody is an extreme example of a general tendency in many 17th-century songs – even arias, including those based on dances – towards throwing the melody line into sharp relief and reducing the musical elaboration of the accompaniment.
The 1630s saw the development in Italy of a longer form divided into short sections, the cantata, which subsequently became the most important category of secular song both in Italy and elsewhere. The rise of tonality later in the century allowed the sections of the cantata to be increased in scale and contributed to the development of the da capo aria used in operas, oratorios and cantatas by Italian composers such as Alessandro Scarlatti and subsequently by Germans, including Bach and Handel.
Italian song became widespread in late 16th-century Germany and Austria, and its influence may be seen in the adoption from 1567 of the villanella by Regnart and of the canzonetta by H.L. Hassler (Canzonette, 1590). These songs, modelled on the simpler Italian homophonic songs of the late 16th century, came increasingly to supersede the older polyphonic tradition of German song, notably in the Musica boscareccia (1621–8) of Schein. In 1623 Johann Nauwach introduced monody to German song (Libro primo di arie passeggiate), and the continuo lied was established in Heinrich Albert’s eight books of Arien, a term analogous to the French air and the English ayre; these Arien include simple strophic songs as well as some in a declamatory style. The tradition of German strophic continuo songs persisted at various regional centres in the work of Adam Krieger, Philipp Erlebach and others, up to about the end of the century, when composers turned increasingly to the italianate da capo aria, as can be seen in Bach’s cantatas. (For details see Thomas, 1963.)
In Bohemia, sacred strophic continuo songs, many based on dances, appear in the collections of A.V. Michna (Česká mariánská muzika, 1647) and J.J. Božan (Slavíček rajský, 1719); da capo arias are found in the Opella ecclesiastica of J.A. Plánický (1723). Collections of secular vernacular song, of purely local importance, appeared also in the Low Countries (e.g. J.A. Ban: Zangh-Bloemzel, 1642); the monodic style was reflected there as early as 1626 in the Neder-landtsche Gedenck-clanck of Adriaen Valerius. Sacred song collections for both Catholics and Protestants appeared throughout this period and long afterwards; in the publication of Dutch song Etienne Roger played a leading part, as he did in international music publication.
In the late 16th century French chansons could be sung as solo songs, with the soloist taking the top part and the lower parts either taken by a group of instruments or arranged for a single instrument (e.g. lute). This practice influenced the development of the air de cour, which is first encountered with the Livre d’airs de cour miz sur le luth of Adrian Le Roy (1571) and was taken up particularly in the 17th and 18th centuries. Such songs are mainly strophic settings of love-poetry, often characterized by a simple note-against-note style (though sometimes with considerable embellishment of the solo line) and an irregular metre influenced by the musique mesurée of the period, with note lengths dependent on syllabic quantity. Within the repertory a simpler category of airs à boire and a more complex category of airs sérieuxmay be distinguished, and, from the late 17th century, a category of simple pastoral songs termed brunettes. Muted traces of the Italian monodic style can be detected in songs of the repertory, especially those of Pierre Guédron. Greater polyphonic complexity is represented in the elaborations, for domestic rather than church use, of the Geneva psalm tunes by Claude Le Jeune and others. Another category of French song of this period is the noël.
The Italian monodic style became known in England about 1610 and was imitated in masque and theatre songs and in dialogues. Throughout the century the repertory of the English ayre contained both declamatory and ‘tuneful’ or dance-like songs; in the first half of the century, Henry Lawes was the most successful exponent of the declamatory style, which he based on the rhythm of English speech without being constricted by the theories of syllabic quantity underlying the French musique mesurée. From the mid-century, song collections published by Playford were very popular; these contained ayres, glees (short tuneful partsongs, mainly homophonic) and catches (canons, mainly in three parts, often featuring obscene double entendre). Towards the end of the century, English song was dominated by Purcell (and to a lesser extent Blow). Purcell grafted the Italian style on to the native tradition; he raised the declamatory style to new heights and made it the vehicle for intense expressiveness. For some of his large-scale songs, such as the Evening Hymn and O solitude my sweetest choice, he used the device of a ground bass, but from the late 1680s he came to prefer large-scale forms, such as the da capo aria, which depended on tonality. The influence of major–minor tonality may be seen towards the end of the century also in the smaller ‘tuneful’ ayres of other composers, now constructed from regular balanced strains with cadences on the tonic and dominant.
For further details see Air, §2; Air de cour; Aria; Balletto; Brunette; Camerata; Cantata, §I; Canzonetta; Catch; Consort song; Glee; Lied, §II; Madrigal; Monody; Noël; Serenata; Villanella.
The 18th century is often represented as a low-point in the history of European song; and it is true that the high degree of unity between text and music achieved earlier by Dowland and Purcell, or later by Schubert and Wolf, is found in few songs of the period. Moreover, as far as is known, songwriting in Italy, Spain, the Low Countries and France was very largely diverted into theatrical and church music. Many songs have a transparent simplicity, even naivety, in several of the national traditions.
This simplicity can often, however, be ascribed to the increasing importance attached by composers and their public to sincerity, lack of affectation, accessibility and, sometimes, sentimentality. The search for these qualities led musicians in various directions. First, folksongs were now for the first time collected and valued as a survival of the past, possessing a unique artistic force related to their simplicity and capable of serving as models for art song (see the arguments advanced by Johann Abraham Peter Schulz in Lieder im Volkston, ii, 1785). The folk repertories of Europe and elsewhere served to open up new musical horizons. A seemingly opposite movement, paradoxically, sprang out of similar roots: many simple songs of the period, placed like those in earlier periods in the service of didacticism and propaganda, were made available to a public larger and more diverse than ever before, and in the process they helped to suppress some genuine folk repertories. Hymnody, for example, enjoyed an enormous flowering, especially in the Protestant churches, which, beginning from the German Moravians, began to export hymnody to non-European indigenous populations which had not previously cultivated European song. Thirdly, in art song – as in the songs of Gluck – a distinct reaction can often be seen against what was thought over-elaborate, especially in operatic song.
During the 18th century art song came to have its predominant modern meaning of solo song with an independent keyboard accompaniment. In England, Playford had mentioned the possibility of harpsichord accompaniment as early as the middle of the 17th century; throughout this period the guitar, formerly an alternative to the lute, was increasingly, though as yet never completely, superseded by a keyboard instrument. Even when a keyboard instrument was used, however, songs were generally notated simply as a melody and bass; fully realized right-hand parts for keyboard, though still not always independent of the vocal line, began to appear in the second half of the century (in France in Plaisir d’amour by J.-P.-G. Martini, 1784; in England in Haydn’s 14 canzonets in the 1790s).
During the 18th century the old cantional hymn tradition diminished in importance in Germany, and, in the ‘songless period’ of that language area at the beginning of the century, secular song had been channelled almost entirely into operatic arias. New traditions appeared, however, and since the splendid promise of English 17th-century song remained unfulfilled, Germany came to enjoy primacy in the composition of art song by the 19th century. German secular song began afresh in the 1730s with such collections as Rathgeber’s Tafel-Confect (from 1733), in which the quodlibet achieved renewed importance, and Sperontes’s Singende Muse an der Pleisse (1736). This repertory of secular song increased notably after the mid-century, centring particularly on the Berlin lied schools, and continued without a break into the lied tradition of the 19th century. Slightly earlier, in Catholic Austria, Germany, Bohemia, Moravia and Poland, a widespread tradition of church songs had been inaugurated, including such categories as the pastorella, which continued to be composed by local organists and schoolmasters into the 19th century.
Some of these songs, both sacred and secular, are cantatas, but most are strophic songs governed by tonality and constructed from balanced strains. Songs in the style of this period, based on dances, even penetrated into the Ashkenazi synagogues of eastern Europe and, before folksong came to occupy collectors at the end of the century, into Russia (G.N. Teplov: Mezhdu delom bezdel'e, published during the 1750s).
A deliberately simple style was adopted by some German composers in songs from the Singspiel repertory and in so-called ‘folklike songs’ (volkstümliche Lieder), student songs and so on; the simple ‘classical’ songs of Gluck, Zelter and Reichardt may be mentioned. A simple style of vernacular Czech secular song, related to that of his vernacular sacred music, was inaugurated also in Bohemia by J.J. Ryba in the early 19th century. Some simple songs in Germany were intended for religious or quasi-religious groups (e.g. the Moravians, whose hymnody influenced that of England and America and who published a hymnbook for the indigenous Greenland population as early as 1772; and the freemasons, whose collections appeared from the 1740s).
In England, Handel was the most eminent figure in theatrical song; da capo arias predominate in his operas, although they are not universal, and their proportion is smaller in his oratorios. A simple popular style, derived from that of the collections of Playford and D’Urfey, appears in The Beggar’s Opera (1728) as in the broadside ballads of the period. Elegance rather than depth of passion generally came to colour the hundreds of songs, some still well known, that were sung at the pleasure gardens in London (e.g. Marylebone and Vauxhall) and elsewhere. These songs were mainly strophic; later in the century many were composed in rondo form. Among them Scottish and Irish ‘folksongs’ enjoyed a wide vogue and were imitated by many composers (including Boyce and Arne in their theatre music); towards the end of the century various publishers, notably George Thomson, commissioned arrangements of folksongs from well-known continental composers, including Haydn and Beethoven. A related offshoot of the 18th-century British song tradition began to appear during the 1770s in New England.
Generally speaking, the 18th-century secular British song repertory, unlike that of Germany, did not lead directly to a repertory of serious Romantic song; its inheritance is to be found much more in popular 19th-century drawing-room ballads. Similarly, the widespread tradition of hymns and sacred songs that flowed from the 18th-century evangelical revival in England remained without serious artistic pretensions in the 19th century. Both these repertories were widely known, however, and must have exercised a strong influence on the musical sensibility of the population in general.
French 18th-century song outside opera is represented not only by the cantata and cantatille but also by the new category of the romance, which may have originated from the brunette. Romances were another category seeking freedom from affectation and are characterized by a certain degree of conscious archaism. They flourished particularly towards the end of the 18th century and declined after about 1815; some, like the famous Un pauvre petit savoyard, which recurs at various points in Cherubini’s Les deux journées (1800), appear in operas. Noske (1954) distinguished between expressive romances, where the vocal line is closely related to the text and where the keyboard part may be relatively important, and ‘abstract’ romances, where the melody is to some degree independent of the text, and the keyboard part is simple and plays a subordinate role. The influence of French song extended in the late 18th century to Poland and Russia.
For further details see Ballad, §I, 7; Lied, §III; Motet, §IV; Opera, §IV; Pastoral, §5; Pastorella; Quodlibet; Romance, §2; Singspiel; Tonadilla; Villancico, §2–3; Zarzuela, §I.
A far-reaching division occurred in the early 19th-century song repertory between a very large ‘popular’ category (i.e. including recreational song for a mass middle-class amateur market, song for edifying the lower and poorer classes, as well as folksong) and a much smaller ‘serious’ category (i.e. of songs written for connoisseurs and regarded as avoiding the vulgarity of the mass market). The two categories overlap in all European countries (the same composers contributing to both) but are distinct.
The whole repertory, serious or popular, consists mostly of solo songs with piano accompaniment, occasionally with the addition of a second voice or obbligato instruments, including arrangements of theatre songs, as well as hymns and partsongs. The nature of the piano accompaniment, where there is one, is often one of the chief features distinguishing the serious and popular repertories: popular song was generally content with a simple harmonic accompaniment, whereas serious song sometimes gave to the piano a role of equivalent importance with the voice, so that it became a representative of the natural forces surrounding the poet-singer, which themselves were taken to reflect the turmoil of his feelings. This could be done because the piano, by the beginning of this period, was capable of producing a resonant, legato, cantabile tone, but the cantabile tone had not yet been developed to the point where it interfered with the ability of the piano also to provide a discreet guitar-like accompaniment where required. About 1815 a solo voice with piano accompaniment was the medium which for song best combined economy of means with expressive potential.
Another rough means of distinguishing serious from popular song lies in the approach of the composer to declamation. The popular repertory very often adhered to foursquare abstract melodies comparable to those of 18th-century songs, repeated for all the stanzas of the text, whereas serious composers – while never jettisoning the strophic song, however – were often inclined to write through-composed songs, and to reflect the declamation of the text correctly – even to the precise small-scale details of the text – to a degree unmatched since the repertory of monody in the early 17th century. But this did not always lead, as then, to austerity and starkness of setting (though this can be seen, for example, in some of the songs of Dargomïzhsky and Musorgsky): ideas like those of Wagner were influential in Germany and elsewhere, and the accompaniment was often seen as a means of reinforcing the emotional force of the text (see Wagner’s Oper und Drama, 1851). These distinctions are far from watertight, however; and a type of ‘modified strophic’ song – i.e. strophic song, but with musical changes made in successive stanzas for the sake of the text – representing a middle course between the strophic and the through-composed song, is often to be found in both the popular and the serious repertories.
Serious 19th-century song in all Europe took its point of departure primarily from Schubert; though he was not personally responsible for all the novel developments in serious song, he first showed their potential. Although the relatively small song output of Beethoven was crowned in the song cycle An die ferne Geliebte (1816), the Viennese Classical composers did not influence the course of 19th-century solo song as they did 19th-century instrumental music; Schubert’s models were lesser composers such as Zelter and Zumsteeg. His songs are very diverse, including simple and modified strophic settings of great variety and through-composed songs, and reflect the adoption of operatic elements (for example, sections of recitative, as also in Zumsteeg), as well as the tunefulness of the 18th-century lied tradition.
Some later lied composers extended the rhapsodic element in Schubert’s songs, notably Schumann, as in the piano epilogues to the cycles Dichterliebeand Frauenliebe und -leben. Others, in particular Mendelssohn and Brahms, were concerned to perfect the musical shape of their songs, and Mendelssohn demonstrated the same concern even without texts in his Lieder ohne Worte; despite the abstract nature of much 18th-century song, this concern is scarcely a sign of conservatism. Attention to declamation reached its height in Germany towards the end of the century in the songs of Wolf, which reflect Wagner’s word-setting theory (see Kravitt, 1962); at this time the piano was no longer the only obvious choice for the accompanimental medium, and orchestral lieder, anticipated by Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder, gained a new importance: examples include the lieder of Mahler and arrangements of some of Wolf’s songs. Throughout the century, songs from German (as from Italian and French) opera enjoyed widespread popularity outside their operatic contexts.
German influence predominated in this period in the serious art song of Bohemia (Tomášek, Smetana, Dvořák etc.), the Netherlands and Scandinavia (Grieg), in some cases coupled with a certain degree of local colour derived from folk music. In Britain (as also elsewhere), large numbers of drawing-room ballads, many originally theatrical songs, mainly strophic, with separate introductions and simple chordal accompaniments, were produced for a domestic amateur market; in them composers focussed their interest primarily, as in 18th-century song and in early 19th-century Italian operatic song, on producing well-turned and singable melodies, and mostly ignored the potential of the piano accompaniment. Ballads remained popular, even if despised by some cognoscenti, until well after the beginning of the 20th century. They were cultivated also in America (notably by Foster) and elsewhere in the English-speaking world. Some British and American composers created a small serious repertory of song with English texts, modelled on the German lied, sometimes also with a certain degree of French influence (Sterndale Bennett, Macfarren, Parry, Stanford, Parker, MacDowell).
Another widely familiar song repertory is represented by Protestant hymnody, produced in large quantities in 19th-century Britain and, together with other partsongs and choral music, made available to an increasing cross-section of society, both at home and overseas, especially after the introduction of the tonic sol-fa system of notation. In some places outside Europe this tradition of choral song became established among the indigenous populations and has not yet disappeared (e.g. in some Pacific islands, or among the Africans of South Africa). It is comparable to the song traditions established among black Americans after emancipation from slavery, for example by the Jubilee Singers.
In France, the romance was channelled from the 1820s into drawing-room songs (sometimes called ‘chansonettes’) comparable in style and popularity to the drawing-room ballads of 19th-century England. From the 1830s Schubert’s songs became known in France and contributed to the rise of the mélodie, a song category in which the symmetrical and strophic structure of the earlier romances is sometimes jettisoned and the piano accompaniment given greater attention; it is thus the French counterpart to the lied. Berlioz was the first major composer to be associated with the mélodie; his most important contributions to the genre are the six songs of Les nuits d’été (1840–41), which he later orchestrated. The mélodie was subsequently developed in the songs of Fauré (e.g. the cycle La bonne chanson, 1892–4), Duparc, Chausson and Debussy (e.g. the Chansons de Bilitis, 1899).
From the late 18th century the russkaya pesnya (‘Russian song’, understood as being ‘folklike’) had gained popularity in opera and thence in domestic music-making in Russia, and collections of folksongs were published in the last quarter of the 18th century. Together with romances in the French style, and often with French texts, which were favoured from the 1790s, ‘Russian songs’ continued to be cultivated by amateurs in the 19th century. The romance persisted in Russia until the 20th century in the work of Rachmaninoff and Medtner. The importance of 19th-century Russian song derives primarily, however, from the songs of The Five, especially Musorgsky, who developed the declamatory style of Dargomïzhsky to express a starkly direct realism; Musorgsky was the first eastern European composer to achieve a declamatory style tailored to his language, as Bartók and Janáček were to do later.
Polish song developed initially from Polish theatrical music and French song in the late 18th century; it was later modified through contact with the German lied, notably in the song output of Moniuszko.
19th-century Italian secular song was almost entirely operatic, apart from drawing-room songs, which also drew on the elements of operatic style; Italian operatic songs were popular in the domestic market as in the theatre. Spanish secular song during this period is also represented chiefly by the Italian operatic repertory.
For further details see Ballad, §II; Gassenhauer; Lied, §IV; Mélodie; Spiritual, §I.
Immediately before World War I the established traditions of serious song were subject to far-reaching experimentation, as in Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet and Buch der hängenden Gärten, representing settings of Stefan George (1908), and his Pierrot lunaire (1912), Stravinsky’s settings of Japanese lyrics (1913) and Ravel’s Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé (1913). Tonality was largely jettisoned, chamber groups rather than the piano or the full orchestra were used for accompaniment, vocal lines were of extreme virtuoso difficulty, and song was turned – as it seemed unprecedentedly – into ‘absolute’ music. At the same time, in these and other songs, experiments were made with declamation: Schoenberg and others overturned established notions of declamation; Bartók established in his songs new conventions of declamation suggested by folksong; Ives experimented, even before 1910, with spoken text and with the realistic imitation in music of the patterns of spoken texts.
From the early years of the century German composers after Schoenberg, Berg and Webern largely abandoned song as such in favour of opera; exceptions include Hindemith (Das Marienleben, 1922–3, rev. 1936–48) and Richard Strauss, whose Vier letzte Lieder (1948) represent the final, glorious sunset of the Romantic lied. French art song was still represented at the beginning of this period by Fauré; it subsequently continued along broadly traditional tonal lines in the work of Poulenc and Milhaud, though with satirical elements and a certain degree of influence from the music hall. Messiaen contributed to the repertory from the 1930s.
After 1910, German and French influences remained the most important to affect art song outside Germany and France and were supplemented in most countries by native traditions – either rediscovered historical repertories or that of folksong. Composers everywhere drew both on the 19th-century German and French traditions (the Romantic lied, and the mélodieof Fauré) and those of the 20th century, represented respectively by Schoenberg and Les Six.
New song repertories, largely along traditional lines, developed in several European countries, such as Finland and Lithuania, in the early 20th century. Collectors of folksong were active in Great Britain (Cecil Sharp, Vaughan Williams) and Hungary (Bartók) from at least the first years of the century, and their activity led not only to the rediscovery of folk repertories but also to the renewal of the composition of art song. The British song repertory (Vaughan Williams, Warlock, Frank Bridge, Ireland etc.) was marked by close attention to declamation in the traditional manner (this partly deriving from French influence) and to the quality of the poetry set; it reached a peak in the songs of Britten and Tippett. Similarly, new repertories of Italian, Spanish and Latin-American song, outside opera, developed in the early years of the century, inspired in Italy primarily by the rediscovery of Renaissance music (Casella, Pizzetti etc.) and in Spain and Latin America also to some extent by folk music (Albéniz, Granados, Falla etc.). In Italy Dallapiccola combined a lyrical style in song with serialism.
In Poland Szymanowski successfully combined French and other influences. In Russia, the romance continued to be cultivated (Grechaninov, Rachmaninoff, Medtner); songs in a style comparable to that of Musorgsky were produced by Prokofiev. In the early 1930s Russian composers were required by the state to avoid Modernism, subjectivism and formalism in music, and solo song was considerably simplified by most composers. Both in Russia and elsewhere in Europe (e.g. Nazi Germany) unison political songs for massed singing were cultivated; these have been used also in communist China, in a broadly European-derived musical style.
Popular song underwent a major change of emphasis through the 20th century. At the end beginning of the 1990s, ragtime from America gave new impetus to popular song, which gradually replaced the earlier drawing-room ballad with forms more orientated towards new types of social dance. This, combined with the beginning of recorded sound and the rise of popular music theatre, allowed the rapid and wide dissemination of new trends. After World War I the widespread commercial popular music characterized by Tin Pan Alley was established (see also Songwriter). While remaining almost exclusively strophic and tonal, with clear distinctions of verse and chorus, the forms of the songs gradually became more sophisticated through, for example, the chromatic inflections in both melody and harmony used by George Gershwin or through structural developments as in the extended form of Cole Porter’s Begin the Beguine. As the commercial (and geographical) boundaries of popular music widened, so did the range of styles that were subsumed within the popular song, such as developing jazz styles, Latin American features, blues, country music and later hybrids such as soul (see Popular music and Pop).
The growing importance of recordings and the establishment of radio broadcasting caused popular songs to become increasingly identified not only with particular performers (as had long been the case through theatre appearances) but with specific performances. Indeed, the identification of the performer with the song in a quasi-autobiographical context – the singer as auteur – has been the most important shift in the context of the popular song in the 20th century. Ultimately it led through the Singer-songwriter developments of the 1960s, particularly identified with Bob Dylan, to the situation at the end of the century where the writing of songs by performers for themselves had become the standard, and the separation of the roles of songwriter and performer had become the exception. Thus, the recording has become the primary form of the pop song (consequently with instrumental textures also integral to that song’s identity) rather than a notated and printed version as at the start of the century.
Serious song in the USA reflects a generally heterogeneous variety of styles (experimentalism, serial technique, late Romantic style, American popular music, Stravinsky’s neo-classical style etc.). Many composers have contributed to this repertory (Ives, Virgil Thomson, David Diamond, Copland, Babbitt, Barber etc.), though as in other countries song composition has generally not been in the forefront of composers’ attention.
For further details see Blues; Jazz; Musical; Popular music, §I; Sprechgesang.
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