Stylistic Periods
Western Music can be divided into the following stylistic periods:
MIDDLE AGES
450
1450
RENAISSANCE
1450
1600
BAROQUE
1600
1750
CLASSICAL
1750
1820
ROMANTIC
1820
1900
20TH CENTURY
1900
1945
20TH CENTURY
1945
PRESENT
1
The Middle Ages (450-1450)
2
The Middle Ages (450-1450)
The Middle Ages are
commonly dated from
the fall of the Western
Roman Empire in the
5th century to the
beginning of the
Renaissance in the
15th century.
3
The Middle Ages (450-1450)
•
The only medieval music which can be
studied is that which was written down,
and survived.
•
Creating musical manuscripts was very
expensive, due to the expense of
parchment, and the huge amount of time
necessary for a scribe to copy it all down,
only wealthy institutions were able to
create manuscripts which have survived to
the present time.
•
These institutions generally included the
church and church institutions, such as
monasteries; some secular music, as well
as sacred music, was also preserved by
these institutions.
4
The Middle Ages (450-1450)
• These surviving manuscripts do not
reflect much of the popular music of
the time.
• At the start of the era, the notated
music is presumed to be monophonic
and homo rhythmic with what appears
to be a unison sung text and no
notated instrumental support.
• Earlier medieval notation had no way
to specify rhythm, although neumatic
notations gave clear phrasing ideas,
and somewhat later notations
indicated rhythmic modes.
5
The Middle Ages (450-1450)
•
The simplicity of chant, with unison voice and
natural declamation, is most common.
•
The notation of polyphony develops, and the
assumption is that formalized polyphonic
practices first arose in this period.
•
Harmony, in consonant intervals of perfect
fifths, unisons, octaves, (and later, perfect
fourths) begins to be notated. Rhythmic
notation allows for complex interactions
between multiple vocal lines in a repeatable
fashion.
•
The use of multiple texts and the notation of
instrumental accompaniment developed by
the end of the era.
6
The Middle Ages (450-1450)
The instruments used to perform medieval
music still exist, though in different forms.
 The medieval cornett differed immensely from its
modern counterpart, the trumpet, not least in
traditionally being made of ivory or wood rather
than metal. Cornetts in medieval times were quite
short.
 They were either straight or somewhat curved, and
construction became standardized on a curved
version by approximately the middle 15th century.
 In one side, there would be several holes.
7
The Middle Ages (450-1450)
 The flute was once made of wood rather
than silver or other metal, and could be
made as a side-blown or end-blown
instrument.
 The recorder, on the other hand, has more
or less retained its past form.
 The gemshorn is similar to the recorder in
having finger holes on its front, though it
is really 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.
8
The Middle Ages (450-1450)
 Many medieval plucked string instruments were
similar to the modern guitar, such as the lute,
mandora and gittern.
 The dulcimers, similar in structure to the
psaltery and zither, were originally plucked, but
became struck in the 14th century, when new
technology made metal strings possible.
 The hurdy-gurdy was (and still is) a mechanical
violin using a rosined wooden wheel attached to
a crank to "bow" its strings.
 Instruments without sound boxes such as the
Jew's harp were also popular. Early versions of
the organ, fiddle (or vielle), and
trombone(called the sackbut) existed as well.
9
The Middle Ages (450-1450)
Genres
 In this era, music was both sacred and secular, although almost no early secular
music has survived, and since notation was a relatively late development,
reconstruction of this music, especially before the 12th century, is currently subject to
conjecture.
10
The Middle Ages (450-1450)
Theory and notation
 In music theory, the period saw several advances over
previous practice, mostly in the conception and
notation of rhythm.
 Previously, music was organized rhythmically into
"longs" and "breves" (in other words, “longs & shorts"),
though often without any clear regular differentiation
between which should be used.
 The most famous music theorist of the first half of the
13th century, Johannes de Garlandia, was the author of
the De mensurabili musica (about 1240), the treatise
which defined and most completely elucidated the
rhythmic modes, a notational system for rhythm in
which one of six possible patterns was denoted by a
particular succession of note-shapes (organized in what
is called "ligatures").
11
The Middle Ages (450-1450)
Theory and notation
 The melodic line, once it had its mode, would
generally remain in it, although rhythmic
adjustments could be indicated by changes in
the expected pattern of ligatures, even to the
extent of changing to another rhythmic mode.
 A German theorist of a slightly later period,
Franco of Cologne, was the first to describe a
system of notation in which differently shaped
notes have entirely different rhythmic values
(in the Ars Cantus Mensurabilis of
approximately 1260), an innovation which had
a massive impact on the subsequent history of
European music
12
The Middle Ages (450-1450)
Theory and notation
 Phillip de Vitry is most famous in music
history for writing the Ars Nova (1322), a
treatise on music which gave its name to the
music of the entire era. His contributions to
notation, in particular notation of rhythm,
were particularly important, and made
possible the free and quite complex music of
the next hundred years. In some ways the
modern system of rhythmic notation began
with Vitry, who broke free from the older idea
of the rhythmic modes, short rhythmic
patterns that were repeated without being
individually differentiated. The notational
predecessors of modern time meters also
originate in the Ars Nova.
13
The Middle Ages (450-1450)
Early chant traditions
 Chant (or plainsong) is a monophonic sacred form which represents the earliest
known music of the Christian church. The Jewish Synagogue tradition of singing
psalms was a strong influence on Christian chanting.
 Chant developed separately in several European centers. The most important were
Rome, Spain, Gaul, Milan, and Ireland. These chants were all developed to support
the regional liturgies used when celebrating the Mass there. Each area developed its
own chants and rules for celebration. In Spain, Mozarabic chant was used and shows
the influence of North African music. The Mozarabic liturgy even survived through
Muslim rule, though this was an isolated strand and this music was later suppressed
in an attempt to enforce conformity on the entire liturgy. In Milan, Ambrosian
chant, named after St. Ambrose, was the standard, while Beneventan chant
developed around Benevento, another Italian liturgical center. Gallican chant was
used in Gaul, and Celtic chant in Ireland and Great Britain.
14
The Middle Ages (450-1450)
Early chant traditions
 Around 1011 AD, the Roman Catholic Church
wanted to standardize the Mass and chant. At
this time, Rome was the religious centre of
western Europe, and Paris was the political
centre. The standardization effort consisted
mainly of combining these two (Roman and
Gallican) regional liturgies. This body of chant
became known as Gregorian Chant. By the 12th
and 13th centuries, Gregorian chant had
superseded all the other Western chant
traditions, with the exception of the Ambrosian
chant in Milan, and the Mozarabic chant in a
few specially designated Spanish chapels.
15
The Middle Ages (450-1450)
 Gregorian chant is the central tradition of Western
plainchant, a form of monophonic, unaccompanied
sacred song of the western Christian Church. Although
it had pretty much fallen into disuse after the 1600s, it
experienced a revival in the 19th Century in the Roman
Catholic Church and the Anglo-Catholic wing of the
Anglican Communion. Gregorian chant was organized,
codified, and notated mainly in the Frankish lands of
western and central Europe during the 9th and 10th
centuries, with later additions and redactions, but the
texts and many of the melodies have antecedents going
back several centuries earlier. Although popular legend
credits Pope Gregory the Great with inventing
Gregorian chant, scholars believe that the chant
bearing his name arose from a later Carolingian
synthesis of Roman and Gallican chant.
16
The Middle Ages (450-1450)
Gregorian chant
 Gregorian chants are organized
into eight scalar modes. Typical
melodic features include
characteristic incipits and
cadences, the use of reciting tones
around which the other notes of
the melody revolve, and a
vocabulary of musical motifs woven
together through a process called
centonization to create families of
related chants.
17
The Middle Ages – Gregorian Chant
 Although the modern major and minor scales are
strongly related to two of the church modes, the
modern eight-tone scale is based on different
harmonic principles and is organized differently
from the scales of the church modes, which are
based on six-note patterns called hexachords.
The main notes in a hexachord are the dominant
and the final.
 Depending on where the final falls in the
sequence of the hexachord, the mode is
characterized as either authentic or plagal.
Modes with the same final share certain
characteristics, and it is easy to modulate back
and forth between them, hence the eight modes
fall into four larger groupings based on their
finals.
18
The Middle Ages
 Gregorian chant had a significant impact on the development of medieval and
Renaissance music. Modern staff notation developed directly from Gregorian
neumes.
 The square notation that had been devised for plainchant was borrowed and adapted
for other kinds of music.
 Certain groupings of neumes were used to indicate repeating rhythms called
rhythmic modes.
 Rounded noteheads increasingly replaced the older squares and lozenges in the 15th
and 16th centuries, although chant books conservatively maintained the square
notation.
 By the 16th century, the fifth line added to the musical staff had become standard.
The bass clef and the flat, natural, and sharp accidentals derived directly from
Gregorian notation.
23
The Middle Ages - Organum
Early polyphony: organum
 Around the end of the ninth century, singers in monasteries such as St. Gall in
Switzerland began experimenting with adding another part to the chant, generally
a voice in parallel motion, singing in mostly perfect fourths or fifths with the
original tune. This development is called organum, and represents the beginnings
of harmony and, ultimately, counterpoint. Over the next several centuries organum
developed in several ways.
 The most significant was the creation of "florid organum" around 1100, sometimes
known as the school of St. Martial (named after a monastery in south-central
France, which contains the best-preserved manuscript of this repertory). In "florid
organum" the original tune would be sung in long notes while an accompanying
voice would sing many notes to each one of the original, often in a highly elaborate
fashion, all the while emphasizing the perfect consonances (fourths, fifths and
octaves) as in the earlier organa.
24
The Middle Ages - Organum
Early polyphony: organum
 Later developments of organum occurred in
England, where the interval of the third was
particularly favored, and where organa were likely
improvised against an existing chant melody, and at
Notre Dame in Paris, which was to be the centre of
musical creative activity throughout the thirteenth
century.
 Much of the music from the early medieval period is
anonymous. Some of the names may have been
poets and lyric writers, and the tunes for which they
wrote words may have been composed by others.
Attribution of monophonic music of the medieval
period is not always reliable. Surviving manuscripts
from this period include the Musica Enchiriadis,
Codex Calixtinus of Santiago de Compostela, and
the Winchester Troper.
26
The Middle Ages – Ars antiqua
 The flowering of the Notre Dame school of
polyphony from around 1150 to 1250
corresponded to the equally impressive
achievements in Gothic architecture: indeed
the centre of activity was at the cathedral of
Notre Dame itself. Sometimes the music of
this period is called the Parisian school, or
Parisian organum, and represents the
beginning of what is conventionally known
as Ars antiqua. This was the period in which
rhythmic notation first appeared in western
music, mainly a context-based method of
rhythmic notation known as the rhythmic
modes.
28
The Middle Ages – Notre Dame Polyphony
Music example:
(from School of Notre Dame)
Perotin: Alleluia: Nativitas (The Birth)
 Perotin was the first known composer to
write for more than two voices.
 An Organum in three voices is based on a
Gregorian alleluia melody- for the nativity
of the Virgin Mary – that Perotin placed in
the lowest part.
 In this recording the three voice parts are
sung by male voices accompanied by
instruments
 A chant that is used as the basis for
polyphony is known as a cantus firmus
(fixed melody)
29
The Middle Ages – Notre Dame Polyphony
Music example:
(from School of Notre Dame)
Perotin: Alleluia: Nativitas (The Birth)
 Above the cantus firmus, or preexisting melody, Perotin wrote




two additional lines that move much more quickly.
As many as sixty-six tones of the upper voices are sung against
one long tone of the chant
Only three tones are treated in this dronelike way, the first, the
second and the last.
The relentless rhythmic patterns of long-short-long in the top
juxtaposed against the rhythm of the bottom voices is typical
of medieval polyphony
The narrow range of the three voices is also typical and are
never more than an octave apart.
30
The Middle Ages – Ars antiqua
This was also the period in which concepts of formal structure developed which
were attentive to proportion, texture, and architectural effect. Composers of the
period alternated florid and descant organum (more note-against-note, as
opposed to the succession of many-note melismas against long-held notes found
in the florid type), and created several new musical forms:
 Clausulae - which were melismatic sections of organa extracted
and fitted with new words and further musical elaboration
 Conductus - which was a song for one or more voices to be sung
rhythmically, most likely in a procession of some sort
 Tropes - which were rearrangements of older chants with new
words and sometimes new music.
31
The Middle Ages
Time line of significant composers of the Middle ages
33
The Middle Ages
France: Ars nova
 During the Ars nova era, secular music
acquired a polyphonic sophistication
formerly found only in sacred music, a
development not surprising considering the
secular character of the early Renaissance
(and it should be noted that while this music
is typically considered to be "medieval", the
social forces that produced it were
responsible for the beginning of the literary
and artistic Renaissance in Italy—the
distinction between Middle Ages and
Renaissance is a blurry one, especially
considering arts as different as music and
painting).
42
The Middle Ages – Ars Nova
France: Ars nova
 The term "Ars nova" (new art, or new technique)
was coined by Philippe de Vitry in his treatise of
that name (probably written in 1322), in order to
distinguish the practice from the music of the
immediately preceding age.
 The dominant secular genre of the Ars Nova was the
chanson, as it would continue to be in France for
another two centuries. These chansons were
composed in musical forms corresponding to the
poetry they set, which were in the so-called formes
fixes of rondeau, ballade, and virelai. These forms
significantly affected the development of musical
structure in ways that are felt even today; for
example, the ouvert-clos rhyme-scheme shared by
all three demanded a musical realization which
contributed directly to the modern notion of
antecedent and consequent phrases.
43
The Middle Ages – Ars Nova
 It was in this period, too, in which began the
long tradition of setting the mass ordinary.
This tradition started around mid-century
with isolated or paired settings of Kyries,
Glorias, etc., but Machaut composed what is
thought to be the first complete mass
conceived as one composition. The sound
world of Ars Nova music is very much one of
linear primacy and rhythmic complexity.
"Resting" intervals are the fifth and octave,
with thirds and sixths considered
dissonances. Leaps of more than a sixth in
individual voices are not uncommon, leading
to speculation of instrumental participation
at least in secular performance.
44
Ars Nova – Guillaume de Machaut
Guillaume de Machaut, (c. 1300 – April 1377)
 Most significant composer of the Ars Nova
 Machaut's poetry was greatly admired and imitated by
other poets including the likes of Geoffrey Chaucer.
 Machaut was and is the most celebrated composer of
the 14th century
 He composed in a wide range of styles and forms and
his output was enormous.
 Machaut was especially influential in the development
of the motet and the secular song (particularly the lai,
and the formes fixes: rondeau, virelai and ballade).
 Machaut wrote the Messe de Nostre Dame, the earliest
known complete setting of the Ordinary of the Mass
attributable to a single composer, and influenced
composers for centuries to follow.
45
Notre Dame Mass –mid 13th Century
Machaut’s Notre Dame Mass, one of the finest compositions known
from the Middle ages, is also of great historical importance: it is the
first polyphonic treatment of the mass ordinary by a known composer.
Ordinary
of the
Mass
Kyrie
• Lord have mercy
Gloria
• Glory to God in the Highest
Credo
• I believe in One God
Sanctus
• Holy, Holy, Holy
Agnus Dei
• Lamb of God
48
Notre Dame Mass –mid 13th Century
Music Example: Agnus Dei, from the Notre Dame Mass
•
A
B
Agnus Dei
•
Agnus Dei
•
•
Triple meter
Solemn and elaborate
Complex rhythmic patterns contribute to its intensity
Two upper parts are rhythmically active and contain syncopation, a
characteristic of the 14th Century
The two lower parts move in longer notes and play a supportive role
Based on a Gregorian Chant, which Maucaut furnished with new rhythmic
patterns and placed in the tenor, one of the two lower parts
Since the chant, or cantus firmus, is rhythmically altered within a polyphonic
web, it is more a musical framework than a tune to be recognized
The harmonies of the Agnus Dei include stark disonances, hollow-sounding
chords, and full triads
Agnus Dei
•
•
•
•
A
49
Notre Dame Mass –mid 13th Century
B
Agnus Dei
A
Agnus Dei
Agnus Dei
Music Example: Agnus Dei, from the Notre Dame Mass
A
A
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi:
miserere nobis
Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the
world: have mercy on us.
B
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi:
miserere nobis.
Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the
world: have mercy on us.
A
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi:
dona nobis pacem.
Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the
world: grant us piece
50