Las Cantigas de Santa Maria
The Illustrations & the Instruments
The situation facing scholars wishing to study medieval musical instruments is that of a student asked to match two columns of information: one containing pictures of instruments, the other having names. The student has little pre-existing knowledge, and much of that of doubtful accuracy, there are different quantities of pictures and names, and there is no answer sheet. But the test will be graded…by the other students.
In addition, the names are in several dozen different languages, scattered in obscure sources, many of them contradictory, and the terms change their meanings over several centuries. The illustrations are distributed among different sources entirely, with widely varying aptitudes for representation, seldom drawn by musicians, and only occasionally for musical purposes.
It is not surprising we still have questions about medieval instruments. It is only a wonder we know as much as we do.
Though the word doesn’t appear in many dictionaries, organology is the scientific study of musical instruments, for practical reasons mostly historical. One of my main interests for almost half a century has been musical instruments, their construction and use. Fortunately for those concerned with medieval music, most of Europe’s instrumentarium came from the Middle East, where versions of many of them are still being constructed and played today, albeit in modified form. However much critical information can be obtained by judicious use of present-day information.
The medieval music group Alfonso X, founded around 1970, has incorporated a host of unusual instruments into its performances, many not seen in seven centuries. But I have never been a fan of the common early music approach of using varied instruments to “spice up” an otherwise pedestrian program: “Ooh, a gemshorn. Wow, a rackett!” Orchestration is no substitute for musicianship.
Each instrument must be approached as if it inhabited a unique world, which it does. A 14th century Arabic manuscript declares “instruments were invented to provide an advantage.” That is, like all tools, to do something which could not have been done without it. It is our responsibility to discover that unique quality. The sound, the technical abilities, the idiomatic musical figures, all must be exploited to make that instrument express its “advantage.”
Traditionally the music did not exist separately from its performance, including the context in which it was performed, and the instrument upon which it was played. The occasion was the preeminent factor. All else followed from that. If music was to be played outdoors (in Renaissance terminology “haut”) the instruments must be loud. If indoors (“bas”), they could be softer. Some instruments were considered more appropriate for accompanying the voice, others for the dance. Some had martial overtones, others pastoral. But they were not specified until late even in Western classical music, and they were not used in a systematic way in anything approaching the modern sense of “orchestration,” until the 18th century. Usually, the mood was set by the choice of instruments at the beginning of the piece and did not vary.
The other difference from modern practice is that, in the Middle Ages, there was no standard pitch. Each region, each tradition, each guild, each type of instrument, each maker would have used a different pitch criterion. Among fixed-pitch instruments, only those that had been made together could have played together. For that reason flutes, shawms, and horns tended to play in groups of like instruments and were the last instruments to be “tamed” and incorporated into the orchestra, as late as the mid-19th century.
The strings (fiddles, psalteries, dulcimers, harps), which could be tuned, made up the largest group of ensemble instruments. They could not only be played with each other, they could also accommodate themselves to the winds. (It is no accident that, even today, it is a wind instrument that gives the pitch to the orchestral strings, not vice versa.)
In addition to the lack of a standard pitch, there is the whole matter of Temperaments. This is not the time or place to go into that wonderful world but suffice it to say that there were probably almost as many different temperaments as there were different pitch standards. And for much of the same reasons. Read Curt Sachs to find out about the geometrical bases of traditional flute scales. Horns, with their overtone scales were a world unto themselves for centuries. The varied musical traditions in Europe: Roman, Germanic, Celtic, regional isolates, monastic-scholarly, and the trendy Byzantine and Middle Eastern, all must have contributed to the heady fermentation.
In the context of the Middle Ages, as in much of the rest of the traditional world, the lack of standardization would not have affected musicians in general since they tended to play alone. There were not that many of them to begin with and, until they began to gather at centers of economic power and wealth, they were probably only part-time, semi-professionals. They may have played several different instruments just as they probably had many different skills: barber, juggler, acrobat, story teller, singer, all of them low-class and itinerant. Even when more than one musician would gather together in a court setting, our ideas of consonance might not have been recognized. It is not only in Africa that several different musicians may play at the same occasion, at the same time, different though perhaps related melodies, at different and unrelated pitch centers. The effect is considered to be a festive elaboration and not a conflict. If natural horns were playing “out-of-tune” notes in Mozart and Beethoven’s time who knows what may have been heard during the time of Alfonso or Landini?
It is tempting to use the modern, orchestral versions of instruments as our aural pattern for what medieval instruments sounded like. Nothing could be more misleading. Medieval shawms sounded nothing like the oboe other than sharing a double reed. And the other winds, strings, horns, and percussion likewise would be unrecognizable. As mentioned, many of the instruments have current Eurasian cousins which share medieval styles and methods of performance. But some techniques have disappeared. The most obvious example is the harp which, nowadays, whether playing in the orchestra or even in its folk milieu in Latin America, is slave to the system of chords and keys of post-Renaissance Europe. While it is obvious that the instrument playing Tchaikovsky or Debussy cannot be used for medieval music, it is also clear that a Vera Cruz or Paraguayan harp does not play in the style of the Middle Ages. I believe that the playing techniques of New World harps can be used in recreating earlier styles but the instruments themselves and especially their musical material must have been quite different. Anyone who has heard the distinctively virile, even distorted, “ping” of a Vera Cruz harper must have felt themself in the presence of a different way of making music and I feel that this energetic, powerful style agrees much more with the attitude expressed by listeners of the medieval harp. It had nothing in common with parasols, lace, and finger sandwiches. The question remains, however, aside from the melody (which is never the whole story in traditional music), what else did the harp play, since they had no chords? There are some suggestions even in New World traditions. While most of the arpeggios played by the left hand are indeed chords, there seem to be some remnants of semi-drone notes and other non-chordal figures played as accompaniment. These are, in many cases, similar to figures used by Middle Eastern qanun players, showing their non-harmonic origins and demonstrating their appropriateness for medieval style.
In addition, there are harps still being played in East Africa and, especially, in Burma, where it is a classical instrument, though increasingly rare. And even though the kinds of music played in those areas are quite different from medieval music, the principles of accompanying figures may yield inspiration. In addition, the West African kora, from a different harp family, has a host of intriguing techniques which should be mined for relevance. There is also the family of psalteries (the qanun, alluded to above) which probably retains techniques common to all the open-stringed instruments of the Islamic World. Finally, there was a harp in the Middle East, the jank, of the upper sound chested variety, which existed from ancient times in Mesopotamia and Egypt, through the Middle Ages, up until the 18th century, when it seems to have disappeared. There is much iconographic evidence but, as far as I know, no written material about technique or style. And I have long wondered if, somewhere in the depths of the Topkapi, or another Middle Eastern archive, there is a jank, lying in a corner, forlorn and waiting for someone to rediscover this wonderful remnant of a bygone age. One of my long-term projects is to recreate a medieval Spanish jank for Alfonso X. [see under Harps.]
How are the Ilustrations Arranged?
In Manuscript E2 there is an illumination, showing one or two musicians, for each Cantiga de Loor. These occur at every tenth position, so that Cantiga No.10 has the first illustration, No.20 the second. There are 40 pictures altogether, for 400 cantigas. There is also a large illumination at the beginning of the manuscript for the Prólogo (Prologue) which likewise depicts musicians. The arrangement of the instruments in the illustrations shows an overall plan, though there are exceptions to it. In general, the first half shows chordophones (strings), while the second half depicts aerophones (winds).
Below is a simplified table of information from my dissertation (1996).
1. Cantiga 10 | 2 chordophones: fiddle, guitarra latina | 21. Cantiga 210 | 2 chordophones: 2 “banjo-fiddles” |
2. Cantiga 20 | 2 chordophones: fiddler, guitarra latina(?) | 22. Cantiga 220 | 2 aerophones: 2 double reedpipes zummara or alboka? |
3. Cantiga 30 | 2 chordophones: 2 lutes | 23. Cantiga 230 | 2 aerophones: 2 double bladderpipes |
4. Cantiga 40 | 2 chordophones: 2 rotas (harp-psalteries) | 24. Cantiga 240 | 2 aerophones: 2 large cross flutes |
5. Cantiga 50 | 2 chordophones: 2 small trapezoidal psalteries | 25. Cantiga 250 | 2 aerophones: 2 bladderpipes w/large horns |
6. Cantiga 60 | 2 aerophones: 2 triple clarinets (launeddas) | 26. Cantiga 260 | 2 aerophones: 2 small bagpipes |
7. Cantiga 70 | 2 chordophones: 2 small psalteries | 27. Cantiga 270 | 2 aerophones: 2 large horns (oliphants?) |
8. Cantiga 80 | 2 chordophones: 2 large square psalteries | 28. Cantiga 280 | 2 aerophones: 2 small bagpipes |
9. Cantiga 90 | 2 chordophones: 2 mandoras | 29. Cantiga 290 | 1 chordophone: large curved psaltery-harp |
10. Cantiga 100 | 1 chordophone: 1 fiddle (a gamba) | 30. Cantiga 300 | aerophone & membranophone: albogón & waisted drum |
11. Cantiga 110 | 2 chordophones: 2 tiny rebabs | 31. Cantiga 310 | 2 aerophones: 2 round-bell shawms (“the mysterious douçaine?”) |
12. Cantiga 120 | 2 chordophones: 2 guitarras morisca | 32. Cantiga 320 | 2 aerophones: 2 straight trumpets (añafil) |
13. Cantiga 130 | 2 chordophones: 2 small guitarras morisca | 33. Cantiga 330 | aerophone & idiophone: shawm & bones |
14. Cantiga 140 | 2 chordophones: 2 small guitarras morisca | 34. Cantiga 340 | 2 aerophones: alboka & hornpipe |
15. Cantiga 150 | 2 chordophones: 2 guitarras latina(?) | 35. Cantiga 350 | 1 aerophone: 1 large bagpipe |
16. Cantiga 160 | 2 chordophones: 2 square hurdy-gurdies (symphonia) | 36. Cantiga 360 | 2 (x2) aerophones: 2×2 shawms(?) |
17. Cantiga 170 | 2 chordophones: rebab & large lute | 37. Cantiga 370 | 2 aerophones (& 2 membranophones): 2 pipe & tabor sets |
18. Cantiga 180 | 1 idiophone: (set) carillon of 3 bells | 38. Cantiga 380 | 2 chordophones: 2 Romanesque harps |
19. Cantiga 190 | 2 idiophones: 2 cymbal (pairs) | 39. Cantiga 390 | 2 aerophones: 2 round-bell shawms |
20. Cantiga 200 | 1 aerophone: 1 portative organ | 40. Cantiga 400 | 1 idiophone: (set) mechanical set of 7 bells |
The first collection of Cantigas only contained 100 hymns and there seems to be an awareness of the importance of each hundred even in this, larger, manuscript. Cantiga 100 features a solo musician, the first exception from the two-man rule, playing a fiddle in the unique Oriental style. Cantiga 200, likewise, shows a single figure playing a portative organ, one of the earliest depictions of that instrument. The last Cantiga, 400, has a tonsured monk playing a mechanical bell-chime box, another unusual instrument. On the other hand, Cantiga 300 shows a strange ensemble: a man and a woman (both Muslim by their sleeve patches) playing unique instruments. The man, wearing the noble box-cap birrete, blows a huge fingerhole horn, while the woman plays an hourglass-shaped drum. Since the organization of the illustrations is a little loose, it seems likely the previous picture (for number 290) was intended for this position. Cantiga 290 follows the pattern of striking solo performers in portraying a man, seated on a throne-like chair, playing the singular curved psaltery mentioned previously.
It is possible to see other patterns in the arrangement of pictures but it is not always certain whether they were intended or are merely part of our penchant for classification. Considering the still primarily oral minds who created these manuscripts I would err on the side of caution, but it is interesting to play the game.
Two thirds of the musicians are shown playing seated, but is this their normal position or because they are mostly shown in a courtly setting? Interestingly, the guitarra morisca players are usually shown standing (a more difficult position[?]) and only one pair is seated.
Why, in the first half which shows stringed instruments (with bells and cymbals thrown in at the end), did the limner show the triple clarinet players–right in the middle of a bunch of psaltery players? Some medieval pun or inside joke? Then, perhaps the punchline is the two Jewish harpers [not Jew’s harps] stuck back toward the end among the shawms and pipes and tabors.
Is there any significance to the illuminations which do Not show the jewel-like coffered background? Cantigas 30, 60, 70, 80, 360, 370, 380, 390, and 400 all settle for musicians against a plain color. The last five could indicate haste in finishing the manuscript but the other four are at the beginning: were they not done in order?
The instruments clearly begin with the most common types: fiddles, guitarra latinas, lutes, and psalteries. But are the rest shown in order of popularity or prestige, or are they products of the preferences of the designer, the illuminator, or merely the multi-directional synapses of memory?