On memorization and partbooks not being marked up to note mistakes: this could well be an instance of survivorship bias. The partbooks that got regularly used are unlikely to have survived. We mostly have the sets that went into ecclesiastic and aristocratic libraries that were rarely used. Also, we've lost a lot of ephemera, parts copied out by hand, parts hand-entabulated into scores for study: these are the least likely to survive, and it's hard to know what has been lost.
Yes, that's what I was thinking and indeed understood. I even recall seeing a handwritten correction fairly recently, but I cannot recall what it was now! Drat!
Yes I was thinking if singers didn't want to ruin the parts they had they might have kept a notebook for the aid of memory. These are less likely to survive
@@alistairkirk3264 _GB-AR_ (Castle Archive, Arundel, England) A340 is an example of a bass part that someone copied out to take home in the first ½ of the 16th century. You can find it on DIAMM.
This video is a very good synthesis of all the musical elements you have dealt with individually, and in some detail, in your previous videos. Tacitus, musica ficta, solimization, cadences, ornamentation, etc. are all seen in a practical context. Good work!
10:20 I know you didn't intend to sing a +6 chord, but as someone with some experience in the Barbershop world: you guys made it sound really convincing
Love, love, LOVE THIS!!! Beautifully done, and with all the delightful humour I've come to associate with these videos! One more advantage to singing off parts - especially without measures - is that each individual singer can get a better sense of phrasing without the "tyranny" of barlines. In polyphonic music especially, barlines added in modern editions can ruin the flow of a phrase in some parts, as modern performers tend to accent notes within the bar rather than within the phrase or text. Plus reading off parts eliminates the distraction of page turns (of course, so does reading off tablet computers!). I would love to create editions of madrigals and motets in parts - maybe with some modern conveniences added (like properly edited text underlay) as a sort of "intermediary" step for singers too timid to go straight from modern score editions to facsimiles of original partbooks. Thanks again for this video - made my day as always.
Wow, your musicianship is wonderful. I play jazz music on the guitar, I know ears when I see them, and you all got some big ears. It sounds like there are more than four of you singing. I love this kind of music, and I've learned so much about it since subscribing to this channel. Bravo and cheers.
Why is nobody talking about the diminutions in the word "fuoco"? That added some magic to the moment and indeed a very difficult thing to do when reading from the parts...
As always, you have provided a delightfully informative and entertaining video. Thanks so much. Except for the births of my children and grandchild, the happiest times in my life (53 out of 61+ years) have been spent singing madrigals and early chamber music. It is abundantly clear that you (and your colleagues) have been similarly blest.
This is so amazing. Thank you! I have been trying to convince other pretty accomplished amateur singers to try out singing from partbooks for years and they all are intimidated and think it will be too hard. I think if I can get them to watch this video they may be more willing to give it a try!
Oh my gosh. This is just absolutely beautiful. How not to cry after listening to the pure beauty you make by singing. I love you guys and I love all your videos. Thanks so much!
Dear Elam, I cannot express how much I love your channel! My personal passage into music was heavily influenced by my hesitant journey into the music of the Renaissance, when all that surrounded me was (mostly bad) pop music in the 1980s. Thank you so much! I feel like you are clearing the road for a new generation of music lovers to dig deeper into where we all musically come from.
Nice job on this presentation. It was indeed enjoyable to watch and listen as the high production values you employ work well in tandem with a nicely tapered narrative. But more so, was the invitation to our historic imagination to ruminate on what it was like to make music in the 16th century when so much of what codifies music today simply didn't exist. It is interesting that harmony, often thought of as the lesser cousin to melody, was perhaps the principle aesthetic in Renaissance polyphony. I think in our modern world we can sometimes forget the profound beauty of certain harmonies like the major 6th that when produced perfectly by an a cappella group of vocalists is simply divine. It is perhaps ironic that harmony as such develops in an area of the world marked by perpetual religious, ethnic, and political strife. Italy itself, a patchwork of armies and city states, prominent families and trade organizations constantly murdering and pillaging from one another. With such wild uncertainty and violence always at play outside one's door, maybe it's not surprising that the inner sanctum of music would emphasize the harmonious relationships of various notes sounded together.. It's also impressive how cultured the nobility class was in Renaissance Europe. They treasured qualities of the intellect and aesthetics, and it seems music in particular. I agree with your points about part singing and mensural notation requiring one to use the ear to a greater degree than is required today to navigate through a piece.
Bravo. Very nice explanation of the advantages of singing from parts. I would say- and perhaps some did back then too- that the natural extension of these advantages would be to perform from memory. My vocal quartet made this decision early on and it helped a great deal.
Amazing and well put together synthesis and application of your past videos. And beautiful performances at that! I’m always overjoyed whenever I see a new video in my subscription box. Y’all never disappoint 👏👏💝
I would love to hear from you about vocal ornamentation, comparative vocal technique, gender of alto/soprano voices, and Italian diction. Thank you for your videos!
"With time it became more & more customary to write most of the necessary accidentals in the parts, leaving, thankfully, less room for debate." The advantage of no accidentals is that singers have to listen, and it motivates them to learn how the music works.
Elam, what a pleasure to hear you and your colleagues perform this music. I wonder about the possibility of light pencil markings that are not apparent except perhaps through detailed chemical analysis (not ordinarily available on a musicologist’s budget!), having in mind numerous 17th century instrumental scores with obvious mistakes and unlikely to be memorized.
I used to sing a couple decades back in a group that did mostly Palestrina, and we sang from photocopies of original parts. The hardest part was text underlay and the conductor trying to tell us where each of us should start when we rehearsed interior sections. It certainly lengthened rehearsal prep time, and the leader got annoyed at us from time to time. But it was great when it all came together. Today when I sing from full part scores, I tend to do better when I ignore the other parts and count the rests. Looking at other parts sometimes makes me late on my own entrances.
Hi ! You should check your solmisation at 7:44 : mi la sol fa mi re la fa sol la mi, instead of re la sol fa mi re la fa sol la re ! It's not much but I think it would be more correct ! 👌 Thanks for your videos 😊
Thank you! Idea of tactus became so popular lately in HIP community (in my opionion sucj conceptions in modern use get popular as some kind of trend promoted by influential personalities in the area) but for me it stays very doubtful still - especially wene I hear it applied (only a few cases were convincing). I personally thought that the fact thta tactus is so often reffered to in early music sources was connected with th efact that they had to teach to coordinate voices in vocal polyphony without practice of working with scores... and also later the voices became synchronized.
Great video as always! What about finalis notes where a singer would not know beforehand whether it's a truly final note, or the other parts carry on? (e.g. the very madrigal in the video). I guess it must be one of these 'on the fly' things, as there's no way to calculate it from looking at a part only.
Amazing as always. Thank you for your hard work. I'll dare to make a request. Could you PLEASE do a review on Machaut's Messe de Notre Dame? I feel like there is so much to debate. The cadences, the chords, the voice leading, i'm baffled. Please and thanks for all the knowledge!
Thank you - I've been wondering about exactly these questions for years. The fact that the part books were so expensive must have meant that professional musicians (as opposed to aristocratic amateurs) would probably have found it difficult to study the scores outside of rehearsals (did they even rehearse? I remember reading once somewhere that there was some evidence that they didn't) - I'd guess they wouldn't have been allowed to take the book home to have a go through their part, as the book was probably worth more than the house! The reliance on sight-reading and memory must have been prodigious.
fascinating to compare this with, for example, the way the Elizabethan theatre was done. Similar use of parts rather than a complete text of the play, meaning probably a lot more attention had to be paid to each other in performance in order to pick up queues and so on. No doubt a very different approach to modern acting, even of Shakespeare.
The Forrest- Heather part books were once used by Taverner, but later Forrest added a collection of masses for Queen Mary, thus preserving many masses which would otherwise have been lost. They are therefore incredibly precious. But Forrest was very careless indeed when notating long rests, to the extent that they couldn't possibly have been used for singing. They are hard enough to put together in a score, because you have to identify which part is faulty, so you need at lest 3 parts in order to see what fits with what. But I can't imagine Queen Mary being terribly patient: "Oh Sir William Forrest, I sent you all round the country to collect masses. Where are they?" There are far too many mistakes to be remembered, even if they could have been worked out without having all the parts on a table. There are signae congruentiae to help to keep it together, but they are not much use if given at the wrong time. I am forced to the conclusion that working copies were taken, even if none survive. There are a few corrections in the Carver Choirbook,
Giovanna: I sharpened my C's Doron: I sang musica ficta Jacob: --- Elam: And I sang Fa super La Me as an average music enjoyer: I liked it without it Edit: Grammar
I think the mensural notation is more of an impediment to things like dynamics and tempo changes rather than using separate parts. Instrumental musicians still use separate parts and have no trouble with dynamics or tempo changes.
This once again shows how much it is lost, and how much they relied on craft and skills based on feel, shared unwritten rules within a corporative set up with entire lives devoted to the building of such skills. Much is given to the imaginative mind, and the technological limits were a chance to develop a higher level of skills.
![Oscar Maydon x Fuerza Regida - Tu Boda [Official Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/_ymicn0_GYc/mqdefault.jpg)
I love the platypus doll over the harpsichord.
On memorization and partbooks not being marked up to note mistakes: this could well be an instance of survivorship bias. The partbooks that got regularly used are unlikely to have survived. We mostly have the sets that went into ecclesiastic and aristocratic libraries that were rarely used. Also, we've lost a lot of ephemera, parts copied out by hand, parts hand-entabulated into scores for study: these are the least likely to survive, and it's hard to know what has been lost.
Yes, that's what I was thinking and indeed understood. I even recall seeing a handwritten correction fairly recently, but I cannot recall what it was now! Drat!
With respect to the value of prints back then, making copies for to work with was done on a habitual basis.
@@Alberad08 ah ok, so what we have left are maybe the 'master' copies? Do you know if any of the working copies you mention survive?
Yes I was thinking if singers didn't want to ruin the parts they had they might have kept a notebook for the aid of memory. These are less likely to survive
@@alistairkirk3264 _GB-AR_ (Castle Archive, Arundel, England) A340 is an example of a bass part that someone copied out to take home in the first ½ of the 16th century. You can find it on DIAMM.
This video is a very good synthesis of all the musical elements you have dealt with individually, and in some detail, in your previous videos. Tacitus, musica ficta, solimization, cadences, ornamentation, etc. are all seen in a practical context. Good work!
10:20 I know you didn't intend to sing a +6 chord, but as someone with some experience in the Barbershop world: you guys made it sound really convincing
Big smile!
Love, love, LOVE THIS!!! Beautifully done, and with all the delightful humour I've come to associate with these videos! One more advantage to singing off parts - especially without measures - is that each individual singer can get a better sense of phrasing without the "tyranny" of barlines. In polyphonic music especially, barlines added in modern editions can ruin the flow of a phrase in some parts, as modern performers tend to accent notes within the bar rather than within the phrase or text. Plus reading off parts eliminates the distraction of page turns (of course, so does reading off tablet computers!). I would love to create editions of madrigals and motets in parts - maybe with some modern conveniences added (like properly edited text underlay) as a sort of "intermediary" step for singers too timid to go straight from modern score editions to facsimiles of original partbooks. Thanks again for this video - made my day as always.
Y'all sound so good! I'm envious.
Thank you very much for your great contribution, because it's difficult to find information about the way music was registered back then.
Wow, your musicianship is wonderful. I play jazz music on the guitar, I know ears when I see them, and you all got some big ears. It sounds like there are more than four of you singing. I love this kind of music, and I've learned so much about it since subscribing to this channel. Bravo and cheers.
Why is nobody talking about the diminutions in the word "fuoco"? That added some magic to the moment and indeed a very difficult thing to do when reading from the parts...
As always, you have provided a delightfully informative and entertaining video. Thanks so much. Except for the births of my children and grandchild, the happiest times in my life (53 out of 61+ years) have been spent singing madrigals and early chamber music. It is abundantly clear that you (and your colleagues) have been similarly blest.
This is so amazing. Thank you! I have been trying to convince other pretty accomplished amateur singers to try out singing from partbooks for years and they all are intimidated and think it will be too hard. I think if I can get them to watch this video they may be more willing to give it a try!
Oh my gosh. This is just absolutely beautiful. How not to cry after listening to the pure beauty you make by singing. I love you guys and I love all your videos. Thanks so much!
Thank you so much for your videos. They are so instructive and fun!
Great musicianship. Great singing. and GREAT sense of humor!!!
This is why I support you on Patreon. Keep up the good work.
Great performance at the end :) I love how you people explain everything so eloquently. Love the videos, keep them coming.
That performance at the end...
you and your friends are amazing singers i love the diminutions trillos are my favourite
Dear Elam, I cannot express how much I love your channel! My personal passage into music was heavily influenced by my hesitant journey into the music of the Renaissance, when all that surrounded me was (mostly bad) pop music in the 1980s. Thank you so much! I feel like you are clearing the road for a new generation of music lovers to dig deeper into where we all musically come from.
Nice job on this presentation. It was indeed enjoyable to watch and listen as the high production values you employ work well in tandem with a nicely tapered narrative. But more so, was the invitation to our historic imagination to ruminate on what it was like to make music in the 16th century when so much of what codifies music today simply didn't exist. It is interesting that harmony, often thought of as the lesser cousin to melody, was perhaps the principle aesthetic in Renaissance polyphony. I think in our modern world we can sometimes forget the profound beauty of certain harmonies like the major 6th that when produced perfectly by an a cappella group of vocalists is simply divine. It is perhaps ironic that harmony as such develops in an area of the world marked by perpetual religious, ethnic, and political strife. Italy itself, a patchwork of armies and city states, prominent families and trade organizations constantly murdering and pillaging from one another. With such wild uncertainty and violence always at play outside one's door, maybe it's not surprising that the inner sanctum of music would emphasize the harmonious relationships of various notes sounded together.. It's also impressive how cultured the nobility class was in Renaissance Europe. They treasured qualities of the intellect and aesthetics, and it seems music in particular. I agree with your points about part singing and mensural notation requiring one to use the ear to a greater degree than is required today to navigate through a piece.
amazing videos and great work! I wished I had this videos 10 years ago... but better later then never! You are a blessing!!! :D
Bravo. Very nice explanation of the advantages of singing from parts. I would say- and perhaps some did back then too- that the natural extension of these advantages would be to perform from memory. My vocal quartet made this decision early on and it helped a great deal.
Amazing and well put together synthesis and application of your past videos. And beautiful performances at that! I’m always overjoyed whenever I see a new video in my subscription box. Y’all never disappoint 👏👏💝
I always get so excited when I see a recent video from this channel! :)
Extraordinary content, with very elocuent storytelling!
Thank you so much Elam Rotem and the Basel Team
beautiful music, interesting explanations, lovely performance.
Amazing video!!! Thank you so much. I’ve been trying to learn how to read mensural notation. This channel helps me soooo much.
I would love to hear from you about vocal ornamentation, comparative vocal technique, gender of alto/soprano voices, and Italian diction. Thank you for your videos!
Definitely some of it will come!
Elam, your low notes are like butter.
I love your voices! Is there a way to listen to you somewhere either in recording or in concert? Thanks!
Soon we'll record a full CD of Verdelot's four-part madrigals. You can follow on Profeti della Quinta's website: www.quintaprofeti.com
@@EarlyMusicSources Thanks so much! What you do here is a great job, it's hugely appreciated!
Absolutely beautiful performance at the end. It has rounded off my busy week perfectly. Thank you.
Lovely to hear singers doing diminutions! Bravo a todos! :D
I'm in love with this channel ❤️
I want to learn to write like this. Love your videos and your singing is incredibly beautiful
"With time it became more & more customary to write most of the necessary accidentals in the parts, leaving, thankfully, less room for debate." The advantage of no accidentals is that singers have to listen, and it motivates them to learn how the music works.
Now, this was incredible! Great singing, great explanation! Congratulations!
Excellent video, great information and beautifully edited!
Informative as always, and absolutely breathtaking music-making. Your voices blend well and your personal friendship is audible.
Elam, what a pleasure to hear you and your colleagues perform this music. I wonder about the possibility of light pencil markings that are not apparent except perhaps through detailed chemical analysis (not ordinarily available on a musicologist’s budget!), having in mind numerous 17th century instrumental scores with obvious mistakes and unlikely to be memorized.
The pencil was not yet invented.
I used to sing a couple decades back in a group that did mostly Palestrina, and we sang from photocopies of original parts. The hardest part was text underlay and the conductor trying to tell us where each of us should start when we rehearsed interior sections. It certainly lengthened rehearsal prep time, and the leader got annoyed at us from time to time. But it was great when it all came together. Today when I sing from full part scores, I tend to do better when I ignore the other parts and count the rests. Looking at other parts sometimes makes me late on my own entrances.
Hi !
You should check your solmisation at 7:44 : mi la sol fa mi re la fa sol la mi, instead of re la sol fa mi re la fa sol la re !
It's not much but I think it would be more correct ! 👌
Thanks for your videos 😊
Thanks for noticing the mistake!! I added it in the info.
Extraordinary presentation, as always.
מדהים וכל כך מעניין! תודה רבה!
Thank you! Idea of tactus became so popular lately in HIP community (in my opionion sucj conceptions in modern use get popular as some kind of trend promoted by influential personalities in the area) but for me it stays very doubtful still - especially wene I hear it applied (only a few cases were convincing). I personally thought that the fact thta tactus is so often reffered to in early music sources was connected with th efact that they had to teach to coordinate voices in vocal polyphony without practice of working with scores... and also later the voices became synchronized.
Great sound and great explanation. Thank you!
Wonderful singing and great to have some sounding examples. Very interesting!
Great video as always! What about finalis notes where a singer would not know beforehand whether it's a truly final note, or the other parts carry on? (e.g. the very madrigal in the video). I guess it must be one of these 'on the fly' things, as there's no way to calculate it from looking at a part only.
Amazing as always. Thank you for your hard work. I'll dare to make a request. Could you PLEASE do a review on Machaut's Messe de Notre Dame? I feel like there is so much to debate. The cadences, the chords, the voice leading, i'm baffled. Please and thanks for all the knowledge!
man, you're good!
Thank you - I've been wondering about exactly these questions for years. The fact that the part books were so expensive must have meant that professional musicians (as opposed to aristocratic amateurs) would probably have found it difficult to study the scores outside of rehearsals (did they even rehearse? I remember reading once somewhere that there was some evidence that they didn't) - I'd guess they wouldn't have been allowed to take the book home to have a go through their part, as the book was probably worth more than the house! The reliance on sight-reading and memory must have been prodigious.
These videos are amazing. Thaaaaaanks
fascinating to compare this with, for example, the way the Elizabethan theatre was done. Similar use of parts rather than a complete text of the play, meaning probably a lot more attention had to be paid to each other in performance in order to pick up queues and so on. No doubt a very different approach to modern acting, even of Shakespeare.
Goosebumps! Thank you!
This is a true Maestri, thank you all :)
Beautiful voices
So, so fascinating! Also you sound great together!
Thank you again, for an awesome, instructive video; really appreciate all your research. What a pity this subject was missing from my B Mus course.
Great video, thanks!
thanks, another great episode!
The Forrest- Heather part books were once used by Taverner, but later Forrest added a collection of masses for Queen Mary, thus preserving many masses which would otherwise have been lost. They are therefore incredibly precious. But Forrest was very careless indeed when notating long rests, to the extent that they couldn't possibly have been used for singing. They are hard enough to put together in a score, because you have to identify which part is faulty, so you need at lest 3 parts in order to see what fits with what. But I can't imagine Queen Mary being terribly patient: "Oh Sir William Forrest, I sent you all round the country to collect masses. Where are they?" There are far too many mistakes to be remembered, even if they could have been worked out without having all the parts on a table. There are signae congruentiae to help to keep it together, but they are not much use if given at the wrong time. I am forced to the conclusion that working copies were taken, even if none survive. There are a few corrections in the Carver Choirbook,
I have two questions. 1. How come you speak Tenoro but sing Basso? 2. Why the platypus on the harpsichord (maybe you already answered this one...)
7:51 la fa sol la mi . Muito obrigado pela excelente lição!
Yes someone already spotted the mistake 😬. I added a note about it.
Early Music Sources o óptimo é inimigo do bom! Parabéns pelo episódio!
QUÉ LINDO!!! ME ENCANTÓ!!!
Awesome performance! :)
Elam,
Thanks so much for your wonderful series! Question: on some title pages (i.e. Bassano) is "data in luce". What is this? Brought into Light?
I think it's just a way to say "published"
I don't speak Italian but in Spanish the expression "dar a luz" (lit. give to light) means to give birth to.
@@pacoym Thanks!
Can you make a video on the Liber selectarum cantionum (Augsburg 1520)? That would be dope :)
This is amazing. Would you be willing to share what software you use for producing the videos?
I use Adobe After effects
Early Music Sources Thanks! Amazing work :)
Giovanna: I sharpened my C's
Doron: I sang musica ficta
Jacob: ---
Elam: And I sang Fa super La
Me as an average music enjoyer: I liked it without it
Edit:
Grammar
I think the mensural notation is more of an impediment to things like dynamics and tempo changes rather than using separate parts. Instrumental musicians still use separate parts and have no trouble with dynamics or tempo changes.
Excellent
Do you have any videos on Carlo Gesualdo?
Great work, thanks!!!
Love your videos so much 😍
Gracias amigos hermoso y valioso trabajo, ojalá se de la posibilidad de escribirlo en Español, exelente!!!!
AND I'M JACOB!
hahahaha
What a cute platypus on your cembalo! :)
Bravi tutti!
When and how then aug6 chords became a thing?
This once again shows how much it is lost, and how much they relied on craft and skills based on feel, shared unwritten rules within a corporative set up with entire lives devoted to the building of such skills. Much is given to the imaginative mind, and the technological limits were a chance to develop a higher level of skills.
I've always wondered this!
Doron, Giovanna and Jacob's musical salutation: HiiII.ii!
Shirts with mi vs fa?
Yay, new vid
Yay!
Indeed!
Ahhhh I love this video!!
7:50 Singing "la fa sol la re" on "la fa sol la mi". That fifth name in a fourth interval is really weird.
Yes it's a mistake 😅 We mentioned it in the info.
wish I wasn't so bad at sightsinging hahaha, I really love madrigals
what did I wish from this video?
I wish I can sing in tune ... :( , it is really hard for me
Just takes a lot of practice.
0:07 that is the most F# i've ever heard
11:30 Legend
Whole beat reference whole beat reference
I think partbooks should be introduced to composition students today - harmony is not a book learning
PS I like the monkey on top of the elephant
"Easier than it looks". Ha! Ha! Ha!
Like si vienes por chachi guitar
He stops yakking at 5:22
No he doesn't. For two reasons.
@@dlevi67 You're right, he yaks all the way through.
@@dreamdiction No need to be rude. This is an educational video, not just for hearing the music.
I love it! Thanks for all huge value you guys give us always!
Greetings from Mexico!
Bravo!