Polyphony

“ No freedom of artistic expression can be gained until absolute command of the material to be used has been obtained, and the principles thoroughly assimilated by the artist.
Polyphony and Monophony Contrasted.—In the concrete, polyphonic music may be represented by a series of lines representing separate and distinct melodies; though a principal melody is always used, it is not supported by chords of harmonic structure but by other melodies, or transpositions of the same melody, so used as to contrast with and support each other. ”

“ The early theorists naturally took it upon themselves to regulate and systematize the popular practice, and thereupon polyphony first comes to our notice through their works in a very stiff and ugly form of music called organum, which in its strictest form is hardly more to be considered polyphony than the magadizing of the Greeks. ”

“ POLYPHONIA (Eng. Polyphony, from the Gr. πολὺς, many, φονὴ, a voice) . A term applied, by modern Musical Historians, to a certain species of unaccompanied Vocal Music, in which each Voice is made to sing a Melody of its own; the various Parts being bound together, in obedience to the laws of Counterpoint, into an harmonious whole, wherein it is impossible to decide which Voice has the most important task allotted to it, since all are equally necessary to the general effect. ”

“ The independence with which each element cooperates as if consciously to produce the whole presupposes a perfect mastery of musical form. True polyphony is the mature fruit of contrapuntal study, although the severe forms of counterpoint are seldom allowed to make themselves visible. ”

“ Emotion in Polyphony.—This style is worthy of examination. As a preface we must remember that we have to deal with the Church and human voices only, for instruments had not been perfected sufficiently for church use, excepting the organ, and that we must consider a voice because of its peculiar tonal qualities and the adaptation of vocal forms and styles to its use. This vocal style had developed gradually, through a long course of reforms, until it reached its perfection in the later polyphonic schools, and expressed the peculiar emotion suited for the services. ”

“ The Wagnerian method of modifying themes in rhythm and harmony so as to alter their dramatic significance is combined successfully with the methods of the classicists in working out. Modern polyphony, the polyphony of [Pg 119] hazardous cross paths in acrid harmony, of the Impinging contrapuntal curves, is handled with consummate ease. It is orchestral technic of the highest kind, but it all aims at making music which shall describe the minutest feelings, the finest shades of thought, and the most varied actions of personages whom the hearer must see with his mind's eye. ”

“ The way of escape from the prosodic monotony of the song lies through polyphony, through the conceiving of music as a group or bundle of melodies each of which has its own vitality and its own provocation to fancy. Once the composer learns to follow each strand in this web, for its own sake, and to attain coherence by the persistence of characteristic motives of all types, rather than by a slavish alternation of phrase and equal counter-phrase, the creation widens in his view, and he writes with a hitherto undreamed-of elasticity. ”

“ Polyphony is simultaneous multiple melody. In 16th-century music and in fugue-writing every part is as melodious as every other. The popular cry for melody as an antidote to polyphony is thus really a curious perversion of the complaint that one may have too much of a good thing. Several well-known classical melodies are polyphonically composite, being formed by an inner melody appearing as it were through transparent places in the outer melody, which it thus completes. ”

“ In the orchestra a vigorous [13] polyphony must summon the attention in several directions at once; particular instruments, or groups of instruments, must address the listener simultaneously without heeding each other, till he gets as nervously excited as the man who vainly endeavours to understand what is being said in the jangle of a dozen voices. ”

“ On the other hand, an intimate connection exists between Plain Song and true Polyphony—which indeed was originally suggested by and owes its very existence to it. Almost every class of Melody we have described has been treated by the Great Masters in Counterpoint of more or less complexity; and that, so frequently, that we possess Polyphonic renderings of the Music used at High Mass, at Solemn Vespers, and in the awful Services of Holy Week, in quantity sufficient to supply the needs of Christendom throughout the entire cycle of the Ecclesiastical Year. ”

“ Not very long ago, this wonderful Mass was supposed to possess certain constructive peculiarities which not only marked it out as the greatest piece of Church Music that ever was conceived—as it undoubtedly is—but which also interposed, between Music written before, and that produced after it, a gulf as unfathomable as that which separates the Polyphony of the 16th century from the Monodia of the 17th. No idea can possibly be more fallacious. ”

“ We shall confine ourselves in this chapter for the most part to the development of polyphony, the art of music within the church, not because it was only within the church that polyphony was perfected, but because the art can be most easily and consistently traced in church music. None of the great composers whose importance we shall discuss restricted himself only to religious music, but all gave the greater part of their energy thereto, and most of the available knowledge of music from 1300 to 1600 is related to the church. ”

“ In the second place, from the time when two melodies were first joined the knowledge and appreciation of harmony were bound to grow—that is, the knowledge of the effect of dissonances and consonances following each other, and it needed but a matter of time for men to come to plan music with the end of producing such effects in a definite sequence. Now in polyphony the consideration of the progression of chords was entirely secondary to the ideal of writing several independent voice parts. ”

“ And in the same country, too, arose the Gothic arch, the beauties of the shrine of Notre Dame in Paris, and the involved and massive polyphony of music. Polyphonic is a term which relates itself to two others, as the leading types of all effort toward the expression of spirit through organized tones. They are Monodic and Homophonic. The musical art of the ancients was an art in which a single melodic formula was doubled in a lower or higher octave, but where no support of harmony was added, and where the only realization of variety could come through the province of rhythm alone ”

“ The last years of the sixteenth century gave evidence of a rebellion from the laws of polyphonic technique; yet the musicians are at first not so much actuated by a feeling of rebellion against this established form as by an enthusiasm for other kinds of music, which, during the centuries when all musicians gave their most serious thought to the development of polyphony, had been more or less neglected—kinds of music in which solo melody and rhythm play a part. ”

“ Handel also wrote concerti grossi, and they, too, partake of the polyphonic character.
The essential trait of this kind of music is the interweaving of the various melodic voice-parts and the effects obtained by their working against one another. Polyphonic writing is the most profound and serious style of composition, and it is also that which best endures the [Pg 219] test of time. Modern composers have fully realized that fact and have introduced a new polyphony into their works. ”

“ For if the masters of vocal polyphony took some twelve centuries to elaborate their science, it is fair to presume that, even though the general laws of music are now firmly established, the technics of the orchestra and of orchestral composition, which are a little over a hundred years old, are yet by no means fully understood. ”

“ The boundless realm of musical combinations is open; it has been worth while to take the trouble to invent. Modern polyphony with its power of expressing at the same time different, even opposing, feelings is a marvelous instrument [215] for a form of imagination which, alien to the forms clear-cut in space, moves only in time.
What furnishes us the best entrance into the psychology of this form of imagination is the natural transposition operative in musicians. ”

“ What is undoubtedly newest in the last works is the enormous development of those polyphonic elements which are always essential to the life of a composition, but which have very different functions and degrees of prominence in different forms and stages of the art. Polyphony inevitably draws attention to detail, and thus Beethoven in his middle period found its more obvious manifestations but little conducive to the breadth of designs which were not as yet sufficiently familiar to take any but the foremost place. ”

“ If the History of Art prove nothing else, it most certainly will never cease to prove this, to the end of time: and we have written to small purpose, if we have failed to establish the fact. After more than two centuries of steady progress, Polyphony attained perfection, in the School of Palestrina ”

“ In this work the interested musical student will find one of the most fascinating subjects imaginable—the growth of independent polyphony and counterpoint spontaneously among the singers of the melodies, a thing unthinkable to those of us who have learned counterpoint from dry text books. ”

“ THE fundamental difference between the sonata and the polyphonic forms is that the sonata is written in the monophonic style. Polyphony is, indeed, occasionally employed, but the reigning style is that in which a melody, song-like in character and sung by a single part, is accompanied by other parts written in chord harmonies. The necessary repetition of the melodic ideas is made, not by the process of imitation, as in the fugue, but by what is called the cyclical method. In this a tune or a composition always returns to a restatement of the original theme from which it started. ”

“ Polyphony, according to our modern professor, is produced by compression of the muscles of the chest, and is an act entirely different from any species of vocal deception or modulation. There is no method, he tells us, of manufacturing true ventriloquists. ”

“ Besides these three sources measurably unprofessional and outside of music, or amateur, as we say now, there was the work of the professional musicians strictly so-called, who, from about 1100 in the old French school, commenced the development of what is now known as polyphony, which culminated in the hands of the Netherlanders, about 1580, Palestrina himself being one of the latest products of this school. These influences reacted upon each other, and all have entered into modern art, and have imparted to it their most essential elements. ”

“ If polyphonic music had still been in the lead, the development of solo instruments would have been impossible, but in trying to find new forms, the first opera inventors had broken the backbone of polyphony, and had replaced it with monody, or single line melody. Then, too, folk dances had taken the public fancy and had been made into suites, which could be played on solo bowed instruments with accompaniments, on spinets and organs, or on groups of instruments. The sonata da camera was really a suite of dances and was the first form used by these new composers for violin. ”

“ Stainer found a sufficient answer by accepting the proposition as put, and directing attention to the fact that the feelings of men having first decided what was pleasurable in polyphony, and the rules of counterpoint having afterward been drawn from specimens of pleasurable polyphony, it was entirely correct to say that feelings are the proximate cause of the laws of counterpoint.
How composers hear music. ”

“ Instructions as to how to imitate these various sounds would be of little use; each one must find out for himself. In fact, an ear acutely perceptive to the nice distinctions of sound is about the only real qualification needed for the attainment of success in the practice of polyphony, as distinct from ventriloquism. ”

“ The earliest attempts of Italian composers to write violin music were singularly childish and unsuccessful, and in most cases they seem stupidly against the simplest principles of instrumental music. But one must not forget that the only art of composition which had been developed to a technical excellence was the art of [Pg 363] vocal polyphony, and that the only skill the first instrumental composers had to bring to writing music for their instruments was the skill which they had acquired in the study of polyphonic choruses. ”

“ At this time the possibilities of polyphony in its ecclesiastical forms may well have seemed almost exhausted, and men turned about to find new fields which should give scope for a greater number of workers. ”

“ This tendency soon became a fixed practice, for composers learned from their dramatic experiments that the church modes were not suitable to the embodiment of human passions, and that they also lost much of their musical effectiveness when not employed in polyphony. The reader will recollect what has already been said about the change from polyphonic to monophonic writing. This excerpt from Caccini's book is one of the earliest specimens of monophonic composition, for it was in the search after the Greek recitative that composers found the new thing in music. ”

“ Secondly, that sense of bodily movement, for which the less clumsy term “dance rhythm” is far too narrow, gained ground as the only means powerful enough to hold the various rhythms of the new and growing polyphony together. In thi. later stages of discant the old metrical conceptions struggled against the grain of the polyphony for awhile, only to succumb in a tangle of inextricable technicality: and the new art, which became coherent in the r 5th century, disregarded poetic metre, with little or no loss in capacity to interpret words if the composer had leisure or desire to do so ”