Medieval & Renaissance Music Performance by Piffaro, The Renaissance Band

Program Notes
The Wind Band in the Renaissance

Throughout Renaissance Europe during the 15th and most of the 16th centuries the premiere instrumental ensemble was the wind band. Every city of any consequence employed its own, the most conspicuous emblem of civic pride. Called "waytes" or "waits" in England, "stad pijper" or "scalmeyer" in the Low Countries, "stadtpfeifer" in Germany, "piffari" in Italy and "ménestrels" in France, these urban bands provided music for many important public, ceremonial occasions, but they were also called upon simply to entertain the local townspeople at various times of the day. In the town of Erfurt, where Johann Bach, great-uncle of Johann Sebastian Bach, led the civic band, the musicians awoke the populace each morning with a chorale, played from the church tower. They played another sacred piece at noon and a third at night.

This practice of marking various times of the day with music was a remnant of the medieval band's function of sounding the hours of the day to help the townspeople keep track of the passage of time, particularly during the long nights. The wind band of the town of Ghent in the early 15th century played fanfares from the church tower on the hour throughout the night, while the townsfolk slept. In addition, they were required by the town fathers to lubricate the clock, since they were already in the tower. They were of course given extra funds for that purpose. In Dublin in 1457 and London in 1454, the town band was under orders to perambulate the city at night for the "purpose of preventing robberies, but also for the recreation of the people". By the middle of the 15th century, however, watch duty was taken over by the corps of trumpeters and drummers and the town band assumed responsibility for a broader range of civic entertainments.

Wind bands were also employed by the royal courts and chapels, where they enjoyed a prominence equal to and sometimes surpassing their urban counterparts. In some towns in Germany the move from city to court musician meant a rise in social status. These bands served to enhance the glory and prestige of the court and its patron. They provided entertainment for festivals, banquets, private ceremonies, theatrical productions and in particular for the elaborate court dances. The court band that served under Ercole I d'Este during his reign (1451-1505) in Renaissance Ferrara achieved a wide and lasting prominence. An important manuscript of music, one of the earliest for instrumental performance, which survives from this period, was clearly compiled for this band of the Estense court. Now housed in the Casanatense Library in Rome, this manuscript contains three- and four-part music, described in a contemporary inventory as "a book of polyphonic music, written and notated by don Alessandro Signorello, a la pifaresca..."(i.e. "for the wind players"). Robert Morton's 4-part instrumental composition based on the popular 15th century French melody, "L'Homme Arme", comes to us from this manuscript and is performed on shawms and sackbuts, as it surely was in Ercole's court.

Despite their prominent role in the civic, court and chapel bands, wind players in the Renaissance were rarely well-paid. Many had to seek additional employment elsewhere to supplement salaries earned for their duties in the established wind bands. In Italy, as elsewhere, civic band members found a regular source of extra income by performing for weddings of the wealthy middle-class businessmen. A cassone by an anonymous painter of around 1450 depicts one such event, showing three shawm players and one slide trumpeter, civic banners hanging from their instruments, accompanying the occasion. One of the shawm players, perhaps resting his lips, is reaching out for a cup of wine. Competition for these extra events was oftentimes fierce and territorial rights, whether officially or unofficially assumed, were vehemently protected. Claudio Monteverdi, for instance, once had his beard pulled during a dispute over the rights to weddings in St. Mark's cathedral in Venice.

The size and instrumentation of the wind bands varied considerably during the 15th and 16th centuries. Iconographical evidence, such as that mentioned above, often depicts a small ensemble of from three to six instrumentalists while payment records and inventories suggest ensembles of somewhat greater constituency. One Paduan miniature of around 1400 depicts a civic wedding ceremony accompanied by two timpani, two shawms, two trumpets, and a bagpipe (Dublin, The Chester Beatty Library, Hs. W 76A, fol. 113 v.). By the early 15th century London boasted a civic band of nine members while Dublin counted eight. The court band in Ferrara may represent a more standard size, however. Its basic form in the early part of the century consisted of two shawms and one slide trumpet, or later, sackbut. During the latter part of the 15th century, however, Ercole I increased the size and complexity of the ensemble, one example of a consistent trend throughout Europe which continued well into the 16th century. Available resources often determined the size and prestige of the local band. However, by modern standards the bands remained small with generally no more than one player per part.

Throughout the Renaissance a clear distinction was made between the "loud" ensemble (haut, stark and alta) and the "soft" ensemble (bas, bajo and still).The former consisted of trumpets, shawms, slide trumpets, sackbuts, bagpipes and percussion in various combinations. The latter implied the flutes, recorders, and by the end of the 15th century, krumhorns and cornetti. The "soft" ensemble also included lutes, keyboards and bowed stringed instruments. Johannes Tinctoris in his theoretical treatise De Inventione et Usu Musicae (c. 1487) describes the loud band of the 15th century, its standard instrumentation and one name by which it was called:

For the lowest contratenor parts, and often for any contratenor parts,
to the shawm players (tibicines) one adds brass players (tubicines) who
play very harmoniously upon the type of instrument which is called trompone in Italy, sacqueboute in France. Together it is called alta.

The loud instruments were generally used in outdoor, open air settings or in large halls, while the soft instruments adorned indoor, more intimate occasions. However, iconographical evidence, admittedly not always the most reliable source of information on actual practice, depicts these instruments in all sorts of combinations and in a wide variety of settings. We may simply assume that the same considerations of balance, timbre, composition and setting that govern music-making today prevailed in the Renaissance as well.

Unlike modern musicians, wind players of the Renaissance were required to master the instruments of both the haut and the bas families. The virtuosity of the Renaissance musician was characterized by fluency not only on many different wind instruments, but also on strings and keyboards as well. When Joos Zoetens, a member of the Ghent town band, was contracted in 1493 to take on two apprentices, the contract read that he must teach them "shawms, flutes and other instruments". After a five- or six-year apprenticeship during which the aspiring musician mastered most of the instruments required, he became a journeyman and was able to apply for membership in an established band, whenever a position opened up.

The repertoire of these Renaissance wind bands included dance music, most often improvised and/or played from memory, borrowed vocal compositions and the newly-emerging genre of idiomatic instrumental writing. Until the end of the 15th century little dance music survives. With the beginning of the 16th and the dawn of music printing, four-part dance settings begin to appear from the presses of the Parisian printer, Pierre Attaingnant. His volumes of dances reflect a new French style of dance, with the waning of the basse dance and tourdion and the emergence of the fashionable pavanes, gaillardes and bransles. The settings are simple, harmonic structures with the tune in the top part, intended certainly for the wind bands, but playable also on any number and combination of instruments.

These settings were embellished by the performers with improvised ornaments, much in the style that was codified by the Italian recorder virtuoso, Sylvestro Ganassi, in his Opera Intitulata Fontegara (Venice, 1535), a treatise on the art of playing the recorder and of free ornamentation. Our treatment of the tune "Der Winter is Vergangen" shows how this system of embellishment might be applied to embellish a simple melody. By the middle of the century, the four-part dance settings published by the Antwerp printer, musician and town band leader, Tielman Susato, show a somewhat more composed style with some ornaments written into the texture, like the two Rondes on this recording. Even these settings, however, are basically homophonic and beg some additional elaboration. The German hoftanz and tripla carrying the French title "Le petit rouen" reflects an earlier, 15th century compositional style with the melody in the tenor and three florid lines decorating that melody, two above and one below. This dance demonstrates the link between the hoftanz and the 15th century basse dance, for "Le petit rouen" occurs as one of the popular basse dance melodies in the famous Brussels basse dance manuscript

In addition to dance music, the wind band performed selections of vocal music that could be suitably rendered on instruments. Not infrequently in the late 15th and early 16th century mansucripts, the same work appears with text in one source and without in another. These untexted works are examples of vocal forms, the chanson or ballade or motet, which composers or arrangers or simply copyists felt could be "sung" as well by instruments, especially wind instruments, as by the human voice. The works by the prolific and justly famous early 16th century composers Heinrich Isaac ("Ich Stuend an einem Morgen") and Ludwig Senfl ("Im Maien", "O Almächtiger Gott" & "Das Gläut zu Speyer") all appear with texts in the manuscript or printed sources, yet they lend themselves perfectly to instrumental performance. This is especially true of the dance-like "Im Maien" and the unusual "Das Gläut" which evokes in its syncopated, almost random, rhythms, its clarion-like repeated c's in the top part, limited tonality and the concluding, overlapping arpeggios in all but the bass part the actual pealing of the carillon of which the words tell.

The third class of compostion that filled out the repertoire for the Renaissance wind band consisted of works that reflect vocal models but which contain elements idiomatic to instrumental performance. The counterpoint in this style of composition shows elements much more easily rendered by instruments than by any but the most versatile and flexible human voice. These elements include wide leaps, complex rhythmic and sequential patterns and rapid runs of an octave or more. In addition, unlike their vocal counterparts these works bear titles that are oftentimes descriptive of the work. Of this type are the pieces from the Glogau Liederbuch, one of the most important late 15th century German manuscript to contain examples of this newly-emerging instrumental genre. The works entitled "Katzenphote" ("cat's paw") "Der Kranich Schnabel" ("the crane's beak") and "Der Ratten Schwanz" ("the rat's tail") all, with just a little freedom of the imagination, evoke the respective animal and some of its characteristics. The same is true of the work entitled "Tuba Gallicalis" evoking the image and sound of battle trumpets, perhaps a pre-battle fanfare, while the pavane-like "Die Schlacht" embodies the sounds of battle itself, often pitting two parts against the other two in answering volleys, until the final section brings the conflict to a climactic, thunderous finish.

But it was dance music that surely served as the mainstay of the wind bands through the Renaissance and even beyond. Despite the volumes printed and disseminated by Pierre Attaingnant in Paris, Tielman Susato in Antwerp, Jacque Moderne in Lyons, the Hessen brothers in Germany and the Italians Mainerio and Bendusi, a relatively small number of actual works survive in written form from the more than 150 years in question. This should not be wholly unexpected from a genre that was likely performed from memory or simply improvised, and rarely if ever performed from music, at least by the professionals that constituted the wind bands. Dance was a social occasion that transcended all class boundaries and national or provincial loyalties, practiced daily from the royal salons to the rustic threshing floors. One can only imagine the large repertoire of dance tunes that must have circulated among the wind bands, professional and amateur musicians alike, to support this practice.

One invaluable source of such tunes is the dancing manual of Thoinot Arbeau (real name, Jehan Tabourot, 1520-1595).This famous work, entitled Orchésographie and published in 1588 with a 2nd edition in 1589, contains numerous dance melodies many of which do not exist in multi-part arrangements from the other dance publishers. Arbeau conveyed a thoroughly positive attitude toward dance. Dance, for him, contributed both to one's health and aids in the pleasurable pursuit of a mate. He considered even the military march of troops as a kind of dance and provided valuable examples of tabor rhythms and two lengthy samples of fife music in his book, the one on the third mode performed here on a soprano flute with tabor accompaniment.

Arbeau included his dance melodies as vehicles for teaching the proper dance steps and etiquette, not as ends in themselves. Consequently, multi-part arrangements were not only unnecessary but would have proved cumbersome to his plan. However, numerous depictions of dancing scenes in Renaissance art show only melody instruments with percussion, not full wind bands, in accompaniment, and we may assume that the practice of doubling or more the melody on a variety of instruments without harmonic accompaniment was not uncommon. Bagpipes are often seen in combination with soprano shawms, pipe and tabor and, at times, small recorders, frequently with at least one percussion. Our arrangements of the Arbeau tunes "Jouissance vous donneray"and "Les Bouffons" give two examples of such combinations. Arbeau's book ends with a lengthy treatment of the latter tune (also known as "matassins" or "mattachino"), which was a popular, athletic sword dance for four mentioned only in passing elsewhere.

-- Robert C. Wiemken

Credits
Producer: Lawrence J. Kraman
Engineers: Lawrence J. Kraman and Stephen J. Epstein
Digital Editor: Stephen J. Epstein

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