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Dante's Relation to Music

Author(s): Bruce Pattison
Source: Music & Letters, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Jan., 1936), pp. 47-53
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/728759
Accessed: 18-09-2016 17:35 UTC

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 DANTE S RELATION TO MUSIC
WE are not accustomed to think of Dante as a musical theorist .
Indeed we should be surprised to see him included in a history of
mediaeval musical theory. Dante is to all of us primarily a poet , the
most representative genius the middle ages produced. Yet that very
fact enhances the importance of his relation to music, for actually
he did make a few observations of interest to musical history, if not
to practical song- writers of our own day. It is true he did not write
any treatise entirely devoted to the musical theory or practice of the
middle ages. The remarks that chiefly interest us in this connection
are to be found in his writing on poetry. But because they are the
words of a poet and of such a representative and purely literary man
they are a clue to the relations of poetry and music at that period ; and
the relations of these cousins must always be of prime importance in
discussing either literary form and content or vocal music, which was
for all practical purposes the only music in the middle ages.
It is always necessary to see a writer or composer against the
background of his own period ; and this is especially true of one who
had the kind of universal appeal that Mr. T. S. Eliot has justly
attributed to Dante ; a kind of universality Mr. Eliot has shown to be
peculiarly characteristic of his age and impossible for such a different
writer as Shakespeare, whose conditions imposed on him a more
limited , though by no means an inferior , kind of appeal. For Dante’s
language and thought alike are the highest expression of a common
civilisation that united the whole of western Christendom as it has
never been united since. His relation to music, too, is that of
mediseval literature as a whole. His personal relation was not parti -
cularly close, but as a creature of his time he indicates the bonds
holding the two arts together.
Students of any literature before the seventeenth century must
constantly be aware of the comparative smallness of the reading public
and must avoid judging literary conditions from printed books only.
Because the illiterate had no books it does not follow that they had
no literature. They inherited a vast common heritage of legend and
romance. Much of this traditional culture was in verse, and was
therefore always associated with music. The minstrel was a common
figure throughout the middle ages, and the balladmonger of

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 48 MUSIC AND LETTERS
Elizabethan times, who hawked his wares round with a fiddle or viol,
was his legitimate though disreputable descendant Older than the .
minstrel even there was also the oral poetry that came from the dance .
Many mediaeval writers describe the caroles and rondes in which the
chorus sang an unvarying refrain while soloists gradually improvised
additions. Nor was ail this popular poetry without influence on the
more learned verse of the time. It is well known that refrains in the
troubadour lyrics often come from these primitive communal dance
improvisations. The fact is that even the most aristocratic lyric was
bound to be influenced by popular verse, not only because social
conditions drew all classes together , but also because the aristocratic
lyric, like the popular, was sung rather than spoken. Indeed this is
a fact to be remembered in studying the lyric right up the seventeenth
century, for even then the poems of Suckling and Lovelace commonly
bear at their heads ‘ Set by Mr. Henry Lawes ’ or some such
direction , and we know that songs were heard by more people than
read them . The troubadours in the period we are concerned with
specifically intended to give equal place to the verse of their lyrics
and to the ‘son, ’ as the musical setting was called. This is amusingly
illustrated by the story of the two troubadours who had a contest to
decide which was the better poet. They were shut up in adjacent
rooms and told to compose a lyric each. One of them could find no
inspiration, but just when he was giving the competition up as lost he
heard a lovely song coming from the next room. It was his rival trying
over his attempt. The baffled poet listened and memorised the effort .
When the contest came he managed to secure the first trial and
confounded his rival by singing the air he had heard from the next
room .
We can see, then , that poetry in Dante’s world was inextricably
involved with music, whether it was popular poetry or learned . Dante
himself derived his poetic style to a great extent from the troubadours
and acknowledges particular debt to Arnaud Daniel. He was more-
over well acquainted with music and his own lyrics were set to music,
though not by himself . In part of the Purgatorio he meets a dead
friend Casella, who was a prominent Florentine musician of the time.
Casella sings his setting of one of the lyrics in the Convivio ( ‘ Amor
che nelle mente mi ragiona ’ ) , and we possess an old MS. of one of
Dante’s songs beside which the scribe has commented : ‘ Casella diede
il suono.’ Dante, then , represents an advance on the troubadours in
being more entirely a poet and not a setter of his own verses ; but he
obviously shared their views as to the desirability of setting lyrics to
music. His greater independence of music is due to his great work

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 DANTE'S RELATION TO MUSIC 49
being speech poetry modelled on classical antiquity and not arising
from the conditions of contemporary diffusion of poetry by means of
.
music When he comes to talk of shorter poems in the vulgar tongue,
as he does in his treatise De Vulgari Eloquentia , he fully shares the
contemporary theory and practice about the interdependence of music
and poetry. Poetry to him is nothing else but ‘ a rhetorical com-
position set to music ' ( op. cit., trans. Howell, p. 65). Strictly
speaking he will not admit any kind of poetry that is not intended for
a musical setting. 4 Whatever we write in verse, ' he declares, ‘ is a
.
Canzone ’ ( he., a song) Nevertheless, the term is becoming
restricted by his time, for works of the magnitude of the Divine
Comedy are no longer declaimed to the strumming accompaniment of
the minstrel. The song affinities of poetry persist explicitly in the
—
lyric, and this has two main divisions there is the kind that is sung
and the kind that is danced and sung at the same time, for the dance
6ong we have already mentioned was still actually a dance song at that
time, and in Boccaccio we often catch glimpses of courtly figures
disporting themselves with dancing to the music of their own voices
and sometimes with instruments added . Yet of these two genres,
both essentially musical, Dante has no doubt that the purely musical
has the greater artistic merit. The form technically known as
Canzone is of higher merit than the rest, for Canzone produce by
4

their own power the effect they ought to produce, which Baí late do not,
for they require the assistance of the performers for whom they are
written .' The fact is, according to Dante, that the Canzone is the
highest type of music or poetry because it is 4 pure song.’ We have
evidently to do with the standards of both musical and poetical virtue
that scarcely envisage a separate judgment on the two partners : the
ideal is to have both excellent and both perfectly matched in their
union. For this reason Dante cannot place the Sonnet or the Ballata
on a level with the Canzone, since their music is to him more popular
and less polished . The Sonnet especially requires only a minimum of
art in the composer, for no one doubts that Baí late excel Sonnets in
4

nobility of form ’ (a surprising statement to those who think of the

sonnet in terms of its position in the Petrarchan revival of the
sixteenth century) . On the other hand, the music alone will not
suffice to elevate a work to the highest class ; the text is equally
important. No music alone is ever called a Canzone , but a Sound ,
4

a Tone, or a Note, or Melody.' Hence we must perceive that in the

Canzone we are dealing with a work that is both music and poetry, or
perhaps we should say neither music nor poetry but an amalgam of
both. ‘And therefore a Canzone appears to be nothing else but the
completed action of one writing words set to music.’

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 50 MUSIC AND LETTERS
Since music and poetry were 60 interdependent in Dante’s time ,
we feel bound to enquire which was the senior partner. Did poetry
determine the form or did music ? It has usually been held that
poetry was the senior partner, and there is a general belief that
musical form as a separate and self -conscious thing dates no further
.
back than the seventeenth century It is indeed true that the madrigal
and all musical species up to that time are built on the 6ong form in
which each strain of music corresponds to a line of poetry, and the
fugal method of developing the strains does not conceal the underlying
basis. But the correspondence of musical and poetical form does not
necessarily mean that musical form did not exist. Usually the poet
wrote a metrical scheme and left the musician to copy it ; but not
always. Sometimes the poet had to follow an existing tune, and even
when he had not to do that he still had often to remember the
exigencies of the musical style he was preparing his lines to receive.
Moreover , even during the middle ages music had begun to draw on
the dance for rhythm and form . The literary genres of the middle
ages that arose from the ronde dances of the Romance peoples were
.
musical rather than literary forms The principle of all of them was
originally that a soloist improvised verses in alternation with an
unvarying refrain from the chorus. ‘ Binnorie, 0 Binnorie * is a well -
known British ballad that has obviously had the same origin , since
the second and fourth lines of each stanza are unvaried throughout .
In such pieces it was clearly the shape of the music, the tune the
people sang, that was most important , and the poetry merely fitted
into it .
Dante appears to consider the music as the determinant1 of the
lyric’s form. In his own case he wrote the poems before the music
had been conceived : he did not compose both music and poetry
together as many of his contemporaries did and as Campion was to do
later, and we have no evidence of his writing any poem to an existing
tune. Nevertheless he insists that the form of the poem must follow
the outline of the musical setting that it is expected to receive. It 1

will become plain,’ he says, ‘ how the art of the Canzone depends on
the division of the Musical Setting,’ and ‘ it appears to us that what we
call the Arrangement (of the parts of the stanza) is the most
important section of what belongs to the art (of the Canzone ) : for this
depends on the Musical Setting, the putting together of the lines ,
and the relation of the rhymes.’ ‘ We say then that every stanza is
set for the reception of a certain Ode ( i .e ., Melody).’ This does not
mean, apparently, that the form of the stanza is fixed by an existing
tune to which the words are written , but rather than the structure of

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 DANTE’S RELATION TO MUSIC 51

the stanza must be prepared for a certain musical style in the tune,
every kind of Canzone having its own particular kind of tune. Indeed
the moulding of the stanza to the requirements of musical setting
‘ appears to be done in different ways, for some proceed to one con -
—
tinuous Ode that is without the repetition of any musical phrase
and without any Diéresis, a transition from one ode to another : and
we understand by Diéresis, a transition from one ode to another : this,
—
when speaking to the common people, we call Volta. And this kind
of stanza was used by Amauld Daniel in almost all his Canzoni, and
we have followed him in ours beginning
—
“ Al poco giorno ed al gran cerchio d’ombra. > > »
Dante’s example makes it clear that he refers to the structure we
are familiar with in folk-song and in the songs of the English luienists
— a continuous melody whose cadences and rhythmical plan corre-
-
sponds to the rime scheme of the poetry. It is difficult in this case to
decide whether the music or the poetry first gave rise to the form.
But the next case is that in which a distinct break occurs in the
melody. ‘ But there are some stanzas that admit of a Dié resis, and
there can be no Diéresis (in our sense of the word) unless a repetition
of one ode be made either before the Diéresis, or after or both .’ That
is to say, if a break occurs in the middle and the stanza is set to two
—
complete melodies presumably the first half of stanza being set to a
tune built round one melodic phrase and the second half on one built
—
round a contrasting one then we may have the forms A B,
A A B, A B B, or A A B B. ‘ If the repetition takes place before the
Diéresis, we say that the stanza has Feet ; and it ought to have two,
though sometimes ( but very rarely) we find three. If the repetition
takes place after the Diéresis, then we say the stanza has Verses. If
there is no repetition before the Diéresis, we say that the stanza has
a Fronte ; if there is none after, we say that it has Syrmas or Coda.’
An example will perhaps make this clearer ; and we shall choose one
from Middle English. This lyric repeats the tune in both halves of
the stanza and so the first half , or Fronte, is divided into two Feet,
and the second half , or Syrma ( Coda) into two Verses.

Lenten is come with love to toune, Musical Themes

With blosmen and with briddes roune ,
That al this blisse bringeth.
} Foot A

Dayes-eyes in this dales

Notes suete of nyhtegales ;
Uch foul song 8ingeth. } Foot A

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 52 MUSIC AND LETTERS
The threstelcoc him threteth oo ;
Away is here wynter woo, l B
When woderove springeth . J Verse
This foules singeth ferly fele
Ant wlyteth on huere wynter wele
That al the wode ryngeth. *1) }Verse B

This type of stanza , which has innumerable variants on the lines

already indicated, was very common in mediaeval lyrics, and Dante ’s
remarks make it quite plain that in composing it poets were not
indulging their ear for poetic rhythm but were writing to fit an
accepted kind of musical form. Their dependence on music is even
more obvious in lyrics closer to the dance. In the various kinds of
rondeau so popular throughout the middle ages, and all derived from
primitive Romance dances, the words are repeated for no literary
purpose at all but simply in accordance with musical repetitions based
on dance figures. As an example we may take Chaucer ’s well-known
roundel, Merciles Beaute , which was probably written to music of
de Machaut.

Musical Themes
Your yen two wol slee me sodenly ,
I may the beaute of hem not sustene , } A
So woundeth hit through -out my herte kene . B
And but your word wol helen hastily
My hertes wounde , whyl that hit is grene , } A

Your yen two wol sley slee me sodenly ,

I may the beaute of hem not sustene . } A

Upon my trouthe I sey yow feithfully , \

That ye ben of my lyf and deeth the quene ; J A
For with my deeth the trouthe shal be sene B
Your yen two wol slee me sodenly ,
I may the beaute of hem not sustene } A
So woundeth hit through -out my herte kene. B

In a poem like this the repetitions clearly add no force to the text.
They spring from a conventional musical pattern stylised on a dance
figure.
In criticising poetry so consciously modelled on musical forms it
is useless to employ the concepts applicable to the modem lyric. The
(l) Chambers & Sidgwick , Early English Lyrics, p. 8 .

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 DANTE’S RELATION TO MUSIC 53

form of the poetry Dante discusses has practically no relation to the

content ; it has scarcely even a verbal music of its own , such as we
are accustomed to find in Shelley or Swinburne. Only when these
lyrics of the middle ages are wedded to their music are they complete
and as their creators imagined them. Music was not a background
to the poetic genius of Dante and his successors up to the sixteenth
century ; it was an integral part of it. This must be remembered
especially in discussing the lyrics of the period , but it is relevant to
any discussion of poetry . It is not without interest, for example, in
considering why the form and the rhythm oT the Divine Comedy are
what they are and not like those of Paradise Lost , the product of an
age following Shakespeare’s speech verse and almost contemporary
with the speech lyric of Donne.

BRUCE PATTISON .

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