Renaissance Improvisation and Musicology

Abstract

[1] Musicologists like me, who study Renaissance music, have usually studied surviving musical scores and documents. We knew that there were unwritten musical traditions, but since we thought we had no access to them, we made little attempt to recover them. Several developments in musicology and music theory have changed all that.[2] First, Rob Wegman published an article (1996) stating that the role of the composer first emerged at the end of the fifteenth century; before that all musicians were "makers" or improvisers. But he did not explain how or what they improvised.[3] Then Jessie Ann Owens (1997) showed that composers did not use scores when they composed Renaissance music. Her evidence-treatises and some of the few surviving autograph manuscripts from the Renaissance-was compelling. But it was hard for most of us to imagine how they actually did it.[4] Peter Schubert pointed out that the term "counterpoint" in Renaissance treatises did not mean written composition: instead it meant improvised polyphony for singers (2002, 503). He started to figure out what musicians could improvise, and how they did it: he taught himself to do it, and taught others, including me.[5] The idea of counterpoint as improvised polyphony is in stark contrast to the standard view of counterpoint, as in Gradus ad Parnassum (Ascent to Parnassus) by Johann Joseph Fux (1966), where counterpoint is presented as the least instinctive, most controlled form of written composition. Centuries of counterpoint students have agonized over every first-species exercise; canons are considered the most difficult, arcane form of composition, which only the most accomplished composers could write.

Contrapuntal Direction and the Diagnosis of Compositional Relationships in Fifteenth-Century Masses

“…[2.8] Julie Cumming considered a similar problem in her work on two-part contrapuntal frameworks (Cumming 2013). Cumming draws on Richard Crocker's definition of the two-part framework as a contrapuntal relationship between two voices following a specified set of voiceleading rules (Cumming 2013, 177-79).…”

The Italian Keyboard Toccata c.1615–1650: A Repository for Oral Compositional Practices

“…Counterpoint during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries meant primarily mental counterpoint a skill that was learned by every choir boy and governed by strict rules. 33 It was practised at all levels of society and by singers and instrumentalists alike, as even the artisan classes sang sortisatio, a kind of orally composed polyphony. 34 Well into the seventeenth century, knowledge and skill in counterpoint is the most important attribute of the 'perfect musician' cited in a letter from cornettist Luigi Zenobi to his patron.…”

Improvisation as a Way of Knowing

“…Students today who play works of music that contain these same compositional devices must know about these schemata in some way in that they are able to produce them, but the way they know may not afford the ability to improvise with them. One could also look to practices of Renaissance improvisation (Cumming 2013;Schubert 2002) with a similar perspective. This is not to say that these practices would have had exactly the same cognitive and neural correlates as those described in the proposed experiments above, although it is feasible that there would be cognitive similarities despite the historical and cultural differences.…”