Music and Song

Music plays an important role in human civilization. The earliest forms of music being recorded can be traced back to ancient Mesopotamia (c. 1400BC), where its recorded form can be found in cuneiform tablets. The role of recorded music, or written music, not only tells us the notation that is being played, but also what kind of instruments are used to play it, the words or story being sung, and who the music was for.

Music serves an important role in our culture, arts and expression. Therefore, humanity has sought ways to record music, to ensure that people can remember how to play it, and has been doing so since the Mesopotamian era. Since music is such an integral part of human culture, naturally, when the printing press emerged in the 1400s (woodblock printing), the recording and distribution of music was revolutionized. 

Before the advent of audio recording and technological devices such as microphones, music was recorded in written form. There is a strange irony to this: as music is mainly an auditory and oral performance, only recording it in writing causes it to lose its fundamental materiality. The music itself is not quite recorded, rather a shadow of it is preserved. For music with lyrics, like songs and rhymes, the words are preserved in the written form, but its melody and rhythm is lost. For pure music, sound is somehow translated into notation in the form of music sheets. Here, the original form of the music is even less preserved. No translation is perfect, and so much of the original music is lost within the written form that it can’t be recreated perfectly. But despite these gaps, or rather because of these gaps, there is room for interpretation, which perhaps highlights the freedom and flexibility of music.

What is recorded, what people choose to record, be it lyrics, rhythm, chords, can tell us what people considered to be the core of music and song.

Rinaldo and Armida

Rinaldo and Armida is a semi-opera written by John Dennis. As a semi-opera, that means that the book contains both spoken lines, as well as songs to be sung by the characters. The book is split into multiple acts, each act having a written description of the scene, and which characters are involved. Throughout the book of Rinaldo and Armida, the information that is provided about music is largely restricted to the lyrics being sung by the characters. There is no mention of notation, no mention of key signature or time signature involved. As such, we are unable to derive how the songs could have sounded purely from Rinaldo and Armida alone, unless there is an accompanying music score that tells us the notes the singers need to sing in. Nonetheless, I believe that the purpose of the book was composed for non-musicians who could not read sheet music, or perhaps for the actors themselves to make a reference during their rehearsals. As such, including music notation would be irrelevant to the people who are using this book. 

Sheet Music for the Octave of St Agnes

This 15th-century manuscript is an example of liturgical sheet music – sung during public worship over the course of the year. The parchment is much larger than most modern sheet music today, as it would have been shared by a church choir who were literate in Latin, the main language for religious service at the time. Part of the music stave has actually been rubbed out to make space for shorthand text that translates to “Octava Agnetis Virginis”, indicating that the corresponding hymn was to be sung on the octave of – eight days after – the first Feast day of Saint Agnes, patron saint of chastity and purity. The fact that this sheet had hymns for not just her Feast day, but her octave, indicates that the region this particular church was situated in venerated Saint Agnes – if not greatly, then at least more than other regions.

Watts’ Divine Songs

This pocket-sized booklet, known as a toy book, is an illustrated children’s book that was published in the mid-19th century. Only 8 pages long, this edition of “Watts’ Divine Songs” contains a small selection of merely 3 poems – ‘Morning Song’, ‘The Little Busy Bee’ (which you might recognize from the parodied version in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland) and ‘Brotherly Love’. These poems are a part of Isaac Watts’ Divine Songs (1715), which is a larger collection of moral and religious poems for children. These records of songs show the attempts made to teach children about moral and religious values through song. While the lyrics of these rhymes were disseminated through the written form, it seems that the actual tunes and melodies were transmitted orally.