Medieval music
Medieval music encompasses the sacred and secular music of Western Europe during the Middle Ages, from approximately the 6th to 15th centuries. It is the first and longest major era of Western classical music and is followed by the Renaissance music; the two eras comprise what musicologists generally term as early music, preceding the common practice period. Following the traditional division of the Middle Ages, medieval music can be divided into Early, High, and Late medieval music.
Medieval music includes liturgical music used for the church, other sacred music, and secular or non-religious music. Much medieval music is purely vocal music, such as Gregorian chant. Other music used only instruments or both voices and instruments.
The medieval period saw the creation and adaptation of systems of music notation which enabled creators to document and transmit musical ideas more easily, although notation coexisted with and complemented oral tradition.
Overview
Genres
Medieval music was created for a number of different uses and contexts, resulting in different music genres. Liturgical as well as more general sacred contexts were important, but secular types emerged as well, including love songs and dances. During the earlier medieval period, liturgical music was monophonic chant; Gregorian chant became the dominant style. Polyphonic genres, in which multiple independent melodic lines are performed simultaneously, began to develop during the high medieval era, becoming prevalent by the later 13th and early 14th century. The development of polyphonic forms is often associated with the Ars antiqua style associated with Notre-Dame de Paris, but improvised polyphony around chant lines predated this.Organum, for example, elaborated on a chant melody by creating one or more accompanying lines. The accompanying line could be as simple as a second line sung in parallel intervals to the original chant. The principles of this kind of organum date back at least to an anonymous 9th century tract, the Musica enchiriadis, which describes the tradition of duplicating a preexisting plainchant in parallel motion at the interval of an octave, a fifth or a fourth. Some of the earliest written examples are in a style known as Aquitanian polyphony, but the largest body of surviving organum comes from the Notre-Dame school. This loose collection of repertory is often called the Magnus Liber Organi.
Related polyphonic genres included the motet and clausula genres, both also often built on an original segment of plainchant or as an elaboration on an organum passage. While most early motets were sacred and may have been liturgical, by the end of the thirteenth century the genre had expanded to include secular topics, such as political satire and courtly love, and French as well as Latin texts. They also included from one to three upper voices, each with its own text.
In Italy, the secular genre of the Madrigal became popular. Similar to the polyphonic character of the motet, madrigals featured greater fluidity and motion in the leading melody. The madrigal form also gave rise to polyphonic canons, especially in Italy where they were called caccie. These were three-part secular pieces, which featured the two higher voices in canon, with an underlying instrumental long-note accompaniment.
In the late middle ages, some purely instrumental music also began to be notated, though this remained rare. Dance music makes up most of the surviving instrumental music, and includes types such as the estampie, ductia, and nota.
Instruments
Many instruments used to perform medieval music still exist in the 21st century, but in different and typically more technologically developed forms. The flute was made of wood in the medieval era rather than silver or other metal, and could be made as a side-blown or end-blown instrument. While modern orchestral flutes are usually made of metal and have complex key mechanisms and airtight pads, medieval flutes had holes that the performer had to cover with the fingers. The recorder was made of wood during the medieval era, and despite the fact that in the 21st century, it may be made of synthetic materials such as plastic, it has more or less retained its past form. The gemshorn is similar to the recorder as it has finger holes on its front, though it is actually a member of the ocarina family. One of the flute's predecessors, the pan flute, was popular in medieval times, and is possibly of Hellenic origin. This instrument's pipes were made of wood, and were graduated in length to produce different pitches.Medieval music used many plucked string instruments like the lute, a fretted instrument with a pear-shaped hollow body which is the predecessor to the modern guitar. Other plucked stringed instruments included the mandore, gittern, citole and psaltery.
The bowed lyra of the Byzantine Empire was the first recorded European bowed string instrument. Like the modern violin, a performer produced sound by moving a bow with tensioned hair over tensioned strings. The Persian geographer Ibn Khurradadhbih of the 9th century cited the Byzantine lyra, in his lexicographical discussion of instruments as a bowed instrument equivalent to the Arab rabāb and typical instrument of the Byzantines along with the urghun, shilyani and the salandj. The hurdy-gurdy was a mechanical violin using a rosined wooden wheel attached to a crank to "bow" its strings. Instruments without sound boxes like the jew's harp were also popular. Early versions of the pipe organ, fiddle, and a precursor to the modern trombone were used.
Notation
During the medieval period the foundation was laid for the notational and theoretical practices that would shape Western music into the norms that developed during the common practice era. The most obvious of these is the development of a comprehensive music notational system; however the theoretical advances, particularly in regard to rhythm and polyphony, are equally important to the development of Western music.File:Gregorian Chant Kyrie.svg|frame|A sample of Kýrie Eléison XI from the Liber Usualis. The modern "neumes" on the staff above the text indicate the pitches of the melody. to it interpreted.
The earliest medieval music did not have any kind of notational system. The tunes were primarily monophonic and transmitted by oral tradition. As Rome tried to centralize the various liturgies and establish the Roman rite as the primary church tradition the need to transmit these chant melodies across vast distances effectively was equally glaring. So long as music could only be taught to people "by ear," it limited the ability of the church to get different regions to sing the same melodies, since each new person would have to spend time with a person who already knew a song and learn it "by ear." The first step to fix this problem came with the introduction of various signs written above the chant texts to indicate direction of pitch movement, called neumes.
The origin of neumes is unclear and subject to some debate; however, most scholars agree that their closest ancestors are the classic Greek and Roman grammatical signs that indicated important points of declamation by recording the rise and fall of the voice. The two basic signs of the classical grammarians were the acutus, /, indicating a raising of the voice, and the gravis, \, indicating a lowering of the voice. A singer reading a chant text with neume markings would be able to get a general sense of whether the melody line went up in pitch, stayed the same, or went down in pitch. Since trained singers knew the chant repertoire well, written neume markings above the text served as a reminder of the melody but did not specify the actual intervals. However, a singer reading a chant text with neume markings would not be able to sight read a song which he or she had never heard sung before; these pieces would not be possible to interpret accurately today without later versions in more precise notation systems.
These neumes eventually evolved into the basic symbols for neumatic notation, the virga which indicates a higher note and still looked like the acutus from which it came; and the punctum which indicates a lower note and, as the name suggests, reduced the gravis symbol to a point. Thus the acutus and the gravis could be combined to represent graphical vocal inflections on the syllable. This kind of notation seems to have developed no earlier than the eighth century, but by the ninth it was firmly established as the primary method of musical notation. The basic notation of the virga and the punctum remained the symbols for individual notes, but other neumes soon developed which showed several notes joined. These new neumes—called ligatures—are essentially combinations of the two original signs.
The first music notation was the use of dots over the lyrics to a chant, with some dots being higher or lower, giving the reader a general sense of the direction of the melody. However, this form of notation only served as a memory aid for a singer who already knew the melody. This basic neumatic notation could only specify the number of notes and whether they moved up or down. There was no way to indicate exact pitch, any rhythm, or even the starting note. These limitations are further indication that the neumes were developed as tools to support the practice of oral tradition, rather than to supplant it. However, even though it started as a mere memory aid, the worth of having more specific notation soon became evident.
The next development in musical notation was "heighted neumes", in which neumes were carefully placed at different heights in relation to each other. This allowed the neumes to give a rough indication of the size of a given interval as well as the direction. This quickly led to one or two lines, each representing a particular note, being placed on the music with all of the neumes relating to the earlier ones. At first, these lines had no particular meaning and instead had a letter placed at the beginning indicating which note was represented. However, the lines indicating middle C and the F a fifth below slowly became most common. Having been at first merely scratched on the parchment, the lines now were drawn in two different colored inks: usually red for F, and yellow or green for C. This was the beginning of the musical staff. The completion of the four-line staff is usually credited to Guido d'Arezzo, one of the most important musical theorists of the Middle Ages. While older sources attribute the development of the staff to Guido, some modern scholars suggest that he acted more as a codifier of a system that was already being developed. Either way, this new notation allowed a singer to learn pieces completely unknown to him in a much shorter amount of time. However, even though chant notation had progressed in many ways, one fundamental problem remained: rhythm. The neumatic notational system, even in its fully developed state, did not clearly define any kind of rhythm for the singing of notes.