European music during the Middle Ages

European music during the Middle Ages

=> Background

The period throughout the entire existence of Western Europe, today called the Middle Ages, starts around 450 A.D. What had once been a tremendous domain ruled by Roman law and culture self-destructed in outcome of a progression of attacks by the Goths, Huns, and other "savage" clans.

Europe turned into a medieval society in which most of the populace was workers, or serfs. The landowners were aristocrats who lived in embroidered artwork hung manors in walled towns, some of which are the predecessors of European urban areas of today.

To battle the practically consistent wars with one another, ground-breaking masters brought up their children to be warriors, knights who promised to pursue codes of faithfulness and gallantry.

When not occupied with fights, these heavily clad contenders took an interest in detailed competitions for the diversion of the court. Knights likewise joined the campaigns, multi-year Christian endeavors to the Middle East to recover the Holy Land from Moslem principle.

As Christianity spread during the Middle Ages, extraordinary houses of God were worked crosswise over Europe as spots of public workship, each directed by a religious administrator selected by the pope.

Religious circles were set up as independent strict networks where priests and nuns lived in confinement from the outside world.

When the populace was basically uneducated, religious communities were focuses of learning. Priests replicated and outlined strict original copies just as books that protected works of Arabic and Greek researchers.

Monasteries have an uncommon importance throughout the entire existence of European music. The intoning of holy messages, a training the early Christians obtained from different religions, was a significant component of their liturgy.

The chants sung in the administrations, some of them of old starting point, were gone on through oral custom, without a doubt experiencing changes simultaneously.

So as to carry some association to this tremendous group of songs, priests figured standards for arranging the scales on which they were based, the church modes.

They likewise tried different things with strategies such as writing them down. Monophonic chants established the center of the repertory, yet there were additionally practices of performing chants with at least one or more melody added to them, an early type of polyphony.

The framework that the priests eventually started, basically the staff of lines and spaces being used today, accomplished the exact fixing of the pitches of a melody and allowed for the notation of two or more simultaneous melodies that graphically represented their relationship to one another.

Perceptions about these connections prompted ideas of harmony and disharmony and to early rules for making new music of at least two sections.

What was initially proposed as a system for saving existing music established the frameworks for Western hypotheses of contrast and concordance.

Those standards and practices made conceivable the organization of music of extraordinary textural multifaceted nature and are themselves among the significant scholarly accomplishments in mankind's history.

=> Milestones in Music

Founding of Schola Cantorum by Pope Gregory in Rome, 600 AD.

Experiments in notation of pitch; first use of neumes.

Musica enchiriadis, treatise describing early polyphony (organum).

Emergence of staff notation as preferred system.

Organ with 400 pipes at Winchester Cathedral.

Advances in notation of rhythm, 13th century.

Earliest preserved examples of composed music of two or more independent melodies.

Earliest theories of consonance and dissonance, 12th century.

Treatises describing advances in notation of rhythm

=> Major Figures in Music

Leonin (ca. 1135–1201): composer and compiler of early polyphony consisting of two melodic lines, active at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.

Perotin (1180–ca. 1207): successor of Leonin at Notre Dame, continued development of polyphony, mainly consisting of three melodic lines.

Guillaume de Machaut (ca. 1300–1377): French cleric, poet, and musician; composer of sacred and secular works, mostly consisting of three melodic lines.

Francesco Landini (ca. 1325–1397): Italian composer of secular songs, mostly consisting of three melodic lines.

Guillaume Dufay (ca. 1400–1474): Netherlandish composer of secular and sacred works of three or four melodic lines.

=> Source (Douglas Cohen - Music: Its Language, History, and Culture)

https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1002&context=bc_oers