MUAR 211 Week 1 January 8-12, 2018

Introduction and Basic Concepts 08/01/18

Sacred music: religious music
▪ All early written music is sacred

Secular music: all non-religious music

▪ dance music, for entertainment, etc.

Ensemble: what instruments and voices are in a piece

▪ This can tell you a lot about the music: types on instruments/voices, type of music, century
▪ Ex: string quartet
→ 2 violins, 1 viola, 1 cello
→ Multi-movement (4)
→ 18th century or later

Form: structure of the piece

▪ ie: how many times melody repeats, bridge, etc.

Texture:
▪ Homophony: melody + accompaniment
▪ Monophony: melody and nothing else (ex: chant)
→ Even if people are singing in different octaves (parallel octaves)
▪ Polyphony: different melodies at the same time
See course notes for more definitions

10/01/18
Medieval – Music of the Early Christian Church through the 12 Century th

▪ Earliest Music in Western World (Europe)

▪ Most music isn’t written down
▪ Everything written for instruments is lost up until the 12th century
▪ Church had a lot of power (kings chosen only if pope allowed it)
▪ We have many images of people playing music with people dancing from before this time.
→ They were playing music they had memorized, like most music of the time.

Earliest music: usually text (words) sung to a melody.

▪ The written music from that time is mostly written down by someone who had previously
memorized it.
▪ Old music written in Latin: no lines, we don’t really know how to read the notes or the
rhythm. Although it’s hard for us to read some of the earlier pieces, sometimes there are
later versions of the same piece that we can read and it can help to figure out the original.
→ Music is written down by people who copied it for a living (monk or nun). So we
don’t really know who most of the composers are.
- But composers didn’t consider themselves to be the artistic composer
anyway, because they thought the music came to them from god
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▪ Everything before 1450 is a manuscript (no printing press)

▪ Another Latin piece: lots of writing, only notes on some of the words.
→ This notation is for people who had already memorized it. The notes were just to
remind them.
▪ Some of the manuscripts have a red line, indicating the pitch. The distance between the
notes and the line indicate the pitches. This is how we write music today too.

Before the Medieval Period

▪ Hebrews have had singing music since 1000 years before Christ. Christians did the same.
▪ They sang (and still do sing) psalms in synagogue and church
▪ Psalms are written in the bible, and for a long time, they were still reading the bible in
Latin, which was only a scholarly language (not a living language).
→ They are poetry
→ Says in the bible notes for the music director, “to be accompanied by wind
instruments”

5th-8th century: no surviving notated music

9th century: find the first manuscripts of music that still survive
▪ From western Europe, a lot came from what is now France
▪ All of them are sacred, written by anonymous scribes
▪ Books were extremely rare and very valuable
→ The monks would have to all sing from a single book
▪ Important: We don’t find anything else but this sacred music for 300 years because:
→ The church were the only ones who were literate, and they didn’t care for secular
music
→ The church was powerful, but they didn’t necessarily surpress secular music. The
peasants were the ones who had the secular music and they just weren’t literate.

Chants
▪ Plainchant: Viderunt omnes
→ What makes it a chant:
- Monophonic texture: one melody line and nothing else
- Sacred latin text
- Ametrical (or nonmetrical)
- Harmonic aspect: Had groups of pitches (pitch is a frequency) that went
together (they didn’t sing random notes)  mode
• Note: If you take a pitch and double its frequency, you get an octave
(A 440Hz, next A is 880Hz)
• Using modes allows you to have a cadence (a resting place in musi
• The final: most important pitch in the mode, the pitch at the end
- Ensemble type: acapella
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→ We don’t know much about how they performed things. They already knew how
and didn’t have to write it down.
→ The text existed before the music
→ Note: Vernacular language = the language spoken by the people

▪ “Chant” isn’t really a genre, the function or genre depends on the text:
→ The mass: most important public worship service in the roman catholic church
- Have to know parts of the mass (in bold) in class notes (spelled correctly)
- We have to know this because they were the most important texts for music
history of that time

→ The divine office: what monks and nuns do as a profession

- They sang a particular text at all of these times (see class notes)
- Closest to the ancient Hebraic practice

▪ So, chant was performed at: mass (public service) or divine office (private service)
▪ To the medieval mind: these were all sacred and sent from god

12/01/18
Note: texture has nothing to do with if instruments are involved or not.
▪ Ex: a flute can only play one note at a time  always monophonic
▪ However, a guitar can play chords  not monophonic
▪ Although most of the early music we know of was monophonic, the other textures still
existed (just not written)

Plainchant: recall - always performed in 2 places: either in mass or in the divine office
▪ Structure of mass: the title of the parts are named after the first words in the text
→ Gloria in excelsis: can be used every single day in Mass
→ Gradual: part of mass proper, for a particular time of year
- Even if you just say it instead of singing it, it’s still a gradual because what
makes it a gradual is its text
- Ex: Viderunt omnes
• Acapella men (ensemble)
• Sacred
• No sense of beat
• “Do” is on a melisma (must be on a vowel)
• Gradual (genre)

Text Setting
▪ Melismatic: single syllable of text that is sung with many pitches
▪ Syllabic: one note for each syllable
→ Easier songs to sing (like folk music) are syllabic
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▪ You don’t need to know neumatic

▪ Note: most music has both

St. Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179)

▪ In her pictures, her face is always on fire, meaning divinity (ie: directly influenced by god)
→ Lots of imagery in churches so that illiterate people could understand the stories
▪ Very prolific writer and wrote on a variety of topics, even female sexuality (rare to find
anything about that in the medieval period)
▪ Convent abbess
▪ Unusually powerful woman for her time
▪ Wrote text and music for chants, and they were difficult!
▪ Know that she’s from the 12th century (in general, we’ll need to know when people lived)

▪ Ex: Alleluia! O virga mediatrix

→ Chant, alleluia (part of the proper of the mass)
→ Acapella (men)
→ Latin sacred text
→ Monophonic
→ Melismatic
→ In the church modes (can’t hear it, have to memorize)
- Note: the way they use the modes in the 9th and 12th centuries is very
different (we don’t learn this)
→ Responsorial Performance: Notice how the ensemble changes
- One person, then a response from a group of people, then back to one.
- At the end of piece: alleluia from all of them

Performance practice:
▪ Responsorial performance: one person followed by a group who responds
▪ Direct performance: solo or unison throughout
▪ Antiphonal singing: singers divided into two groups that take turns singing
→ Boys and men, women and men

▪ Note: we don’t know much about performance

→ 11th century: found sackbuts (old trombones) in the church. There was no music for
them, but they did something.

12th Century
▪ First instrumental music
→ Use to be mostly improvised, or they played the vocal music
→ Now there’s music with no text
→ Has a beat because they were dance pieces (most important aristocratic activity)
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▪ First written secular music

→ Courtier: not royalty but part of the court
→ Peasants wouldn’t have heard this music, it was more for royalty
→ Example recording: text about love, written in vernacular language (French)