Song

 Geoffrey Chew,
 Thomas J. Mathiesen,
 Thomas B. Payne
 and David Fallows
 https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.50647
 Published in print: 20 January 2001
 Published online: 2001


A piece of music for voice or voices, whether accompanied or unaccompanied,

or the act or art of singing. The term is not generally used for large vocal forms,
such as opera or oratorio, but is often found in various figurative and
transferred senses (e.g. for the lyrical second subject of a sonata, in J. Stainer
and W.A. Barrett: Dictionary of Musical Terms, 1875).

1. General.
 Geoffrey Chew
Song may well represent an attribute of all human beings in every age; but the
present article is restricted to the song repertory of Renaissance Europe and
those repertories that preceded it and developed from it. (For discussion
of song in other places, see the articles on the relevant geographical areas.) The
area thus defined is very wide and disparate and evidently not in every sense
self-contained. Yet there seems some justification in treating it as a unit: nearly
all post-Renaissance song may be judged according to its fidelity to the
declamation of the text and according to its expressiveness, and these criteria
are not generally relevant to any other songrepertories.

It would not be true to claim that no attention was paid to word-setting during
the European Middle Ages. Nevertheless, a new attitude developed during the
15th and 16th centuries towards declamation (i.e. the mirroring in the musical
setting of the rhythm of the text as it would be declaimed), which tended to
make song texts more comprehensible to listeners; this occurred in isolated
pieces as early as the first half of the 15th century (e.g. in the motet Quam
pulchra es, attributed to Dunstaple but unusual within his output). Some late
16th- and early 17th-century musicians championed a declamatory style and
claimed for it the authority of Greek antiquity; and attention to declamation has
since that time never been far from European song theory.
Similarly, expressiveness in song has been a constant concern for musicians
since the Renaissance. Songs in the tradition are capable, for instance, of being
criticized on the grounds that the music constitutes a misreading of the text.
Steiner (1975) has drawn out some of the implications of this view, placing it
within a larger ‘theory of translation’. He pointed out that ‘the composer who
sets a text to music is engaged in the same sequence of intuitive and technical
motions which obtain in translation’, and that, while a poem is fully eclipsed in
a verbal translation, a poem and its musical setting together establish ‘a new
whole which neither devalues nor eclipses its linguistic source’.
Views of song dependent, like this one, on ideas that music is a language, or at
least an expressive medium, bind together the repertory covered in the present
article from the 16th century onwards. (The article is not concerned with the
difficulties inherent in such ideas: they raise issues too wide to be discussed
here.) These views originated in the song repertory in the desire of some 16th-
century composers to ‘imitate’ the text in musical settings, often in small-scale
word-painting: the adoption of stereotyped musical figures associated with
certain words. Towards the end of the 16th century this interpretation of the
idea of imitazione della parola seemed to some to be increasingly inadequate.
Accordingly, theories were constructed requiring the music to be subservient to
the text and advocating solo song accompanied by the lute (seen as a parallel to
ancient Greek lyric monody) and in some cases a return to homophony or even
monophony. The results in practice, like the theories themselves, varied both in
their nature and in the success with which they were applied; but a general
tendency may be observed to match texts to music as a whole rather than word
by word and to make settings generally more expressive and ‘emotional’ in
their impact on the listener. Of the various theories, that of Zarlino was
perhaps the most impressive and influential, both at the time and
subsequently. It is arguable that the limitations placed on song by 16th- and
17th-century Italian theorists paradoxically freed composers in an
unprecedented way to realize the full potential of post-Renaissance song.
The persistence of word-setting theories ultimately deriving from 16th-century
Italy represents the chief reason why the Renaissance holds central historical
importance in European song. (A view of this type still underlies Hugo
Riemann’s definition of song as ‘the union of a lyric poem with music, in which
the sung word replaces the spoken word, while the musical elements of rhythm
and cadence inherent in speech are heightened to … rhythmically ordered
melody’ (Musik-Lexikon, Leipzig, 1882, ‘Lied’).) It also, however, suggests a
powerful reason for beginning this article with an account of ancient
Hellenic song, for this was regarded as the period of the ‘origins’ in the
Renaissance, and Renaissance theorists constantly appealed to the authority of
Greek antiquity. 16th- and 17th-century theorists did not of course always shed
light on ancient Greek practice: little is known about the latter even today, less
was known in the 16th century, and even the evidence available to them was
not always approached critically by the theorists.
Renaissance or Renaissance-derived theory does not suffice to appreciate
all song in the repertory – even since the 17th century – however, and it is
useless for judging medieval song; some alternative criteria are suggested in
the course of the historical account below, where they seem appropriate.
Certain areas of song have sometimes seemed inadequate when judged by it;
one such is 18th-century song, much of which may be termed ‘absolute’ song –
i.e. song in which the melody follows a strict musical logic without necessarily
reflecting the features of the text, such as dance-songs. The latter are an
 inheritance from the Middle Ages at least and have never been superseded
completely by ‘declamatory’ songs.

Another problematic category is that of the strophic song. Even if the music is
carefully fitted to one strophe, it may fail to suit other strophes equally well.
Strophic songs, nevertheless, may well represent the most
fundamental song type of all, and they have been cultivated by every type
of song composer, even the most literary-minded. Moreover, they have for
centuries formed a basic part of the repertory of popular song, notably of the
(often sizable) part of the popular repertory originating in the theatre.

A rather different area of song, which presents difficulties in the light of

Renaissance standards, is 20th-century experimental song, such as
Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire. Those who experimented in this way later turned
away from song; and in the 20th century, song has flourished mainly among
conservative composers. So far, indeed, non-tonal music would not appear to
have produced a medium for song of equal potential to that of the Renaissance;
that, however, would be much to ask.

2. Antiquity.
 Geoffrey Chew, revised by Thomas J. Mathiesen
It is generally agreed that words, rhythm, melody (in the most general sense)
and movement were closely associated in ancient cultures. Taken together,
these elements formed song, which is ‘an essential, inseparable element in
primitive life and cannot be isolated from the conditions that are its cause, its
sense, and its reason of being’ (Sachs, 1961, p.16). The relationship
between, song, magic, science and religion (and, by extension, state ritual) was
very strong in all known ancient cultures, and this considerably complicates the
study of ancient song as a discrete entity.
Most evidence for ancient song comes from pictorial and literary sources, some
of which are specifically devoted to the theory or science of ‘music’. These
sources are complemented by some archaeological remains of musical
instruments and a relatively small amount of musical notation that survives on
materials such as clay tablets, stone and papyrus. Some later manuscripts also
contain the notation for earlier pieces of music, generally though not always
considered to be authentic.

Ancient cultures in, for example, Egypt, Greece, Rome, the Middle East,
Mesopotamia, India and China developed a variety of musico-poetic types
of song to be used on specific religious occasions and to accompany
processions, lighten routine tasks of the day and celebrate or solemnize events
such as weddings or funerals. Ancient songeventually developed into the highly
complex forms found in epic, in the national festivals of the Greeks and in
Chinese and Indian court entertainments. The available evidence does not
permit generalization of detail across all these cultures, but for further
details see China, People’s Republic of, §I, China, People’s Republic of, §II and China,
People’s Republic of, §IV; Egypt, Arab Republic of, §I; India, subcontinent of,
§I; Mesopotamia; Ode, §1 .
Almost all surviving ancient song is Greek and of the Hellenistic period, and the
quantity is very small. Literary and pictorial sources, however, permit certain
limited conclusions about the categories of song cultivated in antiquity, and the
instruments used to accompany them; in Greece further information is
sometimes available concerning the metre and modality favoured in them.

An oral bardic tradition of epic song accompanied by the phorminx in the

archaic Greek period, perhaps sung to simple traditional formulae, no doubt
underlies the Homeric epics, and may have been the chief type
of song cultivated in Greece before 700 BCE. Besides epic, simple
functional songs, perhaps unrehearsed and often sung by a leader with choral
refrains, are attested throughout Greek and Roman literature, and also in the
Old Testament. They include work songs, lullabies, victory songs, songs for
weddings and funerals, mocking and satirical songs and so on. These
simple songswere later taken up into the art music of ancient Greece.
An extensive development of accompanied song began in the 7th
century BCE in Greece. Solo lyric or monody (e.g. of Sappho and Alcaeus) may
have corresponded to modern strophic songs: it expressed the personal
feelings of the composer in a series of shortish stanzas identical in metre. By
contrast, choral lyric, which included dancing and was mainly religious in
character, expressed the communal feelings of a group, which might be as large
as the whole city-state. Solo and choral lyric were important also in Greek
drama from the 5th century BCE, and were originally the main element in it.
Both lyric song as such and drama were the subject of competition at Greek
festivals such as the Pythian Games, and lyric song also formed part of the
general education of 5th-century Greeks, so that amateurs as well as
professionals were able to participate in choral lyric. A new musical style of the
late 5th century BCE , the ‘new music’, had, according to contemporaries, far-
reaching effects on song: for example, unprecedented modal and rhythmic
variety was tolerated, instrumental interludes were introduced and texts were
set melismatically, in contrast to previous practice, where the music was
subservient to the text.
During the Hellenistic period, the song of the Greek theatre spread to Rome and
elsewhere, and song composition reached a highpoint in the cantica of the
comedies of Plautus. New categories of song, including mime and pantomime,
were introduced, some under foreign influence.
Of the music mentioned here, it is the song of the period up to the early 5th
century BCEwhich, understood or misunderstood, exerted the greatest influence
on European and European-derived music of later centuries, the music of the
Hellenistic age usually being stigmatized as decadent, as it had been by some
Hellenistic writers. The apparent cultivation of originality by Greek poet-
composers (although there is no way of assessing how far Greek composers
remained faithful to musical tradition, even in 5th-century ‘new music’, when
the melodies have not survived) and the concern with the relationship between
 text and music expressed by Greek writers (e.g. Plato) have often suggested new
lines of departure to later composers.
For further
details see Aoidos; Bacchylides; Bard; Cantica; Chorēgia; Epics; Epithalamium; Euripides; Fe
scennini; Hesiod; Homer; Hymenaios; Hymn, §I,
1; Melanippides; Monody; Nenia; Pantomime; Partheneia; Pherecrates; Pindar; Plato; Plautus,
Titus Maccius; Prosodion; Pyrrhic; Rome, §I; Thrēnos; Timotheus ; andTragōidia .

3. Liturgical song to the 9th century.

 Geoffrey Chew, revised by Thomas B. Payne
Any assessment of the relationships of early liturgical musical practice,
whether Jewish or Christian, is fraught with problems. Ancient Jewish song is
represented chiefly by the texts of the book of Psalms; and though various styles
of performance seem to be implied by their textual structure, corresponding to
the direct, responsorial and antiphonal psalmody, and the litanies with refrains,
of later Christian practice, any notion of direct connections is hazardous at
best. Nonetheless, psalmody eventually formed a staple part of the liturgies of
Jews and Christians; and it is possible that the skeletal forms of the psalm
tones may contain some of the most plausible links between Jewish and
Christian practice.
In the early Christian church, hymns (in this context, sacred songs other than
those with Old Testament texts) appear to have been sung from a very early
date. A fragmentary Christian hymn survives uniquely with melody in Greek
notation in a late 3rd-century papyrus, but its ritual significance remains
unclear, and its singular survival does not allow us to judge how representative
it may be. In any event, links between Christian and ancient Greek song are
likely to have been tenuous. Apart from the hymns whose texts are in the New
Testament itself, the earliest surviving hymn texts were mostly in Syriac but
were soon translated into Greek (e.g. the psalm-like Odes of Solomon, 1st century,
and the heretical hymns of Bardaisan, d 222, and Ephrem Syrus, d 373, who
wrote orthodox contrafacta to Bardaisan’s melodies). The isosyllabic, strophic
principle underlying Ephrem’s hymns appeared in subsequent Greek hymnody
and thence in the Hebrew religious songs or piyyuṭim cultivated from the 6th
century, though these were later influenced by Arabic songs. From the 5th
century a rich variety of hymnody developed in the Byzantine and the other
eastern churches (for details see the articles on the various eastern rites).
The texts of Christian liturgical song often reflect the structure of prototype
hymns, such as those from the Bible, regarded as of divine origin (e.g. the
Psalms, Sanctus, Trisagion etc.). They function as ‘types’ (paradigms) of
heavenly praise within the liturgy which is itself representative of heaven. It is
not known how this idea of hymnody may have affected the melodies in the
early Christian centuries, but the use of a limited number of melodic archetypes
was a characteristic of later Byzantine hymnody, and legends of divine origin
were later attached to Christian chant traditions such as the Gregorian and
Ethiopian (there are modern parallels to these legends, for example in the
Kimbanguist church).

Various categories of chant developed subsequently, possibly through contact

with regional musical styles. Some liturgical song may have been influenced by
popular song, but even if this is so, the popular style was so thoroughly
assimilated in time that the evidence of surviving melodies is useless for
reconstructing it. Most of the categories of song found in the later Gregorian
repertory, whose texts are attested from sources earlier than the 9th century,
developed ultimately, however, from psalmody.

From the 4th century, quantitative metrical hymnody is attested in the Latin
West; the texts survive of hymns by Hilary of Poitiers, St Ambrose and many
later hymnographers. A vast repertory of monophonic hymn melodies survives
from later centuries, which no doubt influenced other Latin and
vernacular song in the Middle Ages.
 For further details see Alleluia, §I; Bardaisan; Christian Church, music of the early; Ephrem
[Ephraem] Syrus; Gregory the Great; Hymn, §II; Jewish music, §III ; andPsalm, §II .

4. Medieval Latin song from the 9th century.

 Geoffrey Chew, revised by Thomas B. Payne
The first notated song melodies, sacred and secular, since Hellenistic antiquity,
in both East and West survive from the 9th century. The introduction of
notation seems to have coincided with far-reaching attempts to impose as well
as to reorganize and classify several of the repertories of liturgical song: in
Latin, Greek, Syriac and Armenian chant this classification was done according
to systems, varying from repertory to repertory, of eight modes. The Gregorian
repertory, as a result, was also subjected to a stylistic revision that decisively
established the special characteristics of Gregorian word-setting and melodic
style, not necessarily found in other chant repertories, even those of the Latin
West. Some of them remained current for centuries and may therefore seem
essentially to represent ‘medieval’ song characteristics; but paradoxically the
interest in flexibility of melody and the increased attention to word-setting
commonly thought to distinguish the Renaissance coincided at first, in the first
half of the 15th century, with a renewed interest in Gregorian style rather than
a preoccupation with Greek lyric song.

Factors affecting the style of Gregorian word-setting and melodic contour

include the liturgical function of the particular chant: thus the antiphons of
introits, for example, share certain stylistic features that set them apart from
other categories such as graduals. The melodies largely consist of carefully
shaped melodic curves of great sophistication. Higher notes may generally be
regarded as having more weight than lower, and melismas as carrying more
weight than single notes, and frequently the text was set with these factors in
mind; yet the attention given to the relationship between text and music may be
obscured for modern listeners by the tendency to place melismatic passages
also on unimportant syllables, where they will not obscure the text, or in places
with a structural significance for the chant form (such as sectional endings): in
recent centuries the opposite principle has generally been adopted. Repetition
of words or phrases within the text, and word-painting, were almost wholly
avoided; no attempt was made, of course, at ‘expressing’ the text, which was a
much later concern. The greatest elaboration in terms of melismatic style
occurs in the responsorial chants following the reading of lessons; these chants
are in a sense ‘meditative’.

New categories of liturgical song besides the classic original corpus of

Gregorian chant, such as sequence, trope and rhymed Office, also arose in the
Frankish monasteries and elsewhere from the 9th century, and throughout the
Middle Ages the chant repertory continued to be extended with new pieces,
sometimes differing in style from that described above. Sometimes the changes
tend towards less systematization than is found in true Gregorian chant, as
when there is an apparently arbitrary juxtaposition within the same piece of
melodic styles kept separate in Gregorian chant. Sometimes, on the contrary,
they represent new systematic chant dialects different from the Gregorian
dialect, as in some 13th-century versified Offices composed in accordance with
the poetic and melodic modal theory of the time.

Together with the composition of new chants, there took place occasional
systematic changes to the chants in the existing Gregorian repertory in
accordance with reforming movements, such as that of the Cistercians in the
12th century. The revision of songs or song repertories in order to bring them
up to date or to purge supposed excesses of range and melismatic
ornamentation, with the underlying implication that songs do not exist in an
absolute sense independent of fashion or function, even when they are of as
much value and authority as the songs of the Gregorian repertory, is
characteristic of medieval European music. It tended to disappear in art music
in the Renaissance.
In post-9th-century chant, repetition structures were created comparable to
those of secular song, especially in the alleluia and sequence repertories. The
sequence, with its ABB¹CC¹… structure, offers parallels with certain types of
secular music such as the lai and estampie of the Middle Ages, which were built
on the same principle; this type of structure may be much older still.
Much of the secular song of the Middle Ages, as well as much non-liturgical
religious song, has disappeared, although it is sometimes attested by passing
literary references; not only was notation the preserve of clerics, but its
introduction is directly tied to the imposition of the liturgical corpus over most
of Europe, rather than arising as a means of preserving extant utterances. The
distinction between sacred and secular is, however, not easy to carry through
logically, and the same styles and forms appear in settings of both kinds of
text. Even a distinction between Latin and vernacular song is not watertight, for
a number of medieval songs are contrafacta – songs in which new texts are
joined to old melodies, either by associating sacred Latin texts with melodies
originally conceived for secular vernacular texts or the reverse.

A small quantity of non-liturgical Latin song survives, mostly in non-

diastematic neumes, in 10th- and 11th-century manuscripts, and comprises
settings of ancient Latin poets (one such is a contrafactum of the liturgical
hymn Ut queant laxis), planctusin honour of Carolingian and Visigothic royalty,
dating in part perhaps from as early as the 7th century, and other types. Larger
repertories are those associated with the goliards of the 12th century (e.g. in
the famous 13th-century Benediktbeuren manuscript known as the Carmina
burana) which are also, however, notated in non-diastematic neumes, and the
contemporary conductus repertory of the late 12th century and the 13th; the
evidence suggests that these songs, like many monophonic hymns, are settings
of Latin verse now scanned according to the number of syllables per line and
the placement of the final stress rather than, as in the ancient world and again
in Carolingian Renaissance times, by length of syllable (quantity). Conductus,
whether sacred or secular, came to signify strophic or through-
composed songsgenerally with Latin texts; the simpler conductus resemble
syllabic hymns, but the most elaborate examples have stanzas whose poetic
structures are very complex and which may be considerably melismatic in
musical style.
In nearly all medieval song (Latin or vernacular) the modern listener or
performer is hampered in gaining a complete idea of the music above all
because of the problems of rhythm, which was not notated without ambiguity
until the latter part of the 13th century. Some of the earlier melodies appear in
a rhythmic interpretation in late sources, yet even here certainty of
interpretation cannot be absolute, since the melodies may in these sources have
been remodelled according to later taste (see above). Another contested point is
instrumental accompaniment: the variety of evidence suggests that a single,
overriding practice for all such songs did not exist.

From the 12th century, conductus were set also in two-, occasionally three- and
rarely four-voice polyphony; some of these polyphonic conductus represent
some of the largest-scale achievements in the whole of medieval song.
Polyphonic conductus are generally distinguished from other categories of
polyphonic song by their use of the same text sung simultaneously in all voices
and the lack of a plainchant tenor, although some conductus drew on various
types of pre-existing material.

By the mid-13th century the composition of conductus in active centres such as

Paris and the Artois gave way to a concentration on the motet. The latter is the
other chief category of Latin medieval song, apart from the Notre Dame
organum, i.e. large-scale polyphonic settings of the solo parts of responsorial
chants sung at Mass and at the Divine Office on certain high festivals. Unlike
the conductus, the motet was based on plainchant or other tenors and its
constituent voices are very often distinct from one another in their rhythmic,
melodic and verbal context.
 13th-century motets are generally of small but concentrated dimensions; the
rhythms used in them often recall those of the rhythmic modes, even though
these no longer served as a basis for the notation. In the 14th century, however,
the introduction of isorhythm expanded the rhythmic palette as well as the
structural dimensions and complexity of the motet. Some late 14th-century
motets display the rhythmic subtleties of the Ars Subtilior.

For further details see Alleluia, §I; Antiphon, §5 ; Ars

Subtilior; Cantional; Conductus; Early Latin secular song; Ēchos; Goliards; Isorhythm; Mode,
§I; Motet, §I; Organum; Planctus; Versified Office; Rhythmic modes; Sequence; Tonary ;
and Trope .

5. Medieval vernacular song.

 Geoffrey Chew, revised by David Fallows
In the early Middle Ages, traditions of heroic and historical epic song appear to
have been more widespread among the Germanic and Celtic peoples than would
appear solely from the few surviving epic texts (e.g. Beowulf, the Hildebrandslied,
the Nibelungenlied and the Scandinavian sagas). One such Old High German epic,
the Petruslied, which may date from before 850, survives with musical notation
(D-Mbslat.6260, f.158v) and is the oldest known song from Germany. Musical
evidence in unambiguous notation, though slight and late, survives for the
comparable chanson de geste in France: simple musical formulae were repeated
over and over again.
Vernacular religious songs existed from an early date, although no large
coherent repertory survives until after the rise of the cantional and the carol.
Bede, for example, mentioned a Christian epic (of which a fragment of text
survives) sung by Caedmon in the 7th century; the text survives of a 9th-
century German lyric by Otfrid von Weissenburg, apparently connected with the
sequence; the earliest vernacular song of Bohemia, Hospodine, pomiluj ny (ascribed
to Adalbert of Prague), may have been sung as early as the 11th century,
although it survives only in a much later source; some English songs were
‘composed’ in the 12th century by St Godric.
Vernacular secular lyrics also survive in small numbers before the 12th century;
an example is the alba (dawn song) Phebi claro with Latin and Provençal text,
surviving, with melody, in a late 10th- or 11th-century manuscript, I-
Rvat Reg.lat.1462. A parallel has been drawn between this melody and that of a
liturgical hymn. From the 12th and succeeding centuries a large body of secular
lyric song survives, which was probably transmitted orally at the time and
codified in later sources. This, the repertory of the troubadours, trouvères and
Minnesinger, comprises songs with Provençal, French and German texts
respectively. Its origins are problematic: few clear links are discernible with
earlier secular lyric. Some scholars have suggested Arabic influence, but
without evidence (Arabic music survives only from the 13th century); Chailley
suggested an origin in Aquitanian versus (‘Notes sur les troubadours, les versus
et la question arabe’, Mélanges de linguistique et de littérature romanes à la mémoire
d’István Frank, Saarbrücken, 1958, pp.118–28).
The repertory comprises settings of ‘courtly love’ lyrics. Some 2600 troubadour
poems survive, but only 264 melodies; of the slightly later trouvère repertory,
however, some 2000 melodies are known. Despite the difference in the
language of the texts of the two repertories, there was much give and take
between them and they have much in common. The songs vary in structure
from great simplicity, with repeated formulae almost as simple as those of
surviving chanson de geste melodies, to forms in which flexible repetitions are
incorporated to create a subtly balanced structure.
These songs differ from any earlier medieval song especially in their cult of
originality, leading sometimes to the creation of novel and unprecedented
formal structures and the cultivation of abstruse styles and obscure vocabulary
in the poetry. Gregorian modal theory has little direct bearing on the modality
of troubadour and trouvère melody. Possible relationships with, or at least
resemblances to, liturgical song exist, however: the form of the sequence is
reflected not only in the Lai repertory but also in the repetition of half-stanzas
of some troubadour songs; and structures resembling psalm recitation occur in
troubadour and trouvère song. The influence of folksong has often been
claimed, largely owing to the simplicity and lilt of many of the songs when
interpreted in modal rhythm, but is of course no more than conjectural.
The repertory of Minnesang – a term generally referring to all settings of
German courtly love poems from their beginnings in the 13th century until the
early 15th century – was in turn influenced by the trouvère repertory and, like
it, was probably at first orally transmitted. The so-called bar form frequently
found in this repertory (AABand variants) corresponds to a similar form in the
trouvère repertory (and indeed appears in much song of all periods); it was the
form obligatory for constructing strophes in Meistergesang, the
monophonic song cultivated in bourgeois German songschools in the 15th and
16th centuries.
Other categories of late medieval vernacular monophonic song were mostly
regional, popular ‘by destination’ and connected with popular religious
movements. They include German and Czech vernacular cantiones – the Czech
repertory was greatly extended about 1420–30 by the adherents of the Hussite
movement, and almost superseded Latin religious song in Bohemia. A repertory
survives of 13th-century Spanish sacred cantigas; of the secular cantigas, very
little music survives. 13th- and 14th-century flagellant movements of popular
origin in Italy and Germany gave rise to song repertories; the music of Italian
flagellant songs has almost entirely perished, but German Geisslerlieder survive.
Italian popular religious songs of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance are
generally termed laude; a large lauda spirituale repertory survives, including
polyphonic settings from the 15th and 16th centuries. A comparable repertory
in England, surviving from the late 14th century and the 15th, was the carol;
surviving examples are nearly all polyphonic. A further repertory, apparently
dependent on French and German secular vernacular monophonic song, is
represented by the medieval Ashkenazi Jewish mi-sinai melodies; after this time,
Ashkenazi Jewish songtended to be an eclectic combination of elements drawn
from diverse musical traditions. All these repertories generally must have
remained unknown, and must have exerted no direct influence, outside their
own regions.
In all the monophonic repertories mentioned here dating before the 14th
century (later in some cases), there is uncertainty concerning the interpretation
of the rhythm. In most cases there is uncertainty also about the use of
instruments; van der Werf and Page have pointed out that there is uncertainty
on the latter point even in troubadour and trouvère song.

Courtly love continued to influence 14th- and 15th-century French song, but
after 1300composers set mainly the fixed poetic forms (formes fixes) of the
ballade, rondeau and virelai. These forms became almost exclusively
polyphonic after the work of Machaut, in a structure comprising a freely
composed melody with text in the top voice, and two accompanying voices
(tenor and contratenor) which generally lack texts in the original sources. The
French monophonic secular song appears to have been relegated, after
Machaut, to the sphere of entertainment music, as was the chanson rustique (a
term found from about 1550, but useful for the earlier repertory). This popular
category is distinguished mainly by a simple style with strophic structures and
simple repetition schemes; it has much in common with the virelai (see
Brown, 1963). Towards the end of the 14th century, in the main chanson
repertory, there was a temporary vogue (mainly in southern France) for much
rhythmic and other complexity, and virelais were occasionally set as large-scale
genre pieces, with imitations of birdcalls, fanfares and so on.
A repertory of polyphonic music comparable to that of France existed in 14th-
century Italy, but this was not preceded by an equivalent monophonic repertory
as had occurred in France. The chief categories of song were the ballata, caccia
and madrigal (the latter category is a formal definition and should be
distinguished from the 16th- and 17th-century madrigal). The caccia,
corresponding to the less numerous category in France known as the chace,
represents the first considerable song category based on canon: the latter
device, attested as early as the 12th century, arose first from the technique of
‘voice-exchange’ (Stimmtausch); it is behind the medieval techniques of rondellus
and rota (the latter may be seen in the famous Sumer is icumen in) and remained
popular, especially in England, in later centuries.
Some of the songs in these repertories seem to owe much to dance rhythms:
this is most marked in some of the monophonic virelais of the French
repertory, or the ballatas of the Italian repertory. In the most complex songs,
the music has a life of its own, seemingly independent of the text, whose
distribution over the music might conceivably be different without losing its
validity. Although this latter feature is found only in some songs, secular and
sacred, of the period, it has sometimes seemed a generally ‘medieval’
characteristic.

Polyphonic songs with texts in languages other than French or Italian occur in
only small numbers: there are from the 14th and 15th centuries a small number
in Dutch and English (the latter, in the early 15th century, generally simple in
style). Since English was not internationally familiar, some English songs such
as Frye’s So ys emprentidwere copied outside England with French or Latin texts.
Throughout the repertory songs were very often turned into sacred Latin
contrafacta; thus some motets (in the later loose sense of a non-liturgical
polyphonic sacred song) which survive only as sacred songs, but which are cast
in the usual three-voice structure of secular songswith the chief melody in the
top voice and clearly divided into two sections like secular songs, may be
suspected of having originated as secular songs.
For further details see Adalbert of Prague; Ars Nova; Ars
Subtilior; Ballade; Ballata; Bard; Caccia; Cantiga; Cantional, §1; Carol; Chace; Chanson de
geste; Formes fixes; Geisslerlieder; Jewish music, §III, 3; Lauda; Madrigal,
§I; Meistergesang; Minnesang; Rondeau (i); Rondellus; Rota; Sources, MS, §III; Troubadours,
trouvères ; and Virelai .
 6. 1450–1580.
 Geoffrey Chew, revised by David Fallows
In the second half of the 15th century, leadership in song composition was held
by French and Netherlandish composers; during the 16th century it passed to
Italians. During the 15th century, three-part secular song settings were slowly
supplanted by four-part settings (and in later madrigals etc. by still more
voices). Polyphony for choirs had been almost unknown in the Middle Ages,
when it was performed by soloists or instrumentalists; after 1450, motets were
increasingly sung by small choirs, but secular polyphony was still generally
performed by ensembles of soloists or by a soloist accompanied by one or more
instruments.
Whereas the voices within a song in the 14th and early 15th centuries had at
times been contrasted in rhythm and in melodic material and style, with pairs
of voices such as tenor and contratenor often sharing a similar range, from the
middle of the 15th century all the voices of polyphonic songs came to be
increasingly sharply contrasted in range and tessitura, but decreasingly so in
melodic material and rhythm. Imitative textures, attested in some songs as
early as the beginning of the 15th century, became increasingly common
in song, as did close attention to declamation (see §1 above), particularly in the
Italian and English traditions.

Monophonic song became less and less important within art music after
about 1450, although collections of sacred contrafacta such as
the Souterliedekens (1540), a collection of metrical psalms, and occasional
secular songs, show the persistence at a popular level of the
monophonic song of courtly love. The medieval tradition of syllabic song based
on the dance (as in the virelai or carol) also continued to flourish, at every level
of sophistication, as in the frottola and related forms.
The formes fixes and the imagery of courtly love associated with them retained
their popularity and importance in the polyphonic songs of French and
Netherlandish composers as late as the 16th century but gradually disappeared
in favour of free songor chanson. The repertory of the latter part of the 15th
century is represented by the song collections published in the early 16th
century by Petrucci, with works by such composers as Compère, Alexander
Agricola, Japart and Josquin. In the early 16th century, three- and four-part
polyphonic arrangements of popular melodies were cultivated at Paris by
composers such as Févin and Mouton, and these were succeeded in the second
quarter of the century by a new type of Parisian chanson, characterized by a
strongly rhythmic, syllabic style. The latter continued to be cultivated even
after some chansons had begun to reflect an Italian madrigalian style (c1560–
75). From about 1550 the vaudeville repertory began to appear: simple strophic
homophonic songs, often performed as lute-songs, which later formed the basis
for the air de courrepertory. Towards the end of this period an isolated repertory
is represented by the songs composed to vers mesurés à l’antique – attempts to re-
create the music of antiquity by pursuing logically theories of poetic rhythm
according to syllabic quantity, parallel with some song composition in Italy.
Late 15th-century Spanish song survives chiefly in the manuscript known as the
Cancionero de Palacio, a collection of songs mainly with the melody in a
soprano or mezzo-soprano register and largely homophonic and non-imitative
in texture. The categories of song represented notably include the villancico in
its earliest form and the romance. These songs were cultivated in the 16th
century in solo settings accompanied by the vihuela de mano; such settings appear
first in Luys Milán’s Libro de música de vihuela de mano intitulado El maestro (1536) and
lasted until Esteban Daza’s collection El Parnaso (1576). Songs accompanied by
single polyphonic string instruments like these became very important in the
16th and 17th centuries (see §1 above and §7 below).
The beginnings of polyphonic song in Germany date from the late 14th and
early 15th centuries, with a few polyphonic songs by the Monk of Salzburg and
Oswald von Wolkenstein within a mainly monophonic repertory. A more
substantial repertory of Tenorlieder, however, survives from the second half of
the 15th century and the first half of the 16th, and this began to displace the
monophonic repertory in importance. (The Tenorlied may be said to have
survived into the 18th century in the form of the German Protestant chorale
elaboration.) Tenorlieder are mainly non-imitative, with the melody line in the
tenor part. Some were sung as solo songs, with the other parts allocated to
instruments, some as partsongs; in those intended to be sung in the latter way
all the voices are provided with the text. It is possible that surviving two-part
arrangements of songs by 16th-century German lutenists were intended to be
performed with the melody sung in the same fashion as in Spanish songs to
the vihuela de mano, but there are no published collections of lute-songs in
Germany parallel to those from other European countries. A further category of
German song of this period is represented by the quodlibet.
The monophonic religious song repertory of Germany was in the early 16th
century extended by the creation of the Lutheran chorale, as that of Bohemia
had been in the 15th century by Hussite song, and the Lutheran chorale, like
Hussite song, was to some extent derived from pre-Reformation song and
dependent on the style of plainchant. The chorales in due course gave rise to a
very fruitful tradition of polyphonic elaborations by a great variety of
composers, as to a lesser extent did the comparable versifications of the psalms
in the Genevan Psalter of the Reformed (Calvinist) tradition.

Secular polyphonic song in early 16th-century England included a distinctive

tradition of so-called freemen’s (? ‘three men’s’) songs, which superseded the
French-influenced English polyphonic song of the 15th century: these are
partsongs for three voices, all provided with the text in the sources. Lute-songs,
though known to have been cultivated as early as the reign of Henry VIII,
scarcely survive in England from before the late 16th century. Partsongs exist
also from the mid-16th century, before the rise of the consort song (see §7
below).

Italian song in the late 15th and early 16th centuries is represented by the
frottola, a type of light, homophonic song, with the melody usually in the
 highest of four parts; 11 volumes of frottolas were published in the early 16th
century by Petrucci. They appear to have been sung either as partsongs or as
solos with instrumental (e.g. lute) accompaniment. The last known collection of
frottolas was published in 1531, by which time fashion had turned to villanella,
villotta and madrigal. The madrigal, only indirectly influenced by the frottola,
appeared in published collections from 1530. It represents the chief form of
16th- and early 17th-century song in general; in it the chief composers worked
out the techniques (including word-setting) that most fully realized the
potential of the musical language of the age.
For further details see Canti carnascialeschi; Chanson; Chorale; Frottola; Luther, Martin,
§2; Madrigal, §II; Pastoral, §3; Psalms, metrical; Quodlibet; Romance,
§1; Tenorlied; Vaudeville; Vers mesurés, vers mesurés à l’antique; Villancico; Villanella ;
and Villotta .

7. 1580–1730.
 Geoffrey Chew
The English madrigal repertory was created during some 30 years, from the
publication in 1588 by Nicholas Yonge of his Musica transalpina; it was perfected
by such composers as Byrd, Weelkes and Wilbye. The English madrigal owed
much to the Italian madrigal repertory, but the other categories of
secular song cultivated at the time grew out of indigenous traditions, such as
the solo song accompanied by a string consort, composed since the middle of
the 16th century and dependent on a domestic tradition of consort playing
before that time; the largest collection of all is Byrd’s Psalmes, Sonets,
& Songs of 1588, and the consort song still survived in
Gibbons’s Madrigals of 1612.
The consort song, and also no doubt lute-songs that have not survived, underlie
the tradition of published English lute-songs beginning with Dowland’s First
Book of Songes or Ayres (1597) and ending with John Attey’s First Booke of
Ayres (1622). Dowland is the supreme master in this tradition of music written
by professional composers for both professional and amateur performers. Most
of the repertory comprises strophic songs; elaborate introductions and
interludes are generally avoided. In the best of these songs, the principles of
word-setting that had been applied to Italian settings in the madrigal were now
worked out thoroughly in terms of English verses.
The progressive tendencies of the period, towards increased expressiveness
and heightened emotion, are more fully reflected in the solo songs devised
specifically as a vehicle for these tendencies in Italy. Some, like the members of
Bardi’s Camerata, believed that these Italian monodies reproduced ancient
Greek practice, apart from the language of the texts. Some of the most
distinctive features of these songs are apparent as early as the 1580s and 90s,
for example in songs from the Bottegari Lutebook (I-MOeC 311). Monodies are
mostly for high voice, and the more madrigalian ones have wayward, highly
expressive vocal lines over relatively static basses and simple chords on a lute
or other instrument; individual expressive words and exclamations in the text
are apt to carry elaborate ornamentation and to give rise to unusual harmonies.
Aria-like songs are more flowing and diatonic. Monody is an extreme example
of a general tendency in many 17th-century songs – even arias, including those
based on dances – towards throwing the melody line into sharp relief and
reducing the musical elaboration of the accompaniment.
The 1630s saw the development in Italy of a longer form divided into short
sections, the cantata, which subsequently became the most important category
of secular song both in Italy and elsewhere. The rise of tonality later in the
century allowed the sections of the cantata to be increased in scale and
contributed to the development of the da capo aria used in operas, oratorios
and cantatas by Italian composers such as Alessandro Scarlatti and
subsequently by Germans, including Bach and Handel.

Italian song became widespread in late 16th-century Germany and Austria, and
its influence may be seen in the adoption from 1567 of the villanella by Regnart
and of the canzonetta by H.L. Hassler (Canzonette, 1590). These songs, modelled
on the simpler Italian homophonic songs of the late 16th century, came
increasingly to supersede the older polyphonic tradition of German song,
notably in the Musica boscareccia (1621–8) of Schein. In 1623 Johann Nauwach
introduced monody to German song (Libro primo di arie passeggiate), and the
continuo lied was established in Heinrich Albert’s eight books of Arien, a term
analogous to the French air and the English ayre; these Arien include simple
strophic songs as well as some in a declamatory style. The tradition of German
strophic continuo songs persisted at various regional centres in the work of
Adam Krieger, Philipp Erlebach and others, up to about the end of the century,
when composers turned increasingly to the italianate da capo aria, as can be
seen in Bach’s cantatas. (For details see Thomas, 1963.)
In Bohemia, sacred strophic continuo songs, many based on dances, appear in
the collections of A.V. Michna (Česká mariánská muzika, 1647) and J.J. Božan
(Slavíček rajský, 1719); da capo arias are found in the Opella ecclesiastica of J.A.
Plánický (1723). Collections of secular vernacular song, of purely local
importance, appeared also in the Low Countries (e.g. J.A. Ban: Zangh-
Bloemzel, 1642); the monodic style was reflected there as early as 1626 in
the Neder-landtsche Gedenck-clanck of Adriaen Valerius. Sacred song collections for
both Catholics and Protestants appeared throughout this period and long
afterwards; in the publication of Dutch song Etienne Roger played a leading
part, as he did in international music publication.
In the late 16th century French chansons could be sung as solo songs, with the
soloist taking the top part and the lower parts either taken by a group of
instruments or arranged for a single instrument (e.g. lute). This practice
influenced the development of the air de cour, which is first encountered with
the Livre d’airs de cour miz sur le luth of Adrian Le Roy (1571) and was taken up
particularly in the 17th and 18th centuries. Such songs are mainly strophic
settings of love-poetry, often characterized by a simple note-against-note style
(though sometimes with considerable embellishment of the solo line) and an
irregular metre influenced by the musique mesurée of the period, with note
lengths dependent on syllabic quantity. Within the repertory a simpler category
of airs à boire and a more complex category of airs sérieuxmay be distinguished,
and, from the late 17th century, a category of simple
pastoral songs termed brunettes. Muted traces of the Italian monodic style can be
detected in songs of the repertory, especially those of Pierre Guédron. Greater
polyphonic complexity is represented in the elaborations, for domestic rather
than church use, of the Geneva psalm tunes by Claude Le Jeune and others.
Another category of French song of this period is the noël.
The Italian monodic style became known in England about 1610 and was
imitated in masque and theatre songs and in dialogues. Throughout the century
the repertory of the English ayre contained both declamatory and ‘tuneful’ or
dance-like songs; in the first half of the century, Henry Lawes was the most
successful exponent of the declamatory style, which he based on the rhythm of
English speech without being constricted by the theories of syllabic quantity
underlying the French musique mesurée. From the mid-century, song collections
published by Playford were very popular; these contained ayres, glees (short
tuneful partsongs, mainly homophonic) and catches (canons, mainly in three
parts, often featuring obscene double entendre). Towards the end of the century,
English song was dominated by Purcell (and to a lesser extent Blow). Purcell
grafted the Italian style on to the native tradition; he raised the declamatory
style to new heights and made it the vehicle for intense expressiveness. For
some of his large-scale songs, such as the Evening Hymn and O solitude my sweetest
choice, he used the device of a ground bass, but from the late 1680s he came to
prefer large-scale forms, such as the da capo aria, which depended on tonality.
The influence of major–minor tonality may be seen towards the end of the
century also in the smaller ‘tuneful’ ayres of other composers, now constructed
from regular balanced strains with cadences on the tonic and dominant.
For further details see Air, §2; Air de cour; Aria; Balletto; Brunette; Camerata; Cantata,
§I; Canzonetta; Catch; Consort song; Glee; Lied, §II; Madrigal; Monody; Noël; Serenata;
and Villanella .
 8. 1730–1815.
 Geoffrey Chew
The 18th century is often represented as a low-point in the history of
European song; and it is true that the high degree of unity between text and
music achieved earlier by Dowland and Purcell, or later by Schubert and Wolf, is
found in few songs of the period. Moreover, as far as is known, songwriting in
Italy, Spain, the Low Countries and France was very largely diverted into
theatrical and church music. Many songs have a transparent simplicity, even
naivety, in several of the national traditions.

This simplicity can often, however, be ascribed to the increasing importance

attached by composers and their public to sincerity, lack of affectation,
accessibility and, sometimes, sentimentality. The search for these qualities led
musicians in various directions. First, folksongs were now for the first time
collected and valued as a survival of the past, possessing a unique artistic force
related to their simplicity and capable of serving as models for art song (see the
arguments advanced by Johann Abraham Peter Schulz in Lieder im Volkston, ii, 1785).
The folk repertories of Europe and elsewhere served to open up new musical
horizons. A seemingly opposite movement, paradoxically, sprang out of similar
roots: many simple songs of the period, placed like those in earlier periods in
the service of didacticism and propaganda, were made available to a public
larger and more diverse than ever before, and in the process they helped to
suppress some genuine folk repertories. Hymnody, for example, enjoyed an
enormous flowering, especially in the Protestant churches, which, beginning
from the German Moravians, began to export hymnody to non-European
indigenous populations which had not previously cultivated European song.
Thirdly, in art song – as in the songs of Gluck – a distinct reaction can often be
seen against what was thought over-elaborate, especially in operatic song.
During the 18th century art song came to have its predominant modern
meaning of solo song with an independent keyboard accompaniment. In
England, Playford had mentioned the possibility of harpsichord accompaniment
as early as the middle of the 17th century; throughout this period the guitar,
formerly an alternative to the lute, was increasingly, though as yet never
completely, superseded by a keyboard instrument. Even when a keyboard
instrument was used, however, songs were generally notated simply as a
melody and bass; fully realized right-hand parts for keyboard, though still not
always independent of the vocal line, began to appear in the second half of the
century (in France in Plaisir d’amour by J.-P.-G. Martini, 1784; in England in
Haydn’s 14 canzonets in the 1790s).
During the 18th century the old cantional hymn tradition diminished in
importance in Germany, and, in the ‘songless period’ of that language area at
the beginning of the century, secular song had been channelled almost entirely
into operatic arias. New traditions appeared, however, and since the splendid
promise of English 17th-century song remained unfulfilled, Germany came to
enjoy primacy in the composition of art song by the 19th century. German
secular song began afresh in the 1730s with such collections as
Rathgeber’s Tafel-Confect (from 1733), in which the quodlibet achieved renewed
importance, and Sperontes’s Singende Muse an der Pleisse (1736). This repertory of
secular song increased notably after the mid-century, centring particularly on
the Berlin lied schools, and continued without a break into the lied tradition of
the 19th century. Slightly earlier, in Catholic Austria, Germany, Bohemia,
Moravia and Poland, a widespread tradition of church songs had been
inaugurated, including such categories as the pastorella, which continued to be
composed by local organists and schoolmasters into the 19th century.
Some of these songs, both sacred and secular, are cantatas, but most are
strophic songsgoverned by tonality and constructed from balanced
strains. Songs in the style of this period, based on dances, even penetrated into
the Ashkenazi synagogues of eastern Europe and, before folksong came to
occupy collectors at the end of the century, into Russia (G.N. Teplov: Mezhdu
delom bezdel′e, published during the 1750s).
A deliberately simple style was adopted by some German composers
in songs from the Singspiel repertory and in so-called ‘folklike songs’
(volkstümliche Lieder), student songs and so on; the simple ‘classical’ songs of
Gluck, Zelter and Reichardt may be mentioned. A simple style of vernacular
Czech secular song, related to that of his vernacular sacred music, was
inaugurated also in Bohemia by J.J. Ryba in the early 19th century. Some
simple songs in Germany were intended for religious or quasi-religious groups
(e.g. the Moravians, whose hymnody influenced that of England and America
and who published a hymnbook for the indigenous Greenland population as
early as 1772; and the freemasons, whose collections appeared from the 1740s).
In England, Handel was the most eminent figure in theatrical song; da capo
arias predominate in his operas, although they are not universal, and their
proportion is smaller in his oratorios. A simple popular style, derived from that
of the collections of Playford and D’Urfey, appears in The Beggar’s Opera (1728)
as in the broadside ballads of the period. Elegance rather than depth of passion
generally came to colour the hundreds of songs, some still well known, that
were sung at the pleasure gardens in London (e.g. Marylebone and Vauxhall)
and elsewhere. These songs were mainly strophic; later in the century many
were composed in rondo form. Among them Scottish and Irish ‘folksongs’
enjoyed a wide vogue and were imitated by many composers (including Boyce
and Arne in their theatre music); towards the end of the century various
publishers, notably George Thomson, commissioned arrangements of folksongs
from well-known continental composers, including Haydn and Beethoven. A
related offshoot of the 18th-century British song tradition began to appear
during the 1770s in New England.
Generally speaking, the 18th-century secular British song repertory, unlike that
of Germany, did not lead directly to a repertory of serious Romantic song; its
inheritance is to be found much more in popular 19th-century drawing-room
ballads. Similarly, the widespread tradition of hymns and sacred songs that
flowed from the 18th-century evangelical revival in England remained without
 serious artistic pretensions in the 19th century. Both these repertories were
widely known, however, and must have exercised a strong influence on the
musical sensibility of the population in general.

French 18th-century song outside opera is represented not only by the cantata
and cantatille but also by the new category of the romance, which may have
originated from the brunette. Romances were another category seeking freedom
from affectation and are characterized by a certain degree of conscious
archaism. They flourished particularly towards the end of the 18th century and
declined after about 1815; some, like the famous Un pauvre petit savoyard, which
recurs at various points in Cherubini’s Les deux journées (1800), appear in operas.
Noske (1954) distinguished between expressive romances, where the vocal line is
closely related to the text and where the keyboard part may be relatively
important, and ‘abstract’ romances, where the melody is to some degree
independent of the text, and the keyboard part is simple and plays a
subordinate role. The influence of French song extended in the late 18th
century to Poland and Russia.
For further details see Ballad, §I, 7; Lied, §III; Motet, §IV; Opera, §IV; Pastoral,
§5; Pastorella; Quodlibet; Romance, §2; Singspiel; Tonadilla; Villancico, §2 ; and Zarzuela,
§1 .

9. 1815–1910.
 Geoffrey Chew
A far-reaching division occurred in the early 19th-century song repertory
between a very large ‘popular’ category (i.e. including recreational song for a
mass middle-class amateur market, song for edifying the lower and poorer
classes, as well as folksong) and a much smaller ‘serious’ category (i.e.
of songs written for connoisseurs and regarded as avoiding the vulgarity of the
mass market). The two categories overlap in all European countries (the same
composers contributing to both) but are distinct.
The whole repertory, serious or popular, consists mostly of solo songs with
piano accompaniment, occasionally with the addition of a second voice or
obbligato instruments, including arrangements of theatre songs, as well as
hymns and partsongs. The nature of the piano accompaniment, where there is
one, is often one of the chief features distinguishing the serious and popular
repertories: popular song was generally content with a simple harmonic
accompaniment, whereas serious songsometimes gave to the piano a role of
equivalent importance with the voice, so that it became a representative of the
natural forces surrounding the poet-singer, which themselves were taken to
reflect the turmoil of his feelings. This could be done because the piano, by the
beginning of this period, was capable of producing a resonant, legato, cantabile
tone, but the cantabile tone had not yet been developed to the point where it
interfered with the ability of the piano also to provide a discreet guitar-like
accompaniment where required. About 1815 a solo voice with piano
accompaniment was the medium which for song best combined economy of
means with expressive potential.
Another rough means of distinguishing serious from popular song lies in the
approach of the composer to declamation. The popular repertory very often
adhered to foursquare abstract melodies comparable to those of 18th-
century songs, repeated for all the stanzas of the text, whereas serious
composers – while never jettisoning the strophic song, however – were often
inclined to write through-composed songs, and to reflect the declamation of the
text correctly – even to the precise small-scale details of the text – to a degree
unmatched since the repertory of monody in the early 17th century. But this
did not always lead, as then, to austerity and starkness of setting (though this
can be seen, for example, in some of the songs of Dargomïzhsky and
Musorgsky): ideas like those of Wagner were influential in Germany and
elsewhere, and the accompaniment was often seen as a means of reinforcing
the emotional force of the text (see Wagner’s Oper und Drama, 1851). These
distinctions are far from watertight, however; and a type of ‘modified
strophic’ song – i.e. strophic song, but with musical changes made in successive
stanzas for the sake of the text – representing a middle course between the
strophic and the through-composed song, is often to be found in both the
popular and the serious repertories.
Serious 19th-century song in all Europe took its point of departure primarily
from Schubert; though he was not personally responsible for all the novel
developments in serious song, he first showed their potential. Although the
relatively small song output of Beethoven was crowned in the song cycle An die
ferne Geliebte (1816), the Viennese Classical composers did not influence the
course of 19th-century solo song as they did 19th-century instrumental music;
Schubert’s models were lesser composers such as Zelter and Zumsteeg.
His songs are very diverse, including simple and modified strophic settings of
great variety and through-composed songs, and reflect the adoption of operatic
elements (for example, sections of recitative, as also in Zumsteeg), as well as
the tunefulness of the 18th-century lied tradition.
Some later lied composers extended the rhapsodic element in Schubert’s songs,
notably Schumann, as in the piano epilogues to the
cycles Dichterliebe and Frauenliebe und -leben. Others, in particular Mendelssohn
and Brahms, were concerned to perfect the musical shape of their songs, and
Mendelssohn demonstrated the same concern even without texts in his Lieder
ohne Worte; despite the abstract nature of much 18th-century song, this concern
is scarcely a sign of conservatism. Attention to declamation reached its height
in Germany towards the end of the century in the songs of Wolf, which reflect
Wagner’s word-setting theory (see Kravitt, 1962); at this time the piano was no
longer the only obvious choice for the accompanimental medium, and
orchestral lieder, anticipated by Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder, gained a new
importance: examples include the lieder of Mahler and arrangements of some
of Wolf’s songs. Throughout the century, songs from German (as from Italian
and French) opera enjoyed widespread popularity outside their operatic
contexts.
German influence predominated in this period in the serious art song of
Bohemia (Tomášek, Smetana, Dvořák etc.), the Netherlands and Scandinavia
(Grieg), in some cases coupled with a certain degree of local colour derived
from folk music. In Britain (as also elsewhere), large numbers of drawing-room
ballads, many originally theatrical songs, mainly strophic, with separate
introductions and simple chordal accompaniments, were produced for a
domestic amateur market; in them composers focussed their interest primarily,
as in 18th-century song and in early 19th-century Italian operatic song, on
producing well-turned and singable melodies, and mostly ignored the potential
of the piano accompaniment. Ballads remained popular, even if despised by
some cognoscenti, until well after the beginning of the 20th century. They were
cultivated also in America (notably by Foster) and elsewhere in the English-
speaking world. Some British and American composers created a small serious
repertory of song with English texts, modelled on the German lied, sometimes
also with a certain degree of French influence (Sterndale Bennett, Macfarren,
Parry, Stanford, Parker, MacDowell).

Another widely familiar song repertory is represented by Protestant hymnody,

produced in large quantities in 19th-century Britain and, together with other
partsongs and choral music, made available to an increasing cross-section of
society, both at home and overseas, especially after the introduction of the
tonic sol-fa system of notation. In some places outside Europe this tradition of
choral song became established among the indigenous populations and has not
yet disappeared (e.g. in some Pacific islands, or among the Africans of South
Africa). It is comparable to the song traditions established among black
Americans after emancipation from slavery, for example by the Jubilee Singers.

In France, the romance was channelled from the 1820s into drawing-
room songs(sometimes called ‘chansonettes’) comparable in style and
popularity to the drawing-room ballads of 19th-century England. From the
1830s Schubert’s songs became known in France and contributed to the rise of
the mélodie, a song category in which the symmetrical and strophic structure of
the earlier romances is sometimes jettisoned and the piano accompaniment given
greater attention; it is thus the French counterpart to the lied. Berlioz was the
first major composer to be associated with the mélodie; his most important
contributions to the genre are the six songs of Les nuits d’été (1840–41), which he
later orchestrated. The mélodie was subsequently developed in the songsof Fauré
(e.g. the cycle La bonne chanson, 1892–4), Duparc, Chausson and Debussy (e.g.
the Chansons de Bilitis, 1899).
From the late 18th century the russkaya pesnya (‘Russian song’, understood as
being ‘folklike’) had gained popularity in opera and thence in domestic music-
making in Russia, and collections of folksongs were published in the last
quarter of the 18th century. Together with romances in the French style, and
often with French texts, which were favoured from the 1790s, ‘Russian songs’
continued to be cultivated by amateurs in the 19th century. The romance
persisted in Russia until the 20th century in the work of Rachmaninoff and
Medtner. The importance of 19th-century Russian songderives primarily,
however, from the songs of The Five, especially Musorgsky, who developed the
declamatory style of Dargomïzhsky to express a starkly direct realism;
Musorgsky was the first eastern European composer to achieve a declamatory
style tailored to his language, as Bartók and Janáček were to do later.
Polish song developed initially from Polish theatrical music and French song in
the late 18th century; it was later modified through contact with the German
lied, notably in the song output of Moniuszko.

19th-century Italian secular song was almost entirely operatic, apart from
drawing-room songs, which also drew on the elements of operatic style; Italian
operatic songswere popular in the domestic market as in the theatre. Spanish
secular song during this period is also represented chiefly by the Italian
operatic repertory.

For further details see Ballad, §II; Gassenhauer; Lied, §IV; Mélodie ; and Spiritual, §I .

10. From 1910.

 Geoffrey Chew
Immediately before World War I the established traditions of serious song were
subject to far-reaching experimentation, as in Schoenberg’s Second String
Quartet and Buch der hängenden Gärten, representing settings of Stefan George
(1908), and his Pierrot lunaire (1912), Stravinsky’s settings of Japanese lyrics
(1913) and Ravel’s Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé (1913). Tonality was largely
jettisoned, chamber groups rather than the piano or the full orchestra were
used for accompaniment, vocal lines were of extreme virtuoso difficulty,
and song was turned – as it seemed unprecedentedly – into ‘absolute’ music. At
the same time, in these and other songs, experiments were made with
declamation: Schoenberg and others overturned established notions of
declamation; Bartók established in his songs new conventions of declamation
suggested by folksong; Ives experimented, even before 1910, with spoken text
and with the realistic imitation in music of the patterns of spoken texts.
From the early years of the century German composers after Schoenberg, Berg
and Webern largely abandoned song as such in favour of opera; exceptions
include Hindemith (Das Marienleben, 1922–3, rev. 1936–48) and Richard Strauss,
whose Vier letzte Lieder (1948) represent the final, glorious sunset of the
Romantic lied. French art song was still represented at the beginning of this
period by Fauré; it subsequently continued along broadly traditional tonal lines
in the work of Poulenc and Milhaud, though with satirical elements and a
certain degree of influence from the music hall. Messiaen contributed to the
repertory from the 1930s.
After 1910, German and French influences remained the most important to
affect art song outside Germany and France and were supplemented in most
countries by native traditions – either rediscovered historical repertories or that
of folksong. Composers everywhere drew both on the 19th-century German and
French traditions (the Romantic lied, and the mélodie of Fauré) and those of the
20th century, represented respectively by Schoenberg and Les Six.
New song repertories, largely along traditional lines, developed in several
European countries, such as Finland and Lithuania, in the early 20th century.
Collectors of folksong were active in Great Britain (Cecil Sharp, Vaughan
Williams) and Hungary (Bartók) from at least the first years of the century, and
their activity led not only to the rediscovery of folk repertories but also to the
renewal of the composition of art song. The British song repertory (Vaughan
Williams, Warlock, Frank Bridge, Ireland etc.) was marked by close attention to
declamation in the traditional manner (this partly deriving from French
influence) and to the quality of the poetry set; it reached a peak in the songs of
Britten and Tippett. Similarly, new repertories of Italian, Spanish and Latin-
American song, outside opera, developed in the early years of the century,
inspired in Italy primarily by the rediscovery of Renaissance music (Casella,
Pizzetti etc.) and in Spain and Latin America also to some extent by folk music
(Albéniz, Granados, Falla etc.). In Italy Dallapiccola combined a lyrical style
in song with serialism.

In Poland Szymanowski successfully combined French and other influences. In

Russia, the romance continued to be cultivated (Grechaninov, Rachmaninoff,
Medtner); songsin a style comparable to that of Musorgsky were produced by
Prokofiev. In the early 1930s Russian composers were required by the state to
avoid Modernism, subjectivism and formalism in music, and solo song was
considerably simplified by most composers. Both in Russia and elsewhere in
Europe (e.g. Nazi Germany) unison political songs for massed singing were
cultivated; these have been used also in communist China, in a broadly
European-derived musical style.

Popular song underwent a major change of emphasis through the 20th century.
At the end of the 1890s, ragtime from America gave new impetus to
popular song, which gradually replaced the earlier drawing-room ballad with
forms more orientated towards new types of social dance. This, combined with
the beginning of recorded sound and the rise of popular music theatre, allowed
the rapid and wide dissemination of new trends. After World War I the
widespread commercial popular music characterized by Tin Pan Alley was
established ( see also Songwriter ). While remaining almost exclusively strophic
and tonal, with clear distinctions of verse and chorus, the forms of
the songs gradually became more sophisticated through, for example, the
chromatic inflections in both melody and harmony used by George Gershwin or
through structural developments as in the extended form of Cole Porter’s Begin
the Beguine. As the commercial (and geographical) boundaries of popular music
widened, so did the range of styles that were subsumed within the
popular song, such as developing jazz styles, Latin American features, blues,
country music and later hybrids such as soul ( see Popular music and Pop ).
The growing importance of recordings and the establishment of radio
broadcasting caused popular songs to become increasingly identified not only
with particular performers (as had long been the case through theatre
appearances) but with specific performances. Indeed, the identification of the
performer with the song in a quasi-autobiographical context – the singer as
auteur – has been the most important shift in the context of the
popular song in the 20th century. Ultimately it led through theSinger-
songwriter developments of the 1960s, particularly identified with Bob Dylan, to
the situation at the end of the century where the writing of songs by
performers for themselves had become the standard, and the separation of the
roles of songwriter and performer had become the exception. Thus, the
recording has become the primary form of the pop song (consequently with
instrumental textures also integral to that song’sidentity) rather than a notated
and printed version as at the start of the century.
Serious song in the USA reflects a generally heterogeneous variety of styles
(experimentalism, serial technique, late Romantic style, American popular
music, Stravinsky’s neo-classical style etc.). Many composers have contributed
to this repertory (Ives, Virgil Thomson, David Diamond, Copland, Babbitt,
Barber etc.), though as in other countries song composition has generally not
been in the forefront of composers’ attention.
 For further details see Blues; Jazz; Musical; Popular music, §I ; and Sprechgesang .

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 R. Kramer: Distant Cycles: Schubert and the Conceiving of Song (Chicago, 1994)
 C. Kahnt: ‘Musik und Jugendstil: Untersuchungen zu den Orchesterliedern der
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 E.F. Kravitt: The Lied: Mirror of Late Romanticism (New Haven, CT, 1996)
 S. Youens: Schubert’s Poets and the Making of Lieder (New York, 1996)