Hay Rakes and Hunting Horns
I often wonder how people from different times and places experienced music. We can find out a great deal about this from records, such as audio and video recordings, sheet music, written reviews, and so on. But this only covers a couple of centuries and cultures (many cultures place little value on physical records of music, prioritising the practice of music). Following my personal interests and research topics during my time as a musicology student, I wanted to create an artist’s impression of secular music from the Middle Ages — a European period during which notating music began to catch on, but almost exclusively in relation to religious vocal music. My goal was to experience a slice of medieval musical life outside the Church, from peasants working their farm to nobles going on a hunting trip.
To create my medievalist artist’s impression, I worked from the information that we do have, such as certain common composition practices and instruments that were available to people of different social classes. Bearing in mind historical faithfulness, I set some constraints based on this info and chose a variety of common medieval events where instrumental music would have sounded. However, I didn’t want to alienate myself from the music by creating a textbook version of medieval music, and so I took some creative liberties here and there. I let my imagination wander within my set constraints to create the historically informed EP called Hay Rakes and Hunting Horns. So pick up your hay rake or hunting horn, and let yourself be transported back into the past…
Listen to Hay Rakes and Hunting Horns while reading:
Music for Every Occasion
One of the goals of Hay Rakes and Hunting Horns was to work on different kinds of medievalist music. To do so, I thought of different types of events: with or without audience, for peasants or for nobles, for indoors or for outdoors. Each situation calls for different instruments and different music.
Musical instruments from the Middle Ages can be divided into one of two main groups: loud or soft. Loud instruments (often referred to using the French word “haut”) were suitable for outdoor use. These loud instruments include shawms (the medieval predecessor to the oboe), percussion, and trumpets amongst others, and were capable of sounding above the hubbub of busy streets. Soft instruments (often referred to using the French word “bas”), on the other hand, were suitable for indoor use. Lots of string instruments and various woodwinds are part of this group. Their timbral nuances would easily be lost in noisy surroundings, but bas instruments come into their own beautifully in more intimate settings. I took this suitability for loud and soft music into account when choosing the instruments for my compositions.
Let me provide some examples of my incorporation of haut and bas into my EP: an ensemble of loud shawms forms the foundation for “Village Potluck” — a composition set on a square during a noisy town festival — whereas a softer harp and recorders form the basis of “Countryside Stroll,” written for an intimate musical get-together between friends. Of course, besides the instruments, many differences can be expected between the music one would hear at a crowded festival and at an intimate musical gathering. One is for entertaining crowds and needs to sound above festivities, the other is for entertaining the musicians themselves and has next to no competition with other sounds. These and other factors influenced how I wrote the music to suit the occasion, and so different song structures and playing techniques make up the different tracks on the EP.
“A Village Fair with Dancing in the Street” by Cornelis Dusart (1688).
“The Music Party“ by David Teniers the Younger (17th century).
[Click images to enlarge.] The paintings shown in this blog post are technically not medieval, as they were created during the Renaissance period. They did inspire me, though, as they capture the moods that I wanted to convey with my compositions. That’s why I’m including them here.
Let’s take a closer look at the two compositions that are both folk music at heart, but contrasting in execution. One is “Barley and Rye,” a fictional folk tune played by some farmers during their break, and the other is “Sounds of Revelry,” a mostly improvisatory performance at a tavern. I wrote “Barley and Rye” as if it were a real folk tune — it’s rather straightforward in terms of structure and technique, in line with traditional folk music. It’s fairly easy to perform this tune without formal training, and it has a common structure where sections recur multiple times (sometimes with variations). Although the farmers play some improvised embellishments, they follow the folk tune closely. “Sounds of Revelry” also contains lots of repetition, but in a more chaotic, improvised structure. The idea behind this is that skilled musicians would take a widely known folk melody and improvise around it, showing off more advanced playing techniques for their own entertainment as much as that of the tavern’s patrons. I tried to bring this idea across by writing recognisable and recurring melodies that sound with lots of variations.
“The Travelers” by Meindert Hobbema (1662).
The final track on the album, “The Hunt,” is set up very differently from my other compositions on this EP. It tells a story of a hunting party: nobles are travelling with a band that is tasked with keeping the travellers’ pace and signalling the hunting party (like upon spotting game), all while providing a pleasant aesthetic backdrop for the nobles. Even though the musicians perform a piece they prepared in advance, it frequently gets interrupted by all sorts of events; they readily change the music to communicate with the hunting party. As a result, the structure of “The Hunt” is much more progressive in nature — it keeps changing and developing, in a way that I personally think led to a rather cinematic result.
The Language of Music
A central theme throughout Hay Rakes and Hunting Horns is improvisation. As the events portrayed on this EP are more about light entertainment than formal concerts or religious worship, there is much room for such frivolity. Sometimes improvisation occurs in the form of variations on the main melodic material (like the majority of “Sounds of Revelry”), other times as complete spontaneous sections like in “Barley and Rye” between 1:17 and 1:52. In the same vein, I included a lot of mimicking between players throughout the EP, which also happens between the lute and recorder in this excerpt from “Barley and Rye.” These call and response techniques are about listening to each other and reacting and improvising — the performers are having a musical conversation, if you will.
Improvisation and mimicking underpin the training practices of musicians in the Middle Ages, as they learnt to play by ear rather than from written texts. And because of this, I wonder whether skilled musicians of the time would have been able to pull of an improvised canon. I wrote a short canon section as part of “Countryside Stroll” (between 1:15 and 1:47), which adds a fun extra challenge for the musicians as it requires extra concentration to perform properly — with a canon it’s easy to lose track of your own melody while listening to your fellow musicians. This would be even more true when a canon is improvised. I enjoy listening to “Countryside Stroll” while imagining medieval musicians improvise this music; besides the canon, the musicians would need to be attuned really well to each other to get the tempo changes right, as well as the melodic variations. All of the compositions on Hay Rakes and Hunting Horns feature improvisation to different extents, and a good musical dialogue between musicians (and often listeners) is key for their successful performance.
Echoes from the Past
For this EP, I chose to make exclusive use of period instruments. This helped me find the sounds I was going for, but it also influenced my composition approach in numerous ways. The construction of instruments determines how they can be played and which sounds they can produce. They all have specific things that they can and cannot do. And so my choices of instruments for each composition were not simply options of slightly different flavours; instead, they shaped my way of writing. Below are some highlights of the ways in which I adapted my music based on my chosen instruments.
“Landscape with Peasants Having a Picnic” by Izaak van Oosten (17th century).
In “Countryside Stroll,” I make use of a medieval harp. With this instrument, it’s possible for a skilled musician to play multiple melodies at the same time. This technique is called “counterpoint,” and was very commonly featured in music from the Middle Ages. Often, different instruments played different melodies at the same time, and I used this technique extensively throughout Hay Rakes and Hunting Horns. But the harp made it possible to write counterpoint sections for just that single instrument.
The right tuning of the lute in “Barley and Rye” makes it easy to play both melody and accompaniment at the same time. The accompaniment in this composition comes in the form of a drone that reinforces the tonic and the dominant — the anchor points of the tune’s key. The layout of the lute and the carefully chosen tuning made it possible to create music that sounds advanced (e.g., between 1:17 and 1:52), but could’ve easily been played by a medieval peasant without formal music training.
“Peasant Inn” by Cornelis Dusart and Adriaen van Ostade (1680).
As the idea behind “Village Potluck” is a noisy outdoor town festival, I had to choose instruments with the capability to sound above that hubbub. This is why I chose shawms (predecessors to the modern oboe) for the track’s foundation. These medieval double-reeded woodwinds have rough, nasal sounds, which can pierce through other noises quite effectively. I adapted the playing techniques to reinforce these qualities. For example, most notes are articulated separately in staccato style rather than smoothed over by slurring them together.
“Sounds of Revelry” is meant to exhibit the dexterity of skilled musicians. One way to do this is by employing an array of playing techniques. The fiddler in this composition switches rapidly between bowed and plucked techniques, for example. The fiddler also frequently plays double stops (i.e., bows two notes at once) — it requires great proficiency to produce clean, in-tune sounds with this technique.
“Resting Hunters” by Dirk Stoop (between 1650 and 1655).
In “The Hunt,” the aim of the music is not only to provide nice music, but also to communicate between the hunting party’s members. Natural horns and derivatives like buisines are very suitable for these purposes as their sound carries far. They also sound awesome and imposing. However, natural horns had no valves; as a consequence, they had a very limited selection of playable notes, and so writing compelling melodies for these instruments requires some extra creativity. A natural horn is tuned to a fundamental tone (to the note C, for example). The other available notes are limited to the natural overtones of this fundamental note. The low notes from this overtone series have lots of distance between them. As the notes get higher, they become closer and closer to each other, but also increasingly difficult to play.
The use of natural horns therefore had a very immediate effect on my writing style for “The Hunt,” as only a few practical notes remained for natural horns, and even fewer when using them alongside other types of instruments. I chose to embrace leaps between far-removed notes for my natural horn melodies, which strengthened the bold and heroic sound of these wonderful instruments.
The natural overtones of a buisine tuned in C. (This diagram has been simplified; I left out the microtonal deviations that our modern tuning system has from natural overtones, meaning that this modern system is essentially out of tune with natural sounds.) The parenthesised notes aren’t practically usable as they are either too difficult to play, or too out of tune with other instruments. Also note how the notes get closer to each other the higher they get on the staff.
Playing with the Past
This historically informed project was a lot of fun to work on. Creating music in this style has been a refreshing way to engage with music that I have been studying for years. Trying to understand music practices from the Middle Ages by playing around with medieval instruments and techniques transported me back several centuries. I hope that listening to this EP also took you back to times long past, and that reading this blog post gave you a glimpse of my creative process behind Hay Rakes and Hunting Horns.
Get your own digital copy of Hay Rakes and Hunting Horns:
