Listen to This. Alex Ross
the markers of musical sadness. But it is actually a song of flirtation, with the singer turning a bleak situation to her advantage: “Hey, the wind’s blowing from the Danube / Lie beside me, it won’t reach you.” Likewise, certain laments lack telltale “weeping” features: the aria “Che farò senza Euridice?” from Gluck’s opera Orfeo ed Euridice, begins with a decorous, upward-arching phrase in a sunny major mode.
In other words, there are no globally consistent signifiers of emotion. Music is something other than a universal language. Nonetheless, the lament topos occurs often enough in various traditions that it has become a durable point of reference. Peter Kivy, in his book Sound Sentiment, argues that musical expression falls into two categories: “contours,” melodic shapes that imitate some basic aspect of human speech or behavior; and “conventions,” gestures that listeners within a particular culture learn to associate with particular psychological states. The falling figure of lament is more contour than convention, and it is a promising thread to follow through the musical maze.
THE ART OF MELANCHOLY
Emotional archetypes came late to notated or composed music. In the late Middle Ages, a stylized array of chantlike lines worked equally for texts of lust, grief, and devotion. Hildegard of Bingen, abbess of Rupertsberg (1098–1179), exhibited one of the first strongly defined personalities in music history, yet the fervid mysticism of her output emanates more from the words than from the music. The opening vocal line of Hilde-gard’s “Laus Trinitati” (“Praise be to the Trinity, who is sound, and life”) has much the same rising and falling shape as “O cruor sanguinis” (O bloodshed that rang out on high”). Still, you can identify a few explicitly emotional effects in medieval music—“not mere signs but actual symptoms of feeling,” in the words of the scholar John Stevens. The lament contour might be among the oldest of these. In the twelfth-century liturgical drama The Play of Daniel, the prophet lets out a stepwise descending cry as he faces death in the lion’s den: “Heu, heu!”
As the Middle Ages gave way to the Renaissance, “symptoms of feeling” erupted all over the musical landscape. Guillaume de Machaut (d. 1377), the most celebrated practitioner of the rhythmically pointed style of Ars Nova, dilated on the pleasures and pains of love, and you can hear a marked difference between the gently rippling figures of “Tant doucement” (“So sweetly I feel myself imprisoned”) and the stark descending line of “Mors sui” (“I die, if I do not see you”). This emphasis on palpable emotion, bordering on the erotic, was probably connected to the growing assertiveness of the independent nobility and of the merchant classes. In the following century, Marsilio Ficino, the Florentine Neoplatonist philosopher, described music as presenting “the intentions and passions of the soul as well as words … so forcibly that it immediately provokes both the singer and the audience to imitate and act out the same things.” The conception of music as a spur to individual action was an implicit challenge to medieval doctrine, and, indeed, Ficino’s revival of Greek ideas led to suspicions of heresy.
When secular strains infiltrated sacred music, a major new phase in composition began. The high musical art of the later Renaissance was polyphony, the knotty interweaving of multiple melodic strands. A cadre of composers from the Low Countries—cultivated first by the dukes of Burgundy and later by such patrons as Louis XI of France and Lorenzo the Magnificent of Florence—wrote multi-movement masses of unprecedented complexity, perhaps the first purposefully awe-inducing works in the classical tradition. These composers adopted a new practice, English in origin, of letting a preexisting theme take control of a large-scale piece. At first, the melodies were taken from liturgical chant, but popular tunes later came into play. The master of the game was Johannes Ockeghem (d. 1497), who is said to have sung with a deep bass voice and who lived to a grand old age. Around 1460, Ockeghem wrote a chanson titled “Fors seulement,” whose lovelorn text begins with the lines “Save only for the expectation of death / No hope dwells in my weary heart.” Its opening notes match up with the lament contour of various folk traditions:
Ockeghem’s song became widely popular, inspiring dozens of arrangements; a version by Antoine Brumel added a text beginning with the words “Plunged into the lake of despair.” In due course, the tune served as a cantus firmus, or “fixed song,” for settings of the Mass. The Kyrie of Ockeghem’s own Missa Fors seulement begins with a terraced series of descents, the basses delving into almost Wagnerian regions. The illusion of three-dimensional space resulting from that vertical plunge is one novel sensation that Ockeghem’s music affords; another is the cascading, overlapping motion of the voices, an early demonstration of the magic of organized sound. As the Mass goes on, the song of despair is transformed into a sign of Christ’s glory.
After reaching a peak of refinement in the works of Ockeghem’s disciple Josquin Desprez, polyphony faded in importance in the later sixteenth century. Listeners demanded new, often simpler styles. The marketplace for music expanded dramatically, with the printing press fostering an international, nonspecialist public. Dance fads such as the chaconne indicated the growing vitality of the vernacular. The Church, shaken by the challenge of the Reformation and its catchy hymns of praise, saw the need to make its messages more transparent; the Council of Trent decreed that church composers should formulate their ideas more intelligibly, instead of giving “empty pleasure to the ear” through abstruse polyphonic designs.
For a host of reasons, then, emotion in music became a hot topic. The theorist Gioseffo Zarlino, in his 1558 text Le istitutioni harmoniche, instructed composers to use “cheerful harmonies and fast rhythms for cheerful subjects and sad harmonies and grave rhythms for sad subjects.” Zarlino went on: “When a composer wishes to express effects of grief and sorrow, he should (observing the rules given) use movements which proceed through the semitone, the semiditone, and similar intervals”—a reference to the sinuous chromatic scale, which had long been discouraged as musically erroneous but which in these years became a modish thing. Various scholars promoted the idea of a stile moderno, or “modern style”—music strong in feeling, alert to the nuances of texts, attentive to the movement of a singing voice.
The passions of the late Renaissance primed the scene for opera, which emerged in Italy just before 1600. In the decades leading up to that breakthrough, the great laboratory of musical invention was the madrigal—a secular polyphonic genre that allowed for much experiment in the blending of word and tone. While early madrigals tended to be straightforwardly songful, later ones were at times willfully convoluted, comparable in spirit to Mannerist painting. High-minded patrons encouraged innovation, even an avant-garde mentality; the dukes of Ferrara commissioned a repertory of musica secreta, or “secret music.” The arch-magus of musical Mannerism was Carlo Gesualdo, a nobleman-composer who put forward some of the most harmonically peculiar music of the premodern epoch. His madrigal Moro lasso—“I die, alas, in my grief”—begins with a kaleidoscopic sequence of chords pinned to a four-note chromatic slide; Dolcissima mia vita ends with a briar patch of chromatic lines around the words “I must love you or die.” The words are ironic in light of Gesualdo’s personal history: in 1590, he discovered his wife in bed with another man and had both of them slaughtered.
The madrigal fad spread to England, where Elizabethan intellectuals were raising their own banners of independence. Drowning oneself in sorrow was one way of resisting the outward hierarchy of late-Renaissance society, the beehive ideal of each human worker performing his assigned task. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which was first performed around 1601, is the obvious case in point. The grief of the Prince of Denmark shines like a grim lantern on Claudius’s rotten kingdom, exposing not only Hamlet’s private loss but the hollowness of all human affairs: “I have that within, which passeth show; / These, but the trappings and the suits of woe.” Music was a favorite site for brooding in the Danish style. The composer Thomas Morley set down some guidelines in his 1597 textbook A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke: “If [the subject] be lamentable, the note must goe in slow and heavy motions, as semibriefs, briefs, and such like … Where your dittie speaketh of descending, lowenes, depth, hell, and others such, you must make your musick descend.”