Page 75 - ESSENTIAL LISTENING TO MUSIC

medieval music. It is impressive for its twenty-five-minute length as well as the novel way it applies music to the text of the Mass. Machaut was the first composer to set what is called the Ordinary of the Mass—five sung portions of the Mass—specifically, the Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei with texts that did not change from day to day. From Machaut’s work onward, composing a Mass meant setting the five texts of the Ordinary and finding some way to shape them into an integrated whole. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Stravinsky were just a few of the later composers to follow Machaut’s lead in this regard.
To construct his Mass, Machaut proceeded as follows. First, he took a chant in honor of the Virgin Mary and placed it in long notes in the tenor voice. In fact, because this voice part was often asked to hold out the notes of a pre- existing chant, it assumed the name “tenor” (from the Latin tenere, French tenir, “to hold”). Above the foundational tenor Machaut composed two new lines called the superius and the contratenor altus, and from these we get our terms soprano and alto, and below the tenor he composed a contratenor bas- sus, whence our term bass. Machaut spread these voices out over two and a half octaves, becoming the first composer to exploit nearly the full vocal range of a chorus. As you listen to the foreign sound of this Gothic work, you likely will be struck by two things: (1) the alternation of chant and polyphony—for some portions of his Kyrie (see Listening Cue), Machaut allowed the monophonic chant to stand unaltered; and (2) the disparity between rhythm and harmony. The rhythmic patterns unfold within a lilting triple meter, but the harmony is mostly dissonant. At the ends of musical phrases, however, Machaut stretches out the dissonances into open, consonant chords (see the asterisk in Example 4.2). These longed-for consonances are especially satisfying in an echo-filled medieval cathedral in which the sound can endlessly reverberate around the bare stone walls.
Example 4.2 > machaut’s kyrie
music in the cathedral 53 Copyright 201 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
56797_ch04_ptg01.indd 53 29/08/14 3:33 PM