In this episode of Houghton75, we speak with Kate van Orden, Dwight P. Robinson Jr. Professor of Music. Her selection for our recent exhibition was a 16th century partbook printed by the first music publisher. The book contained the tenor lines of multiple Masses by Josquin de Prez, a master of Renaissance polyphony and one of the first composers whose works were widely disseminated in both manuscript and print.
Find out more about the exhibition and Houghton Library’s 75th anniversary celebrations at http://houghton75.org/hist-75h
Music
Cut Circle. Jesse Rodin, artistic director
http://cutcircle.org
Selections from Missa L’homme armé super voces musicales by Josquin de Prez
Podcast Transcript and Music Notes
[Title sequence background music: Fireworks, Igor Stravinsky, performed by the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra]
Alex Csiszar: Houghton is just this amazing place.
Deidre Lynch: It’s fascinating.
Stephen Greenblatt: It’s yours for the asking, and that is incredible!
Stephanie Sandler: Plus it’s cool.
James Capobianco (JC): Welcome to Houghton75. I’m James Capobianco.
Hannah Ferello (HF): And I’m Hannah Ferello.
[end music]
JC: Houghton Library opened its doors at Harvard in 1942. Throughout 2017, we’re celebrating the library’s world-class collections, and support of research and teaching over the last 75 years.
HF: This podcast is only one of the ways to participate in our year-long program of events that promises a unique glimpse of some of Houghton’s most treasured holdings and the way they inspire scholars and students. Visit houghton75.org for more information.
[background music: Kyrie from the Missa L’homme armé super voces musicales, by Josquin de Prez. Performed by Cut Circle, Jesse Rodin, director. Track 10 on their CD De Orto and Josquin: Music in the Sistine Chapel around 1490 [Disk 2] (Musique en Wallonie, MEW 1265-1266)]
HF: Early printing methods were labor-intensive, expensive processes. Pieces of type had to be meticulously arranged by hand and placed into the printing press, one piece of type for each letter of a work. Once all of the type was arranged, the page could be printed. Then the process started again for the next page. Needless to say, it took a long time to finish printing a full volume.
JC: The printing of music complicated this process further. How could printers print both the staff lines across the page, and the notes that could appear anywhere on the staff?
HF: There wasn’t any type for this sort of thing!
JC: Finally, around 50 years after Gutenberg revealed his famous printing press, an Italian printer named Ottaviano Petrucci found one solution.
HF: To learn more about Petrucci’s early method of printing music, we spoke with Kate van Orden, Dwight P. Robinson Jr. Professor of Music here at Harvard. Her selection for our recent exhibition was a 16th century partbook printed by Petrucci, containing the tenor lines of multiple Masses by Josquin de Prez, a master of Renaissance polyphony and one of the first composers whose works were widely disseminated in both manuscript and print.
[end music]
Kate van Orden (KO): The difficulty for printers is that you have linear staves that ideally will not be broken, and then you have typographical music notes. So the trick is, whereas typography for verbal texts can separate each individual letter and give each its own piece of type, here the staff lines that go across the page need to be unbroken and have continuity.
Ottaviano Petrucci, who solved this particular problem of putting typographical notes on the page along with their linear staff lines, did so by running each sheet through the press twice. He printed in one run the staff lines and we believe the text as well, and then on top of it he used small woodblocks for the large initials and then the typographical noteheads are also printed in that second run through the press. Now this was very difficult to register, and you can imagine that a lot of sheets had the music notes misaligned on the staff. It’s not a very practical or economic solution and so eventually this is abandoned by music printers, but in this very first generation of typographic printing of polyphony, Petrucci was the one with the most beautiful solution.
[background music: Kyrie from the Missa L’homme armé super voces musicales, by Josquin de Prez. Performed by Cut Circle, Jesse Rodin, director. Track 10 on their CD De Orto and Josquin: Music in the Sistine Chapel around 1490 [Disc 2] (Musique en Wallonie, MEW 1265-1266)]
JC: Staff lines, text, initials, notes – music printing included many extra features. Although putting each page through the printing press twice took a lot of time, it was the most efficient method of getting everything onto the page.
HF: Other solutions, such as carving a woodblock of the staff and notes for each page, allowed for the printing to be accomplished in one trip through the press. But running the paper through the press twice was a small price to pay for not carving a unique woodblock for every page.
JC: In addition to the music, the pages of this book feature unusual decoration. Printed to the left of some of the music staves are a pair of dice, one directly above the other. Each pair of dice show a different pair of numbers. Professor Van Orden explained that these unique additions to Josquin’s Mass actually served several purposes.
[end music]
KO: This book is one of four partbooks, each with its own vocal line to the Mass. You can see up in the header this is for the tenor voice. The tenor had a particular job in this piece, which is to sing one piece of plainchant. To sing it over and over again, but each time in a different mensuration and prolation. Meaning that the notes were different lengths. Now the dice on this page show the tenor what mensuration and prolation to use, but because many people were not handy at resolving these little sets of instructions or canons, here Petrucci has included the resolution underneath each line. So that’s what the dice are doing here. And they also allude to the melody of this song, which comes from a love song with the text “shall I never have better than I have,” which here is an allusion to the gaming of dice players and also has a sacred allusion as well.
HF: So we’ve mentioned the term partbook a few times. Partbooks were volumes containing several works, but only in one part. Perhaps the bass part to a group of madrigals or the alto to a set of motets.
JC: Instead of printing all of the parts onto a combined score like we do today, each part of Renaissance music was printed separately. When groups gathered to sing or play instruments, each individual would have their own parts, but not the others. This practice has had a major impact on the modern study of Renaissance music.
KO: I mean, in a certain way partbooks are like the individual parts to a string quartet, where each person has their own music. In the case of instrumentalists, it becomes clear that each person needs their own space to play and so they need their own part. In the Renaissance though, it was actually just very efficient. Instead of printing all the music for all the vocal parts in scores and wasting all that paper when only one person needed a specific line, they separated it out. And moreover, they did not have any scores in the 16th century. They only had parts.
So from my perspective as a musicologist, this is a disaster. Because in many cases, only one or two or three parts of a set of partbooks that should include four or five survives, and we can’t reconstruct the music or we have to write out an extra part and try to compose it in a way that we think it might have been written. So despite the fancy notation and probably expensive printing, these are actually very practical books and they were used up quickly. They were used hard. They were often used unbound. People just shoved them in a pocket or a music case, and their survival rates are miserable compared to other kinds of books from the time.
JC: Another significant difference between Renaissance and modern music books is the Table of Contents. Today, if we want to see what songs are in a book, we look through the first few pages for a list of what’s inside. Renaissance musicians didn’t always have such a luxury.
KO: These books have very little information initially. They’re just music, and so you have to actually flip through to see what the other Masses are. Petrucci included a couple of Masses in each of these, and in fact, your copy has one, two, three partbooks bound together of different editions. And this is a typical way that we find these fragile partbooks preserved. Some collectors did actually bind their works together in groups by voice type, so you’ve got three different editions that are combined here and survive because somebody bound them in this very, very beautiful Venetian-style leather binding from the 16th century. For secular music as well, you know, people collected these little anthologies and bound them together. And those bound copies survive, but, you know the rest of it, it probably looked a lot like the sheet music that’s on your own music stand at home, in the piano bench. People who used it often didn’t bind [it]. So this is a little bit of a collector’s volume.
[background music: Osanna from the Sanctus of the Missa L’homme armé super voces musicales, by Josquin de Prez. Performed by Cut Circle, Jesse Rodin, director. Track 13 on their CD De Orto and Josquin: Music in the Sistine Chapel around 1490 [Disc 2] (Musique en Wallonie, MEW 1265-1266)]
HF: Something that we often find to be true in the rare book world, is that books that were used usually don’t survive. What lasts are the large, decorated books that set on the shelves or were made for special purposes.
JC: Books that were used on a regular basis have the potential to tell us a great deal about daily life, but unfortunately, they rarely make it out of their times. Like our journals or day-planners, they simply weren’t designed to last.
KO: I have to say that I’m always attracted to the ephemeral, to these smaller printed forms, because they do bring us very close to practical music-making, something amateurs could afford. And these are sort of big books and they certainly seem to have a kind of notation that requires very special literacy, of course they’re in Latin, and yet they have a popular kind of dispersion. We find Josquin’s Masses, for example, arranged for vihuela, which is a sort of Spanish guitar. And so you get this other view of some of this music really just being performed because it’s quite beautiful. This is the kind of thing that could have been played on viols and other Renaissance instruments. It’s church music, but it’s also beautiful music.
HF: In addition to personally studying this and other Renaissance partbooks, Professor van Orden uses them to teach her students in unique ways. One course in particular brings students in direct contact with Renaissance music practices.
[end music]
KO: My undergraduate class that comes here often is one in which all of the students learn how to play a historic instrument that some of them have not even seen before they walk into class the first day; the viola da gamba. They’re kind of like guitars that you play with bows. They have frets, they have six strings, they’re tuned kind of like guitars. And in addition to having the students explore history and explore amateur repertory through learning how to play it on these instruments, we come in each year so that they can take a look at the music books that viol players would have used. Houghton Library has some of the very first instructional methods for how to play the viol with beautiful pictures of here’s how you hold your bow and here’s how you hold the instrument. And Houghton also has a remarkable number of manuscripts that come from these very particular social groups. Some included composers, so we can really get at a sense of who’s making music and what it felt like to work from these original sources by looking at the books and seeing what they put together and what they liked to play.
JC: Not only does Professor van Orden ensure that her students study early music through performance – She is a specialist in historical performance on bassoon and believes that performance and study are both vital to informed musicological practice.
KO: I love playing, and I keep doing it even though it’s hard sometimes to balance everything because I think it keeps me honest. The idea of musicology without music, in my own life, seems impoverished. It’s a constant reminder of the labor and dedication and collaborative nature of music-making, the ephemerality of music. I write books, but my music-making leaves a much lighter footprint. And I think that’s great! There are ways that, of course, I do research through performance, but everything I do, I think, just celebrates that quality of music that we can’t reach other than by playing. And I like to think that that’s always part of the story that I’m telling as a historian.
[background music: Osanna from the Sanctus of the Missa L’homme armé super voces musicales, by Josquin de Prez. Performed by Cut Circle, Jesse Rodin, director. Track 13 on their CD De Orto and Josquin: Music in the Sistine Chapel around 1490 [Disc 2] (Musique en Wallonie, MEW 1265-1266)]
JC: We’d like to thank Professor Kate van Orden for joining us and shedding some light on Renaissance music-making and study.
HF: Thanks to Cut Circle, founded by Jesse Rodin [Harvard Ph.D. 2007], artistic director, for their performance of Josquin’s Missa L’homme armé [super voces musicales] that you’ve heard throughout this podcast. Find out more about this ensemble and their performance of renaissance polyphony at cutcircle.org.
JC: Although the physical exhibition has now closed, you can still view this partbook and other fascinating items displayed in HIST75H: A Masterclass on Houghton Library in our online exhibition. Just go to houghton75.org.
HF: If you are in the Boston area, you can also come by the library and request to view this partbook or other material in our reading room.
JC: For podcast transcripts and detailed music notes, visit houghton75.org/podcast.
HF: Thanks for joining us today, and we hope you will come back next time for another episode of Houghton75.
[music continues to end]