What’s medieval music?
That is the sacred and secular music composed throughout the Center Ages, which covers an enormous stretch of time, from A.D. 476, following the autumn of the Roman Empire, to the beginning of the Renaissance within the 14th and fifteenth century. In order that’s round 1000 years, making it the longest main period of Western classical music.
How a lot is it attainable to find out about medieval music?
Plenty of early medieval music is a thriller. Many individuals of the interval have been illiterate, so music was handed on orally, slightly than being written down, which signifies that we have misplaced it. Plus, it wasn’t till 1030 that an Italian Benedictine monk named Guido d’Arezzo invented a four-line stave, utilizing his hand to recollect the traces.
And later?
The music that was written down was often church music, because it tended to be members of the clergy who may write – and even that’s onerous to decipher for a contemporary musician. That is as a result of there have been completely different techniques of musical notation from right now, the best-known being sq. notation. It wasn’t all the time written very clearly, and for a very long time there was no manner of indicating exact rhythm. As for secular music: the primary surviving fragments we’ve date from the primary half of the thirteenth century.
How medieval music develop and what are some instance of medieval music?
We all know that medieval music progressed by means of a number of phases.
Monophonic chant
The singing of spiritual texts in Latin to a single unison melodic line – in any other case often known as plainchant – was well-liked from the start of the Medieval interval. One of the best identified of those monophonic chants was Gregorian Chant, which unfold by means of western Europe within the ninth and tenth centuries.
Heterophony and polyphony
Over the centuries plainchant progressively developed into one thing a little bit extra elaborate with the addition of additional vocal traces. One outcome was heterophony, wherein a number of variants of a single melodic line are heard concurrently. One other was polyphony, characterised by a number of voices with separate melodic traces and rhythms, the primary true instance of this being motets, whereby a lot of vocal components have been set towards a essential melody, or cantus firmus.
Secular music
With the arrival of the motet, secular lyrics, typically about courtly love, grew to become extra frequent. Through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Troubadours and Trouvères – French poet-musicians – travelled the coutryside singing secular plainsong in Occitan, a Romance language that developed from vernacular Latin. One other type of secular music was the Italian madrigal, which have been often duets a few pastoral topic.
Ars Nova
The late medieval interval (14th century onwards) noticed the flourishing of Ars Nova (‘New Artwork’), a classy type of polyphony that shunned the restrictions of thirteenth century rhythmic modes, due to developments in notation. The results of this was music of better expressiveness and selection than had beforehand been attainable.
