Different question, but that helps me reformulate it. I am steeped in the whole theology/legislation thing--that was a set of basic questions that I asked during the run-up to the new translation. What I mean is, the MUSIC. Somebody yesterday responded to that wonderful Fayrfax Mass setting the JAT posted on Chant Cafe and talked about how modally pure it was with only three Picardy Thirds that he heard--that kind of thing. What makes the music SOUND different?

The books on composition question helped, but what about for a musician who is basically trained but is diving into it?

Thanks.

Kenneth

Hi, Kenneth--

I just finished two semesters of music history, so here's how I'd sum it up, with a broad generalization:

Renaissance polyphony was characterized by:

• multiple voices with independent melodies
• independent setting of text to the melodies
• harmony based on the eight church modes
• compositional rules ("counterpoint" rules) about what intervals were allowed to occur between the voices (vertically) and within each melody line; the style of "panconsonance", exemplified by the works of Josquin des Pres, only allows dissonant intervals as ornaments

All that changed. Renaissance polyphony differs from most music composed after 1700 or so, because several compositional conventions changed:

1. composers moved away from harmony that used the eight church modes and settled on "diatonic" harmony with two predominant modes, major and minor;
2. the principal melody line was moved from the tenor voice to the soprano voice;
3. the other voices were demoted in importance and independence, and became accompaniment for the principal melody, in an approach called "monody";
4. counterpoint rules were relaxed to allow intervals previously considered too dissonant.

Oh, I am doing that...my history books, my online streaming, my university resources. But I am thinking of the complete tyro who wanders into this forum, and Jeff T. encourages them to do.

First, the question of classification. It is true that Byrd sounds different than (or as the English would have it, from) Tallis, let alone Josquin from Ockeghem (whose name is spelled so many ways as to put to rest any concern about Shakespeare's paltry 4.) If we don't even know how to spell the guy's name, how do we tell them apart? Well, how, when we are travelling, do we instantaneously know from a distance it is a group of Americans and not Germans making too much noise, but only when we talk to them do we know what region they are from? The Greeks struggled with the same concept: The Attics hated the Ionians, but they all became Achaians or Hellenes (Greek is later) when they were attacked by the people further inland in Anatolia who talked "bar-bar-bar," and so were barbarians.

I know radio host Robert Aubrey Davis slightly, and his Millenium of Music was my first introduction to early music, as I am sure it is for many. I told him I had trouble knowing which Millenium he meant, until I figured it was the thousand years from Gregory forward. Almost, it's the 1000 years from Bach back. To me, even the later Baroque sounds as we are headed FORWARD into Bach and what we generally call "Classical music." So stick with my dates: 1600 back. (OK, sticklers, 1604 back.)

If I were to start with Hindemith's Elementary Musicianship and worked all the way through Piston and Devoto on harmony, I would have all the tools to analyze why 16th Century music sounds different than baroque, but I would be doing excavation work where many had gone before. But if I just plunged in, and used the wrong interval, why would the more educated people on this list rock forward in shock? 25 years ago, the anachronistic Dona Nobis Pacem from Kenneth Brannagh's Henry V did exactly that to a musician I was with--he almost burst out laughing. If I wanted to write something that sounded so out there as 16th Century music does, so different from what we listen to know, which of the concepts at hand would I use?

I was trying to get a jazz musician friend to help me with something, but he got all shakey in the knees with slow rhythms and simple keys--modes-- so I played, I think, Palestrina's Missa Brevis with the score and showed him how the third never appeared in two pages. (NO I WAS NOT TRYING TO GET HIM TO DO A GUITAR SETTING OF THE MASS. I WAS EXPLAINING THE SOUND.) Right there, that is something that gives it an other wordly quality. I am sure that introducing the third helps the melody come home, as it were.

I hope I offend no one by pointing out that in the hundreds of years before the Pina Colada song appeared in my college years, there was no stupider pop song than L'homme arme'. There's no explaining why FORTY composers thought it would be good for a Mass, but they did--there we get into taste, and that is impossible to discuss. However, you can hear the melody clearly in Josquin's, but why does it sound beautiful there?

So....???

BTW, the guitarist and I share a rehearsal space, so I left loops of Byrd or Tallis or Josquin on Napster(now Rhapsody) when I left. He ended up falling in love with it--but we never got our project done.

Kenneth

Fux.

"There's no explaining why FORTY composers thought it would be good for a Mass, but they did--there we get into taste, and that is impossible to discuss. However, you can hear the melody clearly in Josquin's, but why does it sound beautiful there?"

There is a lot of scholarly literature on this very issue.

As for the original question, I'm not really sure what you're after. "Difference" is just a matter of perception, as Chuck G. suggests. Several other posters have recommended good resources for learning about style and the music itself.

If you are looking for something that touches on meaning and culture, I would highly recommend Andrew Kirkman's relatively new monograph, The Cultural Life of the Early Polyphonic Mass: Medieval Context to Modern Revival. I think it even has a chapter on L'homme armé.

I also agree with Adam that listening is the key here. If one doesn't know the repertoire, it is infinitely more difficult to "unlock" it.

HEY, a helpful specific answer.

Thanks.

Kenneth

I wanted to make the point above that (1) Kenneth asks this question:

If I wanted to know what Sacred Polyphony IS exactly, what books would help me understand?

and (2) his subsequent question:

I mean, why do the 16th Century choral pieces sound so DIFFERENT from what we are used to in choral writing?

asks a contrasting question that pits (the sound of) 16th century sacred polyphony against "what we are used to in choral writing" (which I take to mean in other genres of choral composition). It seemed to me somewhat disingenuous or mistaken to co-opt the term Sacred Polyphony in the first question as referring only to the 16th century, ignoring the spectrum of sacred polyphony that flourished from the 14th century on through the 16th century and, with some peaks and valleys, on into the 21st century where it still flourishes today.

Sure, most of 16th century polyphony is characterized by modal harmony and counterpoint, and much of this was supplanted by later diatonic major/minor modes. But it didn't die out completely. Bach in the Baroque era, Bruckner in the Romantic era and even Titcomb in the 20th century, in some of their finest sacred works, eschewed the diatonic idiom for modal counterpoint and harmony. There are 21st century composers, also, some of whom are known to readers of this form, who currently make use of such modal materials in their compositions. These and others have also retained and use the modal palette while enriching it with more harmony that is more complex than that found in the 16th century but still very modal and not major/minor. This is typical of the evolution of modal harmony and counterpoint from the styles seen in the 14th century (and even earlier) to that of the 16th century then through the Baroque and subsequent eras into the 20th and 21st centuries.

And while (modal) works of different composers do sound different from one another and even, on a coarser scale, different from century to century, when studied in their entirety, they represent a changing but fairly continuous spectrum of progression. One might hope, therefore, that the question of larger scope which was asked first might be addressed without retreating to the more specialized 16th century polyphony. The sacred polyphony that we have now is so much richer and more vast than just the 16th century, thanks to subsequent unearthing of earlier treasures and the reverent and respectful later development of that tradition.

There is book on polyphony by W. Apel, now available on internet, for example, here. Or just google Apel polyphony.

ian beat me to the answer i was thinking