A Brief Thought About Medieval Music

My daughter is a choral singer, and in her high school, the choir puts on and performs in a madrigal dinner every year around Christmas.  She also sings in the Indianapolis Children’s Choir, and this year, they are going to be singing some Christmas music in Middle English.  I looked at the music, and this made me wonder about music in the Middle Ages.  How did it morph from the initially simple, liturgical vocal music to the complexity of Bach and others? 

In Western European culture in the early Middle Ages, most “formal” music was centered on the Church, and took the form of Gregorian Chants, which are believed by some to have been codified by Pope Gregory I at the end of the 7^th century.  This example of Gregorian chanting was recorded in 1930.  Gregorian chants are still sung today, often as part of relaxation music, and usually have some type of minimal accompaniment.  Relaxation recordings may also have such chants superimposed over nature sounds.

 In the late 1200’s a style of secular music was developed called Italian Trecento Madrigal, unaccompanied vocal music for two, or more rarely, three voices.  An example of this form can be found here: Italian Trecento madrigal  .  The other common form of secular music was that provided my minstrels or troubadours, which was essentially a lyrical performance of poetry.

Renaissance madrigal music, which took its name but not its style from the Italian Trecento Madrigal, was not established until the early 16^th century.  This music was again typically unaccompanied vocals, featuring anywhere from two to six voices.  Later, in the early part of the 17^th century, madrigal music began to merge with opera and was eventually replaced with the operatic aria.  This madrigal piece is from the early 17^th century:  Sing We at Pleasure.

 The most common instruments in the 13^th and 14^th centuries were the guitar, the shawm (which was redesigned into the oboe in the middle of the 17^th century), the cittern (pictured), and the recorder, which most of us in the United States were forced to learn to play in music class in grade school.

 

Cittern

By the 17^th century, more musical instruments had been developed, such as the cornetto/trumpet, the lute, the violin (developed from an earlier, larger instrument called the viol), the harpsichord, and the flute.  The development of these instruments made possible the composition of more complex music.

 For those of you who think that history is a waste of time and roll your eyes when someone trots out Santayana’s quote about those who can’t remember the past being doomed to repeat it, it seems to me that much of today’s popular hip-hop music is…..a more or less lyrical performance of poetry.