Musical Revolutions: How the Sounds of the Western World Changed - Hardcover

Isacoff, Stuart

 
9780525658634: Musical Revolutions: How the Sounds of the Western World Changed
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0525658637 ISBN 13: 9780525658634
Verlag: Knopf, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

From the critically acclaimed author of Temperament, a narrative account of the most defining moments in musical history—classical and jazz—all of which forever altered Western culture
 
"A fascinating journey that begins with the origins of musical notation and travels through the centuries reaching all the way to our time.”—Semyon Bychkov, chief conductor and music director of the Czech Philharmonic

The invention of music notation by a skittish Italian monk in the eleventh century. The introduction of multilayered hymns in the Middle Ages. The birth of opera in a Venice rebelling against the church’s pious restraints. Baroque, Romantic, and atonal music; bebop and cool jazz; Bach and Liszt; Miles Davis and John Coltrane. In telling the exciting story of Western music’s evolution, Stuart Isacoff explains how music became entangled in politics, culture, and economics, giving rise to new eruptions at every turn, from the early church’s attempts to bind its followers by teaching them to sing in unison to the global spread of American jazz through the Black platoons of the First World War.
 
The author investigates questions like: When does noise become music? How do musical tones reflect the natural laws of the universe? Why did discord become the primary sound of modernity? Musical Revolutions is a book replete with the stories of our most renowned musical artists, including notable achievements of people of color and women, whose paths to success were the most difficult.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

STUART ISACOFF is a pianist, writer, and the founder of Piano Today magazine, which he edited for nearly three decades. A winner of the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for excellence in writing about music, he is a regular contributor to The Wall Street Journal and many other leading publications. He is also the author of Temperament: How Music Became a Battleground for the Great Minds of Western Civilization, A Natural History of the Piano, and When the World Stopped to Listen. He lives in Closter, New Jersey.  

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Chapter 1

Singing from Symbols

The music surged in my ears, truth seeped into my heart . . . ​

—St. Augustine, Confessions

Striking an ascetic pose in the church sanctuary, St. Augustine (354–430) knelt for a brief instant while motionless as one of the chamber’s stone columns, while the voices of men and women in the choir gently intermingled in a simple, haunting melody rising and falling like incense in the musty air. The sound wafted gently along the cathedral’s walls, intoxicating, sensuous, even seductive—as wily and dangerous as voluptuous Eve’s enticements to a hapless Adam. Flooded with the pleasure of it, Augustine burst into tears. Surrendering to the experience had distracted him from the word of God—a venial sin—and he was gripped with guilt.

For centuries, philosophers had warned of music’s ability to manipulate emotions—provoking sadness, igniting fervor, even enfeebling the mind. Augustine was a witness to the danger, and he recorded his experiences in his Confessions. Four centuries after he penned them, religious authorities were still grappling with the issue, though no longer warning about the threat of beguilement; instead, they began to consider how the very tones that had led Augustine astray could be harnessed in service of the Church’s mission.

In his time, each region under the pope’s reign was caught up in its own way of speaking and thinking, including particular approaches to intoning the sacred hymns. “I myself could hardly believe it,” noted Notker the Stammerer (c. 840–912), one of the leading literary and musical figures of the early Middle Ages, “how widely the different provinces—nay, not the provinces only but districts and cities—differed in the praise of God, that is to say in their method of chanting.” That lack of unity, in the view of religious authorities, robbed the kingdom and the Church of their full power.

They wondered, what if the disparate groups could all be coaxed into singing with a single voice, thereby forging a united people out of a sprawling, polyglot kingdom? It might actually allow the Holy See finally to triumph over a disordered world, though, in fact, putting things in such order seemed a task beyond the abilities of mere mortals.

The job was taken on by Charlemagne (742–814), also known as Charles the Great, the fierce warrior who brought under one rule the individual regions and for his efforts was crowned Holy Roman Emperor by Pope Leo III on Christmas Day in 800. Charles was the son of King Pepin the Short, ruler of the Franks, who purportedly demonstrated his might by piercing a lion’s neck and severing a bull’s head with just a single blow. According to Notker, Pepin’s followers fell to the ground at the sight of this, and instantly declared his authority over all mankind.

Charlemagne inherited his father’s grit and succeeded him as Defender of the Faith. He was tall, towering over most of his contemporaries. Whether done up in gold-embroidered robes on feast days or wearing a simple tunic, he would always have a sword by his side, especially a cherished one made with a hilt of gold and a jewel-encrusted scabbard. Standard dress for the Franks included gilt-covered boots with red thongs, a rich linen shirt, and a buckled sword-belt covered in leather and hard, shining wax. A stick of applewood was traditionally carried in the right hand—with “regular knots, strong and terrible,” according to one witness. The king’s martial skills unfailingly rattled the spirits of foes. Nithard, son of Charlemagne’s daughter Bertha, claimed that Charles managed to tame the “wild and iron hearts” of the Franks and barbarians alike through a form of “mild terror.” In fact, his name was whispered with such awe that it became part of a well-known magical incantation—the so-called Charlemagne’s Prayer—used to invoke Jesus’s help in resisting the devil and securing protection against enemies, natural disasters, and illness.

But the idea of compelling everyone in his domain to sing hymns in exactly the same manner faced insurmountable obstacles. Some groups, Notker explained, “torn with envy of the glory of the Franks . . . ​determined to vary their method of singing so that [Charles’s] kingdom and dominion should never have cause to rejoice in unity and agreement.” When it came to venerating God through Gregorian chant—named for Pope Gregory I, the sixth-century saint whose identity has been forever linked to the catalog of hymns—the kingdom was a musical Tower of Babel.

In Milan, many clung to a regional style known as Ambrosian chant, which can be heard in some churches there even today. In southern Spain, the inhabitants preserved Mozarabic chant, cultivated under the Visigoths. And the Germans were considered a lost cause, since, as the medieval Church chronicler John the Deacon put it, “their coarse voices, which roar like thunder, cannot execute soft modulations, because their throats are hoarse with too much drinking.”

In any case, the dream of teaching everyone to sing in exactly the same manner seemed doomed to failure, because there was simply no good way to make it happen—no means of writing down the melodies so that singers could study them. The most common technique used by teachers at the time involved tedious rote exercise: first locating the pitches of a hymn by playing them on an instrument, such as the single-string monochord, and then asking singers to replicate and remember the result. The process was painstaking. It was also unreliable: as St. Isidore, bishop of Seville (c. 560–636), pointed out, the entire enterprise was built on shaky ground. “Unless sounds are held in the memory by man,” he complained, “they perish.”

Various historical efforts to remedy the situation had been tried. Small accent marks in ancient Hebrew cantillation placed next to the words—like signs sometimes used to indicate poetic inflection—communicated fixed melodic shapes. Tibetan monks relied on meandering squiggles to guide their throaty incantations, like seismograph printouts tracing the Earth’s tremors. Odo, abbot of Cluny, resurrected a Greek method employing alphabetical letters. There were graphic representations of music in such disparate places as China and Syria, where an ancient Hurrian song dating to 1400 BCE was discovered on stone tablets, depicted with what appear to be interval names and number signs. But these were all abstract hints. In any case, it’s hard to soar in song while busily attempting to translate theoretical symbols into practice.

The turning point in Europe came about through the efforts of an Italian monk named Guido of Arezzo (990–1050), who as a singing instructor to youngsters daily experienced the difficulties in achieving the alchemy of voices perfectly blended. Guido was studious, devotional, socially awkward, compliant in the face of authority, and extremely frail. Yet he boldly asserted that the usual method of mimicking the sounds of a monochord was “childish,” and good only for beginners. After studying the available theoretical treatises on the subject and experimenting on his students, he devised a practical way of connecting notation to the physical act of singing. Success brought him little more than personal grief; his work was received as a provocation, not a cause for celebration.

The man became a victim of his infatuation, a loner pioneering in his limited world, with no real support system. He was, perhaps unintentionally, a revolutionary leader. What...

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Verlag
Knopf
Erscheinungsdatum
2022
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0525658637
ISBN 13 
9780525658634
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
320
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
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