Antwerp by Michael Pye

Author:Michael Pye [Pye, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241243220
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2020-06-18T00:00:00+00:00

10

Listen to the City

Walk out and listen: bells, carts, shouts in the city, sometimes dogs, cows or geese, sometimes horses, whistles, builders, market cries and pedlars and, according to Guicciardini, much more. He wrote of ‘hardly a corner of the streets not filled with the joyous sound of singing and the playing of instruments’, ‘instruments of all sorts which everyone understands and knows’. The Hanseatic merchants had a band to play to them daily on their walk to do business at the Beurs. Street processions, civic and holy, were showy with ‘great costly gold pole-candlesticks and their long old Frankish silver trumpets; and there were many pipers and drummers in the German fashion; all were loudly and noisily blown and beaten,’ as Dürer noticed in 1520. The Church of Our Lady was ‘so vast that many masses may be sung there at one time without interfering one with another’.1

The music of the Netherlands was already famous. It was Flemish singers who went with the distraught Queen Juana of Spain all around Castille in 1506, singing the Office of the Dead each day for her dead but unburied husband, whose coffin travelled with them. The capilla flamenca, the choir from Flanders, travelled with Charles V on his journeys round the Empire; he hardly ever took musicians from Spain.2 Queens, kings and emperors paid for the soundtrack of court life and the dignity of their prayers, a kind of patronage which ran through the machinery of the Church and the grand houses of dukes and princes. Music was a household service, like art or cooking.

Antwerp, being in Brabant, was rather different. Erik, King of Sweden, on his way to woo Elizabeth of England in 1560, stopped off in Antwerp, where his people spent ‘a huge amount of money … on hiring musicians and singers to go with him’; what’s more, his spending was notorious enough to be reported to the Medicis in Florence.3 In Antwerp even kings went shopping for their music.

There was a music business, developed enough for a simple kind of merger and acquisition. Georges Lohoys, a musician with a fat contacts book, made a deal with a newcomer, Jean Hobreau or Petit-Jehan, on 20 March 1541. The two would work together, keep joint accounts, provide the music for weddings, banquets, any kind of party any time and for anyone, merchant or citizen or plain resident. They agreed to pool the tips and the incidentals along with the fees. They gave lessons in playing and lessons in dancing, sometimes at their own hall. They also needed apprentices who could play various instruments, and Georges Lohoys was much too busy to do without them. Two of the boys, Didier and Pierre, ran home to their father and it was such a crisis that Lohoys called out three sheriff’s men to bring them back.4

There was high-minded music, as in the booklet the Antwerp bishop wrote which set the Ten Commandments. There was carnival music, raunchy as you like, about bodies and drink and not being able to pay the rent.

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