Last year the vocal ensemble I belong to did a concert of some of the choral music of the 15th-century Burgundian School, and as part of it, we included a lecture by a local art historian about the art of the same period, particularly Van Eyck. Here is the introduction to the program notes I wrote for the occasion; what do you think?
During the fifteenth century, the area then known as Burgundy consisted of parts of northern and eastern France, Belgium and the Netherlands, controlled by the court of the Dukes of Burgundy. At this time the Duchy of Burgundy was the most powerful part of Europe. During the reigns of Philip the Good and Charles the Bold, Burgundy became a prosperous commercial center, and these wealthy noblemen lavished money on the visual arts and music. The middle class became wealthy as well, providing a market for commissioned paintings and musical works. Musicians and artists from elsewhere came to Burgundy to study, and Burgundian composers, now in high demand, traveled around Europe, especially to Italy in order to work for the Church.
The search for new modes of musical expression was matched in the visual arts as well. A case in point is the art of Jan Van Eyck. This great artist has sometimes been credited with the invention of oil painting, but that material had already been in limited use during the previous century. Van Eyck’s true innovation in the use of oil paint was in the way he layered it in semitransparent glazes, making his paintings far more realistic than the works of the previous generation. The Netherlandish painters’ increasing emphasis on realism had a theological basis consistent with the religious scholars of the early Renaissance. During the Middle Ages, church doctrine had rejected the “real” world as unholy, but by the early Renaissance the material world, with all its small details and even its imperfections, was beginning to be seen as the immanent revelation of God’s intent. All aspects of the world were of God’s creation, and with this “new art,” painters of Van Eyck’s generation sought to represent all tangible things as accurately as possible – not to embrace realism for its own sake, but to reproduce the earthly evidence of God’s work. For example, Van Eyck painted the Virgin Mary as a very realistic human being, with great attention to every detail of her features, jewelry, clothing and surroundings – but she appears in many of his paintings to be much larger than the other human figures, as a way of symbolizing her importance.
Similarly, the composers of the period incorporated symbolism into their music. Much of this symbolism relates to the manner in which various texts were treated. In some cases the symbolism was very subtle, even mathematical, and might be noticed only by other musicians. In Guillaume Dufay’s 1436 motet Nuper Rosarum Flores, for example, the composer may have structured the piece to correspond with the dimensions of the Brunelleschi dome at the cathedral in Florence, where the piece was first performed, or of King Solomon’s temple as described in the Bible. In addition, the aesthetic aspects of music were already the subject of scholars and philosophers, and the development of methods of musical notation made it possible by 1250 to create and accurately describe specific rules of composition. The notion that some sounds and combinations of sounds were more desirable – beautiful - than others was essential to these rules. For example, the interval of the augmented fourth/diminished fifth, called a tritone because it consists of three adjacent whole tones, has been classified as a dissonance since the early Middle Ages. In a C major scale, the tritone is the interval from F to B. This interval will be familiar to everyone; it is often used in police sirens because its dissonance attracts attention. It was once called the diabolus in musica (“devil in music”), and it was usually avoided in ecclesiastical singing and composition by musicians seeking to create music that was objectively beautiful.
The Burgundian School of composers was the first generation of what is sometimes known as the Netherlands or Franco-Flemish School, the most famous members of which were Dufay, Gilles Binchois, Antoine Busnois and John Dunstable. Later in the century, composers like Johannes Ockeghem, Pierre De La Rue and Josquin Des Prez continued to develop and refine the Burgundians’ ornate and abstract polyphony, eventually leading to the more familiar styles of the High Renaissance. The Franco-Flemish musical sound itself might be called full and vivid as well as strange and complex - words that might also be used to describe the visual art of the period. Many scholars consider the flowering of music and art in Burgundy to mark the beginning of the Renaissance. Dufay, who retained some of the old medieval compositional practices while embracing and inventing new ones, was clearly a transitional figure and was one of the first of the great Renaissance composers, just as Van Eyck is considered one of the first of the great Renaissance painters.
While most people who are interested in art have heard of Jan Van Eyck, unless you’re a devoted fan of early music you might not have heard of Dufay, or of Johannes Ockeghem, or Josquin Des Prez, even though these fifteenth-century composers are considered by many musicians and scholars to be the greatest composers of their generation. Maybe that’s because although art exists in space, music exists only in time. Once Van Eyck had finished the famous Ghent Altarpiece, it became a permanent, immutable thing, valued and admired – and repeatedly stolen - for the next five centuries. But what about the music Van Eyck surely must have heard in the court of Phillip the Good and at St. Bavo Cathedral, where his magnificent altarpiece was consecrated and where it once again, finally, resides?
The music of Dufay and the other early Burgundians contains clear echoes of its medieval antecedents, but we will also hear how those composers absorbed and invented new styles. By the end of the fifteenth century the music starts to sound a little more familiar to modern ears as composers started making greater use of the triadic harmonies upon which traditional classical music is based. In this concert we will be able to hear that the music of Dufay sounds distinctly different from that of Josquin Des Prez, composed only sixty years later. But because music lives only in time, if it is not performed it is in danger of eventually being forgotten. And, of course, musical styles change.
Composers and other musicians of the time depended for their livelihood on the Church or on their wealthy patrons, and it was assumed and expected that composers would either follow current trends or create new styles for their patrons. Music, especially for the Church, was almost always composed for specific events or rituals, and the notion of a concert like this one was unheard-of. So, after a generation or two the music of even the most respected composers was supplanted by new music for new events, and the older works became regarded as old-fashioned, or were forgotten altogether because they were not performed. In 1470 the Flemish composer and music theorist Johannes Tinctoris wrote, "It is a matter of great surprise that there is no composition written over forty years ago which is thought by the learned as worthy of performance." An interesting exception is the famous French song L’Homme Arme, written during the fifteenth century, sometimes (without much evidence) attributed to Antoine Busnois. The song became the cantus firmus for at least 30 masses, including works by Dufay, De La Rue, Des Prez and Palestrina – and, during the modern era, by Peter Maxwell Davies and Karl Jenkins. But most Burgundian music had fallen out of favor before the end of the Renaissance.
Although painting styles have also changed dramatically between 1400 and the present time, most of the old paintings, even if damaged or faded, have always been in some physical place – a museum or a church or a collection - where they could be seen, studied and appreciated. In our time photography and the Internet have made it possible for everyone to see images of these works, although some paintings – like Van Eyck’s very large Ghent Altarpiece – probably can best be appreciated in situ. Even though artists don’t paint like Van Eyck any more, the excellence of his work and that of his contemporaries and their successors has always been known and acknowledged because the paintings have always existed somewhere in space.
However, the music of the Renaissance was mostly forgotten, unperformed in time and its scores moldering in attics, until the 19th century. In 1828 an Italian music critic, Giuseppe Baini, published a monograph on the music of Palestrina, which helped pique other composers’ interest in the music of previous centuries. Even so, early music was rarely performed in accordance with authenticated historical practices, or heard by the public at all, until the mid-20th century. But today we will decorate an hour or so of time with this wonderful music, and we hope you find it to be just as splendid as a Van Eyck painting.
“All art constantly aspires to the condition of music.” – Walter Pater, art critic and essayist
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