Exhausted

I am terribly sorry for the lapse in posts. I have been working under deadline as well as researching for the Dante presentation. In re-reading long forgotten material about the Italian Ars Nova, I began to question some assumptions I had been making about music history in general, so all of my spare time has been used digging around music texts.

Part of the difficulty is that what we know about the way music sounded is an educated (more or less) guess, always in flux. What I could write about with confidence this year could look utterly silly as soon as a new source is found, but then could look good again, if something casts yet another light on the matter. Generally it is a matter of fine-tuning our knowledge, not a matter of drastic reversals.

One of the big problems, of course, is rhythm. For an modern example of this, look at the difficulties encountered in notation "swing" rhythm. Without phonorecordings of jazz, it would be really interesting to see what future scholar-musicians come up with as the sound of jazz (and I am not even getting into the difficulties of reconstructing improvised solos and comping figures based solely on written sources). Of course the recordings are going to be the source for this stuff, so unless the various media are forgotten, they will have something quite accurate to go by.

At least 14th century musicians were debating the questions of rhythm quite fiercely. The more debate there is over a stylistic point, the more precise writing there is, since musical battles (at least at the theorists' level) are battles of the significance of minutiae.

The big point of contention between the Ars Antiqua defenders and the Ars Nova defenders was over the relaxation of the rhythmic modes (corresponding to the types of poetic meter), and the increased use of duple meters. Fairly heavy dissonance was accepted by both sides (it just was not seen as that important an issue).

In contemporary times we debate dissonance, although really what most people have a problem with (as Michael Tilson Thomas points out often) is density, rather than dissonance. There is a theory that I have always accepted, since it came from James Tenney, a composer and theorist I have long admired, that we have, as a people, an ever-increasing amount of dissonance that we are willing to accept, with major changes happening at certain points (Monteverdi, Satie, Schoenberg, etc.). It is a tidy theory that perfectly conforms to the notion of progress in music, but when you look at 13th and 14th century music, it does not work.

The other day I was listening to a Machaut motet and it really struck me as how dissonant it was, even on strong beats (not all voices had to be in consonance, just a couple). The rhythm was complex, but did not strike me as that out of order.

So, forgive my long-windedness on this, but I have just a little time before I have folks coming over for paella, and wanted to post something to let you know that I am still here, and that you can expect more musings on this topic.