THE MAGIC POWER OF MUSIC
Nothing better than myth can express the magic powers of music. The Sirens song bewitches fearless sailors who throw themselves in the waves in the whirl of a lethal ecstasy ; Orfeo crosses the doors of hell armed with a cither and with his song.
Music seduces, convinces, drives, and annihilates.
Music enjoys a privileged relationship with the world of emotions and wins the battle against reason by simply using rhythms and melody.
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The hypnotic effect of rhythm, the power of its obsessive repetition is the vehicle on which magic works to defeat all kind of interference from ratio.
During Antiquity, when the language of poets, of aristocrats, and of public meetings is scanned, tradition assigns an ethos, a character to every meter. For instance, the dactyle is adapted to the gravity of death, the minor inspires epicurean orgiastic excesses.
The polyphonists of Horatian ode from the beginning of the 16th- century – the inventors of the Musica more antiquo mensurata – built theirs compositions on these parameters.
In Tritonius, Senfl, Hofhaimer, Honterus, and other «Germans» of musique mesurée à l’antique, the hypnotic dizziness finds another effective ally in the melodic repetition of strophes, overlapping and tying each other together without rest, without breath.
The composers working in Italy during the same time adopt a very different position. First Arcadelt, then Cipriano and Lassus will try to give life to poetry by using all the instruments of eloquence. Their declamation is adapted to the rhythm of speech and, like its images, avails itself of a larger set of rhythmic figures in order to accelerate in enthusiasm or anger and slow down for sadness or pain.
The Italian way of composing in the stile antiquo skillfully mixes the arts of versification and madrigalism, assuming the expressive instruments of the latter, while inheriting the verticality of the former.
The German way celebrates the plasticity of poetry, the Italian way its sensuality
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Melody has a larger and more complex arsenal to convey the affetti in the imagination of the listener.
Thinking about the nature of song, Ficino, philosopher who had a strong impact on the scientific and esthetic thought of the Renaissance, says:
Marsilio Ficino : “De vita triplici”, III-21
“Iam vero materia ipsa concentus purior est admodum coeloque similior quam materia medicinae: est enim aer etiam hic quidem calens, sive tepens, spirans adhuc et quodammodo vivens, suis quibusdam articulis artubusque compositus, sicut animal, nec colum motus ferens affectum praeferens, verum etiam significatum afferens quasi mentem, ut animal quoddam aerium et rationale qudammodo dici possit.”
«Now the very matter of song, indeed, is altogether purer and more similar to the heavens than is the matter of medicine. For this too is air, hot or warm, still breathing and somehow living; like an animal, it is composed of certain parts and limbs of its own, and not only possesses motion and displays passion, but even carries meaning like a mind, so that it can be said to be a kind of airy and rational animal.»
By attributing life and will to his anthropomorphic counterpoint, Ficino also implicitly attributes it all the qualities of man and his mind.
Inspired by the tradition of Greek medicine, the following correspondences can be defined:
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Tessitura |
Elements |
Humors |
Temperaments |
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Soprano |
Fire |
Yellow bile |
Choleric |
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Alto |
Air |
Blood |
Sanguineous |
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Tenor |
Water |
Phlegm |
Phlegmatic |
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Bass |
Earth |
Black bile |
Melancholy
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Elements, humors and temperaments influence our psychological activity and determine our mental and physical health. Elements, humors and temperaments speak in the counterpoint. The fire of love or anger push the voices in the high range, tears and laments bring them back in the low range. Similarly a low melody can tame a hot-tempered man, or a high melody will awake up his fury.
The Horatian ode defines the relationship between text and music, exclusively by quantitative rules. The long or short syllables of poetry are translated in long or short notes. In the Italian madrigal, the musical composition acts differently, as a duplicate/amplifier of emotions and of the affects of poetry.
Defining the mode of a song is the first task of every good composer and this has to be done with insight because the ethos of a tone must be compatible with the humor of the text.
The tensions of speech could speak the language of dissonance, privileged vehicle of every roughness and harshness; modal deviations and chromatisms will illustrate magic and mystery, miracles and mirabilia, as in the Prophetiae Sibyllarum of Lassus, but also gloomier transformations and degenerations, as in Que est devenu by Claude Le Jeune, where the constant modulation by semitone translates in sounds the slow putrefaction of the human body.
At last, there are figurae, harmonic and/or melodic models that can modulate the listener’s feelings like magic formulas, bringing into his soul the ghost of death with the falsobordone, or the royal power with the tubae, etc.
It is important to understand that, during the Renaissance – both for the ode or for the madrigal – there is an identity between meaning and form. The body of a melody, and the simple fact of writing it down automatically conveys a sense and a meaning into the composition
Until the 17th-century, the affect is a element that can be read in the score, because it benefits from a specific morphology, built on rhythm, intervals, and harmonic relations.
In this context, the performance issue cannot arise. It is impossible to think about a theory of performance in the repertoire of the Renaissance. If music speaks through its magic powers, if the body of a melody translates, embodies and transmits an affect, the figure of the performer cannot correspond to the Romantic model of the genius communicating by means of his talent and sensitiveness.
The individual experience and background are insignificant, foreign to creation. The musicus, like the poet, or the painter, are only a medium at the mercy of cosmic powers and uncontrollable energies.