Re: Nature, nurture, history, and style

Hello, there, Paul Erlich, and I'd like to join in emphasizing the
excellent point you made in discussing the relationship between theory
and practice: there is a mutual interaction, but with theory often
_following_ practice, whether in the immediate process of
experimenting with a given tuning or style, or in the longer
historical process of stylistic change.

For example, let's consider the very apt illustration of early organum
during the 9th-11th centuries which both you and Monz have discussed.

While the question of an actual polyphonic practice of some kind in
Classical times is a controversial one, I have noted at least that the
concept of _symphonia_ or simultaneous consonance as described by
Boethius (c. 480-524) nicely predicts the stable concords of early
organum as well as the later complex styles of Gothic polyphony.

However, what neither Boethius nor the early organum treatises tell us
is how the art will evolve, more specifically in such matters as the
use of unstable intervals and of the various kinds of motion
(parallel, similar, oblique, contrary).

By around the late 11th century, we see a style emerging where all the
basic stable concords (octave, fifth, fourth, unison) get used,
associated with a greater variety of resolutions from unstable to
stable intervals.

Near the end of the 12th century, now within the Gothic era of
architecture and music, we come to a quantum leap with Perotin and his
colleagues, who regularly compose in three or four voices. It is like
a leap from 2-D to 3-D graphics: we are in a new and rich universe of
vertical combinations and progressions.

Here it seems to me that practice is definitely in the lead, with a
theory of multivoice sonorities following about a century later, with
Johannes de Grocheio, Coussemaker's Anonymous I, and Jacobus of Liege
in the epoch around 1300.

While part of this thread concerns following or breaking the rules,
sometimes composers such as Guillaume de Machaut may be in the
position of _choosing_ between different sets of rules, at times
picking and choosing so as to indulge in liberties which any single
set of rules might exclude.

For example, Machaut seems to have a penchant both for traditional
13th-century liberties with major seconds or ninths and minor sevenths
(e.g. Jacobus, who describes these intervals as partial "concords"),
and for the new 14th-century leanings toward more emphasis on thirds
and sixths (e.g. Johannes de Muris or a student reporting his
teachings).

Machaut himself refers to his style as a "new forge," maybe suggesting
this kind of free and creative synthesis.

We could also look at the development of polyphonic forms such as the
ballade, virelai (or Italian ballata), and rondeau. There wasn't, to
my knowledge, any handbook available in the later 13th century to tell
Adam de la Halle how to write a three-voice rondeau, or in the 14th
century to tell Machaut how to arrange his cadences. Practice
developed its own logic, its own organizational plans.

Maybe one analogy would be to compare theory to a map or compass, and
practice to the actual landscape or terrain -- with the important
amendment that this musical "terrain" is changing even as one attempts
to describe it.

Thank you, Paul, for making a point which can't be overemphasized.

As a medievalist, I often want to express my view that medieval
theorists are valuable sources of information -- as valuable as
theorists of later eras. However, I certainly would not wish to claim
that they are somehow more able to sum up or predict musical practice
than theorists of later eras; the limitations of theory, and sovereign
liberties of practice, seem to unite all eras of Western European
music, and maybe the musics of various world traditions.

Most appreciatively,

Margo Schulter
mschulter@value.net