Dear Roman, I think it's a fair question, because towns and villages have been around for many centuries, as have the rich and the poor. It is reasonable to suppose that music has not always been the same for all strata of society. However, it is difficult to give a thorough answer through lack of evidence. The music of illiterate musicians tends not to get written down and recorded for posterity. We know quite a bit about church music, because much of it was written down.
As far as I can ascertain, art music before c.1500 was largely the preserve of the professional musician. The 16th century saw the flourishing of amateur music-making, which happens to coincide with the use of tablature for the lute. Henry VIII was no doubt an important influence on amateur music-making in England, having all his children study music and learn the lute. Yet instruments were expensive, so they remained the preserve of wealthy people. To answer Bill's question, I would suggest that people out in the country would probably not have heard as much music as townfolk, but they would have sung, and a few might have played instruments such as the bagpipe or hurdy-gurdy. Breughel's painting of a meal with a bagpiper is the sort of image I have for country music: simple tunes with no more than a drone for accompaniment. Polyphony would have been for the church or sophisticated musical circles. Lutes and viols were played by professionals or wealthy amateurs, but would have been too expensive for most people. Occasionally we get a glimpse of what music might have sounded like away from church and court, when folk tunes are incorporated into some more sophisticated setting. Besard's Branles de Village (1603), for example, give us a taste of what rustic music-making may have been like, albeit through the medium of a lute duet. In many ways I agree with what you say about the separation of mass culture and elite culture. It is too simplistic to say that country folk had their music, wealthy folk had theirs, and never the twain should meet. No doubt there was an overlap between the two. Some of the earliest Scots tunes consisted of a single melodic line, a narrow range of notes, and were sometimes pentatonic. However, they don't survive in that simple form. Instead they survive in lute tablature, with bass notes added for the sake of the lute, crudely tracking the original melody in consecutive octaves. This old pentatonic melody has been adapted in that way: |\ |\ |\ |\ |\ |\ | |\ | |\ | | _______________________________ ____a____|___________|_,a____|_ _______d_|_a_____a_d_|__a____|_ _a_______|____c______|_______|_ _________|___________|__c____|_ _________|_c_________|_______|_ a //a One famous occasion when folk music upstaged more high-brow music, was when Queen Mary pulled Henry Purcell down a peg or two. She'd heard enough of Purcell's music, and wanted something a bit easier on her ear, so she asked Mrs Arabella Hunt to sing the Scots folk song, Cold and Raw, to the accompaniment of a lute. The irony is that when people like Cecil Sharp start collecting and notating traditional music and dance, they destroy an element of that culture, i.e. the way it evolves naturally of its own accord. Writing it down fossilises it. Yet if such things were not written down, they would be lost altogether. Much the same goes for lute music. When Bill writes about historically informed performances as "music in aspic", it's the fossilisation which bothers him. Old music can be like a dead creature preserved in a bottle of formaldehyde. I believe that, if we want to understand music which was played many years ago, we should study it as much as possible, but when we come to perform it, our primary aim should be to do what we can to bring it back to life. Best wishes, Stewart. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Roman Turovsky" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "bill" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; "Stewart McCoy" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: "Lute Net" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Tuesday, August 31, 2004 3:43 PM Subject: Re: hip > > earlier this year i asked a question about early country music - what > > were untrained, informal instrumentalists of the time playing outside > > the traditional, well documented repertoire of renaissance and baroque > > music in the towns? > Separation of mass-culture from elite-culture is a much later phenomenon, so > the question wasn't very appropriate. > RT >
