© 29 October 2004

A DATABASE OF THESE FOUNDATIONS IS IN PREPARATION. BH

AMS 1997

Introducing Sacred Polyphony in Fifteenth-Century Ghent

Barbara Haggh

Perhaps the greatest impediment to our understanding of fifteenth-century polyphony is our lack of perspective on what it represents - in relation to the polyphony that was sung but does not survive, and in relation to the chanted, recited or read texts that constituted formal sacred worship. A remarkable series of registers in the archives of the city of Ghent now provide a means of mapping performances of sacred music in the city throughout the fifteenth century and help to answer a multitude of questions, not only about the introduction and performance of polyphony and its presence in worship in relation to the chant, but also about the process of foundation and the history of the moneys and properties involved.

Like all late-medieval cities, Ghent was led by a city council of thirteen elected aldermen. One of their principal tasks was to register major ordinances and business contracts, particularly those concerning property within the city walls, thereby making the contracts legal and also safeguarding them. Detailed summaries of such contracts were recorded by numerous individual scribes in enormous parchment registers now housed in the Stadsarchief in Ghent (registers van de schepenen van de keure), measuring 56 by 35 and a half centimeters. Similar aldermen's documents from other cities have come to musicologists' attention for the songs or poems added to them (the aldermens’ registers of Namur), but the books from Ghent are of special interest, because they are complete for the fifteenth century (and comprised of a staggering 18,000 folios!), and because they record every single foundation of music that was supported by rents from property within the city walls of Ghent - hundreds upon hundreds of unstudied foundations. Hardly any of these benefited the two abbeys dominating religious life in the city. Instead, the foundations were established at all of the parish churches as well as at beguinages, convents and smaller oratories, and even in chapels outside the city. You may gain some idea of the relative wealth and status of the oratories in Ghent from the first two pages of your handout - the first listing principal oratories and the second showing the amounts of taxes that were levied on them.

Foundations for music were registered with the aldermen because they were contracts to be safeguarded. In a typical foundation, an individual or a group (confraternity or guild), promised to give once or twice yearly a specified hereditary rent to a selected oratory, that is, to its administrators, such as priors, churchmasters or mistresses, the Fabric, the Holy Ghost table, a confraternity, or the leaders of singers known as the ‘cotidianen’. The hereditary rent was a sum yielded at regular intervals of time on property that was leased to individual owners. Such rents could be diverted to a selected oratory. The administrators of the oratory paid priests or singers from these rents to perform the requested services. Thus, a foundation was a reciprocal promise: the founder promised an income to the oratory to support his request, and the oratory promised to execute the wishes of the founder. To ensure the continuity of the foundation to save the founder(s)’s souls, founders also nominated priests and prescribed successors for the priests and themselves, and they often described in detail what should be done if inflation or negligence caused the amounts of the rents to diminish to insufficiency. Any such instructions had legal force once they were registered with the aldermen.

Yet some foundation notices are crossed out in the aldermen's books, because the foundations were discontinued. For example, an obit was founded by a family on the eve of their departure for Santiago de Compostela. It is crossed out in the register with a marginal note that the Augustinians, who had promised to celebrate the obit, had decided to discontinue it because the family had died en route. Implicit here is that the arrangements made for the obit, which was founded by a procurator and not by the family itself, did not suffice.

Did the aldermen register every single local foundation? No they did not, because some foundations in Ghent churches were made with property or by persons outside of Ghent - from even as far away as Cambrai. Such foundations were recorded by the aldermen of the town where the property lay - so rents on Ghent lands going for foundations were registered by the aldermen of Ghent, rents on Dendermonde lands were registered with the aldermen of Dendermonde, and so on. Still, one does not need to search every aldermen's book from the Low Countries to reconstruct Ghent foundations. Every Ghent oratory kept cartularies and rent books with copies of charters recording foundations for that oratory. These charter copies are always cross-referenced to the aldermen's registers of whatever city the land was in, evidence of the priority of the aldermen's registers as historical evidence. Therefore, the registers of the Ghent aldermen do not alone tell the whole story, but when combined with cartularies and rent books recording foundations that were made with non-Ghent properties, they permit as complete a foundation history as is possible for Ghent. Such a foundation history - as I proposed in Acta musicologica 1996 - carries considerable weight, because Ghent was the most populous and largest city north of Paris in the early fifteenth century. Of those cities from which we have documentation from this time, only Venice and Milan covered a greater area, and, surprisingly, Paris was smaller.

Most foundations recorded in the aldermen's registers of Ghent are for obits or Requiem masses, but an unexpectedly large number are for weekly masses, including cycles of votive masses (for the Holy Sacrament, Cross, Angels, Virgin and so on). There are foundations of loven (i.e. antiphon, versicle, and collect), Marian antiphons, votive offices of the Virgin, and of yearly masses on high feast days as well. Rare were foundations for individual chants – such as the singing of a Christmas hymn in the vernacular -- but these often established the most interesting music. Unique is a foundation for two vicars of the cotidiane of St Nicholas, which was established with a rent of eight pounds yearly. Other records are of augmentations of foundations, mostly of the series of masses held daily in the parishes (the mass held in the morning before work), the so-called Prime mass, and the slapersmisse or “sleepers' mass” (presumably held later in the evening). Two entries typical of those in the aldermen's registers are on pages four, five and six of your handout. The entry made on July 18 concerns the augmentation of the foundation of a weekly mass on Wednesdays in the crypt of St John's parish church with the small yearly sum of twenty shillings. The entry made on June 22 is for another weekly Wednesday mass, now in the parish church of St Michael's at the altar of the Annunciation, and an obit, introduced with a yearly rent of 5 pounds, 14 shillings and 8 deniers. Both entries show how founders turned over the administration of their foundations to the oratories along with the rents.

My tabulation of the Ghent foundations revealed an unexpectedly large number of cycles of votive masses, which I had always regarded as exceptional. Most foundations were of two or three votive masses a week, but six cycles of daily votive masses were founded in the fifteenth century. All were expensive, costing between eighteen and sixty pounds yearly. Single Marian votive masses are common, but it is worth mentioning that a Tuesday mass Salve sancta parens was founded to be sung at the high altar of the parish church of St Nicholas in 1390 with a rent of eighteen pounds. Among the earliest polyphonic mass proper settings that we know are several individual settings of the introit Salve sancta parens.

The reasons for founding such votive masses are often clichés of the time, but one family founded a Marian votive mass in penance for one of their black sheep who had deflowered a virgin. The majority of the votive masses fitted the same time slot as the mass of Tournai, that is, during Prime, or just after the high mass (still in the morning).

The vocabulary of the aldermen's registers separates read and sung texts from discant. The difficulties lie in knowing what was done where none of these options is specified and in knowing whether the sung masses included discant. Yet answers surface from comparison of the amounts of rents designated for different categories of masses. Masses specified as being in discant are invariably more expensive, as are masses using schoolmasters and boys or the cotidiane singers.

We can compare two foundations of daily masses. In 1440, Gherem Borluut, a member of a local patrician family, founded a daily mass at the altar of St Monica in the Augustinian convent for ten pounds. By contrast, the daily discant mass founded by Lievin van Leins, a wealthy parishioner, at the altar of St Lawrence in the parish church of St John's in 1460 cost one hundred pounds. The description of this last foundation is of uncommon interest, because it explains that the priests hired for the discant masses were to select members of the cotidiane for their choir, and that pay for the cotidiane singers was included in the pay to the priests, suggesting that singers of polyphony may well be hiding behind lump-sum payments to priests celebrating masses in other documents. This may be the case for an expensive sung Sunday mass founded in the chapel of the woolcarders with 26 pounds, because only a single priest is mentioned. Other expensive discant masses were the yearly mass for St Sebastian to be sung at the parish church of St James beginning in 1450, which cost 67 pounds 4 shillings yearly and two weekly masses plus ten sung masses to be done by the deacon and subdeacon with five or six choorkinderen, founded at St James in 1406 at 36 pounds yearly. We may compare the cost of an antiphoner purchased by the St James parish in 1457, which was six pounds, the cost of a missal sold to the woolcarders, also six pounds, the cost of a silver trumpet sold by Willem Obrecht to a clothesbuyer, which was four shillings and three deniers, and the cost of an organ built in 1414 for the parish church of Bassevelde near Ghent, which was fourteen pounds. By contrast, chanted masses performed by a priest run between two and five pounds per weekly mass; read masses are less than two pounds, unless bread distributions or alms are added.

In Ghent, most discant masses included the organ, and statutes of 1440 of the St Barbara confraternity at the parish church of St Pharailde even go so far as to name the ordinary movements played by the organist - they begin only with the Offertory and end with the Deo gratias following an ‘a capella’ Ite missa est.

The composite picture of polyphony sung in Ghent suggests that performances were most frequent at confraternity services and after 1440 and that foundations for mass polyphony and polyphony for the evening Salve by far outnumbered foundations for the zeven getijden or seven Hours. The Hours were established in many cities throughout the Low Countries to be sung in polyphony expressly, but in Ghent the cotidiane singers assigned to the zeven getijden were only required to know polyphony long after their initial foundation. In the parish church of St Martin, polyphony was only required of the cotidianen in 1491. The church which emerges as the most important center of polyphonic practice is not St John's, the preferred parish church of the aldermen, and not St Pharailde, which never received another foundation to match that of 300 pounds made by Simon de Mirabello, a wealthy merchant, in the fourteenth century, but St James, the only parish with a documented motet book and also the only parish from which an antiphoner survives today.

All of our evidence suggests that when polyphony was required by foundations, it was requested specifically by the founders and not introduced ad-libitum by the singers. Reading the documents, the 'voice' of the founders is active; that of the church or its representatives is passive. Moreover, singers would not introduce polyphony were they not ensured of higher pay, and the amounts of rents paying for foundations were fixed following agreement between founder and church. Only another similar legal agreement could change the sum and such revisions do appear in the aldermen's books. Therefore it is unlikely that plainchant masses were changed to polyphonic masses serendipitously by singer-composers.

Specific compositions are not mentioned in the aldermen's registers or cartularies from Ghent, so it was probably up to the singers to decide on the kind of discant to be sung. We do know of some founders' requests for selected texts and perhaps compositions. In 1473, Kerstin van Roesselaer gave three pounds so that the choirboys of the church of St James would sing Een kindekijn es ons gheboren at the Christmas Eve and Christmas Day masses at the parish church of St James, and in 1464 a foundation requested that the choirboys of the parish church of St Nicholas sing the O benigna, O regina, O Maria of the sequence Inviolata in counterpoint at the Sunday procession, the only appearance of the word 'counterpoint' in the aldermen's registers. Founders of cycles of masses often provide missals, but the fifteenth-century archives of Ghent give no evidence for the copying of books of polyphony to serve foundations. There is only one reference to a motet book in all of the aldermen's books. It belonged to the parish church of St James according to the 1424 inventory on pages 3 and 5 of your handout. It is unclear whether the two mesboeken donated in 1485 to the St George guild are books of polyphony or just missals.

The registers of the aldermen of Ghent do not only yield information about foundations of masses. Dozens of chaplaincies are described in the contracts recording transfers of property from one private individual to another, because the hereditary rents destined for chaplaincies were sold with the land producing those rents. Such transfers of rents suggest that the foundation-histories of chaplaincies are far more complicated than one might have imagined. Most chaplaincies in Ghent were already founded by 1400, however, as was the case elsewhere - exceptional is the 1494 foundation of a chaplaincy at St Michael's parish church for 5 pounds 10 shillings and 3 pennies yearly.

The aldermen's registers are filled with other fascinating contracts - promises to copy missals from named exemplars that are inventoried in some detail, assurances that new bells would last six years, and a promise of 1473 to build and deliver an organ with a description of the proposed length of its pipes and registration (as determined by a committee of organ builders). The registers of the aldermen also tell us exactly where the Bonifanten or choirboys of the collegiate church of St Pharailde lived, name schoolmasters in Ghent and specify that the parish church of St Nicholas had established four new boy singers by December 1463.

Other interesting observations result from collation of the data from the aldermen's registers. The numerous foundations with the mendicant houses, beguinages, hospitals, and even chapels of the guilds and aldermen give overwhelming evidence that these miscellaneous oratories served the populace as much as did the parish churches. Yet at the same time, we note that most foundations in Ghent were made NOT by the laity but by priests, a statistic which argues for a reconsideration of religious sentiment in Ghent, and perhaps even in the Low Countries. It also suggests that the fifteenth-century Church in Ghent was self-supporting to some extent. It is striking that Ghent was the only city in Flanders to embrace Calvinism in the sixteenth century, and some writers have seen this as a consequence of a deep-seated suspicion of the Catholic church already evident in the fifteenth century. It is NOT surprising that foundations for polyphony were decidedly rare in Ghent, a city dominated by two Benedictine abbeys, nor should we wonder that confraternities, knights and patricians (not priests) were those with the wealth and inclination to request polyphony.

The most important consequences of this search through the aldermen's registers of Ghent are the implications for future research. Aldermen's registers and cartularies survive in whole or in part from other European cities, most that are less populous than Ghent. Henri Pirenne singled out Bruges, Ypres, St Omer, Lille, and Douai as towns organized in the same way as Ghent, for example; to them, I can add Brussels. If it is possible to search all of the Ghent records in a total of six months in situ [though it may take longer to tabulate the results] then it should be possible to complete similar searches for cities such as London, Paris, Cologne, Munich, or Amsterdam in less than a year. And since it is now possible, for Ghent, to say where and when different kinds of sacred music were performed in the fifteenth century and how much they cost, a similar reconstruction should now be possible in whole or in part for every other northwest European city. Were more financial and public support available for this ungrateful and not always exciting sifting through archives, we might hope to combine in ten years' time a musical geography of the major European cities based on the archives with the evidence from the manuscripts inventoried in the Census Catalogue and RISM, and thereby open the door to better interpretations and performances of the music that does remain to us.