Article Outline
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 art song—that is, with song that is the product of a trained musician—and consists of melodies and accompaniments primarily of the musician's invention. It is distinguished from the folk song—that is, a song, typical of a musically unsophisticated culture, that is originated by, and is part of the tradition of, a people. A short description of the folk song is provided to indicate the background against which the more complex forms developed. For a fuller discussion, see Ballad; Folk Music.
Folk songs are primarily communal compositions—that is, they are anonymous expressions of the society or culture that produces them, although the melody and words of a specific song may have had their origin in a single, unknown individual. They are invariably cast in verse-repeating forms, in which a single melody is used again and again as the setting for each of a number of stanzas of verse. Musically, folk song is characterized by the frequent use of the diatonic 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 demanded by modern musical notation and performance.
These three features of the folk song are also characteristic of the earliest 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 (5th century to 15th century). The main tendency of church music, however, after the definitive formulation of the Gregorian chant at about the end of the 10th century, was toward choral forms rather than toward the solos and duets characteristic of the song proper.
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Secular Song in the Middle Ages
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Art songs during the Middle Ages were carried on in the secular courts maintained by a few great families under the feudal system. From the 11th century to the 13th century, a number of secular styles of song were created. These song styles were monophonic—that is, they consisted solely of unharmonized melody (see Polyphony), and accompanying instruments duplicated or varied the singer's melody. Typically, the musical rhythm was strictly metrical and the text was a love poem. The great period of medieval secular songs reached its first peak about 1100 with the troubadours of southern France and Provence, whose influence was felt in northern France by the trouvères (see Troubadours and Trouvères). Their counterparts in northern Europe were the German minnesingers (see Minnesinger) 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 for “songs”) written at the court of Burgundy.
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The Renaissance Period
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During the Renaissance (14th century to 17th century), the secular song underwent rapid change. The 15th-century Burgundian-school composer Guillaume Dufay continued the tradition of the polyphonic chanson, which became the leading secular-music genre of the 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. See also Madrigal.
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