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"Music's exclusive function is to structure the flow of time and keep order in it." Igor Stravinsky |
"Without music, life would be a mistake." Friedrich Nietzsche |
| The Alphabet Vs The Goddess › Sex, Time and Power › | |||||||||
| In the Renaissance, as we have seen, art first and then science, discovered the third dimension of depth; so, too, did music. Chords -- multiple notes struck at the same time -- deepened the richness of music, and allowed music, like perspective in art, and the Copernican system in science, allowed it to be truly three-dimensional: Music could now be considered a three-dimensional aural geometry that was structured by the flow of time. Perspective enhanced depth in art and chords deepened the timbre of music. The incredibly expressive possibilities inherent in a music that was not only melodious but also polyphonic and harmonious lifted the curtain on a new age beginning in the late sixteenth century. In order to prevent chaos, composers constructed their intricate new musical compositions on a grid consisting of the upright of key and the crossbeam of counterpoint. These two sturdy supports provided the great composers the means to scaffold simple motifs and melodies into towering aeries which would rival the Music of the Spheres. The Great Age of Music had begun. The invention and dissemination of musical notation continued to create many different branchings within music. The most significant was that which split speech from song because it hastened the development of two separate new art forms: instrumental music without words, and poetry without melody. In the oral tradition, poems were mostly sung and songs were in verse. Musical notation signaled the end of the age of minstrels and troubadours. Once written language could be conveyed in silence, the melody in poetry died away like a fading echo. The bleached-out remnant of the song became known as verse. In the fifteenth century, as the importance of song in Western culture diminished, poetry became ascendant. * (*f.n.: It is notable that in the modern era the cycle appears to have turned a complete revolution and we have witnessed songs' rebirth and a decline in poetry's general appeal. Byron's, Keats's and Shelley's romantic poetry has been supplanted by the songs of Cole Porter and the Beatles. More people know the lyrics of Bob Dylan than they do the verse of Dylan Thomas. Very recently, however, it appears that poetry is enjoying a resurgence as songs seem to be in decline.) If the lyrics of songs became poetry, then the pure melody, the other half of song, was transformed into a wordless achievement known as instrumental music. Before written notation, music was rarely composed without including the human voice. The oral tradition had been so pervasive that hardly anyone had ever thought to compose a piece of music without words. In the sixteenth century, however, coincident with the beginnings of the great age of European poetry, music was composed primarily for instruments alone, and from that time until the twentieth century, except for operas, masses and song poems, words disappeared from music sheets altogether. From the sixteenth century onward, words and music would begin to go their separate ways. The disappearance of the written word from music took place at the same time writing disappeared from art. During the Dark Ages, when literacy was at its nadir, what there was of art concerned itself with the letters of the alphabet. People invested the ability to read with magic and made the word an object of worship. Written language became the reverential subject of art. Monks in monasteries illuminated manuscripts, such as the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Book of Kells, which in and of themselves were works of art; and calligraphy, the art of lettering, superseded drawing, the art of image. In the Renaissance, Gutenberg's press again made words common enough that they ceased to be the icons of religion. The printing press, which had squeezed the melody from verse, began to grind the calligraphy from script. Clear, spare, Carolingian letters, briefly used in the ninth century, reappeared to replaced the filigreed, crabbed Gothics of the medieval period. During the period that composers wrote songs without lyrics, artists returned to making visual images without words. Then, from the Renaissance until the advent of modern art, words remained virtually absent from inside the picture frame, even though they appeared in a painting's title which was outside the painting itself.* (Footnote: It was not until Picasso and Braque reinserted fragments of writing into their twentieth century Cubist paintings that calligraphy reestablished itself in art.)
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