Medieval, dark time, music used to assist with long hours of prayer.
Plainchant: unadorned and unaccompanied, consisting of a single unaccompanied melody line, a musical texture called “monophony” (“one sound”)
Monophonic texture: a texture consisting of a single, unaccompanied melody line
Ave maris stella: Hail, Star of the Ocean
Revering to the virgin mary:
Hail, star of the ocean, gentle mother of God, and also always virgin, joyous portal of the sky.
Taking that sweet ave, which from Gabriel came, peace confirm within us, changing eva’s name.
This is known as a Plainchant hym: A plainchant with a straightforward, memorable, and compact melody; a melody that’s repeated with each new stanza of text. These were sung during the regular “offices” (eight to ten short services conducted across the span of any given day) they were never sung at mass (that special “high service” that celebrates a re-enactment of the last supper)
The most important of the offices (hours):
Matins: held before dawn
Lauds: held at daybreak
Vespers: held at sunset
Other types of plainchant are: monotone plainchant, sung primarily on a single pitch.
No music to dance to due to the fact that such music was looked at as causing sexual arousal and unwanted desires and thoughts.
Plainchant was not accredited and took hundreds of years to create, it was created to assist with prayers, was the greatest body of music in western history.
It is the only music to have survived in written form from the dark ages.
2. High middle ages:
Rebirth of Europe, public safety played a major part in recovering from the dark ages, Christianity was to thank for this. Much of the technological “advances” accredited were taken from the muslim world.
Polyphony: a musical texture in which there are two or more principal melodies heard simultaneously.
Plainchant was taught orally, polyphony required the ability to read and write music.
Brought about the concept of composer (and ego) composers began to sign their names to work.
Organum: the earliest composed type of music. An organum is a two-part polyphonic composition in which a plainchant is heard in one part while the other part decorates and embellishes that plainchant.
A polyphonic composition in which the word of God (as manifested by the plainchant) is present in one voice, while the hand of man (as portrayed by the decorative voice) celebrates and elaborates the word of God.
Florid organum: “flowery” organum. 1150-1300
Ars antique: the old art
Plainchant were extended.
Tenore: to hold or sustain.
Duplum: the decorative voice
Leonine: the first post ancient world composer to sign his name to his music,
Perotin: another great ars antique composer.
Alleluia pascha nostrum: hallelujah our Passover, by Leonin
A melisma occurs when a single syllable of text is sung over multiple changing pitches.
Things that led to the end of the middle ages:
The Babylonian captivity (when the pope left Rome and went to south France)
The instructor made a funny comment about Trenton new jersey!
The Black death (
The hundred years war
Music in the 14th century:
Ars nova: the new art
Much of its music is secular, non-religious
The music is of extraordinary, often daunting polyphonic complexity, with rhythmic systems carried to incredible extremes, new classifications of consonance and dissonance, and new compositional genres.
Isorhythm music: music in which complex rhythmic patterns are repeated over and over again, even as the pitch material does something completely different. a technique about treating rhythm and pitch separately, two basic aspects of music melody and rhythm (color and talea)
Guillaume de Machaut: a great poet and composer of Isorhythmic music.
Through-composed: evolving as they go, and feature no particular patterning or repetition.
Hocket: rhythmic gaps in each part which are filled in by the other part.
