Song

I

Introduction

Song, short lyric or narrative text set to music. The music often reproduces the mood of and lends a heightened emotional expression to the song's text, which is often a poem. In modern usage, the term song is usually restricted to compositions for one or two voices, frequently with instrumental accompaniment. This article is concerned mainly with the history of the Western art song, that is, with song that is a product of the conscious skill of a trained musician, and consists of melodies and accompaniments entirely of his or her invention. It is distinguished from the folk song, that is, a song that is originated by and is part of the oral tradition of a people. A short description of the folk song is necessary, however, to indicate the background against which the more complex forms developed.

II

Early Song Forms

Folk songs are primarily communal compositions; that is, they are anonymous expressions of the culture that produces them, although the melody and words of a specific song may have had their origin in a single, unknown individual. In the West they are invariably cast in verse-repeating forms such as the ballad, in which a single melody is used again and again as the setting for each of a number of stanzas of verse. Musically, such folk song is characterized by the frequent use of the medieval musical modes and the pentatonic scale; by purely melodic vocal lines, often unadaptable to harmonic treatment; and in some cases by free rhythms that correspond to the loose rhythmic structure of declaimed words rather than to the strict tempos dictated by standard musical notation and performance.

These three features of the folk song are also characteristic of the oldest form of art song of which fairly complete records remain, the Gregorian chant used in the service of the Christian Church during the Middle Ages. The main tendency of church music, however, after the definitive formulation of the Gregorian chant at about the end of the 10th century, was towards choral forms rather than towards the solos and duets characteristic of the song proper.

III

Secular Song in the Middle Ages

The evolution of the art song during this period was carried on in the secular courts maintained by a few great families under the feudal system. From the 11th to the 13th century, a number of secular styles of song grew up. These song styles were monophonic, that is, they consisted solely of unharmonized melody; accompanying instruments duplicated or varied the singer's melody. Typically, their rhythms were strictly metrical, and their texts were love poems. The great period of medieval secular songs reached its first peak around 1100 with the troubadours of southern France and Provence, whose influence was felt in northern France by the trouvères. Their counterparts in Germany were the minnesingers and meistersinger, whose songs were composed both in the courts and, with the rise of the meistersinger, in middle-class musicians' guilds that sprang up in almost every city. During the late Middle Ages polyphonic songs (having two or more interwoven voice parts) were composed, notably the chansons (French, “songs”) written at the court of Burgundy.

IV

The Renaissance Period

During the Renaissance the secular song developed at an intensified rate. The 15th-century Burgundian-school composer Guillaume Dufay continued the tradition of the polyphonic chanson, which became the leading secular music genre of the early Renaissance. In the 16th century the lute song was developed by the lute composers of Spain, England, and France, who customarily sang their songs to their own lute accompaniment. Although the earliest lute songs were composed in Spain, and the first book of lute songs (1536) ever printed was by a Spanish composer, Don Luis Milán, the English lutenists probably created the finest examples of the form. Led by such composers as John Dowland and Thomas Morley, the English school achieved the first blending, in the history of the art song, of fine music with great lyrical poetry.