In the Medieval Ages, listening to music was said to be one
of the major entertainments of people ranked from below to top. Music was played to the accompaniment of fairy
tales and myths so that people could enjoy the stories together with the music,
and in this way, a segmental entertainment was developed rather than merely
listening to the yarns spun by the storytellers known as Bards. Along with the folk music, ‘plainsongs’ started to be used at the churches, which were “an
importation from the East, imposed upon the newly converted people of western
and northern Europe” (Ulrich, 56). Therefore, there emerged a conflict of
tastes, and “the history of music in Middle Ages in large part reflected that
conflict” (Ulrich, 56).
Medieval music, usually considered as falling between the 5th
Century and 15th Century, is divided into two different periods in
terms of the used instruments, textual forms, notation, and genres. The first period is considered as the interval
that falls between the 5th Century and 12th Century,
specifically the 1150s, since very little is known about the time between the 5th
Century and the 11the Century. The second period of the medieval music is
considered to be between the 1550s and the beginning of the 15th
Century, which was followed by Renaissance tradition (Hindley, 65).
The first period of the Medieval Music featured “the
introduction of what may be called vertical
troping, that is, the practice of adding new material above or below”
(Ulrich, 56) of the horizontal movement of the notes. The introduction was
about a new melody that was added to, and played together with the only melody
of the songs of the previous centuries. Polyphony,
“the style of simultaneously combining a number of parts, each forming an
individual melody and harmonizing with each other” (Polyphony), is specified
for the medieval music by H. Ulrich as “a chant sung at one pitch level by one
group, and sung simultaneously at a fifth below by another” (57). Polyphony brought
a great change in the textural forms of the western music and led music to an evolvement
that constituted the western music we
know today (Hoppin, 187). Therefore, the aim of this paper is to show this
crucial change and its reflections in the traditional western music, give
information about the first examples of polyphonic music and its structure by
concentrating on the insight of the medieval compositions, and also illustrate
this change with examples.
Before the polyphonic melodies were used in the history of
music, pieces were usually consisted of a single melody that repeated itself
several times, usually to accompany a story that was orally told rather than
solely to be listened to. A horizontally single-lined melody is called monophonic. Here is an example of a monophonic
melody that is formed by a single melody:
(Cassidy, Monophonic Texture)
As
it is seen, the melody goes with a single note at a particular time and no
single note has a harmonic note until the end of its duration. That means, the
audience hears only a sound after a sound of a plain and flat melody. Therefore,
one can conclude that monophonic music was, not completely but to a great
extent, a part of the storytelling process rather than a form of art by itself.
Towards the end of the first medieval music period, music
was transformed into a form that was dominated several harmonic melodies and
accepted as a way of entertainment by itself with the introduction of polyphony.
“The earliest unmistakable reference to harmonized music appears to be in
Hucbald’s De harmonica institutione” (Hughes, 276). Hucbald was a monk of
St. Amand in Flanders, whose reference to simultaneous sounds is accepted as
the most convincing statement and one of the earliest descriptions of
harmonized medieval music made back in the medieval period; Hucbald writes:
Consonance is the calculated and concordant combination of
two notes, which will only occur if two notes of different pitch are combined
to form a musical unity, as happens when a man and a boy sing the same tune, or
in what is generally known as organizationem.
(Hughes, 277).
It
might be concluded that the word organization
stands for a structure of part-singing. Here is an example of a part-singing
melody:
(Fletcher, Parallel Melody Lines)
This
new way of composing music is called Organum
by a written agreement on music, entitled Musica
Enchiriadis, which “was formerly attributed to Hucbald, but it is now,
after proposals to ascribe it to other authors, reckoned as anonymous” (Hughes,
277), and dated to sometime around the second part of the 9th
Century (Christensen, 480). It is widely accepted that Organum was the first
step that enlarged the imagination of many composers, such as Johann Sebastian
Bach and George Frederic Handel, who evolved music in the following centuries
and shaped the music form that is known as the traditional western music today.
Although Organum,
as a technique, can be described in significantly different ways, considering
the period in which the work was composed, Musica
Enchiriadis talks about a practice that determines a standard form for the
early examples of polyphonic melodies. According to that standard, “the first
group sings the vox principalis
(principal voice) and the second group sings the vox organalis (organal voice)” (Ulrich, 57). Musica Enchiriadis suggests that polyphony is based the rule that the
base notes should be included their fourths or fifths, sung by the second group.
Here is an example of an Organum’s first notes:
(C and G on the treble clef)
In
the example, it is seen that the C
note has its perfect fifth, G. Organum’s first part follows this rule for
its each note and every note is sung together with its fourth or fifth. To
illustrate, if we have a sequence of C-D-E
(base notes), the organum of that base notes should be included either G-A-B (the fifths), or F-G-A (the fourths). Hence, an Organum’s first part looks like:
(Te
Deum, two-voiced)
The
above example is from Te Deum which
was one of the earliest examples of Organum and is named as “strict organum” in
the Musica Enchiriadis (Ultan, 52).
The ‘original voice’ in the Te deum
may be said to be the equivalent of vox
principalis and the ‘organum’ is the equivalent of vox organalis. Consequently, some harmonized, two-voiced
compositions came into the ears with the practice of Organum in the Middle
Ages, which, inevitably, led the western music to evolve into the shape of what
it is today.
Octaves, “the interval between the two notes at the extremes
of an octave” (Octave), in a composition are not compulsory, but each voice can
be doubled, according to Musica
Enchiriadis, with “the principalis
an octave below and the organalis an
octave above, resulting in a texture comprising four parallel lines” (Ulrich, 57).
(Te Deum,
four-voiced)
Here
in the example, one can see that the original voice has its octave below while
the organum has its octave above, and a four-voiced composition is formed. This
doubling method was useful when a choir of boys and men were entrusted with the
part-singing performance (Ulrich, 57). However, either the simple type
(two-voice) or the compound type (four-voice) was used, one can understand that
the principal rules for parallel writing were practiced and chants that were
treated in parallel organum were produced in the Middle Ages.
In conclusion, it must be stated that the first period of
medieval music was a time when a great change occurred in the history of musical
compositions. The introduction of polyphonic melodies was a revolution for the
traditional western music. Although there were many changes in the period from
the point of instruments, notation and genres, the change in the textual form
of the pieces was the greatest one. Organum, the name given to the earliest
practices of polyphonic music, was produced with the apposition of the fourths
or fifths of the base notes to the principal melody and sometimes, a
four-voiced structure was created by the addition of octaves, as it is
described in the Musica Enchiriadis
which was an anonymous work commenting on the period’s music.
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