3 - Trompetta and Concordans Parts in the Early Fifteenth Century

Summary

Trumpet-style vocal writing and the place of trumpets in early Renaissance instrumental music have been well investigated by a number of scholars, notably including Reinhard Strohm. Most discussion has concerned the musical character of parts so labelled. In this essay I will investigate neither the melodic style nor its relation to instrumental techniques, but a particular compositional strategy sometimes associated with trompetta and related terms.

Before considering the term and its use, some background is needed. Many early fifteenth-century mass movements alternate duets and three-part sections. In straightforward alternation, one part (usually the tenor) falls silent during the duets. In an earlier article I discussed a small group of pieces with non-straightforward alternation where the scoring is not merely reduced between sections but changed. In these compositions, usually only two or three voices sing at once, but four are notated and required. With contemporary support, I called this style ‘a versi’, and set out its characteristics and those of five associated manuscript layouts. Editors have often assumed those layouts to be erroneous or confused, but without recognising why they appear so, or indeed that they follow a pattern. I showed, rather, that scribes sometimeswent to very great trouble to create a different distribution on the page from the layout they must have been copying from, with considerable implications for performance practice. I now extend this investigation to pieces with parts labelled trompetta, concordans, or one of a few comparable terms, showing that some (but not all) were later additions to pieces originally composed in a versi style. Beyond inferences about performance invited by striking differences of layout or by melodic style, such added parts attest the updating and recomposition of existing works in a way which at the same time respects, changes and extends the ‘opus’ status of the earlier composition.

Table 3.1 gives a provisional list of a versi compositions thus far identified. A very few of these pieces have one or more short sections scored for all four voices. (Of those listed in Table 3.1, only the Romano pair, the Salinis motet and the Sanctus Papale are affected.) Duets for cantus i and cantus ii alternate with three-part sections for cantus i, tenor and contratenor. Cantus i is therefore the only part that sings throughout.