Developments of Music During the Middle Ages

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International Baccalaureate History

The Middle Ages: Cradle of Modern Music

        The rich orchestration of Beethoven’s symphonies and the charming melodies of Mozart’s piano sonatas are easily recognizable, but few people can identify with the names or the works of medieval composers such as Léonin or Guillaume de Machaut.  Better-known musical geniuses are praised for their masterpieces, but their works would have never been created were it not for developments made in earlier time periods.  Throughout the Middle Ages, the creation of music notation, polyphony, and form paved the path for many great composers that would follow.  In the early medieval period, European monks developed music notation, ensuring that their ideas could be passed down in the form of manuscripts.  Apart from this important development, music composition evolved as more and more voices were added to the original single-line melodies of the time, a stylistic trait known as polyphony.  Nearing the end of the Middle Ages, secular music took on fixed musical form, a development that would create the basis for centuries of music composed thereafter.  The sounds of medieval music were quite simple in melodies and harmonies, but the period’s various developments make it arguably the most important era for music.

        The invention of musical notation, time signature, and staff can be attributed to a series of events that occurred in the medieval churches.  At the beginning of the Middle Ages, the Gregorian chant, “a single melodic line that was sung without any accompaniment", became the central tradition of the Christian church (Reese 115).  As the quantity of melodies grew to number in the thousands, singers became perturbed by the different rhythms and pitches that they had to recall during performances.  In the eleventh century, neumes, small ascending and descending signs similar to French accents, were introduced under the Latin texts of the chants (Pisk and Ulrich 33).  They provided contours of the melody, although they lacked a certain level of precision.  Between 1250 and 1280, neumes were changed to a form of square notation, first proposed by Franco de Cologne in his treatise Ars Cantus Mensurabilis (Horne Para 3).  This important book was influential throughout Europe, and the continent’s musicians embraced the ideas presented in its pages.  Quickly, performers learned to read and interpret the notation, which led to its popularity and continued development.  Nearly a century after the publication of Ars Cantus Mensurabilis, an Italian monk called Guido d’Arezzo sought a more accurate notation, and he eventually created a four-lined staff in order to fixate the pitches of the neumes (Einstein 23).  Clefs were then placed on the staff in order to represent the pitches of C and F.  Throughout the music community, this is widely accepted as the birth of modern music notation.  However, it has been proposed other forms of musical notes were developed in Mesopotamia long before d’Arezzo’s time, but the evidence for this theory is limited and extremely controversial (McComb Para 12).  While ancient Mesopotamian scores remained primitive, the notation developed in the medieval era evolved into the music scores widely used today (Hawes Para 2).  At the start of the 1300s, melodies were reserved for solo singers, but all the progression in music notation made it possible for multiple voices to sing together.  Therefore, it was logical that the notion of time signature was developed in order for singers to stay organized during chants.  The contributions made by various groups of musicians in the medieval period created the possibility for music to be passed down from generation to generation, and freed composers from the rigid bonds of monophonic music.  Apart from being able to write much more complex pieces, composers could also mark down dynamics and inflections; thus, music had found a means of preservation.  Perhaps most remarkably, the steps taken during the medieval period were the first towards creating the world’s only internationally understood language.  The drastic differences made during the Middle Ages helped create the notion of music as an art form.

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        Apart from theory developments, the medieval period was also the turning point for music genres featuring diverging parts and melodies.  Between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, polyphony, the concept of multiple melodic lines, was born in medieval churches (“Medieval Music: Birth of Polyphony”).  By the 1100s, the Gregorian chant still formed a keystone in sacred music, and it was upon this foundation that most developments took root.  At the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, a composer by the name of Léonin took the popular chant melodies and placed them in the bass as long held notes.  He then added a ...

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Developments of Music During the Middle Ages
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