On May 21, 1604, the cathedral of Toledo in Spain held job interviews for the post of choirmaster, the head of music at the church. The position had been vacated when the previous occupant, Alonso Lobo, was poached by the nearby cathedral of Seville, and Toledo needed a replacement who could really put Toledo on the map and establish it as the center of contrapuntal music-making in Spain and across Europe.
Their job interview for the potential church musicians is something of a shock to the present-day mindset. The whole interview process, recently reconstructed from historical documents by the music historian Philippe Canguilhem1, took several days. The four candidates, having arrived at the cathedral during Vespers, were given some well-known pre-existing chants from which they were to compose a motet and a polyphonic song over the course of the next three days.
But that was not all–not nearly. The most important part of the interview was a series of 24 tests of increasing difficulty, specifically to test the ability of these musicians to improvise. And when I say “improvise” I do not mean at a keyboard or on an instrument or singing by themselves. It was their ability to improvise counterpoint polyphony, to improvise with other choristers, or, as they called it, to sing super librum, “on the book.”
This practice has fascinated modern historians since it defies the imagination. Many music students have slaved over part-writing assignments in which we carefully choose every note to avoid parallel fifths and to prepare our dissonances properly. The idea that such music could be improvised by multiple singers seems impossible. Yet the historical documents, such as the one outlining the tests for the church musicians applying in Toledo, clearly attest that this improvisation was done frequently and was considered exquisitely beautiful by its audiences.
For instance, in addition to being able to improvise against someone else singing a pre-existing chant, the interviewees were asked to improvise a two-part canon at the interval of a second below a pre-existing chant. They would do this using the “Guidonian hand,” a mnemonic device whereby one could point to the knuckles on the left hand and thereby refer to musical pitches. Thus, if I were applying for the job, I would both sing and also indicate knuckles on my hand so that another singer could sing a quite separate melody which I was coming up with on the spot.
They also used the hand for the most famous of the twenty-four tests. It utterly staggers the mind. In the test, the applicants were given a chant. They were then asked to use it to improvise a four-voice motet. One voice was a pre-existing chant. The applicant would sing-improvise a new part and then would use both of his hands to indicate to two local choristers from Toledo what notes they should sing. This was to be done not in a dry chordal style but using the elegant flowers and ornaments of the contrapuntal idiom, the sort of stuff you’d hear in Palestrina or Victoria or William Byrd.
Setting aside for a moment the idea of improvising counterpoint, I want to draw your attention to another baffling side of the anecdote: the very fact that people cared. I don’t know about you, but I do not know any pastors or sessions or vestries or rectors who would think to impose any comparable test for prospective church musicians. This is not a knock against pastors or hiring committees, but priorities are dramatically different than they used to be in church music; what we fund, and how we think about the job of church musician. I’ll return to this theme below.
To return to the topic of improvising polyphony, it’s so extraordinary a concept that it has taken musicologists a while to accept that it actually happened. As is oftentimes the case, many modern scholars simply discounted historical anecdotes like the job interviews in Toledo as exaggeration; the tasks described are just too monumentally difficult to be plausible. But scholars recently have been forced to reconsider; not just reconsider, in fact, but to invert the whole picture of polyphony during this period. Improvised counterpoint was not some strange exception tucked away in rare pockets of talent but it was the norm, the assumption. It is in fact composed counterpoint that seems to be the odd man out. The vast majority of polyphony that was sung in this period was improvised, not composed. The fifteenth-century theorist Johannes Tinctoris called composed counterpoint res facta, literally a “made thing,” whereas improvised counterpoint was called cantare super librum, singing upon the book2. This latter term he used synonymously with “counterpoint.” That is to say, by default, when they thought of “counterpoint,” they thought of something that was improvised. Nor does Tinctoris loosen all the usual rules of preparing dissonances and parallel fifths and so forth, even when things are being improvised. There are examples of people who claimed to transcribe improvised polyphony, and every time, it is immaculately conceived and gorgeous, rivaling the beauty of the best fifteenth and sixteenth century composers. As seems so often the case, good scholarship and good historiography seldom result when historians begin with the assumption that the contemporaneous accounts must be wrong because we simply find them implausible.
How did they do it? How did they get so good at a style over which music undergraduate students slave and slave in order to invent even four perfect bars? It turns out that this kind of improvisation is no different from any other kind: it is not haphazardly making up whatever you want out of your head, but it is carefully memorizing a stock of preferred musical phrases and procedures which you can, with practice, begin to deploy intuitively in the right situations3. I can give you an example: musicians in this period knew, for instance, that you could always create a canon (that is, a round) at the fifth above if you followed these simple rules: the first voice (the dux) must move down by even-numbered intervals and move up by odd-numbered intervals. In other words, the dux could move down by second, fourth, or sixth, or up by third or fifth. Whenever the dux followed these rules, the resulting second voice, the comes, would always have been in perfect consonance and never run into undesirable parallel intervals. These kinds of procedures, multiplied and re-applied, are capable of producing the variegated surface of counterpoint.
It’s just the same with improvised poetry, from what we understand of Homer or the Beowulf poet or a chanson de geste. A wordhoard of kennings or stock epithets that fit perfectly in dactylic hexameter–these things make possible high-quality improvisation by imposing certain limitations on the vocabulary and using a finite subset of language: large enough to be continually interesting, but small enough that it could be mastered, memorized, ceaselessly re-organized. The same is true for musical language in the fifteenth century: they were capable of improvising it because it was limited, because it followed certain predictable lines.
Now, no matter how much we want to emulate such an incredible musical culture in our church music, it’s impossible. It is made impossible by our eclecticism. This musical eclecticism is a certain commitment to including in our musical diet a wide variety of different traditions and centuries. Most church-music traditionalists are committed to an incredibly wide variety of musical options and choices, different musical idioms of all sorts. I myself am no exception. When I teach the history of sacred music, I generally take the students through a smattering of Bach, Messiaen, Tallis, Perotin, John Tavener, Henry Purcell, Gospel music, Gregorian chant, and the wide and rich hymn tradition. I imagine that most of our choral programs and congregational singing, if our church musicians could will it into existence, would be like this too: some days, Anglican Revival music, the occasional Russian Orthodox gem, a Lutheran Baroque anthem, perhaps a bit of original music from modern church music composers, something from the sixteenth-century Piae Cantiones, some Josquin when we can manage it, and maybe, just maybe, something from the nineteenth century. No century or church music tradition, so long as it is aesthetically worthy and liturgically appropriate, is excluded.
Of course, no such thing was possible or desirable in the fifteenth or sixteenth century when the applicants for the position of music leader at Toledo cathedral occurred. As Johannes Tinctoris said in the 1470s, “there does not exist anything that was composed more than forty years ago which is deemed, by those who are trained, to be worthy of the hearing.”4 I must say, by the way, that Tinctoris is universally laughed at for this sentiment: nobody credits him with any wisdom in uttering it. What a fool Tinctoris is! But I wonder if perhaps he is right in an important sense: Tinctoris and many others in his time admired prior generations of composers as models, but why would he take up their musical language? He had his own that suited his needs perfectly well. I don’t think or mean that music just gets better over time, because I don’t think this is actually true. But I do mean that perhaps we should follow every prior era of good church music and be unafraid to be narrow in our musical choices, while at the same time learning widely and eclectically from every available model.
And not just in the fifteenth-century: no great wealth of musical choices for Sunday morning was available or desirable in Bach’s time–Bach, who mainly studied Vivaldi and Pachelbel and Buxtehude, barely his own elders, and whose exposure to earlier centuries of music consisted of some motets by Obrecht, Josquin, and Isaac.5 The fact is, our own musical past was not nearly so well-educated about their past as we are, yet they produced far more impressive musical practices than we do. I am not suggesting we have any moral need to be like them in this respect. But, for the traditionalist church musician, all of this represents an unsettling paradox. The ages that the modern-day traditionalist most wants to imitate tend to be, on the whole, much less interested in their own musical pasts than the traditionalist is.
Our musical eclecticism throttles our creativity and productivity as music makers. We cannot commit to one style, so we can never truly become excellent in any. Music is like a language: if we are to speak meaningfully, we must choose a dialect to become fluent in. This is a lesson others have learned in the past but we have not. We desperately need to commit to one style, one idiom, one musical language. Otherwise, our church music programs will always languish, never gain hegemony in the lives of our congregants nor garner that intense enthusiasm that comes only from deep familiarity. We are musical Casanovas. We too need to fish or cut bait; we need to commit.
I could foresee a couple possible objections. The first objection: am I suggesting we forego all the riches of the musical past and all the diversity of the different ecclesiastical traditions? Here we need to distinguish between what serves as a model for our music and what our actual music is. The past serves as instruction, but it is imitated at the level of structure and form, not surface. We could, and should, commit to a single idiom and use that exclusively in our churches, yet still be hearing and learning from a variety of sources. This is the difference between, for instance, reading Shakespeare to improve your own writing (and, more importantly, for your own pleasure) as opposed to speaking Shakespearean English. As the ancient Roman philosopher Favorinus said to the boy overly fond of old words, “You say you like the ancients, because they are honest, good, sober, moderate. So then live by the old customs, but speak with the words of the present.” We need to be able to do something similar in our music.
None of this, however, should be understood to be a knock against the ancients. Anti-eclecticism doesn’t rule out constant immersion in a wide variety of musical traditions. As church musicians, that is our job: we should be conversant with every conceivable tradition–but ordered toward the goal of enriching our churches into our own tradition.
Second, one could object: is Toledo even a good ideal to emulate? Perhaps I’m assuming that the culture of musical excellence in Josquin’s time or Bach’s time is worth imitating, but it may not be. Perhaps we’re better off not being so professionally excellent and instead more amateurishly enjoy various musical traditions. Perhaps that amateurism is a benefit. Not everything needs to be about depth. Breadth is also important.
But I disagree. As the Gentiles say in Psalm 87 of the musicians from Zion, “This and that man was born in her: and the highest himself shall establish her. The Lord shall count, when he writeth up the people, that this man was born there. As well the singers as the players on instruments shall be there: all my springs are in thee.” What the Gentiles say about Zion is that their musicians are truly excellent; as in Psalm 137, the Gentiles can’t wait to hear the musical training of the exiles. We, as the Church, should be musically excellent. I don’t mean excellent “for its own sake,” as is the goal with art music or Classical music, but we certainly shouldn’t plan for mediocrity.
Ultimately, however, it isn’t the professional musicians who are at stake in this discussion. It is regular, lay-people, the non-trained, those in the congregation who listen, who participate, who absorb. Think again of the Toledo job application and focus on the people who were hiring, the people who insisted on the tests. It was the cathedral chapter, the beancounters, the “session.” In other words, even though the tests were likely constructed by professional musicians in the choir, it was not professional musicians who approved going to such trouble to hire a qualified candidate. Musical excellence of this sort, in other words, indicates a great deal of buy-in from the non-musicians. Toledo, after all, was competing at the time with the Cathedral in Seville; they wanted the reputation for the greatest church music in Europe (and I don’t think we can say entirely that that’s vainglory, since Psalm 87 itself is the church bragging on its own musicians). When the musical idiom is limited, the average person is more likely to be able to comprehend that musical idiom, to themselves participate in it, to detect which species are lovely and worthy and which are ignoble and of poor quality. Professional excellence is the result, not the cause, of a great church music program; but the point is that the narrowness of musical style creates a general listening public which can learn to appreciate excellence.
In being overly eclectic in our musical choices, we are starving our congregations of a musical idiom with which they can become conversant. I think of this very issue when I listen to Bach chorale preludes: sometimes Bach will so distort and contort a Lutheran chorale melody that I myself cannot recognize the original. But that is probably because I am familiar with 1000 hymns and Lutherans in Bach’s time knew only a very few hymn tunes in comparison. These they had so deep within themselves that, even when Bach disguised them in his florid counterpoint, they no doubt could detect the tune. They could get the joke. Such musical interest is foreclosed to a congregation which is exposed to too many kinds of music. We are unlikely to produce a modern equivalent of Bach, or to pay him a living wage, or to write a job description to attract him, if we do not equip people with a style.
How can we move forward? First, we should distinguish between “fusion” or “heterogeneity” as opposed to “eclecticism.” Whereas eclecticism would be many styles co-existing, there are certain individual styles which are marked by a fusion or heterogeneity, yet all within a single idiom. If eclecticism were analogous to a liturgy done in French, German, and Latin, then this fusion or heterogeneity would be the liturgy done in English–a single language whose origins, nonetheless, lie in French, German, and Latin. A musical example of such heterogeneity might be the Baroque style Bach wrote in, which included national styles, secular styles, and dance styles which all invaded the church music. Nevertheless, it was a single style which simply employed many elements within the musical fabric. But one thing that never occurred to Bach or Scheidt or Parsons was to take, wholesale, a Gregorian chant and perform it as such. They might chew that Gregorian chant up, digest it, and then produce a quite modified, Baroquified version of it. This I would take to be the difference between a unified style which is marked by fusion or heterogeneity versus eclecticism. If we can do something more like fusion and heterogeneity, this may be a path forward.
Another solution would be to become more localist. If we smart from the sting of foregoing the smorgasbord of sacred music, we can soothe ourselves with the balm of our own local community’s musical styles. There are many famous examples of this localism motivating wonderful sacred compositions in the past. Shape note singers, black Gospel, Anglican revival music all take the folk aesthetic that grows out of their local fabric. It is time we do the same things ourselves, and perhaps we will all do it a bit differently from one another. The point is, however, that our own congregations and parishes, our own presbyteries or dioceses, come to deeply know their own music and to feel it is their own.
Ultimately, I am endorsing a painful path forward: when it comes to Sunday morning and what we decide to choose for our choral anthems, for our congregational singing, even for our incidental music, we must at a certain point say “no” to good things. But in so doing, we are saying “yes” to an immense musical richness which we cannot at present imagine: the ability to create generations of musicians and laypeople who are steeped in a language in a kind of familiarity currently unknown in American church music.
John Ahern is the director of the Te Deum Music Fellows Program at Theopolis, and is a graduate student pursuing a PhD in musicology from Princeton University. He is a substitute organist for the Princeton University chapel on occasion. He loves his wife and son, and they all frequently sing, to greater and lesser degrees of success, Renaissance bicinia over dinner.
- Philippe Canguilhem, “Singing upon the Book according to Vicente Lusitano,” Early Music History 30 (2011): 55–103. ↩︎
- Tinctoris, De arte contrapuncti, III.3. ↩︎
- The literature on this subject is spectacular and well-worth reading. For an understanding of how memorization plays a role in verbal improvisation, see Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory : A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). For this sort of study conducted on music, see Jessie Ann Owens, Composers at Work : The Craft of Musical Composition 1450-1600 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) and Anna Maria Busse Berger, Medieval Music and the Art of Memory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). ↩︎
- Translated by Rob C. Wegman in “Johannes Tinctoris and the ‘New Art,’” Music & Letters 84, no. 2 (2003), 173. ↩︎
- Christoph Wolff, Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician, New York: W. W. Norton & Co (2000), 83. ↩︎