The music of the Western classical tradition is known for its dynamism, drama, and rhythmic and intellectual energy. While I value these qualities as much as anybody, more and more these days I find myself gravitating toward music that is contemplative and serene rather than active and developmental—music that makes us content being where we are rather than taking us on an intensely emotional journey. Both types of music can be found in the Western classical heritage, and remarkably enough, the contemplative note can be found at both ends of the tradition, the early and the modern. In another essay I extolled the drama inherent in Western music. Here I’d like to concentrate on the timeless, meditative, undramatic elements in music, qualities that can be a balm to the ears and soul, particularly in trying times.
Let us start with the sacred music of the Renaissance, commonly known as choral polyphony (many-voiced music). Even those not musically knowledgeable can sense its serene, flowing, devotional, and pure qualities, perfectly fitted to religious worship. Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina is the most famous creator of this kind of music, and for good reason, but a good case could be made for Josquin des Prez of northern France as the greatest Renaissance master.
Once at a rehearsal for a concert of early music, I overheard a fellow performer exclaim with irreverent humor that “Palestrina is boring!” I don’t agree, but I do think it’s true—and this is probably what the musician was getting at—that Palestrina represents a very specific, and very pure, interpretation of the Renaissance choral style. Living in the shadow of the Counter-Reformation, the Italian composer deliberately fulfilled the Council of Trent’s requirement that liturgical music should be written so that the sacred texts could be clearly heard and understood. His choral music maintains a serene flow of melody and a perfect balance of consonance and dissonance while never obscuring the words.
Josquin Des Prez—whose name, as Richard Brookhiser cleverly points out, translates as “Little Joe Fields”—took somewhat bolder liberties in his music, especially in the use of dissonance and of rhythm. Indeed, he has been described as a “Renaissance Beethoven,” whose Masses have as much color and variety as symphonies of later times. Yet Josquin’s sacred works are no less gloriously beautiful, majestic, and serene in their own way than Palestrina’s. Listen to his beloved motet Ave Maria, virgo serena or his Missa L’homme armé to get a feel for his art, which sums up what classical polyphony is all about: a closely interwoven tapestry of individual melodic lines, expressing an ethos of corporate faith and divinely ordained harmony.
This kind of music may take a bit of time to get used to if you have been bred on Mozart and Beethoven, as it creates a fundamentally different sound world and musical space. In polyphony you have to listen for the unfolding and intertwining of the multiple melodies rather than what we nowadays understand as harmony. Yet after a week or so of listening to early music, the Classical-Romantic repertoire sounds strained to me—overactive with its busy figuration, repetitions, and harmonic-melodic clichés. There is something authentic, whole, and pure about early polyphonic music, free of the rococo frills and theatrical tricks that European music later took on.
For myself, I was not able truly to appreciate this style of music until I had the chance to hear it “from the inside,” singing it in my parish choir. Not until I was actually in the middle of the music (namely, on the tenor line), sensing its inner workings and the relation of the part to the whole, was I able to understand why this music was so prized and why it remains so rewarding to perform and to hear.
For a good guide to early polyphony, seek out the recordings by the Oxford Camerata on the Naxos recording label. At a budget price you can hear luminous renditions of Josquin, Palestrina, Victoria, Tallis, Byrd, and other early masters. (William Byrd, whose 400th death anniversary we commemorate this year, is also a highly appealing Renaissance composer, with his haunting and distinctively Elizabethan-English harmonies.) Or try a new trilogy of recordings by the British vocal group Stile Antico, entitled “Golden Renaissance.” The first two entries in the trilogy have been devoted to Josquin and Byrd; the third is yet to come, and if the first two installments are any indication, it will be magnificent.
The gradual permeation of the humanistic spirit into culture brought Western music in new directions. Claudio Monteverdi helped create opera, with its heightened expression of emotion through a highly schooled and artful style of sung drama. Composers of madrigals and other secular vocal genres developed music’s ability to express fleshly passions, and soon instrumental music grew in importance and was called upon to expression strong emotion too, as well as to embody sheer animal spirits, physical exhilaration, and extroverted display. Dissonance was used more freely, new chords were accepted, and a conception of music as melody-plus-harmony came into being, coexisting alongside the older style of polyphony or counterpoint.
The stage was set for what music scholars call the Common Practice Period, sometimes characterized as “Corelli through Brahms,” the period of the mainstream classical concert repertoire familiar to modern listeners. Tonality, based on the major and minor scales and the sense of key, became the central organizing principle of Western music during this time. The new Baroque style found its apex in the works of Johann Sebastian Bach.
One of the aspects of tonal music—the journey away from and back to a central key or tonality—led composers to emphasize a musical composition as a sort of drama in tones. Thematic development, or the repetition and transformation of small musical ideas, became the basis of the Classical symphonic style of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.
Along with this dramatic conception of musical communication came a change in musical texture and pace. Music became generally faster and busier; even slow movements could be intensively occupied with thematic development. The growth of instrumental virtuosity, the larger place for instrumental music generally on the musical scene, and the increasing importance of the dance-feeling in music also played a part.
I would like to suggest that the influence of humanism on music, although a wonderful thing overall, had a side effect of weakening music’s contemplative qualities. For example, there was a tendency for composers, and instrumental performers too, to become intoxicated with speed and dexterity as a means of showing off and impressing listeners. In this connection one thinks of the supposed words of the emperor to Mozart: “too many notes.” Instrumental genres like the concerto emphasized brilliant passagework (scales, runs, and the like), and opera singers vied to emulate this type of performance.
I mentioned that after a week spent listening to Josquin and Byrd and Palestrina, one of the things you notice about Common Practice music is how busy and active it sounds. Earlier music had a quality of circularity in its structure, rotating around a fixed point and expressing a sense of stability and order, almost a contemplation of eternity. Such music is in fact very like meditation, where one “chews on” a few beautiful sounds or ideas.
Now with a sense of narrative or story at its core, Western music had different priorities, leaning on the dramatic, the argumentative, the psychological. Opera became a central European artform, and its values tended to flow into other musical genres, including instrumental and even sacred music.
Even so, the meditative strain in music didn’t go away. The instrumental works of Johann Sebastian Bach can be supremely contemplative, such as his suites of dance-based pieces for keyboard, violin, or cello—some of the best evocations of solitude and introspection I know. The same could be said of the work of Bach’s good friend, the lute player Silvius Leopold Weiss. Such music, born of dancelike tempos and rhythms, evokes with courtly restraint all the emotions from joy to anguish, and can fit into any phase of your life. Speaking for myself, I love to play the solo music of Bach, Biber, Baltzar, Telemann, and other early composers on the violin in moments of solitude and introspection.
New music during the Enlightenment was characterized by musical athleticism and an increasingly secular spirit, aimed at immediate pleasure and entertainment. Yet Beethoven, toward the end of his life, offered a contrasting vision of music that was less active and more contemplative. We hear in works like the “Holy Song of Thanksgiving” (Heiliger Dankgesang) in his A-minor String Quartet a deeply meditative, inward, even mystical mood, concentrating often on the intensification of quite simple musical ideas. The energy and rough brio of Beethoven’s earlier works are quieted, and we walk in green pastures and by restful waters. Many of Beethoven’s slow movements from all periods of his career are slow-moving, meditative, or prayerful. The composer is known to have engaged in ruminative improvisations at the piano, which brought audiences to tears; you can hear echoes of this kind of rapt, trancelike music-making in his late piano sonatas and other chamber works, moments in which time itself seems suspended.
A good deal could be said of meditative aspects in music of Wagner and other composers of Romanticism. Yet throughout the 19th century there was a countervailing tendency toward an increase in music’s decibel volume—a product of the burgeoning size of concert halls, opera houses, and orchestras—combined with a heightening of tension by means of chromatic harmony and the sheer bombast of personal expression—an overcomplexity (heard in some of the works of Richard Strauss) in which one seems to lose sight of the still, small voice of contemplation.
All these developments led to the crisis of modern music around 1900, with composers asking “Where can we possibly go from here?”
Standard accounts of music history tend to be preoccupied with artistic innovation and revolution. But this obscures the fact that much modern music involved a rediscovery and reuse of what was very old. Impressionist composers like Claude Debussy looked to past eras and exotic locales for new musical tools to compensate for what was perceived as the exhaustion of traditional tonality. Some of these tools came from early European music. Research into early music had made composers aware of the techniques used by earlier composers. The monks of Solemnes in France were at work reviving the art of singing Gregorian chant. Ecclesiastical musicians were working to get sacred polyphony back into churches again, after a period when works in operatic style had been the norm. The church modes (or scales) of medieval and Renaissance music became available to composers again, part of their regular toolbox, used in new ways.
Thus, we find much Impressionistic music moving away from the idea of a musical composition as a drama or a dialectical argument and toward a more circular or contemplative sense in which we savor sounds for their own sakes and are much less conscious of musical time ticking away. “Ancient” scales and harmonies reentered the musical vocabulary, sometimes as a way to evoke religious feelings or a sense of history or the eternal. Among Debussy’s many short preludes, I would name La cathédrale engloutie (The Sunken Cathedral) or La fille aux cheveux de lin (The Girl with the Flaxen Hair), originally for piano but which I particularly enjoy in orchestral transcription; few composers can evoke the timeless and golden moment as this Frenchman can.
In 1922 the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote his Mass in G minor for unaccompanied choir, a work that in its modal harmonies harkens back to Byrd and the Elizabethan masters. The French-speaking Swiss composer Frank Martin also wrote a neo-modal Mass around the same time, music that sounds ancient and modern at the same time. In France, Maurice Duruflé married Gregorian chant to Impressionist harmonies in his beautifully contemplative choral works.
Closer to our own time, a group of composers popularly called “holy minimalists” has concentrated on reiterated patterns and very simple musical materials to create a changeless spiritual aura. While such techniques can be a recipe for monotony and sterility, there is much that is of value in this school. I highly recommend the contemporary composer Pēteris Vasks of Latvia, whose music has a Baltic melancholy married to a spiritual sincerity and conviction. A series of discs by the Latvian Radio Choir featuring Musica dolorosa, a Mass, and numerous other works of Vasks for choir and for string orchestra are among my favorite recordings at present. Mr. Vasks does not write “pure music,” and his composition titles all bear some sort of spiritual idea or intent. He has the rare talent of writing music that expresses timelessness while still somehow moving us along on a journey—truly the best of both worlds.
As listeners, a good case could be made for shifting the center of gravity of the Western musical tradition from the Classical and Romantic periods (which, let’s face it, make up most of our musical diet) to the Renaissance and Baroque. Certainly, the Early Music Movement of the last sixty years or so has opened our eyes and ears to the riches of music “before Bach,” as well as helping our understanding of Bach and subsequent composers. There is simply no excuse today for pretending that “classical music” consists solely of the concert staples from the 18th and 19th centuries. While for a long time “early music” has been considered a bit exoteric and scholarly, there’s no reason why this has to be so. Palestrina can be just as pleasing, once you have become acquainted with his style, as Mozart. There is nothing at all primitive about earlier music, which inhabits a rounded and complete world of its own.
The Classic and Romantic periods grew out of the Enlightenment and, at least in part, a different set of values. After this main line of musical tradition had run its course, around 1900, composers were freed up to return to certain aspects of earlier traditions, which had become neglected or forgotten with the march of time. This looking back is an aspect of musical modernity that gets little press, but one that seems to me very important. We have in turn progressed to a state of postmodern pluralism wherein all styles of the past can be welcomed and appreciated.
In this spirit, I think it will be enlightening and pleasurable for listeners to make both Early Music and salutary parts of Modern Music part of their life. And that’s my message for the curious musical explorer: not to be boxed in by the Common Practice Period of 1700 to 1900, but rather to sample from the entire luxuriant garden that is Western classical music.
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The featured image is “Young Man With A Violin” by Carroll Jones III. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.