We haven’t encountered the concept of sin yet, but that will now change. The ancients had many worries about music, but these tended to focus on practical matters relating to its impact on character and society. The notion that the gods might have strong opinions on musical entertainment rarely entered into their thinking. The deities, of course, had their own music, embedded in ritual observances, and this needed to be handled with proper decorum, but the objections to secular music so frequently raised by cultural elites focused on the here-and-now, not the hereafter. Zeus really didn’t care what songs you heard in your spare time.
This same practical approach to music, which needed no concept of an afterlife or sin to enforce the most severe strictures on performance styles, can also be found beyond the boundaries of Greco-Roman influence. In fact, it reaches its highest pitch in the extraordinary diatribe Against Music by the Chinese thinker Mozi, who lived around the same time as Socrates and taught a philosophy of austerity and restraint. Against Music is the most hostile manifesto on the subject that has survived from ancient times, and few in the succeeding centuries have even come close to matching its bitter protestations. Where other theoreticians distinguished between permitted and forbidden songs, making fine discriminations among instruments, modes, and styles, Mozi offers a sweeping claim: “Making music is wrong!” He allows for no exceptions, insisting that if rulers want to “promote what is beneficial to the world and eliminate what is harmful, they must prohibit and put a stop to this thing called music!” And yet the concept of impiety or sin never enters into his thinking; nor does he make any references to notions of the sacred or profane. Mozi bases his objection to music entirely on practical concerns. He wants the time and money spent on music directed to more useful projects.1
Music does nothing to feed the hungry or clothe the poor, he points out. Music does not contribute to social order, or reduce the ever-present chaos of day-to-day life. Hence its allure must be resisted by both high and low, the powerful and the weak. If rulers allocate resources to music, they are taking them away from more pressing needs. Farmers who listen to music will neglect the crops. Women who pay attention to music will forget to spin and weave. In a well-ordered society, such dereliction of duty cannot be allowed.
The severity of this position is striking, but its obsession with utilitarian factors is very much in keeping with prevailing concerns about music in ancient times. Confucius held quite different opinions, but also adopted a hardheaded practical outlook, emphasizing music’s central role in education and ritual. He well understood the sensual pleasure involved—a famous story tells of his rapture, lasting three months, spurred by hearing the shao, a kind of pantomime accompanied by music attributed to the legendary Emperor Shun (another powerful authority who gets credit for musical innovation). But the appeal of this music was linked to its beneficial impact on morals and character. Confucian thinking would eventually focus on the practical value of song almost to an absurd degree. Even the most innocuous folk song was twisted and turned, dissected and reinterpreted, so that teachable moments could be extracted from its lyrics. The notion that good, well-ordered songs contributed to a good, well-ordered society was the foundation of Chinese music theory.
For example, the song “In the Bushlands a Creeper Grows” seems to have an obvious meaning.
There was a man so lovely,
Clear brow well rounded.
By chance I came across him,
And he let me have my will.2
In this lyric from the Shijing, two lovers meet in a secluded spot. Or do they? Later commentators showed enormous ingenuity in finding other ways of interpreting this simple heartfelt song. They tell us that the people meeting are not a romantic couple but two worthy men, or else that this kind of thinking about “random encounters” was a consequence of bad governance—taking place because the “lord’s favor did not flow down to the people [who were] exhausted by military uprisings.” Once they discarded the surface meaning of a lyric, there was no limit to how far they could push the moralizing interpretation. In “Guan Ju” (or “The Ospreys Cry”), the words clearly reference the pain of unrequited love:
Shy was his noble lady;
Day and night he sought her.
Sought her and could not get her;
Day and night he grieved.
But this lyric got turned into a political commentary, a moral lesson, even a celebration of virginity and chastity. As a result of such interpretive liberties, the essential qualities we seek in lyric, namely, the expression of heartfelt feeling and personal agency, were shuffled offstage as inconvenient barriers to the edifying potential of sanctioned texts.3
But it’s worth stressing that this expedient, for all its violence to the surface meanings, was still driven by pragmatic considerations. With the rise of Christianity in the Western world, in contrast, romantic lyrics were scrutinized not for their teachable lessons, but in order to eradicate their metaphysical danger to the souls of believers. At this junction, the notion of sin moved to the forefront of musicology, and would stay there for a thousand years and beyond. Every aspect of music was now scrutinized for signs of profanity and impiety—not just the lyrics, but also the instruments, the time and place of performance, the character and sex of the performer, and the emotions stirred by its melodies and rhythms. Priests fulminated against the evils of music from the pulpit, church councils issued rulings on its use, theologians disputed its nature, even the pope intervened on occasion, clarifying and condemning as the situation warranted. All this was handled with the most deadly seriousness: after all, salvation or damnation in the next life hung in the balance.
Perhaps the most surprising aspect of this massive intervention into music criticism was how little impact it had on the practices of believers. During the first one thousand years of Christianity, the same musical abuses were identified again and again, countermeasures were implemented, penalties and penances imposed, yet these sinful songs never seemed to go away. The impieties continued unabated, and each generation held onto the evil songs of the previous one or invented new ones of its own. And when secular music finally emerged from this barrage of invective and censorship, with the rise of the troubadours in the twelfth century, the ‘new’ style of song entering the mainstream of elite culture revealed the same obsession with carnality and lustfulness that the clerics had been battling for the previous millennium.
Christianity was not hostile to all kinds of music. From the start, music was integrated into the daily practices of adherents. In the Epistle to the Ephesians, Paul urges believers to abandon drunkenness and instead turn to “psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord.” The mention of music as an alternative to intoxication suggests that the early Christians well understood the ecstatic properties of song, its ability to induce trance and altered states of consciousness. Paul refers to music again in the Epistle to the Colossians, but here focuses on its use as a pedagogical tool: “Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom through psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts.” But these are two very different views of music—songs as a pathway into euphoric trance and as a source of teachable moments—and often in conflict with one another. The resulting tension has never been adequately resolved by Christianity. Over the course of centuries, its leading authorities have tended to favor the pedagogical paradigm, but rank-and-file believers still seek ecstasy and transcendence—and no religion can entirely dispense with those ingredients, despite the danger and unpredictability they bring in their wake.4
“Christians in the succeeding era often designated liturgical song as their sacrifice, thus distinguishing it from pagan sacrifice,” explains scholar Johannes Quasten. This concept of religious songs as sacrifice may seem straightforward and uncontroversial to us nowadays. Even two thousand years after the rise of Christianity, believers often speak of church services as a sacrificial rite without thinking much about the full implications of that concept. Yet in this subversive history, so attuned to the hidden linkages between music and violence, we need to look at the actual history of sacrificial music, and consider what it tells us about both the past and present. In many ways, this seldom discussed topic in the annals of musicology can even help us grasp the significance of contemporary performances, fully secular in tone and without any religious affiliations, that draw capacity crowds to concert halls and stadiums.5
This is a side of music history many would prefer to ignore. Plutarch, for example, makes the extraordinary claim that music in the Carthaginian sacrifices was not meant to solemnify the ritual or even to enhance the mood, but to drown out the cries and wails as parents offered up their children to Baal Hammon. We find a similar connection in the Hebrew scriptures, where child sacrifices by the ancient Canaanites are harshly condemned. These sacrifices took place at Topheth in Jerusalem, and that name is derived from the Hebrew word toph, or drum—a linkage emphasizing the prominence of drums to mask the sounds of the slaughter. This is the troubling origin of sacrificial music, harkening back to a violent era when the offering of blood and flesh took place without any soothing transubstantiation into bread and wine.
Is this irrelevant to our modern musical practices, a savage anachronism that has no bearing on our more refined, peaceful, and peace-promoting rituals? Social theorist Jacques Attali in his provocative book Noise asserts otherwise. In fact, he argues that throughout history, and even today, “the musician is an integral part of the sacrificial process, a channeler of violence.” Such a claim may seem bizarre at first blush… until you start to consider the actual performance rituals of heavy metal, punk rock, and hip-hop artists—to cite only the most obvious genres—with their stirring of the most potent emotions in closely packed settings, where inhibitions are often further reduced by alcohol or other intoxicants. Attali draws here on the theorizing of critic René Girard, who devoted decades to studying the linkages between ancient sacrificial rites and contemporary cultural institutions. This body of work is almost entirely beyond the purview of music writers, but is essential for grasping how violence and conflict can be sublimated in performance rituals. In other words, the sacrificial rite is alive today, and church services represent only a tiny portion of it. Go to the annual gathering Burning Man in the desert of northwestern Nevada—even the name reveals the linkage to sacrifice—for a full taste of one version of this ongoing tradition. The high point of the event is the fiery death of a large human effigy that takes place on the Sabbath. The more things change, the more they stay the same.6
This is the context in which we should view the rise of Christian ‘sacrificial’ music. The believers wanted to channel the energy of pagan sacrifice, but they also needed to purify it. This point is made explicitly in the Oracula Sibyllina, one of the oldest surviving texts on Christian music. This anonymous work in Greek hexameters was already cited by early church authorities back in the second century AD, and it is clear that they understood both the ritual’s connection with human sacrifice and the need to cleanse it of these associations. “We may not pollute ourselves with burning fat from flesh-consuming pyres or with the horrible smells of the ether,” the author asserts. “But rejoicing in holy speech, with a happy heart, with the rich gift of love and generous hands, with psalms and hymns worthy of our God, we are encouraged to sing your praise, O eternal and unerring one.” Along with this elimination of blood sacrifice, a change in music was absolutely required. Under the new approach, “no kettle drum is heard, no cymbal, no many-holed flute, instruments full of senseless sounds, not the tone of the shepherd’s pipe, which is like the curled snake, nor the trumpet, with its wild clamor.” All these musical traditions were, according to this revered text, tainted by their violent associations.7
As far as church authorities were concerned, only one musical instrument was above reproach, namely, the human voice. Instrumental music was considered dangerous, both for its pagan history and the pernicious influence it supposedly exerted on moral temperament—although it’s ironic how often this contagion was described in language revealing the influence of the pagans themselves, notably Plato. Putting aside their drums and cymbals, converts to the Christian faith were encouraged to sing hymns and psalms, giving praise with their voices. St. Pambo, one of the early desert fathers, even discouraged hand-clapping and foot-tapping because, he insisted, they carried heretical associations—and this controversy continues to the present day in many Christian ministries. You might even divide all current-day congregations into two categories, clappers and non-clappers, and probably would find that this distinction is closely correlated with a host of other attitudes and practices. But in the early centuries of Christian ascendancy, few disputed the superiority of psalms and hymns to all previous forms of ritual music, and the results of this shift would prove far reaching.
Singing became entrenched as the dominant musical practice in Europe, and it remained so until the seventeenth century. This preference for vocal music can be measured in many ways, but perhaps the simplest is to examine the career paths of the leading Western composers in the period before Bach. Consider, for example, the lives and times of Pérotin, Guillaume de Machaut, Guillaume Dufay, Josquin des Prez, Hildegard von Bingen, Johannes Ockeghem, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Thomas Tallis, and most of their leading contemporaries. They either sang in choirs, supervised choirs, or composed their leading works for choirs. In some instances, they also demonstrated skill on musical instruments, but this was a small part of their legacy when compared to their vocal music. After Bach, this not only changed, but reversed entirely—the keyboard and violin, not the voice, began to serve as the calling cards of composers in the Western world. That’s still true today, when an aspiring composer is expected to study the keyboard but hardly need consider joining a choir. Yet the 1,500-year elevation of the human voice to a position of unassailable preeminence in Western music must rank among the most influential cultural interventions in the history of Christianity.
Vocal music, for the early churchgoers, not only uplifted their earthly worship, but even gave them a taste of the Paradise to come. Aurelian of Réôme, author of the oldest surviving work of medieval music theory, Musica Disciplina, explained that it was possible for a select few to hear the singing of angels, and told of a pious priest of Auxerre who was treated to a celestial rendition of the 148th Psalm. Another anecdote describes a hymn that a monk of the monastery of St. Victor learned from a choir of angels during a vigil—he later taught it to clerics in Rome, where it was sung by the entire congregation. “The very world and heaven above us,” he announced, “circulate with a harmonious sound.”8
Yet there’s something peculiar about this shift. Singing (or chanting) the Psalms became central to church life, yet the Psalms themselves celebrate instrumental music, and do so repeatedly. Musical instruments figure prominently in at least sixteen different Psalms, and typically in a tone of exhortation. “Praise the Lord with harp: sing unto him with the psaltery and an instrument of ten strings,” announces Psalm 33. In Psalm 149, we find this admonition: “Let them praise his name in the dance: let them sing praises unto him with the timbrel and harp.” And in Psalm 68 we even encounter that much-feared representative of paganism, the female tambourine player: “The singers went before, the players on instruments followed after; among them were the damsels playing with timbrels.” This connection is so prominent that David, the attributed composer of the Psalms, is frequently depicted with harp in hand. This recurring image, a staple of religious iconography, also serves as a reminder of merited rewards in the afterlife, where the harp figures prominently—not just in cartoons, jokes, and popular culture, but in Christian texts and images going back to the Book of Revelation.9
The elimination of musical instruments, especially percussion, from ritual had the unfortunate effect of removing those very ingredients most closely associated with ecstasy and trance. We now understand how much influence rhythm exerts on brain activity, and the key role drumming plays in this process, whether measured in a clinical study by a scientist or in actual trance-producing settings out in the real world. Perhaps the leaders of early Christianity were instinctively aware of this, and made a deliberate decision to construct a ritual structure conducive to conformity while avoiding the intensely individualistic experiences that come in a trance state. But that’s a hard policy to enforce: songs have a dual power. They can produce both disciplined group cohesion and an uncontrolled throwing off of all discipline and restraint. As social movements evolve from their early charismatic stage to more bureaucratic and codified practices, any extreme kind of ritual ecstasy becomes, at best, an embarrassment, and at worst a threat to the hierarchy. At that juncture, it’s best to put the drums away and sing cohesion-producing anthems instead. Church leaders may have been conscious of this, or perhaps merely grasped it through trial and error.
In any event, the church solved one problem and caused another. Religions require trance as much as they do dogma, perhaps even more. I suspect that the later emergence and institutionalization of intense chanting in medieval Christianity, which would eventually become the core element in monastic life, drew on this need for transcendence, and the discovery that rhythmic chanting was the best way of achieving it within the constraints imposed by the church’s prohibition of drumming, hand-clapping, and other more straightforward paths to neural entrainment. But there’s a catch: a drum can change your state of consciousness in around ten minutes, but with chanting, a much longer period of time is necessary. Ritual and dogma must adjust to this biological necessity.
A surprising confirmation of this necessity took place in the late 1960s, when the iconoclastic music therapist Alfred Tomatis intervened in a crisis at the Abbaye d’En-Calcat in the south of France. Here the monks were afflicted by collective exhaustion and widespread depression. In Tomatis’s words, they “were slumping in their cells like wet dishrags.” Other medical practitioners had failed in their remedies, but Tomatis immediately grasped that the listless monks were suffering from recent restrictions on their chanting imposed by the monastery in the aftermath of the Vatican II reforms. He convinced the head abbot to reinstate the traditional chants. “By November, almost all of them had gone back to their normal activities,” Tomatis would later boast, “that is their prayer, their few hours of sleep, and the legendary Benedictine work schedule.” When allowed to chant, the monks could get by on just four hours of sleep and still have ample energy for hours of chanting as well as all the chores of monastic life. Without the chant, no amount of sleep could compensate for the disruption in their psychic energy.10
The life of a medieval monk was steeped in music. The rise of the monasteries in Western Europe marked a reaction against the worldly entanglements of the church and offered a simpler mode of devotion focused on prayer, manual work, and discipline. As the practices of these groups became more codified, the late-night vigils and daily interludes of prayer were replaced with the prescribed chanting of the Psalms. St. Benedict (480–547) established the Rule, the most influential guide to monastic life in the history of Christianity, and one that still inspires followers more than 1,500 years later. The prominence this work gives to the performance of the Psalms can perhaps best be measured by comparing the eight chapters Benedict devotes to faults and punishments with the twelve chapters on the Divine Office. Here Benedict specifies in detail how Psalms should be chanted over the course of the hours and days and seasons of monastic life. With vehement insistence, he tells his followers that they must “sing the psalms that mind and voice may be in harmony,” remembering always that they are “in the presence of God and his angels.”11
But one could easily be misled by this celebration of vocal music. The same religious authorities who fostered singing when it was under their control also worked zealously to eliminate all its other manifestations. No force in the history of the Western world has ever matched the early Christians in their determination to police, prohibit, and punish singing among the populace. The intrusive music criticism of the clerics, which reached even into homes and bedchambers to enforce its dictates, prevailed with remarkable consistency for a period of almost one thousand years. At first glance, the priests’ success in this project seems stunning, at least when we consider that virtually no secular songs in the vernacular European languages have survived from the long centuries preceding the rise of the troubadours. Yet we know these songs existed. There were probably tens of thousands of them, but almost all were excluded from the texts preserved for posterity. Occasionally a few stray lines appear, furtively copied in a religious document, perhaps by chance, or maybe in perverse defiance by a rebellious scribe. But these were rare exceptions.
How can we be certain these songs flourished? Our best evidence is the frequency and intensity with which they were condemned. Hundreds of attacks on these songs have survived, yet scholars have paid surprisingly little attention to these intriguing documents from the history of music criticism. “To my knowledge, no single study has been devoted to these many condemnations,” remarks medievalist John Haines, yet he also notes their relevance to modern discussions about the role of music in society. When Haines first began studying the subject, it brought up vivid memories of his upbringing among fundamentalist Christians, and in particular a fierce denunciation of rock ’n’ roll he had heard from a visiting preacher, who “told harrowing tales of Alice Cooper consorting with demons, of Linda Ronstadt seducing men of God and of John Lennon claiming he was bigger than Jesus Christ.” Thirty years later, immersed in his studies of a forgotten branch of medieval life, Haines was surprised how little had changed in the tone of the attacks on popular music. “All the themes of his sermon, implicit and explicit were there: middle-aged apprehension of youthful energy; adolescent desire for rhythm and beauty; the devil and his drums; voluptuous women and effeminate men dancing to Satan’s beat and singing diabolical songs; and the power of song to seduce and damn to hell.”12
Yet I’m not sure which is more surprising: the eerie echoing of medieval polemics in modern society, or the almost complete lack of interest by researchers in this strange chapter in the history of song. The amount of scholarship devoted to church music in the medieval period would fill a library, but the music the church didn’t want you to hear stirs up very little curiosity. The conventional history, as Haines accurately summarizes it, presents the evolution of this music as “a progression of great or greater men whose innovative achievements move the reader towards the perfection of late medieval polyphony.” The foundation of this process is the Gregorian chant, named after the most powerful man in Christendom during the late sixth century, Pope Gregory the Great, who is celebrated in almost all of our source documents as a towering musical innovator—not just a reformer of ritual, but the preeminent composer of his day. We should perhaps be suspicious that temporal power again coincides so perfectly with attributions of artistic vision. By now we have seen this same overlap many times—in the assignment of musical innovations to King David, King Solomon, Emperor Shun, Confucius, and others. Skepticism is the only proper response when those who hold the reins of power turn into music superstars in the surviving accounts, but we ought to be even more concerned over what such texts omit. Imagine what the history of modern song would look like if we eliminated from consideration the music denounced by religious (and other) authorities?13
In Christian Europe, these denunciations were frequently directed at songs performed on religious feasts or in holy places. “Do not allow women’s song and ring-dances and playful games and songs in the church and churchyard,” declared Pope Eutychius in the third century. St. Augustine, in the early fifth century, complained about blasphemous performances at the resting place of St. Cyprian: “All night long in that place abominations have been sung and danced to with songs.” A century later, Caesarius of Arles was still lamenting people “who come to the feasts of saints only to get drunk, dance, sing songs with lewd words, lead ring-dances and twirl like the devil.” These and other complaints by clerics might seem to suggest that the populace harbored a taste for blasphemy and waited for religious holidays to vent their diabolical urges. Perhaps that was true, and medieval equivalents of Ozzy Osbourne and Alice Cooper showed up in the churchyard to wreak havoc. But I believe we get closer to the reality of these musical performances if we simply consider them as typical of the festive life of the people. Their vernacular songs came to the forefront during holy days for the simple reason that these were the times set aside for celebration and revelry.14
Who sang these sinful secular songs? Again and again, religious authorities call attention to the pernicious role of women in spreading musical contamination through Christian society. When church leaders gathered at Auxerre in the late sixth century to consider how to extirpate the superstitions and pagan practices of Teutonic and Gallic converts, they issued a prohibition on puellarum cantica, or “girls’ songs,” in church. None of these songs have survived, so we can’t say with any certainty what naughty subjects the girls might have addressed in their music. But around this same time, Bishop Caesarius complained about the many women “who know by heart and recite out loud the Devil’s songs, erotic and obscene.” In the middle of the next century, the Council of Chalons condemned “obscene and shameful songs… with choruses of women.” Further details were provided at the Council of Rome in 853, where women were accused of using verba turpia (dirty words) in their songs, as well as dancing and forming pagan choruses.15
Only on the rarest occasions were these songs specifically attributed to prostitutes. For example, Bishop Haymo in the early ninth century referred to the “whorish wantonness” of the “songs of prostitutes.” Lawgivers sometimes joined in this crusade, implementing statutes restricting the singing solicitations of women in the streets at night—prohibitions that remind us that, until very recently, singing has been considered, in almost every part of the world, a valuable skill in the sex trade. But overt solicitations were only the smallest part of the contagion of female vocalizing feared by the medieval mind. No woman was exempt, whether virgin or housewife, from church oversight of her musical choices. Even nuns, we learn, required close supervision, as demonstrated by Charlemagne’s instruction to abbesses in 789 on the dangers of winileodas (songs for a friend)—“On no account let them dare to write winileodas, or send them from the convent.” How friendly were these songs for a friend? We will never know. These forbidden lyrics were not preserved. Yet from the frequently repeated prohibitions and attacks we know that women continued singing licentious songs throughout the first thousand years of Christendom.16
What is striking from all this is how closely Christian authorities maintained the same priorities as their pagan predecessors. Their theoretical observations and metaphysics were completely different, hence the clerics’ obsession with sin and blasphemy, but the real-life applications of their music criticism are almost identical with those favored by the elites of ancient Greece and Rome. The dangers of music, in both instances, were associated with feminine qualities, especially with regard to sensuality and emotional excess. The Christian councils even adopted the ancient condemnation of musical laments, a form of song invariably associated with women. The medieval church leaders could hardly have known that the lament, in its earliest days, was inextricably connected with sexuality, where mourning for the dying god was combined with the explicit imagery of fertility rites, and probably, in many instances, actual fornication. But church authorities hardly needed such information to denounce the lament: the strong emotions these songs aroused in women were sufficient reason to prohibit their use.
Here, too, we encounter an unexpected correlation with musical matters in our contemporary world. It’s worth noting that the Chinese government, in the present day, is trying to eradicate the practice of hiring strippers to perform with musical accompaniment as part of funeral rites. This tradition is especially popular in rural areas—a puzzling and disrespectful custom in the minds of twenty-first-century authorities, but very much aligned with the ancient connection between the music of death and songs of eroticism. Here all three ingredients recur: laments for the departed, music as an enticement to fornication, and repression by the authorities. Once again, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
In both pagan and Christian teachings, men were the unsuspecting victims of the alluring songs of women, who might, for their part, be Sirens, witches, whores, or just a chaste peasant girl singing on a saint’s feast day. No matter what the role or intention of the performer, such music required intervention and, wherever possible, replacement with the sanctioned songs of the entrenched institutions.
Yet even the dominant institutions are more complex than we may realize. A recurring theme of this book is the significance of outsiders and renegades in launching musical innovations that are later adopted—and legitimized—by the leaders of mainstream culture. We shall see in the next chapter how the same women incessantly attacked by the church for their filthy songs about love and sex anticipated the biggest shift in the history of Western music, marked by the rise of the troubadours and the legitimization of secular songs about personal emotions. But even our understanding of music inside the Catholic hierarchy is enhanced by grasping the rebel streak in its leading music innovators. Many of the key aspects of Christian musical life came from controversial reformers. This is just as true with St. Benedict, who placed chant at the center of monastic life in the sixth century, as it is with St. Francis, who composed the first song in vernacular Italian in direct imitation of the sinful troubadours of the thirteenth century. Yet after the Benedictines became established, battles over music still raged within its ranks and innovators were punished. Hucbald, the leading Benedictine music theorist of the late ninth and early tenth centuries, was forced out of the order and had to seek the protection of the bishop. Guido of Arezzo, who joined the Benedictines a few decades later, is lauded today as the inventor of musical notation, but he was also evicted from the monastery because of his disruptive musical practices. In a surviving letter, he bewails “the conspiring of the Philistines” who caused him to be “banished from pleasant domains”—and goes on to complain that “the jealousy of the artisan made him unwilling to teach anyone his secret.”17
What in the world is he talking about? Nowadays it’s hard to imagine anyone getting angry about musical notation, but in the medieval era that simple expedient posed a threat to singing masters and choir leaders. Before the arrival of written music, you needed to go to those power brokers to get taught songs, but with Guido’s notation you could learn the melodies on your own. Guido of Arezzo is, for us, an esteemed innovator, but in his day he was a nuisance and a threat.
The same is true of Benedict himself, now a revered saint but in his own time a radical who incurred the wrath of powerful adversaries inside the church. We are told that Benedict survived two attempts at poisoning by angry clerics and faced many obstacles and persecutions because of his obstinate attempts to reform religious life. Benedict is now considered one of the great spiritual visionaries in Western history, but no one thought the details of his life worth preserving until several decades after his death. Can you guess who finally decided to research and preserve Benedict’s life story? Pope Gregory, nowadays honored as the father of Christian chanting, is the source of almost everything we know about St. Benedict. Gregory based his account on discussions with four of Benedict’s disciples, and left us a detailed narrative relating the great deeds and miracles of the reformer who, in his own day, left Rome in disgust at the decadence he saw there.
We can look at this process as a straightforward case of Pope Gregory expressing belated approval of St. Benedict’s reforms, but it’s just as true, and perhaps even more revealing, that Gregory legitimized his own activities, musical and otherwise, by linking himself with this once controversial predecessor. Roughly half a century elapsed between the death of Benedict in the year 543 and the papacy of Gregory in 590—approximately the same length of time between Bob Dylan shaking up the establishment with his protest songs and his later acceptance of a Nobel Prize. That’s a typical duration for this process of musical mainstreaming, whether we are talking about rockers or chanters. The rebellion is institutionalized, but it’s a messy process that happens slowly, confronting many obstacles along the way. History books retain the official account, downplaying details of the earlier friction, and the most revealing evidence is often destroyed.
As such examples show, many of the most transgressive musical movements of the medieval era sprang from the heart of the Catholic faith, often to the dismay of church leaders. Among these, none is more intriguing and deserving of attention than the music of the renegade clerics known as the Goliards. If Christian society during this period could be said to have a counterculture, the Goliards operated at the heart of it, and though few of them achieved positions of rank and influence, they played a decisive role in secularizing European music. Many of the Goliards had abandoned their religious orders for a less disciplined life, surviving on the fringes of society. They often traveled from town to town, and for that reason were sometimes referred to as vagantes, or “wandering students.” They were most noticeable in university towns, where they lingered either to study, to teach, or merely to enjoy the bustling activity of such settings. In an age when literacy was rare and erudition even rarer, the Goliards stood out wherever they traveled due to their learning, although their worldly wealth was modest. They made their way in society by relying on their wits, their education, and—most important for our history—their skills as performers or entertainers.
Even though religious vows represented a lifelong commitment during the Middle Ages—Pope Innocent III claimed that even he had no authority to rescind this holy obligation—clerics had long sought ways of escaping from their orders, some literally climbing over the wall, others merely walking out the door. As far back as the early fifth century, St. John Cassian had noted that monks, like slaves, might try to sneak away under cover of darkness, and St. Benedict in his Rule was forced to make provisions for monks who left the community and wished to return. The label “Goliard” would not emerge until the twelfth century, but we have good reason to believe that these renegade clerics had an impact on European music and entertainment long before their songs were documented in manuscripts.
As with so many other secular songs, we first learn about those of the disobedient clerics from attacks made against them. The Council at Auxerre, in the sixth century, prohibited priests from singing and dancing at feasts—clearly an extension of the concerns mentioned above over the pagan overtones of these celebrations. But the specific reference to members of religious orders tells us that even at the dawn of the Middle Ages, priests and monks had aspirations to entertain. Complaints and prohibitions about the secular leanings of wandering clerics and those who aspired to a religious life date back even further. As early as 370, the Roman emperors Valens and Valentinian ordered the arrest of “devotees of idleness” who, abandoning their civic responsibilities, “under the pretext of religion have joined with bands of hermit monks.” In 451, the Council of Chalcedon issued harsh restrictions on the movements of clerics—prohibiting them from changing dioceses, serving in multiple churches, or officiating in new locations without the permission of their bishop. A host of later councils and authorities imposed similar rules, with increasing reference to the unseemly behavior and performances of these feral monks and priests. For example, an Irish canon from the seventh century denounces clerics who “jested with foul words” and “sang at banquets, not building the faith but gratifying the ears.”18
The Goliards’ repertoire included something to upset almost everyone: satires, drinking songs, parodies of liturgy and religious music, bawdy lyrics, criticisms of powerful people (including the pope), love songs, gambling songs, and other idle entertainments. For example, this lyric from the Carmina Burana, the most famous collection of Goliard texts, describes a long visit to a bordello:
For three months, I suppose, I lingered there with her,
and as long as my purse was full I lived as a man of
distinction.
But now on leaving Venus, I have been relieved of
money and clothing,
and so I am a pauper.
But the author takes a moralizing stance at the end of his story: “Young men, let this story which you hear deter you.”19 We find such disavowals again and again in these lyrics, but they possess about as much conviction as a tobacco company’s warning label on a pack of cigarettes—what the Goliard advises against he also tries to sell. As, for example, in this song in praise of Decius, the god of dice, which both warns against deceit and exalts in its benefits:
The gambler’s god
Is simply fraud;
The pang of losses
One counts a joke
When double-crosses
Win him a cloak.20
In another lyric the charge of homosexuality is raised, but quickly rebutted: “Why does my mistress hold me in suspicion?… I am content with natural love and have learned to take the active, not the passive role.”21 But not every Goliard sin comes with a disclaimer or denial. “No finer song in praise of drinking has ever been written,” the scholar George Whicher declared in praise of the Archpoet’s Estuans intrinsecus, sometimes called “The Confession of Golias”:
My intention is to die
In the tavern drinking;
Wine must be at hand, for I
Want it when I’m sinking.22
The noble sentiments of courtly love, which would soon infiltrate poetry and song throughout Europe, are occasionally found in the Goliards’ lyrics, some of which predate the earliest troubadour works. But these coexist alongside coarser descriptions that have not lost their ability to shock. Grates ago Veneri, attributed to Peter of Blois, starts out describing a romantic encounter; but soon it turns into a disturbing description of a sexual assault:
With overboldness I use force…
She coils herself and entwines her knees to prevent the
door of her maidenhead from being unbarred…
I pin her arms, I implant hard kisses. In this way
Venus’ palace is unbarred.23
Here the original text is in Latin, and this would have limited the audience for such lyrics. Yet we can’t help but conclude that similarly offensive works must have circulated in the vernacular languages of Europe—part of that vast body of secular lyrics never preserved for posterity.
Some scholars believe that the word Goliard is drawn, in part, from the name of the medieval theologian Pierre Abélard (1079–1142), whose calamitous personal story serves as a fitting case study to close this chapter. Abélard would be esteemed today for his contributions to scholastic philosophy, if he wasn’t more famous for his scandalous affair with Héloïse d’Argenteuil. Their renown as lovers was all the more remarkable when one considers how seldom the doings of private individuals became widespread news in those days. Abélard was a brilliant young man from a noble Breton family. He studied at the cathedral school of Notre-Dame de Paris and established himself as an eminent teacher while still in his early twenties. His mistress, Héloïse, was a formidable scholar in her own right—her knowledge of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew and skill in writing would have been rare in any individual of the time, but especially for a woman from outside the nobility. Abélard was her instructor before becoming her lover.
“With our lessons as pretext, we abandoned ourselves entirely to love,” Abélard later wrote in his account of their affair. “In short our desires left no stage of love-making untried, and if love could devise something new, we welcomed it.” Héloïse became pregnant and gave birth to a son. The couple were married secretly, but her uncle still bore a grievance for his niece’s dishonor and sought revenge, his anger aggravated by Abélard’s unwillingness to admit publicly that Héloïse was his wife. A servant was bribed to allow assailants entry to Abélard’s sleeping quarters, and there they “took cruel vengeance on me of such appalling barbarity as to shock the whole world; they cut off the parts of my body whereby I had committed the wrong of which they complained.” The denouement finds Héloïse taking vows as a nun and eventually rising to the rank of abbess, while Abélard retreats to the life of a monk and occasionally a hermit. He continued to teach and write, but faced repeated charges of heresy that followed him until his death. This is not the ending Hollywood would have chosen for a love story, but one suitable for the purposes of those upholding public order and morality.24
Yet the student of music history will be especially intrigued by a revealing admission in Abélard’s account of the affair. “Now the more I was taken up with these pleasures,” he relates in regard to his passion for Héloïse, “the less time I could give to philosophy… and when inspiration did come to me, it was for writing love-songs, not the secrets of philosophy.” Given the paucity of surviving secular songs from this time and place, the revelation is worthy of note, but even more fascinating is the philosopher’s next comment. “A lot of these songs, as you know, are still popular and sung in many places, particularly by those who enjoyed the kind of life I led.” Lest anyone ascribe the fame of these songs to Abélard’s vanity, Héloïse validates his claim in a surviving letter of her own. She writes to her former lover:
You left many love-songs and verses which won wide popularity for the charm of their words and tunes and kept your name continually on everyone’s lips. The beauty of the airs ensured that even the unlettered did not forget you.… And as most of these songs told of our love, they soon made me widely known and roused the envy of many women against me.25
The fact that Abélard’s famous (in their day) songs have not survived, at least not with any clear attribution to him, is extraordinary, especially when we consider that this scholar’s preserved texts amount to around one million words and could fill a library shelf. Was there no room in all these manuscripts for a few love lyrics—especially songs that were so popular that today we would describe them as hits? But we learn an important lesson from this fact: namely, that the real history of music, as it flourished among the “unlettered” (to borrow Héloïse’s term), is often hidden from view, and the perspicacious researcher must often go beyond the sanctioned texts and reconstruct past events—almost like a detective at the scene of a crime—from stray clues and dropped hints. That will become especially evident as we try to unlock the origins of the great revolution in Western song unleashed during Abélard’s own lifetime, by the troubadours in the south of France.26