Fomrhi Comm. 1932Christopher Goodwin
Tronc, tonc, tonc, preng, preng, preng: onomatapoeic words as an indication of the sound and playing technique of early stringed instruments.
As we all know, there are no recordings of music dating from the 16th and 17th centuries. There seem, however, to have been musical boxes, for the 1547 death inventory of King Henry VIII of England lists:
‘an Instrumente that Goethe with a whele without playinge upon of wooded vernisshed yellowe and painted blewe with vi round plates of silver pounced with antike garnished with an edge of copper and guilte’. [i]
The six round plates of silver would be interchangeable discs, each embossed to produce a different piece of music when played; according to the Wikipedia entry for musical boxes, metal discs predate the later, now more familiar, cylindrical drum musical boxes.
What a shame Henry VIII’s musical box – made by the ingenious craftsmen of Nuremberg perhaps? – has not survived, unlike Henry VIII’s six-shooter pistol, still preserved in the Royal Armouries. It would have given an indication not only of what sort of melodies were considered fit for such a king, but also examples of tempo, inegale and the spreading of chords in a handful of 16th century pieces.
Another kind of attempt to imitate music available to the 16th and 17th centuries lay in the use of onomatapoeic words, coined to capture the sound of different instruments. Different languages have different words; the earliest instance in English literature I have come across – well-read Fomrhi-ites may well be able to suggest many more – is in Nicholas Udall’s play of c.1552, Ralph Roister Doister, whose eponymous hero is, we are told:
So fervent hot wooing and so far from wiving
As I trow, never was any creature living.
With every woman is he in some love’s pang,
Then up to our lute at midnight, twangledom, twang,
Then twang with out sonnets, and twang with our dumps,
And heigho from our heart, as heavy as lead lumps;
Then to our recorder with toodleoodle poop
As the owlet out of an ivy bush should hoop.
Anon to our gittern, thrumpledum, thrumpledum, thrum,
Thrumpledum, thrumpledum, thrumpledum, thrumpledum, thrum.
When new instruments appear they are often given old names, for want of anything better to call them. As John Ward has pointed out, in 16th century England the name gittern (now reserved for the round-backed, teardrop-shaped, carved-from-solid instrument, with a sickle-shaped pegbox, perhaps often wire-strung, and paired with a lute in many 15th century church windows) was also used for the newly-arrived and modish four-course renaissance guitar. Since the onomatopoeic ‘thrumpledum thrum’ seems to refer to an instrument which is less metallic-sounding than the ‘twang’ of the lute, perhaps the playwright is imagining the latter instrument here, gut strung rather than metal strung. That a rather gentle sound is implied seems to be confirmed by the 18th and 19th century usage of the word to refer to the purring of a cat.
The reference above is the first instance of ‘thrum’ in the OED, and notwithstanding my hypothesis, the word thrum seems to have broadened in meaning, often suggestive of strumming idly, and could refer to all manner of stringed instruments, in metal or gut. (The modern word ‘strum’, incidentally, is not encountered before the 18th century). Greene (1592) refers to ‘thrumming on the gittron’; Samuel Pepys, on the 12th April 1669 refers to ‘sitting a while, thrumming upon my viall, and singing’. Covel, in 1675, refers to ‘A little pitiful instrument of three wire strings which every ordinary fellow thrums ordinarily about the street’ while Dryden, in his Absalom and Achitophel 1681 refers to ‘the old harp on which he thrums his lays’. Other 18th and 19th centuries instances use the word thrum for instruments as varied as hurdy-gurdy, mandolin, violin or even piano, though many references are to the guitar. It could also be used to refer to lacklustre or sing-song recitation of words, drumming one’s fingers on the table, or to striking somebody, and it even had a sexual sense – perhaps connected to the improper associations of the cittern.
An interesting instance of the word ‘thrum’ referring to guitar-playing, but also used alongside a more metallic-sounding onomatapoeic word is found in a (play?) song by Samuel Akeroyde, in the third book of Playford’s The Theater of Musick (1686):
From drinking of sack by the pottle
Preng, prengta preng, prengta preng preng,
From breaking a constable’s noddle,
His noddle, preng preng, his noddle, preng preng, his noddle
From bullies that would have been roaring,
From bullies that would have been whoring,
I have brought here a noise
Of merry, merry, merry boys,
Sweet ladies, to hinder your snoring
Preng, prengta preng, prengta preng preng,
Hark, how the strings jar when I thrum my guitar!
Preng, prengta preng, prengta preng preng,
Ah prove not my foe! Here I languish below,
To my sleep I would go, hey ho.
It sounds as if the singer had a guitar on stage, but the ‘prengta preng’ syllables are sung to the notes of the bass line, and as this goes much too low to play on a baroque guitar, it seems as if the singer is ‘jumping down’ to sing along with an accompanying theorbo each time there is a gap in his words. Theorbo and bass viol are the instruments specified on the title page. The onomatapoeic ‘prengta preng preng’ could indeed be a rather good rendition of the somewhat nasal and metallic sound of the low diapasons of the theorbo, when plucked hard. So the impression given is that the actor was playing a guitar on stage, accompanied by a continuo section including a theorbo.
Nicholas Udall, furnishing the first use of ‘thrum’, also provides the first use of the more familiar ‘twang’, in 1542: ‘a minstrel, the worst that ever twanged’; and ‘Pariswith his harp did nothing but twang fond fancies of dalliance and lasciviousness’. In 16th and 17th century instances, as given in the OED, the word ‘twang’ most often refers to the sound of a hunting bow (or indeed Cupid’s bow), or of the harp. It could also refer to a nasal vocal delivery, a regional accent, or an unpleasant aftertaste (where we might say tang). Sometimes it is used to refer to the sound of the lute rather than the harp, and very occasionally other instruments such as the viol or fiddle. ‘Twang’ is not a pretty word, and is often perjorative or comical.
English makes use of the nasal or metallic-sounding suffix ‘–ng’ to suggest a prolonged metallic resonance in a whole family of words, such as ring, ding, ping, ting-a-ling, dong, bong, clang, clangour, and twang – not to mention the modern coinage for the sound of the electric guitar: Kerrang! Is notable that the structure of these and other onomatopoeic words follows a consistent pattern, with variation depending on the sound the speaker is trying to evoke: first a consonant, hard or less so, to represent the initial impact of the sound, then possibly a softening consonant such as w, l, or r, then a vowel, then a voiced consonantal sound, such as –m or –ng to suggest the continuing resonance of the sound.
In Italian this useful –ng termination, is not very natural, and could not be used to evoke the sound of instrument strings, at least not without a vowel to follow. Orazio Vecchi, in his Convito Musicale (1597) uses the suitably metallic-sounding syllables ‘dingu dengu la dingu’ to render the sound of the harpsichord, ‘lirum li lirum li’ for the violin; ‘lira lira lira’ for the lira; ‘vion vion vo’ for the bagpipes; and finally for the lute, ‘tren tirin tren tren tirin tren’. His L’Amfiparnasso published in the same year has a scene in which a character pretends to play the lute, miming with a frying pan: ‘trencu trencu tren, trunc, tronc, tronc’. The –nc endings give a more staccato effect than the English –ng termination.
So far this is all quite interesting, but of no particular practical use. But there is one musical work which I think gives evidence of performance practice that is well worth modern plucked string players thinking about, namely, Banchieri’s Barca di Venetia per Padova (1605/1623). Banchieri was a composer who was very interested in imitative effects beyond the merely musical. His best-known work today is probably his ‘Contraponto bestiale alla mente’, in which the singers imitate animals: a dog (‘babau’), a cat (‘miau’), an owl (‘chiu’) and a cuckoo (‘cucu’). Barca di Venetia per Padova is a comical and dramatic work in which there are characters not only from the towns of the Venetian lagoon, but from Siena, Florence, Lucca, Naples, Bologna and Germany, with a couple of Jews for good measure. Part of the ‘fun’ of the piece must have come from the singers putting on the accents of these cities as best they could, complemented by a display of musical erudition from Banchieri, who includes madrigals in the styles current in Lucca, Naples, Piedmont and Rome. But of particular interest here is an ‘ottava all’ improviso nel liuto’. While the first soprano sings the text, the lower four voices imitate a lute, singing in quick homophony to the syllables ‘tronc ton tronc’, ‘trinc tin tin’ and so forth. For added variety, each voice tends to sing a different vowel, but I would suggest that the important distinction is between those syllables including an ‘r’, and those without it. The Italian ‘r’, always forward and rolled, must surely be meant to suggest a slight rolling or arpeggiation of the chord. Moreover, while it is generally the strong beats and the beginning of phrases that are thus ‘rolled’,the singers’ rhythmic patterns created between syllables with and without ‘r’ sometimes varies between the different parts.
Thus at the beginning of the number (no. 16) the four lower voices sing, respectively:
Soprano: Trinc tinc tin tin ti ri trinc, tin tin tin tin ti ri trinc
Alto:Trenc ten ten ten ten ten trenc, ten ten ten ten ten tenc trenc
Tenor: Tronc, tronc, tronc, tronc, tronc tronc tronc, tronc ton ton tronc ton ton tronc
Bass:Tronc ton ton tronc ton ton ton, tronc ton ton tronc ton ton tronc
But the fun doesn’t stop here. At the end of the next number, the soprano songs, all alone on a high note: ‘chich’ (English pronunciation keek!) – the top string of the lute has snapped. The following ‘aria secca’ is sung with a thinner textured accompaniment from the chorus, three voices only, without the first soprano who sang as one of lute-imitators in the previous section:
‘Rott’al Leuto per disgratia il canto
Oratio suona senza, e Rizzolina
Concerto un aria seco, (udite in tanto)’
What Banchieri is attempting to render in these pieces, I would suggest, is the use of rolled chords as a rhythmic effect in lute music. Strong beats are often rolled, but more subtly, rolled chords can be inserted to change rhythmic accents. This is a most significant record of lute playing style as Banchieri knew it, and salutary for so many modern players, who in some cases tend to roll practically every chord – whether to conceal difficulties in moving cleanly from one chord to another (there is plenty of music in which this is genuinely hard) or because they are simply drifting along in a dream. Of course, there are plenty of people today who think lute music is supposed to be dreamy. But what Banchieri’s use of onomatopoeia seems to show is that chord-rolling is an effect to be used selectively, to enliven homophonic passages which changes of accent – another weapon in the lute player’s armoury – and perhaps it would be good exercise for players today to choose a suitable passage of lute music, and practise playing it with different rolling patterns and accents.
[i] The Inventory of King Henry VIII, The Transcript (Society of Antiquaries, 1988), item 11887