Mikes Music Room – Music Articles

English literature of the Middle Ages is full of references to minstrels and minstrelsy, and abounds in quaint and curious details of their life and manners; and for the present-day reader, desirous of information concerning the early music of this country, no better authority exists than Chappell

Music in the United Kingdom prior to the seventeenth century, or at any rate the latter part of the sixteenth, presents itself under very much the same aspects as on the Continent. On the one hand Church music, on the other Minstrelsy and latterly, the rise of a secular art, secular in spirit but hampered with ecclesiastical traditions.

English Church music of the pre-Reformation period necessarily moved on the same lines as that of the Continent, although probably existing in a far less advanced stage of cultivation. Minstrelsy, however, was greatly esteemed among English. Scotch, Irish, and Welsh; and among the Irish and Welsh the bardic caste enjoyed a degree of power and influence probably unknown in any other country of the world. Thus in Ireland the three grades of minstrels or bards of the legendary period

Woe betide the unlucky noble who was ridiculed or denounced by a Troubadour! In the first instance he might feel assured that before long every court and castle in Southern Europe would be laughing at him, and in the second, he might consider himself fortunate if he was not compelled to turn out and defend his life and property against the steel-clad paladins of a hostile neighbour, as had the Lord of Rossilho when Alfonso of Aragon laid waste his territories, as vengeance for the death of the Troubadour Guillem de Cabestanh.

To the Troubadours we owe the existence of various art-forms common to music and poetry, such as the ” Pastorela,” or ” Pastorela ” the shepherd’s song, whence the modern Pastoral or Pastorale; the “Alba”

The next step in advance was the addition of a second part to the Chant, moving on certain fixed intervals

The first important event in the musical history of the Christian era was the institution, by St. Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, of a uniform version of Church music. Prior to his time, the melodies in use in the Church had been transmitted from generation to generation by mere oral tradition. Under even the most favourable circumstances, it would have been almost impossible to preserve the ancient melodies of the Church in their original purity with this hap-hazard method of perpetuation; and when it is remembered that the Church itself only passed from the direct dangers of the persecutions, to the almost as great, if less obvious, dangers of imperial favour, it will be readily understood that Church music, in its original form at any rate, ran a considerable risk of perishing altogether.

With a view to removing such corruptions as already existed, and preventing the possibility of others arising in the future, St. Ambrose, about the year 384, made a general collection of the tones or tunes to which the Psalms were then sung, and setting forth each in the purest form possible. This formed the orthodox music of the Church for more than two hundred years, and in St. Ambrose’s old diocese of Milan it continues in use to this day.

Two centuries later the uniformity introduced by Ambrose had become very much relaxed; the Ambrosian chant was still in use throughout the Church at large, but with two hundred years use had come many modifications, and the modifications of one country differed materially from those of another. The necessity for a remodelling of the music of the Church was consequently very apparent. To this task Gregory the Great, who became Pope in 590, gave his earnest attention: and the system of Plain Chant which he arranged, broader in conception than that of Ambrose, and designed to meet the liturgical requirements of the entire year, under the title Gregorian, remains in use to the present time. Gregory also revised the Office of the Mass and gave it that form which still remains unchanged, and upon which some of the grandest musical con