Medieval Music (1967)
25 tracks, 44 minutes
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I first got this album from the estimable News From Nowhere, an excellent radical bookshop in Liverpool which also has a great music selection, and (on this day at least) a bargain bin of old LPs for 50p each. At that price, of course I raided it for a load of music I would never have heard otherwise, and this was the best of the bunch. Although I have had a fringe interest in early music for quite a while, I chose to pick this one up in part for its cover, which features a bunch of reconstructed medieval instruments. Several of the instruments bear a strong resemblance to those played in other parts of the world, which I find fascinating – what catches my eye the most is the lute in the foreground which looks remarkably like the Central Asian long-necked lutes, specifically the Kyrgyz komuz. Much as I was going on about the other day with Matthaios Tsahouridis’ Pontic lýra, I love being able to see and hear how music changes across cultures, geographies and time, and the organology of instruments are a very clear way to see this.
The music contained within is also full of those sort of connections, although more temporal than geographical. The repertoire that the Jaye Consort perform here covers quite a range, encompassing pieces from about the 13th century to the end of the 15th and from all across Western Europe, mostly Britain, France and Germany. A span of 300 years and half a continent is a lot in terms of musical history (for comparison, what we refer to as the ‘Classical period’ of Western art music lasted only 90 years), but because we are so far removed from that time culturally, it all does sound musically contiguous, to non-educated ears like mine, at least. What is fascinating is that at the time these pieces were written, the line between folk music and art music was far less defined than it is now, and you can really hear that in some of the pieces. Take the 14th century Italian piece ‘Lamento di Tristano’, which, depending on how you orchestrated it, could pass as an orchestral piece or a folk song even today.
There’s a lot of interesting pieces all the way through this album, both in how they sound and their historical context, but there’s one in particular that I want to mention. One of several estampies (dances) in this set (the one on track 9) is played on an interesting instrument, which you can see on the cover: a portative organ, which is a hand-pumped keyboard instrument like our modern-day harmonium, but using pipes to create its sound rather than reeds. That’s already intriguing, but the piece itself is particularly historic – it is the first known piece of keyboard music of which we have record. There were doubtlessly pieces beforehand, but this is the earliest piece of written keyboard music that we know of, from the Robertsbridge Codex, written around 1360. The manuscript is actually slightly damaged at the bottom of the pages, which is probably why the ending sounds so abrupt. I just love how there is music that is so old, that we can recreate almost exactly as was intended when it was written.
Of course I recommend this album for people like me, because I like it, and I reckon it is a good and pleasant introduction to medieval music. However, as I’ve stated, I know very little about early music, so there may well be much better examples out there than this one that I just don’t know about. Please, do recommend if there are others I – and we – should be listening to!
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