¿Quién pagaba por oír una historia cantada?

We ask ourselves

• If a story is sung all the way through, how do you know who is speaking?
• What exactly does the person who "accompanies" play?
• Why do some pages of old music have numbers written under the notes?
• Who paid forty musicians for a single evening?
• Can you play something well when nobody has written down what you should play?
• If two people read the same page and it comes out different, is one of them wrong?

Don't answer yet. We come back to these at the end.

The fragment

Before any recording, the class builds the accompaniment. Four low notes and nothing else: A, G, F, E. One note every four beats, very slowly, round and round.

First everyone plays it in unison, two full turns. Bass only. It sounds empty, and it is supposed to sound empty.

Then three or four people on guitar or keyboard put chords on top: A minor, G, F, E. The bass has not moved a single note, and already it sounds like a song.

Now the trick. Write a 6 under the F. That six means: over this note, play a D minor chord with the F at the bottom. Write another 6 under the G, and there you play E minor with the G at the bottom.

Same four low notes. Two new digits. A different accompaniment. And nobody wrote the right hand: whoever is playing decides that.

Claudio Monteverdi, dominio público, vía Wikimedia Commons

Now play the Toccata from L'Orfeo, all of it, with nobody talking over it. It is the first thing the room heard on that night in 1607, and it does exactly what you have just done: a bass that hardly moves, with all the motion above it.

What changed

For the whole previous century, serious European music meant several voices singing different lines at once. It sounds good and it is hard to write, but it has a problem with no fix: you cannot make out the words. Four voices saying four things means no story.

Around 1600 a group of Italian musicians found the answer, and it is almost suspiciously simple. One voice on top, delivering the text as clearly as speech. Underneath, two or three instruments holding the harmony so that voice is not left bare.

A voice that speaks while singing, following the rhythm of the sentence instead of the rhythm of the bar, is called recitative. It is what makes a sung story possible: when someone recites you know they are talking, and when they break into real singing you know they are feeling something.

What gets written underneath is the genuinely strange part. The composer does not write the accompaniment: only the bass line, with numbers above it. The numbers say which chords to play. Everything else — how to space them, when to spread them, how much to decorate — is decided by the player, that night. That is basso continuo.

It is a division of labour, not a way of saving ink. The composer fixes the harmony and leaves the texture open. That is why the whole period is known as the age of the continuo, and why two recordings of one piece can sound so different without either being wrong.

Something else is born here too: a large, organised group of instruments. The score of L'Orfeo printed in Venice in 1609 includes the list, and it is the first time a composer put in writing who is supposed to play.

Claudio Monteverdi, edición de Ricciardo Amadino, Venecia 1609, dominio público, vía Wikimedia Commons

Count the chord instruments on that list: two harpsichords, two wooden organs, a double harp, two chitarroni and a regal. Eight instruments whose only job is to put chords over the bass. Thirty-odd players, and eight of them there to hold it up.

That leaves the money question, which is the one that really changes the music. In 1607 opera is a court festivity: the Duke of Mantua pays for it as carnival entertainment and you see it if you are invited. There are no tickets because there is no public.

Thirty years later, in 1637, the Teatro San Cassiano opens in Venice. It is the first opera house to sell tickets. Until then commercial theatres put on spoken comedies only, and opera stayed private, for courts and aristocrats.

You can hear that change. Once the payer is a stranger who bought a seat, tunes get catchier, singers become famous, and whoever writes the music has to compete with the theatre down the canal. Opera stops being a gift and becomes a business.

Hard facts: L'Orfeo, Mantua, 24 February 1607, for the Gonzaga court, score printed in Venice in 1609. Teatro San Cassiano, Venice, 1637, the first ticket-selling opera house. Ospedale della Pietà, Venice: an orphanage for abandoned girls with a music school, where Vivaldi taught violin and singing from 1703 to 1715 and from 1723 to 1740. His concertos were premiered by the residents.

The same device elsewhere

A bass that holds things up while the player chooses the chords is not a museum curiosity. These three do the same job, and they are worth hearing back to back.

• With or Without You, U2 (1987) — four chords, D, A, B minor and G, repeating from first bar to last without a single detour, over a bass figure that never changes either. Its article in the library calls that an ostinato. The band is not reading a score: it is reading four chords.
• La folía — a chord scheme of Iberian origin, old enough that the playwright Gil Vicente mentions it in 1503 as a shepherds' dance. From the late seventeenth century onwards, musicians all over Europe wrote hundreds of sets of variations on it. It is a chord chart that had already been circulating for two hundred years.
• The tanpura in Indian classical music — four strings sounding the same note without stopping, while everything above is improvised. It is the limit case: a bass with no chords at all. Use it to measure precisely what the European continuo added.

None of them is better than the others. All three solve the same problem: put something steady underneath so the thing on top is free to move.

And here at home?

There was basso continuo here, and one of its manuals was printed in Zaragoza.

Gaspar Sanz was born in Calanda (Teruel); his baptism record is dated 4 April 1640. He spent a long stretch in Rome and Naples, close to the world of Venetian opera, and came back with the method learned.

In 1674 he published in Zaragoza, at the press of the Herederos de Diego Dormer, the Instrucción de música sobre la guitarra española. Look at the cover image above and read the small print: it promises "a brief treatise on accompanying with perfection… summed up in twelve rules".

Twelve rules for accompanying, for guitar, harp and organ. That is a continuo manual, written in Spanish and published in Zaragoza, twelve years before Bach was born.

Gaspar Sanz, 1674, Biblioteca Nacional de España, dominio público, vía Wikimedia Commons

Look at the bottom corner of that plate: "Gaspar Sanz Invenit Cesarauguste. Sexta die Decembris anno 1674". Cesaraugusta is Zaragoza. It is dated 6 December 1674.

Seventy kilometres to the south-west, in Daroca, the organist of the collegiate church of Santa María de los Corporales was Pablo Bruna (1611–1679), blind since the age of five or six. He had been playing there since he was sixteen, officially appointed in 1631, and he kept the post until his death on 26 June 1679.

Here the money question gets a different answer from Venice. Daroca was a pilgrimage town, with people passing through all year. The organist did not sell tickets: he was part of what you came to see. Philip IV and Charles II would stop in Daroca to hear him play.

And not everyone wanted the capital. In 1639 the chapter of El Pilar in Zaragoza offered him the organist's post and Bruna turned it down. He stayed in Daroca his whole life.

What about opera sung in Spanish? It arrived late, and for reasons of state. With the Peace of the Pyrenees and the marriage of the infanta María Teresa to Louis XIV, the Spanish crown wanted to match what the French court was doing, and commissioned two fully sung works from Calderón de la Barca and the composer Juan Hidalgo.

They were La púrpura de la rosa (1659) and Celos aun del aire matan, first performed on 5 December 1660 at the Coliseo del Buen Retiro. The second is the oldest surviving opera of the Spanish-speaking world.

The same circle produced the zarzuela. The name is not a genre's: it is a place's, the Palacio de la Zarzuela near Madrid, where these works were staged. Calderón was the first to call a work of his a zarzuela, El golfo de las sirenas, staged in 1657.

The awkward fact is the one worth saying. Venice had been selling opera tickets since 1637; here, twenty years later, sung drama was still a matter of palaces and churches. The technique arrived fast and the paying audience took a century.

Classroom activities

• While the Toccata from L'Orfeo plays: raise a hand every time you hear the lowest note change. We count the hands afterwards. There will be very few, and that is the answer.

• While Corelli's La folía plays: one sharp tap on the desk each time the bass comes back round to the start. We count how many turns go by before someone loses it.

• While the tanpura plays: write down how many different notes you heard underneath. We compare answers and argue about why they don't match.

• Play: we build With or Without You. Half the class on the four bass notes only, everyone else on the chords above. The chart and the tab are in its own article.

• Create: each group writes a four-note bass line and two different figurings for it. Two groups play the same bass with the figurings swapped and the class picks a favourite. There is no right answer, and that is the point.

Key vocabulary

• Chord — acorde: tres o más notas que suenan a la vez apoyadas en una nota del bajo
• Recitative — recitativo: canto que sigue el ritmo del habla, no el del compás
• Basso continuo — bajo continuo: línea de bajo con cifras que indican los acordes de encima
• Figured bass / chord chart — cifrado: nombrar un acorde sin escribir sus notas
• Ostinato — ostinato: figura de bajo que se repite sin cambiar debajo de todo

Resources

The songs in this unit are in the library, each with its own article and chart: With or Without You, La flaca, Levitating.

Where it all starts — Monteverdi's L'Orfeo, trailer of the Teatro Real production.

What basso continuo is, played and explained — the Netherlands Bach Society takes it apart with the instruments in front of you.

The same bass, turn after turn — Corelli's La folía in Geminiani's arrangement, by Voices of Music on original instruments.

The orphanage orchestra — Vivaldi's Spring, by Voices of Music. Music written to be premiered by the residents of the Pietà.

Here, in 1674 — Gaspar Sanz's Canarios, played by Miguel Rincón on baroque guitar.

Here, in Daroca — a tiento by Pablo Bruna, played by Ángel Montero on the organ.

The bass with no chords — a tanpura demonstration from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

• Sanz's title page in high resolution — the National Library scan on Wikimedia Commons.
• The instrument list from L'Orfeo — the plate from the 1609 edition, on Wikimedia Commons.