Hard Evidence

If you have read my last few blogs, you will notice that I have a keen interest in uncovering something about the early days of European instrumental performance practice (and the music with its rhythmic and pitch content itself). I feel this area of music history is important because it occurred at the same time as the theoretical and practical tenets of Western music as they existed in burgeoning liturgical contrapuntal music were first documented (at least in a body of commentary that has grown continuously to the present modern era), and though largely undocumented, would have influenced later documented instrumental composition and performance practice. I believe it is unlikely instrumental traditions in the common practice period simply piggy-backed on the developments of vocal music, only imitating the practices existing in a largely liturgical body of work while forgetting the gestural content of improvised or rote-learned music of a previous era. To this claim, I will provide some evidence, though I should make it clear that my endeavor in researching this era of history is to fill a vacuum that I intuitively sense, rather than to explain the meaning of fragmented mysteries calling out from the past.

You may also have noticed that I have been very interested in the transmission of culture between the Christian world of the late middle ages and the Islamic world of the time. While the application of Arabic performance practice has been experimented with by performers of ancient European music, it is ripe fruit for critics apt to find Orientalist undertones in a fantasy of reviving moribund and lost Western traditions with the vitality of an exotic Other. However, suggestive evidence of cultural transmission between East and West at a critical point in the history of European music is pervasive. Furthermore, in the canonization of Western art music and its rigorous defining of itself (and particularly the value laden holding-up of great works of art), musicologists (ever since an awareness of historical literature among musicians and listeners) have tended to misread the significance of works of the past, listening to older music with the aesthetic ears of the present.

The following list includes items which I consider evidence toward the likelihood toward the importance of instrumental music and the Arabic connection in the late middle ages:

1. The transmission of culture from Persia, North Africa and the Arab countries in the form of musical instruments is well documented and obvious. The spread of wind and stringed instruments in the years before the 13th century was rapid, on a large scale, and also included some verifiable aspects of performance practice such as tuning and use of bow (bowing technique was new at this time in Europe, where previous stringed instruments were only plucked).

2. Dance music has its own history, traceable in court dances as far back (maybe further) as the 14th century, and we can see how some basic dance forms and the accompanying music persisted and changed throughout the two or more centuries preceding "modern" instrumental performance practice (such as that of Haydn's music, after which developments in the use of instruments in the modern sonata aesthetic and "absolute" music can be seen clearly). Bach, while so often cited for his significance as a singular genius of profound works and his contribution to model harmonic language and Baroque counterpoint, is also useful in this discussion as he stands in the middle between eras - the modern and the ancient - and wrote music in already archaic dance forms. Bach's appropriation of these forms may be far from authentic, but mark clear evidence of the transmission of secular musical sensibilities from the ancient to the modern.

3. The human apparatus for music has not likely not changed for about 50,000 years - the minimum time that significant evolutionary changes would need. There is nothing about the human brain/mind that would make one more modern therefore more disposed to complexity, skill or advanced musicality than one of earlier Millenia. It is a common fallacy that music some how "developed" from primitive origins without taking into account changing aesthetics. Music of the past did not propose to adhere to the aesthetics of modern taste, and subsequent developments in music cannot be seen as "improvements" in so far as quality or virtuosity are concerned. Virtuosity [read early posting] is a capacity universally distributed in humans in every era and culture.

4. A major increase in the transmission of culture between Europe and the Middle East occurred during the Crusades. While violence, racism and all forms of brutality were rampant during this time, the transmission of culture (including mathematics and engineering) was very real and had real implications.

5. It should be noted, however, that while the Crusades "brought back" a lot of cultural material from far away places, there were areas in Europe of neighbor-transmission. This would include the Muslim occupation of the Iberian peninsula, which offers potentially the most furtile environment for transmission of culture and assimilation of musical sensibility and technique. The Moors, often identified as Arabs, though mostly Berbers in Spain, ruled over a largely indigenous population who were subsequently expelled or forced to convert, following the reclaimation of Christian territory complete in the fall of Grenada under Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492.

This type of Eastern influence on the fringes of the European continent finally calls into question the identity of what is essentially Western about European music. The development of canonical literature involves a transnational system of networks, of conservatories, patrons and ensembles throughout Italy, Germany and France. Clicheed reductions of European music history have it that lyracism is essentially Italian, Germans perfected the meat and potatoes of form, and the French gave us all the spice of orchestration. The great canon of Western musical literature actually does not fall far from this simplistic reduction. Late theorists such as Shenker identify a small group of German and Austrian composers as the supreme exponents of Sonata form. There is also a large gap between the early Baroque and Berlioz (and a good deal after him as well, into the 20th century) during which few if any notable French composers emerge in the canon, and the isn't much from England at all between the Elizabethan madrigals and Elgar. What we see, however, is great production (and recognition) of works in other countries both before and after the Common Practice period. What, then, should "we" as heirs to cultural heritage take as our legacy? With the exception of a body of work consolidated by historic criticism spanning a couple busy centuries, the bonds of what holds European music together as essential are not so tight. Given the fairly obvious Germanic bias in 19th and 20th century music scholarship, I believe it is wrong to look at our own distant past as part of that same canon, which simply did not exist as the single consilidated mass of literature as it was in the 19th century even as recently as 300 years ago. Furthermore, despite the enormous project of counterpoint, the perfect tonal paradigm and concepts of "absolute art music," I believe there is a thread of continuity in instrumental performance practice that persisted through the early days of European instrumental music well into the modern era of documented commentary and notated music.