Old Scores and New Readings | Page 6

Pages might be, and I daresay some day will be,
written about Dr. Campion's melody, its beauty and power, the unique
sense of rhythmic subtleties which it shows, and withal its curiously
English quality. But one important thing we must observe: it is wholly
secular melody. Even when written in the ecclesiastical modes, it has
no, or the very slightest, ecclesiastical tinge. It is folk-melody with its
face washed and hair combed; it bears the same relation to English
folk-melody as a chorale from the "Matthew" Passion bears to its
original. Another important point is this: whereas the church composers
took a few Latin sentences and made no endeavour to treat them so as
to make sense in the singing, but made the words wait upon the musical
phrases, in Dr. Campion we see the first clear wish to weld music and
poem into one flawless whole. To an extent he succeeded, but full
success did not come till several generations had first tried, tried and
failed. Campion properly belongs to the sixteenth century, and Harry
Lawes, born twenty-five years before Campion died, as properly
belongs to the seventeenth century. In his songs we find even more
marked the determination that words and music shall go hand in
hand--that the words shall no longer be dragged at the cart-tail of the
melody, so to say. In fact, a main objection against Lawes--and a true
one in many instances--is that he sacrificed the melody rather than the
meaning of the poem. This is significant. The Puritans are held to have
damaged church music less by burning the choir-books and pawning
the organ-pipes than by insisting (as we may say) on One word one
note. As a matter of fact, this was not exclusively a plank in the
political platform of the Puritans. The Loyalist Campion, the Loyalist
Lawes, and many another Loyalist insisted on it. Even when they did
not write a note to each word, they took care not to have long roulades
(divisions) on unimportant words, but to derive the accent of the music

from that of the poem. This showed mainly two tendencies: first, one
towards expression of poetic feeling and towards definiteness of that
expression, the other towards the entirely new technique which was to
supersede the contrapuntal technique of Byrde and Palestrina. In
making a mass or an anthem or secular composition, the practice of
these old masters was to start with a fragment of church or secular
melody which we will call A; after (say) the trebles had sung it or a
portion of it, the altos took it up and the trebles went on to a new phrase
B, which dovetailed with A. Then the tenors took up A, the altos went
on to B, the trebles went on to a new phrase C, until ultimately, if we
lettered each successive phrase that appeared, we should get clear away
from the beginning of the alphabet to X, Y, and Z. This, of course, is a
crude and stiff way of describing the process of weaving and
interweaving by which the old music was spun, for often the phrase A
would come up again and again in one section of a composition and
sometimes throughout the whole, and strict canon was comparatively
rare in music which was not called by that name; but the description
will serve. This technique proved admirable for vocal polyphony--how
admirable we have all the Flemish and Italian and English contrapuntal
music to show. But it was no longer available when music was wanted
for the single voice, unless that voice was treated as one of several real
parts, the others being placed in the accompaniment. A new technique
was therefore wanted. For that new technique the new composers went
back to the oldest technique of all. The old minstrels used music as a
means of giving accent and force to their poems; and now, as a means
of spinning a web of tone which should not only be beautiful, but also
give utterance to the feeling of the poem, composers went back to the
method of the minstrels. They disregarded rhythm more and more (as
may be seen if you compare Campion with Lawes), and sought only to
make the notes follow the accent of the poetry, thus converting music
into conventionally idealised speech or declamation. Lawes carried this
method as far as ever it has been, and probably can be, carried. When
Milton said,
"Harry, whose tuneful and well-measured notes First taught our English
music how to span Words with just note and accent,"
he did not mean that Lawes was the first to bar his music, for music had
been barred long before Lawes. He meant that Lawes did not use the

poem as an excuse for a melody, but