The Middle Ages and the Muscial Instruments

Yet the extremely sensual pleasures of music had been sometimes viewed with excellent suspicion by early Christians. As Augustine makes clear in his Confessions, church music was in between the forces that moved him most "in the beginning of [his] recovered faith." And, so long as the words had been sung inside a clear voice, correctly modulated, he thought the method was valuable. But, as Augustine added, it was possible to be caught up inside pleasure from the music rather than attending towards texts and "so always because it befalls me to be more moved with the voice than in the ditty, I confess myself to have grievously offended."

Liturgical music persisted, however, because Christian thinkers included it among the liberal arts. Music was related to arithmetic, geometry and astronomy by its "reliance on the idea of measurement and perception" and it was viewed as an intellectual study involving "the proportional measuring of sound in accordance with pitch and duration." But Augustine's suspicions had been shared by later centuries mainly because the function of sacred music was the expression in the texts. The first duty from the monks, like all ecclesiastics, was the daily performance in the liturgy. This was "both an act of worship and an act of ritual [that] conformed to a pre-ordered pattern" where the appropriate recitation from the texts--spoken, sung, or chanted-- was the main duty.
Reaney, G. "Voices and Instruments inside Music of Guillaume de Machaut." Revue Belge de Musicologie 10 (1956): 3-17.

Boethius' distinction in between instrumental music (incapable of expressing words of worship) and vocal music relegated the former towards sphere of a physical skill, or handicraft, while the latter was produced by true musicians whose contemplation of the "science of singing" produced their work an art. In Boethius' formulation "physical skill obeys as being a handmaid although reason rules as being a mistress." Instrumental music was, therefore, of a much lower order than vocal music, both in terms of its ability to participate inside the ritual of praise and its reliance on mechanical skill instead of intellect. Instrumental music, or singing heavily augmented by instruments, could only call attention to itself and detract within the "ditty," thereby, as Augustine said, causing the distracted listener to offend God instead of praising him.

Despite the evidence that such ensembles were well-liked it's nevertheless not identified which extant music ought to be played wherever fashion. As Wilson notes the popular procedure is to assume that "anything untexted must be played not sung," but this works against the "probability that significantly vocal music was sung to a neutral vowel or the vowel on the tenor text" and all-vocal performance is always a lot more most likely than vocal-instrumental combinations. The question of how instruments had been deployed will remain open to a large extent, barring the discovery of new, precise evidence. But so extended as contemporary performers bear in mind each the flexibility inherent in medieval instrumentation, its needs concerning contrasting sounds, and also the general primacy in the voice that derives, even if indirectly in secular music, during the ideal of the voice as the expression of reason, their performances will capture the spirit with the music.
2012-10-15

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