Current western classical music did not occur overnight. It was a long process that had its beginnings in the sacred music of the Middle Ages. War, disease, famine, political unrest and advancements in science brought changes, to not only how music was perceived, but also in how it was presented, giving modern western classical music its rich history today.
In medieval times the Catholic Church controlled every aspect of life. The church educated the nobles, advised the rulers, presided over judgments and was the spiritual guide for the people. The church itself was usually the only stone building in the village and it was central to the lifestyles of the time as it was where festivals, baptisms, marriages and death rites were held. While there was some secular music in the courts of the nobles, most music was sacred. Plainchant was the official music of the church and each chant had a specific time or condition of use according to the liturgy. The pitch the chant was sung on was referred to as the reciting tone. The simplest form of the plainchant was a short phrase sung before or after a psalm, called an Antiphon. A more complicated plainchant form was the sequence, where a melody is sung twice to different words. An early form of organum, the parallel organum, is where the plainchant was sung to two different melodies at the same time. According to Timothy Dickey, the four-voice organum is generally attributed to Perotin, a twelfth century composer of the Notre Dame School, whose works are recorded in the Magnus Liber located in the Notre Dame Cathedral. The three and four voice organum is referred to as the Notre Dame Organum. An example of this is Perotin’s Alleluia. Diffusa est gratia, which is a song composed to revere the ...
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The evolution of music, from the single note plainchants of the Middle Ages to the complex multiple instrumental symphonies of the Classical Era, was a long process. Each age built on the advances of the previous age, even as some parts were rejected by the following age. In the end the advancements and changes to the ways and means to combine rhythm, melody and harmony makes for a rich music heritage and a foundation for future musicians to build on.
Works Cited
Dickey, Timothy. "Pérotin (12th C.-13th C.); FRA ." Pérotin. Classical Archives, 2008. Web. 08 Nov. 2013.
Kerman, Joseph, and Gary Tomlinson. Listen. Bedford/St. Martin's, 2011. CD.
Kerman, Joseph, and Gary Tomlinson. Listen. 7th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2012. Print.
Oakley, Thomas P. "Religion and the Middle Ages." Catholic Culture. Trinity Communications, 2013. Web. 08 Nov. 2013.
Kleiner, Fred, Gardner's Art through the Ages: A Global History, Fourteenth Edition The Middle Ages, Book B (Boston: Wadsworth, 2013), 348.
The book begins with a prologue, in which a letter is sent from a musician working for a cardinal in 1347. It is sent from the papal court of Avignon and is received by some of the musician's ...
TitleAuthor/ EditorPublisherDate James Galways’ Music in TimeWilliam MannMichael Beazley Publishers1982 The Concise Oxford History of MusicGerald AbrahamOxford University Press1979 Music in Western CivilizationPaul Henry LangW. W. Norton and Company1941 The Ultimate Encyclopaedia of Classical MusicRobert AinsleyCarlton Books Limited1995 The Cambridge Music GuideStanley SadieCambridge University Press1985 School text: Western European Orchestral MusicMary AllenHamilton Girls’ High School1999 History of MusicRoy BennettCambridge University Press1982 Classical Music for DummiesDavid PogueIDG Books Worldwide,Inc1997
Our heart and souls at all times sense rejuvenated and lively with every beat of finest music we hear. Music comes in a variety of diverse forms which are admired and renowned for their own unique styles. Classical music is one of the breeds of musical forms that exist since many years with its visible significance in the music industry. Classical music is a part of our globe from almost 1000 years and inspires millions of people with its liveliness and simplicity.
Religion has been an important part of man’s life. Man has allowed religion to control and influence his life in many different ways, affecting both his behavior and his actions. So its not surprising that music, one of man’s earliest expressive forms, has also been influenced by religion. Religion has had an effect on man’s music all throughout history, from the early Egyptians to even now. So it is only natural that Western music should also have been affected by religion. Western music, and its development by composers, has been strongly influenced by the Christian religion, especially in the Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque periods. The music in these periods laid the foundation for all the different types of music we enjoy today.
The social attitudes surrounding these subjects and purposes heavily influenced composers approaches to writing, use of modes to create moods, instrumentation for texture and even figuration for interest. The Development of instruments plays an important role in the composers work, brass instruments like the Trombone and the French Horn, woodwind like the flute or clarinet or string and plucked instruments like the lute and double bass. Each varying from culture to geographical origin to century. Recently a 500 year old instrument was finally built by Slawomir Zubrzycki, the Viola Organista designed by the great Leonardo Da Vinci who at the time simply did not pocess the means of constructing this magnificent instrument, for if he did we surely would of seen a significant cultural trend amongst the music composers of the era.
Music has shaped the lives of people throughout history. Even in its earliest forms, music has included use of instruments. One of the oldest musical instruments known is a variation of the flute; the original flute is thought to date back nearly 67,000 years ago. Tonight we are going to move throughout the eras with a history of instrumental music. This concert will begin with the Renaissance Era and continue through time until we have reached modern instrumental music.
Atlas, A.W. Renaissance Music: Music in Western Europe, 1400-1600. 1st ed. New York: Norton, 1998.
Music has been around for thousands of years throughout the world dating all the way back to prehistoric times proven by the digging up of a 9,000-year-old flute that had seven holes drilled into it to create a musical scale in China ("Prehistoric flute music:," 2000). Music went through numerous stages before becoming what we know music as today. The earliest periods of music were the Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque Periods which took place from the years 500-1760. The next cluster of periods were the Classical, Romantic, and Modern Periods which ended in 1930 to bring us to the most recent periods: Twentieth Century Period and the ongoing Contemporary and Twenty First Century Periods.
Beethoven is viewed as a transitional figure between the classical and romantic eras and from 1800 to 1809 he wrote some of the most revolutionary compositions in the history of western music. This essay therefore will aim to discuss the numerous ways in which Ludwig Van Beethoven expanded the formal and expressive content of the classical style he inherited. From the early 1770s to the end of the eighteenth century the concept of the symphonic style and sonata style dominated most of the music composed. These forms, employed countless times by Mozart and Haydn, stayed relatively constant up until the end of the eighteenth century, when Beethoven began to extend this Viennese classical tradition. Many musicologists have put forward the idea of Beethoven music falling into four periods.
Works Cited Arnold, Denis, ed. , pp. 113-117. The New Oxford Companion to Music. Vol.
Introduction The world is changing and so is the style of music. Often people who do not have any musical background might think that classical music is boring and only for more mature audiences. In fact, the sales of traditional Western classical music albums are decreasing and many symphony orchestras and operas are struggling to find endowments and audiences. It is considered that classical music today occupies a position similar to that of religion, as a form of art rather than entertainment or just a background noise (Johnson, 2002). Unlike popular music, classical music may be more sophisticated and complex in its form.
Many of the songs we have today of the Middle Ages were in Latin, and are by anonymous composers. Many were written by wandering people, many of them men and churchmen without permanent residences of their own. Men who could not obtain a position in the Church and had to drop out were called goliards. These goliards wandered around the land, composing and performing for people. Their music was mostly comprised of the "’eat, drink, and be merry’ type, appropriate to the wanton kind of life the goliards lived" (Stolba, 99). Carl Orff, the composer of the Carmina Burana, used the poems found in the largest surviving records of Latin secular music that we have today. The Codex latinus 4660 was held in the Benedictine monastery at Benediktbeurn. Many of the songs speak of love, many of them lascivious. Others speak of drinking, satires of the religious life and even liturgical plays. A few of them are even written in the vernacular of the region in that time (Stolba, 99).
Classical music has a big impact in today’s music; modern music is influenced by music from the Classical, Baroque and Romantic eras. Many of today’s modern songs are inspired or even copied from music of this periods, and even when we don’t realized by listening to modern popular songs we are actually listening in some way to music composed by famous composers of the classical periods of music, that’s why I believe that without the creative intellect of famous composers such as Bach, Chopin, Shubert, Beethoven and many others modern music that we know today it would not exist because many songs are a result of the evolution of music, and their fundamental roots come from classical composers.
Ullmann, Walter. A Short History of the Papacy in the Middle Ages. 2nd ed. New York City, NY: Routledge, 2003.