Spotlighting Two Huge Developments during the Middle Ages
Musical Notation
Notating music goes all the way back to the early Greeks who inscribed notes on rocks and such things. Other countries, such as Persia, also developed its own system of musical notation long before it began to take root in western music. Music notation in Europe during the Middle Ages did not happen over night. It developed gradually over many years around the time period of 1000 C.E.
Why is the development of musical notation so important? Think in terms of how music was performed prior to this development. It was memorized and passed along orally from one to another. For that to work, melodies had to be simple and easy enough to remember. It is also easy to imagine that human memory being what it is sometimes forgets, mixes things up, or just gets lazy. The result is music that probably changes over a period of time due to human "error." However, the tradition did allow for this in the sense that it was not a big deal if a few notes were changed or improvised here and there in a performance of Gregorian chant.
That begins to change with the development of music notation. Writing music down note for note preserves the music as it was originally written. That also opens the door for composers to write more complex music, since no longer did musicians have to memorize music if it was already preserved in written form.
The Development of Polyphony
Polyphony had already been established in western music by the 9th Century. Polyphony simply means many melodies. In terms of musical texture, it refers to two singers or instrumentalists playing different melodies at the same time. Historians think this may have first happened in monasteries when they added boys to the men's choirs. Boys had higher voices and started the melody on a higher pitch than did the men. Probably what happened is that everyone thought it sounded pretty good, and they simply went with it, without realizing the can of worms they opened up.
Why is this development important? It creates a whole new world of possibilities for composers to explore, thus advancing music, and it leads to the development of harmony, which is the consonant sounding of two or more notes together. Without the development of polyphony, we would not have gotten Mozart or Beethoven who took the idea of harmony or combining different notes to some high levels of sophisticated design.
To help clarify the concept, compare early Gregorian chant performed in unison monophony. Let us make up some notes of a melody for three singers as follows:
Example 1 (unison monophony)
Singer 1 sings: A, D, E, F, A
Singer 2 sings: A, D, E, F, A
Singer 3 sings: A, D, E, F, A
In other words, each singer sings the same melody in the same way at the same time, which is unison monophony.
With the development of polyphony, singers sing different melodies at the same time as in the following example:
Example 2 (polyphony)
Singer 1 sings: A, D, E, F, A
Singer 2 sings: D, F, A, D, E
Singer 3 sings: A, A, A, A, C
In Example one, Singer 1 is singing the melody as it was written in Example 1. However Singers 2 and 3 are singing different melodies. Note that Singer 3 sings the same note A for an extended time, but still it is a different melody. The explanation for this is that Singer 3 sings the lyrics in a slowed down manner, much slower than the pace of the other singers. In the example above, Singer 3 is singing the same note to every four notes that Singers 1 and 2 sing. Usually, in these types of choirs, the task of singing the slowed down melody was assigned to male tenor (low and deep sounding voices) singers.
Now, here is the interesting thing about polyphony and how it opens up a whole new world of possibilities for composing. In Example 2, as Singer 1 begins with the note A, Singer 2 is singing the note D. Here, two different notes are combined. The issue at stake when combining different notes is whether or not they sound good together. You learned at the beginning of the course that not all notes sound good together; whereas some do. Recall what the most consonant interval in western music is. That is the interval of a fifth, such as the note D on the piano played together with note A. This is the magic door. So, a composer has to ensure that he writes an interesting, different melody for each singer, but he also has to ensure that all the notes that sound together, as a result, must be consonant. The ballgame just got more complex.
Listening Example:
Go to Spotify and listen to Perotinus: Organum quadruplum Links to an external site., by Elisabeth Verlooy, from the album Leonin: Organum Duplum (14:56).
0 - 10 secs: The singers all start on a different note which they hold together for a few seconds.
10 secs: The other singers go silent leaving the tenors (the lower male voices ) singing a single note as we saw in Example 2 above with Singer 3. They are actually singing a separate melody line with different lyrics. The thing is that they are singing the lyrics so slow that it seems like they sing the same note (like a drone) for the entire song. This is important to note, because in later times the practice changes, and the tenors speed up their lines.
14 seconds: The other singers soon come back and the fun begins.
Listen to the remainder of the recording, while isolating the different melodies and noting the quality of consonance created by the combination of different notes and melodies at the same time.