My own theory, however, is that the organ is playing heterophonically with the voice, namely playing an ornamented version of the vocal part. The study of non-western music suggests that this practice would be carried on in the Middle Ages, and the fact that the great majority of pre- 15th- century instruments are treble ones indicates the use of heterophony, too.

One thing is clear: the contrast between vocal and instrumental performance which exists today did not exist in the Middle Ages. If voices retained a certain priority, they could easily be supported and often replace by instrument. Machaut himself says that one of his ballades could equally well be performed by an organ, bagpipe, or other instrument, and he is obviously referring to the vocal part here. (Le Livre du Voir Dit, ed P. Paris (Paris 1875), p.69 (letter 10). Cited in G. de Manchaut, Musikalische Werke, II (Leipzig 1928), p 55 by F. Ludwig.)"

...almost everything in the orchestra, from temperament to string technology to pitch to instrument construction--even our conception of time--has changed since the death of Beethoven.

We must remind ourselves that this is not a problem unique to music. Even as eminent a historian as Marc Bloch admits all historical studies are based, not upon certainties, but upon probabilities. We must avail ourselves of all reasonable probabilities in the reconstruction of medieval music. There is much we can learn from the research which has been done in this century by historians, linguists, literary historians, and others who are far in advance of musicology in their understanding of the Middle Ages.

The prehistorian, palaeobiologist, or archaeologist nowadays no longer confines himself to chronicling the meager finds of cultures of past millenniums in their nudely scientific aspect. He rather conceives it to be his chief mission to restore the scanty remnants of these sunken worlds to living reality. The same should be demanded of the musical scientist: he ought, with the aid of all critical resources to reconstruct the long-lost music of old in a form approximating that in which it was heard by the contemporaries of that age-old culture. Only then shall we be in a position to raise and answer the question respecting the aesthetic value of this art. (Rudolf von Ficker, Music Quarterly, XV (1929), quoted in Dom Anselm Hughes, "Music in Fixed Rhythm," in: The New Oxf Early Medieval Music up to 1300 ord History of Music, Vol. II (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), pp.328-29.

   These are the church modes of the Middle Ages, they are not all the modes in common use. From the Jewish Saphardic tradition we are provided with surviving songs that are in Turkish and Persian modes. Historical records tell us that the Jews redefined their modes and music to fit the surrounding culture in Spain. Careful analysis of note emphasis can lead one to some non church mode use in Medieval Music. The Moors were musicians and composers on Alfonso X ‘s staff. Arabic modes were common and fit well in the structure of documented secular music of this period. Surviving medieval tunes in the aural tradition support these non church modes.

As Curt Sachs expressed it:

The medieval melodies that we see on paper, the archaic quadrangular notes so neatly written on staff lines or in the spaces between, look innocently diatonic and European– just as do the native melodies that modern Orientals try to write down in Western notation. But were these medieval melodies actually sung as they sound when played on an equal-tempered piano? Hardly. Give them the many unwritable shades of Arabian intervals from note to note, now a little wider, now narrower than ours, try to give them the color, the intonation, the strange mannerisms of Oriental singing, and the whole illusion of Western style is gone.

(Curt Sachs, "The Lore of Non-Western Music," in Three Aspects of Musicology: Three Essays by Arthur Mendel, Curt Sachs, Carroll C. Pratt (New Your: Liberal Arts Press, 1957, p.26

The question of distinct stylistic identity between the Christian, Moorish, and Jewish musics intermixing in the Middle Ages must be addressed.

There appear to be three types of relationship among repertories and three types of material exchange between them.

1 Two repertories may be distant in style; material is unlikely to pass between them and undergo change.

They may be close in style, in which case a good deal of material is likely to pass from one to the other and likely to undergo changes to conform with the style of the repertory it is entering. If the styles of the repertory it is entering.

3) If the styles of the two repertories are (Identical) (a hypothetical circumstances) the material will pass between them unchanged. Finally, if the repertories are distant in style, and songs do pass from one to the other, these songs will usually not change to conform to the style they are entering but will remain more or less intact and form a new stylistic layer in the repertory...

"Journal of the American Musicological Society " Change in Folk and Primitive Music Bruno Nettl p108

The Moors came to Spain in the year 711, bringing with them their distinctive musical style and modes. What was the effect upon the indigenous Spanish music – If option one occurred, we should see two distinct styles rigidly holding out against the other. If option two occurred, then there would be liberal mixing and collaboration of one consolidated style. Indeed in the Thirteenth Century, we find Jewish, Moorish, and Christian musicians, and composers all represented in the court of Alfonso X. The inescapable implication is that there is no difference in style perhaps after a mixing, but, one style pervaled for all. The Kingdom of Navarre is on the Spanish side of the mountains proving easier commerce with Spain than with France. Much of the troubadour material comes from Navarre. The Compestella de Santaiago was the major pilgrimage to make during the Middle Ages. The Crusades brought all of Europe across Spain and the pilgrimages to Santaiago brought many others. From the Moorish start in Spain in 711, the Spanish style of music diffused through out Europe The Romans brought the music style of the ancient world as far north as England. These ties with the culture of the ancient world argue for musical modes adopted by the Romans from the Greeks, who were influenced by the Persians and Egyptians. To interpret every musical manuscript in the Medieval church modes would be folly in light of these facts.

From the philosophical perspective, keeping four modes was important to fixing music into to the order of the cosmos. There are four – Seasons, Elements, Winds, Ages, Body Fluids, Qualities and Modes. There are seven – Planets, Days, Metals, Organs, Qualities, Virtues, and Note-names. The writers kept the purity of concept through the church modes, ignoring all other secular modes, or redefining the others as church modes with accidentals. Perhaps a Turkish mode was dorian in which one used b flat, e flat, and f sharp -- musician knew this and notation lacked the ability to express these differences. Then again, the persons writing the notation would keep the purity of the church modes for philosophical and religious reasons. Why write these songs down at all, musicians did not read the notation? This was an aural tradition transmitted from musician to musician. Perhaps the answer lies in preservation for the future. This concept of preservation allows for perfection of the transmitted material, not as heard, but as philosophically correct. In other words, the notes were conformed to fit the church modes.

I. Medieval & Renaissance Cultures’ Impact on Music.

A. Tense — Restrictive:

Culture restricted class mobility and yet brought security. In the Middle Ages, once a serf, always a serf. Upward class movement came rarely, if at all. Everyone knew their place and role in life. Class distinctions blurred toward the Renaissance. By the twentieth Century, much of this rigidity, and to a certain extent comforting, social structure vanished. Tradesmen were apprenticed and assured a place in society, so too farmers followed in the trades or crafts of their fathers or were apprenticed out to learn a new trade. Security was assured through the tight knit social structure.

B. Religion’s Importance in everyday life:

A person living in the Middle Ages, or the Renaissance found religion to be an important aspect of his or her daily life. It promised the chance of a better life after death. Mysticism lent beauty and mystery to the mundane, even to suffering. The medieval man or woman worked less from logic and more from intuition. Entering the cathedral was a symbolic and dramatic change from daily life. A person entered grandeur and splendor of great magnitude in the magnificent cathedrals. Here the daily life was left behind and a symbolence of heaven entered.

Watch your favorite movie without music. How important is the music to your movie — to Star Wars, or The Wizard of Oz. Music sets the mood, creates tension, communicates ideas and emotions. Music reaches mans’ soul, shapes it, moves it, reforms it. From this perspective, music is magic and mystical. Music is power.

C. Remnants of Medieval Style:

Remnants of Medieval Style survive in modern European, Middle Eastern, and Mediterranean folk music. Listen to examples (see discography). Note the voice quality and style of musical performances.

1) Voice quality differs from modern sound. Instead of a pure tone the vocalist strives for richness with multiple harmonics, created through tenseness in the throat, not by singing nasally (as some erroneously suggest). The shawm and other double and single-reeds produce sound qualities representing the vocal timbre desired.

2) The musician’s play with abandon in the confines of a preset structure. Their performance — their music springs from within. Their structure comes from their traditions.

A. Modern — Baroque (1650) to present:

The composer is the creator, the musician his instrument, his articulator. In symphonic music the music must also bend to the will of the conductor who directs his interpretation of the musical sounds from a written score, or the small ensemble conforms to the dictates of the notation on a written page. The era of the composer, where the super musician creates music and all others recreate that persons work from notation is how the musical process works.

1) Musical performance and listening are kept separate from everyday life. The average Twentieth Century person hears music either in a symphony hall, sports arena, or through a stereo system.

2) Technology allows sound engineers to edit a musical performance, taking the best from many hours of tape and produce a recording that is flawless.

3) Rarely, does the average modern man or woman partake in a live musical performance. Live performances usually occur in settings where the audience is not at liberty to take part in the performance — they are kept a sterile distance where they are socially restrained.

B. Medieval and Renaissance music:

The performer created the music new at each performance — each performance of the same music was different and renewed. The performer was the genius behind the music. Example: Mary had a little lamb: The skeletal form, the pure simple melody of Mary had a little lamb would not give us a glimpse of the musical complexity and artistry involved in its rendering, by a Dixie Land Jazz band. Style and occasion are more important than the actual notes being played. Mutable, music became a celebration by those creating it and hearing it, as an expression of God through the players. Music performance evoked by the musician, not music evoking the musician.

Notation in the Middle Ages was not for the musician. There are no well used manuscripts with notes for performance. Music was produced as stated earlier, by knowledge of style and musical expertise. Notation only provides an outline upon which a musician could truly create a work of art.

Rizaldi Siagian wrote in his Document in support of his masters lecture-recital at San Diego State University — The Performance and Theory of South Indian Classical Music with Special Emphasis on the Characteristics of the Raga Kalyani.

"Karnatak music is a tightly integrated system of performance and theory. Within its cultural setting the living musical tradition is strongly supported by a close relationship between the performer and the listener. The performer spontaneously creates and presents an abstract musical idea through his musical creativity and aesthetic effort, while the listener constantly endeavors to understand the music more deeply in order to appreciate it fully, and is consequently indispensable to the total musical process."

These same aspects apply directly to the performance of music from the Middle Ages. The musician spontaneously creates and presents an abstract musical idea through his musical creativity based on the simple melodic outline, much as a jazz musician does. The style is of upmost importance — without the application of style the music has no life and is a mere skeletal nothing.

Let us use the cathedral illustration one more time. Pretend that music existed in tangible, material, form and, great works of music from the Middle Ages exist. There is no argument about what music was like for there it is before us in all its splendor (as cathedrals are today). Pretend, also, that the great cathedrals and buildings of the medieval period do not exist because they are a non-material art form (as medieval music performance is). We do have sketchy outlines and writings from the period describing aspects of cathedrals but nothing to actually construct such from the sketchy remnants. Now you find in your studies some world cultures where they still build cathedrals in the same way as described in the medieval texts. You study those cultures cathedral building and find crossover information allowing you to attempt medieval cathedral building. You see how much you missed before you learned from the other cultures. Why there are gargoyles all over the roof and Colombes. The stained glass art — you would have missed that from your outline. The details — the details that make this a work of art are missing from the outline and would never be present without the help of the world culture who still build such structures.

1) Music existed as an integral part of everyday life (Example of folk musicologist asking to hear wedding music in Eastern Europe. The answer given by the musicians was, "There will be a wedding in two weeks, we will play the wedding music then"). Women sang as they harvested crops, sewed, or cooked. Knights brought fiddlers in their retinue and bade then play in preparation for battle. People of all classes danced. Music bestowed healing and deliverance. Different tunes, modes, and rhythms possibly symbolized different emotions, seasons, or things (example — in Eastern Indian Ragas, certain ragas are for times of the days and moods).

2) In the Middle Ages, or Renaissance, no one knew of stereos, CD players, tape recording or any form of capturing and replaying a performance. If someone heard music, he or she heard it live, and many times would join a performance by clapping, stomping, or singing. Everyday life invited impromptu concerts. People sang songs or played instruments while they worked. Examples: The man plowing his field sings a song to the oxen, and the shepherd watching over his sheep plays an end blown flute or reed pipe.

1) The Modern concept of music brings creativity and freedom through lack of restraint. Medieval musical concepts engender creativity through security, restraint, and confinement. These approaches are directly opposite of each other.

2) Musical interval is determined through philosophy — use of the monochord for purposes of demonstrating those philosophical relationships of sound and interval to god and the universe proved their case.

Pythagorean tuning is by far the most common tuning system of the Middle Ages. Look at the difference from our modern system.

3) Sounds — instruments imitate the human voice’s tenseness. A multidimensional sound is desired, in contrast to the pure , hollow tones of the modern flute (modern preferences). A few examples of instruments that imitate the human voice — shawm, end-blown flute, fiddle, bagpipe, cornett, strings, double-reeds and single reeds.

4) Pitch — Music held no standardized pitch. For a set of woodwinds to be in tune one had to have them made as a set or consort (a practice not known before the Renaissance). A 415 vs A 440 vs A 460, all lead to unknowns regarding pitch with no uniformity, or standard in sight. Modern example — The best folk singers sing notes a few cents off pitch from standard A 440. The best indication of a standard during the Middle Ages are some surviving bells. Some of these bells are tuned and hit modern notes within the A 440 pitch universe. A medieval tuner called a monochord required one standard pitch to set its single string. Once that one string was tuned, a movable bridge allowed all the other notes needed to be easily obtained. In this manner, using one small bell or tuning fork or other set pitch, an instrument maker or musician could tune instruments accurately. The confusion on variable pitch appears to be a much later problem associated with the baroque musical period. Flutes are another story due to the ease of manufacture many flutes in traditional cultures today do not match the rest of that cultures pitch universe. Shepherds in the fields cut a reed and fashion a six hole pipe to play on. The relationship of that pipe to the rest of the musical world will not match unless he uses another carefully matched instrument as a model. One cannot make judgements on the medieval pitch universe based on whistles and flutes. One can draw conclusions from fixed tuned pitch instruments that survived such as bells.

5) Unique aspects of period instruments as applied to style:

The entire approach to musical instrument construction differs from later time periods. We are familiar with the great masters of the Seventeenth Century and many propose their work to be the culmination of centuries of development leading to the arrival of perfection. This view is simplistic at best.

Construction of instruments in the Middle Ages, first and foremost, was a visual art as well as an auditory one. Yes, the instruments must be functional but they must also be pleasing to the eye. A cathedral could be functional but the concept of visual beauty created much more than functionality.

Most instruments in the string family had bodies carved from a single block of wood — the back and sides of the instrument, and sometimes the neck and pegbox were all from a single block of wood. Medieval artists had the knowledge and ability to create instruments as they were constructed in the Renaissance, using slabs of wood bent to form sides and attached to a separate back. There were good reasons for not doing so.

Aristotle taught the importance of everything in balance. The fibers in wood carry vibrations. When the back and sides are cut from one piece of wood, carved out of the whole, the fibers are attached and unbroken between sides and back. Sound can travel unhindered throughout the body of the instrument. The instrument is louder, low tones clearer, high tones cleaner — muddy sounds are not associated with these instruments.

There is no stress due to bending wood into shapes in which it did not grow, in an instrument carved out of a single block of wood. Stress also dulls and mutes sound, by retarding the musicial vibrating quality of the wood fibers. The use of the bent slab system is more economical on wood, takes less skill to carve or create, and allows for faster manufacture of an instrument. These are the reasons for dropping the superior medieval instrument making techniques. I have made instruments both ways — instruments that are identical in all respects except the construction of the box. Both of these instruments were medieval fyddles, one’s sound was a muted soft voiced thing, while the other, a loud responsive clear toned wonder. The better instrument was made in the medieval fashion, carved out of the solid.

I will go so far as to say that the instrument makers of the seventeenth century, as far as construction technique is concerned are de-evolved. If some enterprising person were to use medieval construction technique to make a modern violin, they would be noticed for their superior instruments.

The Middle Ages does not represent a backward stage of Western music from which greatness springs. The Middle Ages is greatness in Western music and holds its own place against all others.

Curtis C. Bouterse wrote in his masters thesis, World Music Techniques as Analogues for Early Music Performance in Theory and Practice:

If, as I believe, the very essence of the shawm is that it is a loud, outdoor, festive instrument, played with a continuous sound and characteristic finger articulation, then no early music group today is playing one of the most ubiquitous instruments of the Middle Ages.

One of the most prestigious instruments of the Middle Ages, and one whose importance was to rise during the Renaissance, was the lute.

We have long lists of different types of characteristic Arabic lute ornaments, though in typical fashion often conflicting with other lists. (Henry George Farmer, "The structure of the Arabian and Persian Lute in the Middle Ages, " Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, January 1939, pp. 43-45 Many of the ornaments are derived from the idiom of the instrument as we would expect. A common example is playing a note a fourth or a fifth away from the main note, either alternating or simultaneously. Since the ‘ud is tuned in fourths, striking the adjacent string is an obvious action and one which comes naturally in performance. Combining these idiomatic lute ornaments produces a convincing soloistic result.

If we truly understand the nature of ornamentation, we shall realize it was not something which was "tacked on" to the "tune," but an intrinsic part of the melody which, when performed by a traditional musician, was always ornamented, and was never heard otherwise.