Introduction to Early Music

I. Ancient Society

We don’t know what the music of ancient Greece and Rome sounded like because the people of those cultures didn’t have an exact way of writing music down. However, we know a lot of about what the Greeks and Romans thought of music from their writings and from what their instruments looked like in pictures. We know from both their writings and pictures that music was a very important part of their way of life.

The economies of the Greek and Roman empires were based on slavery. They were militaristic societies that would conquer neighboring peoples and enslave them. At the top of the society were the patricians, the slave owners. In the middle were the plebeians, free citizens who worked as artisans or small farmers. They had little rights and their lives were made more and more difficult by being called upon to serve in the army and pay taxes. At the bottom were the slaves who did the work on giant plantation-type farms.

The Roman empire lasted a thousand years and spanned from England in the north of Europe to Tunisia in the north of Africa. As the empire grew, the problems of the plebeians became greater and greater, and so the Roman army had to look elsewhere for fighters. The army began depending on mercenaries hired from the very tribal peoples the Romans had enslaved. In the cities, mobs of unemployed plebeians often rioted and generally caused trouble, while on the battlefield unmotivated mercenaries did a poor job of fighting for an empire they hated. These two social factors led to the decline and eventual collapse of the empire. The strong anti-slavery sentiment of the plebeians led them to convert to Christianity, which grew and grew until finally in 330 A.D. with the conversion of the Emperor Constantine it became the state religion. On the battlefield the empire kept shrinking until by 410 A.D. barbarians overran the city of Rome itself.

II. Feudal Society

When the barbarian peoples took over a part of the Roman Empire, they didn’t instantly transform it to their tribal ways. Instead a blending of the two ways of life occurred. The barbarian leaders liked the patricians’ homes and would move in, drink their wine, wear their clothes, and keep their slaves. Often the slaves would continue to live and work there in exchange for protection and a small plot of land to grow food for themselves. The cities of the empire fell apart during this period, but the large plantations in the countryside became the centers of life. Over time a new economic system, feudalism, developed. At the top of this system was the Lord of the Manor; at the bottom was the serf. Serfs were better off than slaves, but not by much. Their lives were controlled by oppressive rules called banalities. They had a small plot of land to grow food for themselves and had to work in the Lord’s fields, too. Every time they pulled up a bucket of water for themselves they also had to pull one up for the Lord. When they baked a loaf of bread for themselves in the Lord’s oven, they also had to bake one for the Lord. When a serf got married, the Lord had “the right of the first night” with the wife. Life under the banalities went on for centuries with little change.

While the empire fell apart, the church held together and over time converted many of the barbarian leaders. The church continued to use the language of the empire, Latin. Everyone else began speaking a mix of Latin and local languages, and this was how modern Spanish, Italian, and French evolved.

III. Rise of Cities

One group of Roman refugees managed to escape the barbarian invasions by hiding in the marshes and small islands on the coast of the Adriatic Sea. Instead of dealing with the new feudal rulers of mainland Italy, they built ships and traded with cities in the Middle East. This was the beginning of the city of Venice and typifies how cities grew up in between the cracks of the feudal system in Europe, eventually leading to the Renaissance in 1400 A.D.

IV. Music in Feudal Society

There were two types of music during the Middle Ages; religious and secular (non-religious or popular). We know a lot about church music because the church developed the system we use today for notating music. Using this same system, some secular music was also written down, although most of these collections are from later periods of the Middle Ages leading up to the Renaissance. Music was very important to Christianity according to the earliest writings.

The main purpose of sacred music was to chant the church services of the Offices, eight daily services performed only at monasteries and cathedrals, and the Mass. For several centuries, the notation of these chants was made only to provide the general melody, while the singer was free to improvise rhythms and added “ornamentation.” The music was meant to be secondary to the words of the services. There were several kinds of chants, but around 600 A.D. Pope Gregory organized the chants of the Roman church into what is now known as Gregorian chants. Legend has it that it wrote them all.

The vernacular, or popular music of the Middle Ages, was based largely on improvisation that often started with the same church chant melodies. Wandering troupes of performers such as the Jongleurs of France went from castle to castle singing, dancing, doing acrobatic tricks and tricks with trained animals. If a jongleur was taken in by some Lord, they rose in rank to become a minstrel. Jongleurs usually didn’t compose the songs they sang. Later aristocrats called Troubadors in the south of France and Trouveres in the north composed songs and hired Jongleurs to perform them. These wealthy composers had collections of their songs written down, and many of these collections still exist. The songs included epic poems set to music about heroic knights, love songs and dramatic ballads. Similar wandering knight-musicians roamed Germany (Minnesingers and Meistersingers) and other parts of Europe.

Gregorian chants were a single voice texture, which we call monophonic. Around 1000 A.D., a new polyphonic music (multiple voice texture) music began to emerge. The large Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris was a center of this type of music. Just as the single voice Gregorian chants had rules to help make them sound even and balanced, the new polyphonic music also had rules, called conterpoint or voice leading. These counterpoint rules continued to guide the music of the Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, and Romantic period, and even jazz improvisation. Polyphonic music became the music of the Renaissance and reached its high point during the Baroque.

Response Question: What was the life of a musician like in the middle ages? Did anything stay the same about the church music of the Middle Ages and the music of today?