Essays on the Origins of Western Music
by
David Whitwell
Essay Nr. 135: On Occupational Music
Everyone has heard the phrase, Music is the International Language. The real meaning behind this phrase lies in the fact that both music and the basic emotions are genetic and common to all men. The phrase is true and it is reflected in the broad range of ordinary workers who use music to ease their labor. It is another subject you will not find discussed in music history texts, which concern themselves only with the music of aristocrats and the Church.
At the very dawn of the Renaissance we find the Italian poet, Francesco Petrarch (1304 – 1374), mentions an illustration of occupational music, the “plowmen singing in the fields” in one of his letters.[1] Another example, the “poor hoer,” is described in one of his poems,
When the sun turns his flaming wheels to give place to night
and the shadow descend more widely from the highest
mountains, the poor hoer takes up his tools and with words and
mountains tunes lightens his breast of all heaviness.[2]
The music of a similar level of occupation is mentioned in the 15th century English classic, William Langland’s “Piers Plowman,” where he mentions the songs of the ditch diggers and provides us with an actual title of one such song.
Such as diggers of ditches that do their jobs badly,
And dawdle away the long day with “Dieu save dame Emme.”[3]
Certainly one of the most unusual examples of occupational music is found in an account from Paris in 1418. The City of Paris paid men to walk the streets at night to watch for fire and for criminals and they were called the “knights of the watch.” One of these employees, apparently somewhat nervous about his nightly duties employed two or three minstrels, “playing loud instruments,” to walk before him to frighten away potential muggers!
Il y avait alors a Paris un chevalier du guet nomme Messire Gautier Rallart, qui ne se rendait jamais au guet sans se faire preceder de deux ou trois menetriers qui jouaient tres fort, ce qui paraissait tres etrange au peuple et lui faisait dire qu’il semblait annoncer aux malfaiteurs: “Fuyez, car je viens!”[4]
By the 16th century, the high level of sophistication reached by music is reflected in at least one reference to occupational music. While it is quite difficult to believe, Johannes de Colonia’s edition of some anonymous three-part compositions includes a woodcut showing three peasants at work and relieving their labor by singing polyphonic music![5]
Another 16th century Italian who was particularly observant of occupational music was the nobleman, Vicenzo Giustiniani. As one fascinated with the mystery of the power of music over the character and actions among contemporary men he mentions some remarkable anecdotes in ancient literature, but also finds many examples in modern life which he cannot explain. Why in fishing for swordfish is it “reputed necessary to sing, and what is more, to sing with Greek words?” Why does song lighten the effort and tiresomeness of the heat for farm workers in the summer, “even though with singing their thirst increases?” What benefit comes from singing and playing to silk-worms in Lombardy? These questions, he says, must be left to doctors and philosophers who know more about them.
On the other hand, some effects of music seemed more obvious to Giustiniani:
Among the sailors and porters we see it in the custom of accompanying their united efforts with singing in order to lessen fatigue; and so, too, do those who crush drugs and spices on the Rialto Bridge.[6]
Another who was always interested in life around him was the great sculptor, Michelangelo. He found his moments of peace in occasional walks into the country.
One of his poems describes the music of the goatherd he heard on one of his walks. He may not have found the music sophisticated, but he did notice its communication of feeling as the peasant was “pouring his soul out.”
It is a novel and superior pleasure
To see the daring goats climbing a rock,
Making one peak and then the next their pasture,
And down below their owner, with harsh music,
Pouring his soul out in a rough-hewn measure,
Playing as he stands, or at a gentle walk....[7]
The famous Italian music theorist of the 16th century, Gioseffo Zarlino (1517 – 1590), not surprisingly gave some analytical thought to the fact that so many ordinary workers made use of music while working. In a discussion of the medieval concept of the music of the angels, he seems to suggest that he had concluded that some genetic memory of such music impels man to sing as a means of easing labor.
Many were of the opinion that in this life every soul is won by music, and, although the soul is imprisoned by the body, it still remembers and is conscious of the music of the heavens, forgetting every hard and annoying labor.[8]
Michael Pretorius (1571 – 1621), in his Syntagma Musicum, Book III, discusses at length the various forms used in music. This discussion includes two specific examples of occupational music, which he calls “songs of laborers and peasants.” First among these is the Vinette, the song of the wine growers. Here Praetorius mentions a German variant, the Vinate, or “drinking song.”
If I should call them by their right name, they are booze songs, which here in Germany are not uncommon. I think there is nothing in the world base enough not to have been set to music.[9]
Another, the Giardiniero, is, of course, the song of the gardener. Praetorius writes that the Villanelle (from villa, “village”), or villotta among the Bavarians, is the music of the peasants and common craftsmen. Some artistic composers write these using parallel fifths “contrary to the rules of composition, just as the peasants do not sing according to the art but simply as it occurs to them.” He mentions a French version of this kind of music, the villages, “made up by the peasants themselves, performed on shawms and viols, often with two, three and more people on a part.”[10]
The French poet, Joachim du Bellay (born 1525), in a poem speaks of a variety of persons in diverse occupations who find solace in music.
So workmen sing who do not like their job
Or ploughmen when the furrows are too long
Or travelers who cannot get back home,
So young men who have trouble with their girls
Or sailors when the oars are hard to pull
Or prisoners desperate to be out of prison.[11]
A Spanish poet of the 16th century, Luis de Camoes, mentions a most unusual and ironic form of occupational music, the songs of love sung by makers of instruments of war!
Some whetting arrow-heads on bloody hone,
Others the shafts of arrows shaving small.
Working they sing, and sing of love alone,
And then that Love it is Seraphical:
In Parts; and in the burthen all do join;
The Ditty excellent, the Tune Divine.[12]
We also find several references to occupational music in English literature of the 16th century. Sir Philip Sidney (1554 – 1586), in his classic tale, The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia, pictures a shepherdess is knitting “and singing, and it seemed that her voice comforted her hands to work and her hands kept time to her voice’s music.”[13]
Another example is found in the early comedy, Ralph Roister Doister. First, three household female servants are working when one suggests they sing to ease their work.
Let all these matters pass, and we three sing a song;
So shall we pleasantly both the time beguile now,
And eke despath all our works....[14]
Later these three sing again and the text of the song is given,
After drudgery,
When they be weary,
Then to be merry,
To laugh and sing they be free;
With chip and cherry,
Heigh derry derry,
Trill on the bery,
And lovingly to agree.[15]
All of the above examples are concerned with the working class, but it is in the 16th century that we also begin to see music making of the emerging middle class. This kind of musical performance reaches its climax in the orchestral, choral and band societies in Europe which, even today, occupy many thousands of citizens. An early example of a private civic singing society was the Krenzleinsgesellschaft of Nurnberg, founded in the home of one, Niclas Netzel in 1568. This was a group of some twenty citizens which met every other week to rehearse instrumental and vocal music, accompanied by food and wine. A list of the members for 1568 shows that the participants came from a cross section of professions.[16]
Educators 5
Preachers 5
Lawyers 3
Doctors 3
Council officials 2
Musician 1
Businessman 1
Goldsmith 1
Finally, we should mention that the growth of middle class music also had an ironic aspect in the case of those merchants who became very wealthy. They began to imitate the aristocrats in maintaining their own servant musicians, as in the case of a Krakow merchant, Jacobus Ellendus Augustanus (d. 1577)[17] who maintained consorts of cornetts and crumhorns. Others assembled large private collections of instruments, as we see in the example of a member of the wealthy Fugger family, Raimund Fugger of Augsburg, who in 1566 owned 140 lutes, 82 cornetts, 59 recorders, 47 flutes, 13 bassoons, 2 doltzanas, 9 shawms and 8 crumhorns![18]
6
[1] Letter to Guido Sette, in Morris Bishop, trans., Letters from Petrarch (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966), 268.
[2] “Ne la stagion che ‘l ciel rapido inchina,” in Robert Durling, trans., Petrarch’s Lyric Poems (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 116.
[3] William Langland, “Piers Plowman,” trans., E. Talbot Donaldson (New York: Norton, 1990), Prologue, 224.
[4] Journal d’un Bourgeois de Paris (Paris, 1888), 50.
[5] Nino Pirrotta, “Ars Nova and Stil Novo,” in Music and Culture in Italy from the Middle Ages to the Baroque (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 176.
[6] Vicenzo Giustiniani, Discorso sopra la Musica (c. 1628), trans., Carol MacClintock (American Institute of Musicology, 1962), 67ff.
[7] Creighton Gilbert, trans., Complete Poems of Michelangelo (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 42.
[8] “Le Istitutioni harmoniche,” quoted in Palisca, in Claude V. Palisca, Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musical Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 179.
[9] Syntagma Musicum. A facsimile of the original German publication has been printed by Barenreiter Kassel, 1958, 20.
[10] Ibid., 21.
[11] Joachim du Bellay, The Regrets, trans., C. H. Sisson (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1984), Nr. 12.
[12] Luis de Camoes, The Lusiads, trans., Richard Fanshawe [1655], ed., Geoffrey Bullough (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1963), IX, xxx.
[13] Sir Philip Sidney, The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia, in The Prose Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed., Albert Feuillerat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), I, Book I, ii.
[14] Nicholas Udall, Ralph Roister Doister, I, iii.
[15] Ibid., II, iii.
[16] Susan Gattuso, “16th-Century Nuremberg,” in The Renaissance (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1989), 289.
[17] A. Chybinsky, “Polnische Musik und Musikkultur der 16. Jahrhunderts in ihren Beziehungen zu Deutschland,” in Sammelbande der Internationalen Musikgesellschaft (1911-1912), XIII, 465.
[18] R. Schaal, “Die Musikinstrumenten-Sammlung von Raimund Fugger,” in Archiv fur Musikwissenschaft (1964), XXI, 212ff.