medieval music essay

Medieval Period Music Guide: A Brief History

Imagine a time when the air was filled with the haunting melodies of Gregorian chants, the rhythmic pulses of courtly dances, and the harmonies that echoed within the cold stone walls of ancient cathedrals. Welcome to the medieval music period—a captivating era of music that spanned almost a millennium, weaving together the threads of art, culture, and spirituality.

This guide will look at some of the history, key composers, and important musical features to help give you an understanding of what makes a piece from this time sound the way it does. Let’s get started.

Table of Contents

When was the Medieval Period of Music?

Because it covers such a long time frame, stretching from 500-1400AD, historians like to split the Medieval era into three mini-periods, each of which saw various new musical developments.

• Early Medieval music (500-1150)
• High Medieval music (1150-1300)
• Late Medieval music (1300-1400)

These mini periods saw different styles of medieval music that we’ll cover in this article.

If you’d like a broader overview of the entire history of Western art music tradition, do take a look at our guide to classical music eras here.

Gregorian Chant

The dominant form of music in the Early Medieval period was Gregorian chant , which was named after Pope Gregory, who was credited with bringing it to the West.

Otherwise known as plainsong, it was liturgical, meaning that it was sung by monks as a ceremonial part of Mass in the Catholic Church.

This was monophonic music , meaning that it contained just a single melodic line, sung by the monks in unison, with no accompanying harmony parts or instrumental accompaniment.

Here is an example of a monophonic plainsong sung by the Gregorian Choir of Paris:

The 9th Century saw the development of organum.

This is where an extra voice is added above the main melody, usually at a fixed interval of a perfect fourth or fifth away.

This can be seen as an extremely primitive form of counterpoint (the relationship between simultaneous interdependent musical lines) and the beginning of harmony as we now know it.

Here’s a video of some early organum where you can hear the second voice singing the second line.

Liturgical Dramas

The first liturgical dramas were probably seen in the 10th Century.

A liturgical drama was a sort of religious musical play where monks, nuns, and priests sang and acted out biblical stories or scenes, including dramas that told the stories of Christmas or Easter.

Secular Music and Development of Polyphony

Although most music in the medieval period was religious, the High Medieval period saw the birth of the troubadour in France.

These wandering minstrels would make a living by traveling from town to town and were some of the earliest professional musicians.

They performed monophonic secular songs on topics including war, chivalry, and ‘courtly love’ – the love of an idealized woman from afar. The Minnesinger was the Germanic equivalent of this tradition.

Ars Nova was an artistic movement that gained traction in the Late Medieval period, at the beginning of the 14th Century.

Meaning “new art” in Latin, this was secular music that was increasingly expressive and varied.

Polyphonic writing (which has two or more simultaneous independent melodic parts) had begun to develop in the High Medieval period, and this now became the dominant style.

This shift led the way for the Renaissance era that was to follow, which would be characterized by a grander and more complex style.

Here is a piece of polyphonic music by Guillaume de Machaut, a major composer of the late Medieval era:

Music Notation in the Medieval Era

It was during the Medieval period that the foundations were laid for the way that we write down music today.

Until around the 9th Century, there was no written music, so pieces had to be taught “by ear” from person to person.

An early solution to this in the world of plainsong was the introduction of neumes , a series of symbols placed above the words, which indicated whether the pitch went up or down.

To begin with, the notation was not sophisticated enough to accurately record every aspect of a tune, so it was used as more of a memory aid, rather than as a comprehensive informative document.

As a result, interpretation of pieces would vary significantly from region to region.

Gradually, the notes began to be placed at different heights to give a rough indication of the size of the interval between each note then, gradually, horizontal lines were added for more accurate placement: this would ultimately lead to the five-line stave that we use for music notation today.

Now that pieces could be notated on parchment or paper, composers were able to share their music much more easily and widely, which allowed the Church to standardize the musical material for its religious ceremonies.

Rhythmic Notation

Incredibly, there was no way of notating rhythm until the 13th Century, when a system of rhythmic modes was developed.

These were set patterns of long and short note durations.

German theorist Franco of Cologne then came up with a system that laid the foundations for the way we write rhythms today, whereby differently shaped notes signified different note lengths.

This approach was popularised by Phillipe de Vitry, one of the most important composers of the Ars Nova period.

The functional tonal harmony and cadences that would dominate the Baroque, Classical, and Romantic periods had not yet been developed.

Medieval music was based upon a series of scales called modes whereby a melody would be built upon a particular scale.

There were eight ‘church modes’, which were all considered to have different effects upon the listener:

• Hypodorian (which we would now call Aeolian)
• Hypophrygian (which we now call Locrian)
• Hypolydian (which we would call Ionian)
• Hypomixolydian (which is like a Dorian scale, but with the fourth degree as its ‘Finalis’, or ending note)

These modes can be accessed by playing a scale starting on various degrees of the major scale .

For example, a D Dorian scale contains the same notes as a C major scale but has quite a different character.

The modal approach would return centuries later in some 20th Century classical music and jazz.

Medieval Instruments

As we’ve discovered, the Early Medieval period was dominated by vocal music but there were still a number of instruments used in the medieval era .

Instrumental music began to develop alongside the vocal music, and many of the instruments used then are ancestors of instruments used by musicians today.

For example, flutes were made of wood rather than metal, and had holes instead of the complex system of keys we see now.

The lute, a fretted instrument with a hollow body, is a predecessor of the guitar, while the gemshorn, made from the horn of a goat, is a member of the ocarina family.

Meanwhile, the wooden recorder is a rare example of an instrument that has essentially retained its form since the Medieval period.

Other instruments included an early bowed string instrument called the lyre, and the hurdy-gurdy, a kind of mechanical violin.

Key Medieval Composers

Here are some of the key composers from the Medieval period:

• Stephen of Liège (850 – 920) – Belgian bishop, hagiographer, and composer of church music who was active towards the end of the Early Medieval period
• Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) – one of the best-known composers of sacred monophony. Also a writer, abbess, philosopher, and polymath
• Franco of Cologne (dates unknown) – German theorist and composer of the Late Medieval period who was instrumental in developing the notation of rhythm
• Guillaume de Machaut (1300-1377) – French poet and composer. A central figure of the Ars Nova style

So, that concludes our guide to the Medieval period of music.

We’ve learned about early developments in music theory, notation, and harmony that would go on to help shape Western art music as we know it today and about early changes in religious and secular music.

We hope you’ve enjoyed learning about this vast, mysterious, and fascinating era and that you’ve loved some of the pieces of music that we’ve shared.

Dan Farrant

Dan Farrant, the founder of Hello Music Theory, has been teaching music for over 15 years, helping hundreds of thousands of students unlock the joy of music. He graduated from The Royal Academy of Music in 2012 and then launched Hello Music Theory in 2014. He plays the guitar, piano, bass guitar and double bass and loves teaching music theory.

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Music and the emotions of medievalism: The quest for identity

• Introduction
• Published: 16 January 2020
• Volume 10 , pages 411–422, ( 2019 )

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• Helen Dell 1  

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In this special issue my co-editors Andrew Lynch and Elizabeth Randell Upton and I set ourselves a task whose complexity became more apparent as we proceeded. Writing this introduction, the task of considering the three components of our title – music, emotion, medievalism – in their various interrelations has been challenging, while at the same time convincing me of the value of scrutinizing them together.

Within the humanities, music has, until quite recently, been largely neglected in the study of medievalism. As a sounding art, it may have seemed less familiar in a field initially devoted more to sight-oriented activities, although it has been very much in evidence in a range of medievalist pursuits. Films, fiction, performances, recordings, and online games have created or adapted a range of musical tropes or their literary evocations that have become indissolubly associated with the ‘medieval.’ Possibly, the relative inattention music has received in medievalism studies is owing, as Claudia Gorbman noted, to the fact that film music tends to ‘mask its own insistence and saw away in the backfield of consciousness’ (Gorbman, 1987 , 1). Game players and film audiences may feel the results without noticing how they are produced. But trained musicologists, tuned to an awareness of music, with its narrative, ideological, and emotional implications, are able to notice and to draw these implications into the foreground. Since the early years of the present century, musicology has contributed significantly to the concept of medievalism, though not initially under that title. Musicologists’ work, perhaps as a result, did not receive the attention it warranted within the humanities. Karen Cook, Susan Fast, John Haines, Annette Kreutziger-Herr, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, Elizabeth Randell Upton, Kirsten Yri, and Nick Wilson, among others, have produced much valuable work for students of medievalism.

A little more recently the gulf between medievalism in music on the one hand and the humanities on the other has begun to be bridged from the other side. Authors and editors have realized that music cannot be excluded when medievalism is the subject of enquiry – all the more so when the emotional aspects of medievalism are in question, as in fact they always are. As David Matthews affirms: ‘“Medievalism” (however it is defined) is always bound up, necessarily and intimately, with emotional responses to the premodern past’ (Matthews, 2018 , 209).

Essay collections on medievalism have been including chapters on music for a decade and more. In 2007, David W. Marshall edited Mass Market Medievalism , which includes three chapters devoted to musical medievalism. Bettina Bildhauer and Anke Bernau’s Medieval Film ( 2009 ) has a chapter on music in medievalist movies. In Medievalisms ( 2013 ), Tison Pugh and Angela Jane Weisl devote part of a chapter to recent performances of medieval and medieval-inspired music. There is a chapter on neo-medieval music in The Middle Ages in Popular Culture , edited by Helen Young ( 2015 ). A music chapter is included in the Cambridge Companion to Medievalism ( 2016 ), edited by Louise D’Arcens. More recently, three essays were brought together in the final section of Studies in Medievalism: Authenticity, Medievalism, Music XXVI ( 2018 ), edited by Karl Fugelso. Ruth Barrett-Peacock and Ross Hagen’s essay collection, Medievalism and Metal Music Studies: Throwing Down the Gauntlet , was published in May 2019. The Oxford Handbook on Music and Medievalism , edited by Stephen C. Meyer and Kirsten Yri, forthcoming in 2019, neatly embeds the association in its title. Some of the names associated with these writings are Ruth Barrett-Peacock, Alana Bennett, James Cook, Karen M. Cook, Helen Dell, Ross Hagen, Paul Hardwick, Alexander Kolassa, Aleks Pluskowski, Tison Pugh, Simon Trafford, Alison Tara Walker, Angela Jane Weisl, Adam Whittaker, and Kirsten Yri.

Our issue adds to this expanding conversation, with new work from both musicologists and literary scholars. Our three medieval musicologists, Karen Cook, Elizabeth Randell Upton, and Kirsten Yri, are also working on the broader questions of medievalism, that is, on questions of how the ‘medieval’ and its music have been invented, modified, received, interpreted, felt, and understood, enabling them to elucidate for the non-musically trained the various musical means by which the ‘medieval’ is transmitted in different genres. Of particular relevance in this issue is their understanding of the emotional pull of music and how it can guide or manipulate the listener.

On the literary side are three scholars who combine research in the humanities with a love for and experience of music as performers, listeners, students, and teachers: Louise D’Arcens, Helen Dell, and Andrew Lynch. There are, however, no strict demarcation lines between the essays, an indication, I believe, that the conversation has now spread across what once seemed an impassable disciplinary divide. This is also true of the two 2019 book collections mentioned above.

Perhaps one could say that (as in my bridge metaphor), it might still make a difference to our mode of writing which side we start out from. Our three musicologists have tended to begin with sound and then work outwards to more general insights into medievalism and the emotions it arouses. The humanities trio in the collection have tended to work more from the side of words written about music or words evoking music or drawing on its metaphoric power, whether in fiction or argument. And it must be remembered that words heard, in sound or in imagination, also have their music – in emphasis, in timbre, in intonation, in all of which emotion plays a part, transferred from speaker to listener.

For the musicologists, Elizabeth Randell Upton’s essay discusses how repetition in music, the backbone of medieval secular and liturgical song as it is for popular and folk song today, has been routinely ignored by composers, critics and musicologists brought up on classical music:

Repetition in song form, either popular or medieval, has not often been discussed, perhaps because it seems so straightforward and simple an element. But simplicity should not imply insignificance.

Upton responds to this scholarly neglect in her discussion of a song by Bob Dylan, ‘Tangled Up in Blue,’ modeled on Guillaume de Machaut’s fourteenth-century ballade form; Upton demonstrates how an accomplished and inventive singer/composer, by exploring the ‘subtle medievalism’ of form, can bring out the play of repetition and difference in a strophic song.

Kirsten Yri has written on the quixotic experiment by Rondellus, an Estonian medieval and Renaissance ensemble, to produce an album of songs by heavy metal band Black Sabbath, translated into Latin and using medievalist performance practices. The changes include abandoning electric for acoustic instruments – ‘fiddles, organistrum, recorder, and lute [with] muted onsets, a much narrower dynamic range, and thinner timbres than electric guitars and basses’ – and using trained, refined voices to replace the typical heavy metal vocal snarls and screams. Such a metamorphosis, Yri suggests, using the terminology of Monique Scheer, translates the language of ‘anger, aggression, and pain, viewed as beyond human control and positioned as largely “physical” and “exterior”’ into the language of ‘contentedness and reflection, carry[ing] little visual bodily expression or gesture, and […] typically received as intellectual and “interior.”’

In this context, to medievalize music is to raise and refine it aesthetically and emotionally. As I think Yri assumes here, the aesthetic response is not separable from the emotional. Footnote 1 Nor, for this reason, can the aesthetic response be disinterested. Music in particular has profound emotional effects on the listener, however they are theorized. These effects, sometimes unconscious, are implicated in various attitudes and agendas and erupt into arguments whose force cannot be understood unless the depth of emotional engagement is taken into account. And the reverse is also true: one’s attitudes and agendas are implicated in the way one hears and receives music. Music creates an emotional hotspot on many levels.

Rondellus’s ‘editorial process’ constitutes a reversal of the typical trajectory by which we progress from the barbaric Middle Ages to the civilized modern era. Differences in instrumental and vocal timbre, like those between Black Sabbath and Rondellus, communicate perfectly which ‘medieval’ is in question in any given context, without the medium of words. The word ‘medieval’ is flexible enough to cope with a range of implications: positive, negative, or oscillating between the two. Yri’s essay reflects the oscillating nature of medievalism by exploring the alternative forms it takes in the work of these two medievalist music groups.

As Karen Cook notes in her essay, such oscillations are ubiquitous in medievalism. Music provides copious illustrations:

[Medieval] stereotypes have permeated Western culture since the Middle Ages themselves: the medieval past is, on the one hand, pure, tranquil, simple, religious. […] On the other hand, it was barbaric, permeated by violence, torture, and inquisition, primitive and superstitious. […] Through supporting such attributes or emotional states, medievalist musical tropes took on a sort of bifurcated polyvalence, such that the same sound can act as a ‘connotative cue’ [for a particular meaning and also its inverse] (Gorbman, 1987 , 5). Footnote 2

Thus, as Cook elaborates, in her section, ‘The bell,’ a sound may create ‘divided emotional states: on the one hand tranquility, “joy, peace, or victory,” on the other “something sinister.”’ These differences depend on the sound’s position within the narrative and in the player’s situation, since ‘the player’s emotions can and will change depending on their familiarity with the game and their own success at achieving their goals.’

Cook uses a form of Topic Theory, that is,

the analysis of how certain musical figures become saturated with and therefore convey extra-musical meanings. Unlike the Western instrumental genres most often analyzed in topic theory, though, the medievalist tropes I discuss here have been aligned with explicit narratives constructed through visual, textual, musical, and other descriptive means. As such, their array of possible emotive meanings becomes both clarified and reified as they appear in a given context.

Narrative and emotional context is thus all-important in modifying the effects of medievalist musical cues in game-playing.

Nonetheless, Cook argues, in spite of the polyvalence of certain musical sounds, some musical tropes are difficult to detach from their dominant associations:

We cannot change how certain musical sounds have been associated with medievalist contexts in the past, nor […] completely eliminate their medievalist overtones from our aural memories. Yet when we continue to rely on those sounds to create or reinforce the emotional states with which they have become so closely linked, I suggest that we inadvertently imbue the new context with a mythological […] idea of the medieval past. For example, by almost exclusively using musical tropes clearly linked to the Christian church to depict the medievalist, do we not imply that those sounds alone can represent the past, and thus imply that that is because the past was solely, wholly Christian?

Medievalism and identity

Cook alludes here to what has turned out to be a vital question in this issue and, I believe, in medievalism studies generally: the question of identity for the medievalist player, listener, viewer, reader, academic, or enthusiast of any kind. (In the academy we study medievalism, but that does not mean we are immune to its influence.) Our essays demonstrate, some more than others, that questions of identity lie at the heart of medievalism and are a potent driving force in the forms it takes and in the reactions it produces. We project something of the selves we wish to be seen in our medievalist pursuits, to those by whom we wish to be recognized. A glance at Facebook or a range of forums, online and off, offers examples of these projections.

Music plays a significant role in the establishment and maintenance, sometimes the evolution, of an identity. The quest for identity can also be seen as a factor in determining which particular associations remain dominant in medievalist music. As Cook demonstrates, in Western performances, recordings, study, games, and films, musical sounds with their associations have played a significant role in the emotionally charged interior maps that those of European descent have drawn of the medieval world. Cook’s example centralizes a homogeneously white and Christian Europe within a boundary beyond which lurks the ‘other’ little-known, alien world to be reckoned with. When these already loaded musical associations are re-enforced by similar narrative and visual cues, they have the capacity to reach beyond the fictional universe and create havoc in the world we share. That shared world is, in any case, so heavily overwritten by a range of assumptions and their concomitant emotions that it is rendered virtually invisible.

On the literary side too, as in my essay, music plays a significant role in providing (or withholding) answers to the questions of identity – who am I? who are we? who is the other? what is my relation to the other? what distinguishes me from the other? – by which we construct ourselves and those we deem ‘other,’ shoring up the differences required to sustain an identity constructed on the basis of binary opposition. Other questions naturally follow: who is my friend? who is my enemy? or perhaps, as demonstrated in D’Arcens’s and Lynch’s essays: how can ancient enmities be healed and feuds ended? Yri’s essay reflects the oscillating aspect of medievalism by exploring the alternative forms of identity it offers in the work of two medievalist music groups: that exemplified by the ‘exterior’ emotional expression of Black Sabbath – raw, bodily, and unrestrained – and the more compressed and restrained ‘interior’ expression of Rondellus.

These questions of identity may be asked at a personal, group, or national level or at an even broader level, for instance that invoked by the terms ‘East’ and ‘West’ in D’Arcens’s essay. In my essay, the distinctness of national musical traditions is recruited as the key to national identity, just as, in Cook’s essay, the bell sustains an atmosphere of medieval Christianity. In the early twentieth-century world of collector Cecil Sharp, folk music was considered as specific to a particular nation, hence ‘its fitness to serve a national purpose follow[ed] as a natural consequence’ (Sharp, 1907 , x). Thus the children of England, by imbibing English folk song from an early age, would grow up ‘naturally’ English:

Folk-song is in verity the product of the people, rising as naturally out of its consciousness, expressing as truly its feelings and its aspirations, as the song of thrush and blackbird and ousel expresses the longings of the little hearts, and their rapture in spring sun and zephyrs (Sharp and Baring-Gould, ca. 1906 , iii).

Alternatively, in D’Arcens’s essay, music and literature are offered as evidence of – and as metaphors for – the

deep and complicated intertwining of these apparently opposed cultures [‘East and West’] across hundreds of years. The task in reading Boussole is to refrain from turning Franz’s fugue into plainchant. The contradictions, blind spots, and discomforts of this narrator are the novel’s point.

In the light of this comparison, ‘plainchant’ distinctions like Sharp’s and Baring-Gould’s analogies can perhaps be seen as endeavours to dismiss the kinds of ‘contradictions, blind spots, and discomforts’ which Franz’s ‘wakeful ruminations’ engender: those discomforts ‘in which desire, denial, fascination, guilt, and the weight of history all move in counterpoint.’ Nationalist rhetoric which excludes all voices but our own is one way to shut out ‘desire, denial, fascination, guilt, and the weight of history,’ but it seems, if possible, only to increase the offence when music is conscripted in that attempt.

Time written on space

Questions of identity are also posed in temporal terms; they have to be for an identity to be maintained through time. The loosely defined ‘medieval,’ our temporal other, standing in as both opposed to modernity and as its foundation, cannot choose but be caught up in these attempts. The medieval encompasses both continuity and rupture with the present, whenever ‘the present’ is situated. In Lynch’s essay, ‘last minstrels’ inhabit a tangled temporality:

As the conduit of an imagined, loosely ‘medieval,’ past, the modern poet-as-minstrel asserts long-term cultural continuity, or at least creates possibilities of rapprochement with that past. Yet in the guise of ‘aged’ and ‘last’ minstrels, archaic survivors in a latter age, modern poets both assert a ‘medieval’ identity for themselves and their work and acknowledge the impossibility of realizing that identity when the past has already gone.

In Upton’s essay, the strategy of how we hold the medieval in the present is different. Bob Dylan enacts the medievalist entangling of time by framing his song narrative of late twentieth-century meetings and partings as a medieval ballade. In ‘Tangled Up in Blue’, Dylan ‘def[ies] time,’ eliminating it by turning it into space and stretching identity across it, trying

to be somebody in the present time, while conjuring up a lot of past images […] I wanted to defy time, so that the story took place in the present and the past at the same time. When you look at a painting, you can see any part of it, or see all of it together. I wanted that song to be like a painting (Quoted in Heylin, 2001 , 370).

There seems no possibility of ever settling the question of our identity in relation to the medieval when the term itself carries the same ambiguity. The ‘medieval’ has gone beyond recapture yet it remains and cannot be banished. Whether asserted or disavowed, as D’Arcens recognizes in her essay, the past remains, as the temporal ‘Other within the self’ of the modern, and it takes different shapes. The past has different modes according to how it is approached, as Lynch’s essay demonstrates. In music, as in imaginative literature, historical change is inflected by aesthetic and emotional responses in ‘the […] layering of time that both a sense of place and reading from the past create in the experience of individual subjects’:

Yet at the same time as [Walter] Scott emphasizes the historical changes in religious culture, social organization, manners, and tastes that have made romance archaic, he suggests its power survives still in imaginative literature, according to a poetic timeline that constructs history along lines of aesthetic pleasure and emotional allegiance, through which modern subjects can still feel close to the heart of the past.

In Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel , poetry (in which we can include music, not literally heard but made present to us through the ‘soundscape’ created by words) does not ‘provide an authentic history, or undo historical change.’ Footnote 3 Nonetheless it can allow us ‘new alignments with the past over the course of time’ by ‘attention to its creative performance.’ As in music, passages of turmoil and enmity may find a degree of resolution through changes of key or peace-offering cadences. In D’Arcens’s essay a ‘cadence’ of words is chosen to end Boussole , with Franz ‘thinking at dawn of the Danube, flowing between the two compass points [East and West], and realizing, finally, that it’s “not shameful to give in […] to the warm sunlight of hope.”’

Time is also written onto spaces, reversing Dylan’s strategy in ‘Tangled Up in Blue,’ where he paints space onto time so he can ‘see all of it together.’ John M. Ganim has suggested that ‘geography is transmuted into history,’ as instanced in Raymond Schwab’s statement that ‘India was an “antiquity of today”’ (Ganim, 2005 , 7). Temporal tricks are the mainstay of medievalism. Some countries are still ‘medieval’ according to certain sources. In the language of the early twentieth-century folklorists cited in my essay, certain ‘races’ remain ‘in a state of arrested progress while others develop a highly-organized civilization’ (Burne, 1914 , 3). Some appear to do both at once, like Timothy Lynch’s ‘technologically sophisticated band of medieval barbarians [who] have declared war on America’ (quoted in Holsinger, 2007 , 8). Quite a degree of mental agility is required to strip technological sophistication of its typical associations with civilized modernity. But when an ethnic or national identity is forged on notions of superiority, that agility will be found.

In my essay, the nationalist anxieties evident in music revival rhetoric forbid any mingling of foreign influences with the ‘purity’ of English folk song or of English practices in the performance of medieval music, as opposed to those of continental Europe. But purity is also a temporal matter, since to remain so it must be maintained over time, as I write in my essay:

Lineage – a pedigree – paper[s] over with words the impossibility of regimenting the past to uphold a chosen identity. In the English medieval and folk music revivals, music and its performance are harnessed in an attempt to maintain Englishness as an intrinsic and constant quality, superior, in its unassuming way, to other national types.

‘Tradition’, the unbroken chain linking the present with the past, is invoked to construct and maintain a straight and continuous line through time, keeping secure a chosen identity.

The past is differently experienced yet again within what D’Arcens calls ‘the fugue-like structure’ of the narrator Franz’s ‘wakeful ruminations,’ where

this premodern time-place is best thought of as contrapuntal to Western modernity, a line entering, leaving and re-entering, running beneath and breaking across the main line in a kind of echoic structure. This contrapuntal relationship is witnessed in Franz’s identification of what he regards as narrative patterns across centuries of Eastern verse romance and Western music.

Here again, ‘geography is transmuted into history’ as it is in fugue – in both musical and narrative patterns – an indication of how well music figures the spatio-temporal nature of medievalism, as D’Arcens’s lines here enact. Footnote 4 In this ‘contrapuntal relationship [that] render[s] legends rhizomatic, their root systems horizontal and entangled,’ any idea of a pure textual or musical inheritance resting on an unbroken national tradition is as unsustainable as the claim of ‘pure’ lineage exemplified by the family tree. Footnote 5

Music and literature appear to offer but, when studied more closely, actually disrupt the comfortable distinctions on which, for many of us, a clear sense of identity relies. One could say that any identity is necessarily fugal, pieced together from different strands and patterns, or, to put it materially, it is like shot silk, ‘a fabric which is made up of silk woven from warp and weft yarns of two or more colours producing an iridescent appearance’ (Takeda and Spilker, 2010 , 49). And the present is shot through with the past – with many pasts, just as any identity, whether personal, familial, national, ethnic, or religious, is shot through with countless and changing others. As Walt Whitman wrote, we contradict ourselves: ‘Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)’ (Whitman, 2015 , 83). How is it possible to pinpoint and maintain a sense of self under the weight of these multitudinous influences? Music can be seen as a promising yet ultimately disappointing resource in that endeavour.

If the ‘medieval’ of medievalism contains such a multitude of contradictions, it seems an unlikely supporter of identity, only to be sustained by cherry-picking on a massive scale – at least, that is, on the basis that identity is equated with unity or sameness. When identity is based on lineage, as in my essay, the past must be fossilized, corralled to stay forever in place, at least for those branded ‘restorative’ nostalgics by Svetlana Boym (and we may all be more ‘restorative’ than we know):

Restoration […] signifies a return to the original stasis, to the prelapsarian moment. The past for the restorative nostalgic is a value for the present; the past is not a duration but a perfect snapshot. […] Reflective nostalgia is more concerned with historical and individual time. […] Restorative nostalgia takes itself dead seriously. Reflective nostalgia, on the other hand, can be ironic and humorous (Boym, 2001 , 49).

‘Dead’ is the operative word here. Like the ‘perfect snapshot,’ the past – as guarantor of one’s identity – is not supposed to move about, but it nonetheless refuses to lie down and die. How could it do otherwise when the emotional baggage of so many is bound up in it? In fact the term ‘medievalism’ itself, with its connotations of mobility and playfulness, would need to be proscribed for a true ‘restorative.’

Perhaps, to pursue this idea a little further, the multiplicity of the ‘medieval’ suggests that if a pure and stable lineage is essential to the forging and maintenance of an identity – individual or group – then anxiety will be an intrinsic aspect of medievalism for many. The licence taken by the more freewheeling ‘reflectives’ will be a constant irritant, as the popularity of the term ‘authentic’ in debates around the correct performance of medieval music bore witness. Footnote 6 The required decorum of critical or academic debate might mask the open expression of aggression and anxiety. Similarly, it might be considered more decorous for readers to tactfully ignore their recognition of that anger and anxiety when not explicitly stated, but nonetheless we cannot be blind to it. And in many forums, of course, open derision is de rigueur .

We are often made aware of the ideologies in play in versions of the medieval in academic and non-academic circles. They are no less apparent in debates about medieval music and its performance. But if ideology is the armour then the living, feeling flesh of medievalism is emotion. Ideology speaks loudly but sometimes hides the pain of the flesh. The rancour apparent in debates about medieval music is one instance of the degree to which we cling to our own particular version of the authentic Middle Ages. It is as if the word ‘authentic’ is forced to bear the weight of our identity. To quote John Ganim, ‘The Medieval, almost by the root of its terminology, has always been imagined by the West as both ourselves and something other than ourselves’ (Ganim, 2005 , 5). If this is so, as our essays sometimes suggest, then the impossibility of the term comes to mirror the breakdown of the illusion of an undivided self.

The aesthetic emotions can be as turbulent as any. See Paul J. Silvia on some of the less-discussed aesthetic emotions, where he examines ‘knowledge emotions such as interest, confusion, and surprise; hostile emotions such as anger and disgust; and self-conscious emotions such as pride, shame, and embarrassment’ (Silvia, 2009 , 48).

Internal quotation from Gorbman ( 1987 ).

Lynch lists some of the musical ‘notes’ in Scott’s Lay : ‘“Sound,” in “voice,” “clang,” “din,” “clash,” “murmur,” “mutter,” “yell,” “cry,” “moan” and “shrill,” is a constant presence.’

Perhaps the psychological term ‘dissociative fugue,’ a form of amnesia in which identity is threatened, is also relevant here.

See Deleuze and Guattari ( 1988 , 3–28) for the idea of a rhizome as opposed to a tree. For instance, ‘[A]ny point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be. This is very different from the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order [proceeding] by dichotomy’ (7).

See the introduction and the three essays on music in the final section of Fugelso ( 2018 ). See the entire volume for a range of essays on the question of authenticity in medievalism.

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Dell, H. Music and the emotions of medievalism: The quest for identity. Postmedieval 10 , 411–422 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-019-00147-7

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Music Theory Academy

Medieval music.

Monophonic Music

The vast majority of medieval music was monophonic – in other words, there was only a single melody line. (“mono-phonic” literally means “one sound”) . The development of polyphonic music (more than one melody line played at the same time (“poly-phonic” means “many sounds”)) was a major shift towards the end of era that laid the foundations for Renaissance styles of music.

Gregorian chant

Gregorian chant, consisting of a single line of vocal melody, unaccompanied in free rhythm was one of the most common forms of medieval music. This is not surprising, given the importance of the Catholic church during the period. The Mass (a commemoration and celebration of The Last Supper of Jesus Christ) was (and still is to this day) a ceremony that included set texts (liturgy), which were spoken and sung.

Have a listen to this example of Gregorian Chant:

Play Procedamus in Pace By Paterm (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons]

The chants were also based on a system of modes , which were characteristic of the medieval period. There were 8 church modes – (you can play them by starting on a different white note on a piano and playing a “scale” of 8 notes on just the white notes. For example, if you start on a D and play all the white notes up to the next D an octave higher, you will have played the “Dorian Mode”) .

The Development of Polyphonic Music

As the Medieval Period progressed, composers began to experiment and polyphonic styles began to develop.

Organum was a crucial early technique, which explored polyphonic texture. It consisted of 2 lines of voices in varying heterophonic textures . The 3 main types of organum are:

Parallel organum (or “strict organum”) One voice sings the melody, whilst the other sings at a fixed interval – this gives a parallel motion effect. Have a listen to this synthesised example of parallel organum: Parallel Organum audio example

Free organum The 2 voices move in both parallel motion and/or contrary motion. Have a look at this example of free organum and listen to the track of the beginning being played on a synthesised choir sound:

Free Organum audio example

Melismatic organum An accompanying part stays on a single note whilst the other part moves around above it. Have a listen to this synthesised example – notice how the 2nd voice stays on the same note whilst the 1st voice “sings” the melody: Melismatic Organum audio example

Sheet Music in the Medieval Period

The Catholic Church wanted to standardise what people sung in churches across the Western world. As a result, a system of music notation developed, allowing things to move on from the previously “aural” tradition (tunes passed on “by ear” and not written down) .

As the medieval period prgressed, nuemes developed gradually to add more indication of rhythm, etc..

Instruments of the Medieval Period

There were a number of characteristic instruments of the Medieval Period including:

Other medieval instruments included the recorder and the lute.

The period was also characterised by troubadours and trouvères – these were travelling singers and performers.

Secular Styles of Medieval Music

Ars Nova (“new art”) was a new style of music originating in France and Italy in the 14th century . The name comes from a tract written by Philippe de Vitry in c.1320 . The style was characterised by increased variety of rhythm, duple time and increased freedom and independence in part writing. These experimentations laid some of the foundations for further musical development during the Renaissance period . The main secular genre of Art Nova was the chanson . Examples of Art Nova composers include Machaut in France and G. Da Cascia, J. Da Bologna and Landini in Italy.

Recommended Medieval Music Listening

It is quite difficult to find many recorded albums of medieval music, which offer a range of styles. There is an album called “Discover Early Music” that has some fantastic recordings of plainchant and organum in particular. You should be able to find the album by searching on the amazon store. Hope this helps.

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Ben Dunnett LRSM is the founder of Music Theory Academy. He is a music teacher, examiner, composer and pianist with over twenty years experience in music education. Read More

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• "Medieval Music" in Oxford Bibliographies Online by Mary Wolinski & James Borders Publication Date: February 2020 Major sections include: General Overviews; Reference Works & Journals; Music Theory; Latin Poetry; Western Plainchant; Monophony apart from Chant; Polyphony; Instrumental Music; Musicians; Compositional Process; Performance Practice; Music and the Visual Arts; Music in Cultural Contexts; and Postmedieval Reception.
• "Medievalism and Music" in Oxford Bibliographies Online by James Cook & Karen Cook Publication Date: March 2018 Article concerns the cultural and intellectual afterlife of medieval music and the Middle Ages" by considering the intersection of medievalism and music in the revival and reception of medieval music; in popular music; on stage and screen; in literature; in constructs of race and ethnicity; gender; disability; religion; and nationality/geography.
• Medieval by Christopher Page Publication Date: January 2001 Divides into main sections: Terminology; Historiography; Defining "Medieval Music," Over 20 years out of date (especially bibliography) but still a valuable survey of the period.
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The Modern Invention of Medieval Music: Scholarship, Ideology, Performance

• Daniel Leech-Wilkinson
• Published 2002
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30 Citations

Britten's unquiet pasts: sound and memory in postwar reconstruction, a history of singing, problems in the performance and historiography of english popular church music, a study in geography, 'tradition', and identity in concert practice, the monstrous new art: divided forms in the late medieval motet, re-writing composers’ lives: critical historiography and musical biography, living troubadours and other recent uses for medieval music, locating the past in the present: living traditions and the performance of early music, singing through the looking glass: child's play and learning in medieval italy, recent trends in the study of music of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, 15 references, most german of the arts: musicology and society from the weimar republic to the end of hitler's reich, reconstructing contexts: the aims and principles of archaeo-historicism (review), science as a vocation, the autumn of the middle ages, deutsche historiker im nationalsozialismus, autumn of the middle ages, related papers.

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Essays on Medieval Music in Honor of David G. Hughes

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Publication date: 06/18/1995

This collection of nineteen essays presents a broad spectrum of current research that will interest students of medieval music, history, or culture. Topics include a comparison of early chant transmission in Rome and Jerusalem; the relationship between the earliest chant notation and prosodic accents; conceptualizing rhythm in medieval music and poetry; the persistence of Guidonian organum in the later Middle Ages; a connection between Dante and St. Cecilia; and the development of the trecento madrigal. The essays, written by distinguished scholars, stem from a conference in honor of David G. Hughes, professor of medieval music at Harvard University and noted specialist of chant.

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Medieval Music, the Library of Essays on Music Performance Practice" Edited by Honey Meconi and Mary Cyr Timothy Mcgee

Performance Practice Review

Volume 17 | Number 1 Article 7

"Medieval Music , The Library of Essays on Music Performance Practice" edited by Honey Meconi and Mary Cyr Timothy McGee

Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.claremont.edu/ppr

McGee, Timothy (2012) ""Medieval Music, The Library of Essays on Music Performance Practice" edited by Honey Meconi and Mary Cyr," Performance Practice Review: Vol. 17: No. 1, Article 7. DOI: 10.5642/perfpr.201217.01.07 Available at: http://scholarship.claremont.edu/ppr/vol17/iss1/7

This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at Claremont at Scholarship @ Claremont. It has been accepted for inclusion in Performance Practice Review by an authorized administrator of Scholarship @ Claremont. For more information, please contact [email protected] . Book review: Meconi, Honey, ed. Medieval Music . The Library of Essays on Music Performance Practice, series ed. Mary Cyr. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. ISBN 978-0- 75462-851-4.

Timothy McGee

© 2012 Claremont Graduate University

This is a part of several sets of volumes published by Ashgate whose goal is to present the current state of research on a particular topic by reprinting significant essays chosen by a leading scholar in the field. By publisher’s design, this series has rather formidable limitations that challenge the volume editors to select wisely in order to represent the entire subject: it reprints only scholarship originally presented in essay format in English; and page quantity limitations severely restrict the number of works that can be selected.

The area of performance practice is somewhat different from most other subjects in that there are so many unresolved issues, and therefore a presentation of the current state of research is necessarily more a guide to contrasting opinions than a summation of definitive answers. With its vast time span of more than 600 years and paucity of factual evidence, medieval music is the most complex and the least settled of all traditional historical time periods with many unsolved problems that concern such basic performance issues as rhythm , pitch, tone quality, and tempo.

Professor Meconi, editor of this volume, has dealt with the major issues both as a performer and scholar and has clearly defined the problems and cleverly selected the essays to illustrate as many of them as possible. To fill in the holes, she introduces the topic with an insightful essay that outlines the subject itself and then defines the various issues, describes the methods employed to resolve them, and discusses the often contradictory scholarly positions. She carefully avoids taking sides on most issues, choosing to step back from the arguments, look at the larger picture, and then positioning each of her chosen essay writers within that picture. This approach is quite valuable because most of the reprinted essays, by their very nature, are directed toward a specific problem and assume that the reader is well- acquainted with the issue. By consulting Meconi’s overview and analysis of the writings along with the essays themselves, the novice reader receives the needed background and gains a more calculated, sober evaluation of the issue at hand as well as the intensity of the individual argument.

The essays are subdivided into five rather broad sections according to repertory: Plainchant; Secular Monophony ; Polyphony to 1300; Mass and Motet After 1300; The Polyphonic Chanson ; and a sixth section, titled “Other Matters,” that is a catchall for important performance topics that address problems affecting more than a single repertory.

I. The performance of Plainchant is represented by two articles that concentrate on current performances and the evidence for the performers’ choices. Lance Brunner (“The Performance of Plainchant: Some Preliminary Observations of the New Era”) and Katarina Livljanic (“Giving Voice to Gregorian Chant or: Coping with Modern Orthodoxies”) both address the subject from the point of view of how a performer can sort through the various issues, and both register serious questions about the relationship between the written neumes and contemporary commentary versus the performance practices advocated by the Solesmes school.

II . Secular Monophony concentrates mainly on rhythm, meter, and the role of instruments. Contrasting positions about the first two issues are represented by Hans Tischler (“Rhythm, Meter, and Melodic Organization in Medieval Songs ”) on the side of the application of specific patterns and Hendrik van der Werf (“The ‘Not-So-Precisely Measured’ Music of the Middle Ages ”), who proposes a far more flexible set of solutions. Sylvia Huot (“Voices and Instruments in Medieval French Secular Music : On the Use of Literary Texts and Evidence for Performance Practice”) pursues the topic of the use of instruments based on evidence gathered from literary texts, and Christopher Page (“ Johannes de Grocheio on Secular Music: A Corrected Text and a New Translation”) translates relevant passages from Grocheio’s treatise De Musica and interprets the statements as to how instruments were used in conjunction with the repertory.

III. The major issues in Polyphony to 1300 are similar to those in the previous section: rhythm and the role of instruments, but in the case of early polyphony, many of these issues are far more complex since different musical forms seem to require different solutions. The application of modal rhythm is central to all of the essays presented here, and it is enlightening to see how different scholars interpret the existing evidence. Edward Roesner (“The Performance of Parisian Organum ”) and Charles M. Atkinson (“Franco of Cologne on the Rhythm of Organum Purum”), drawing on similar theoretical evidence, arrive at different conclusions concerning the application of modal rhythms to organum purum . Jeremy Yudkin (“The Copula according to Johannes de Garlandia”) interprets a definition provided by medieval theorist Johannes de Garlandia in order to identify what is a copula and what is its rhythmic organization. Ernest H. Sanders (“ Conductus and Modal Rhythm”) explores the various layers of the conductus repertory and proposes a flexible approach to the application of modal rhythm as suggested by analysis of the accompanying poetry . Christopher Page (“The Performance of Ars Antiqua Motets ”) draws on personal performance experience as well as theoretical treatises and literary analysis in his discussion of motet performance. Both Page and Roesner address the topic of accompanying this repertory with instruments and agree that it was probably intended for all-vocal performance.

IV. Mass and Motet after 1300 concentrates principally on the issues of who and how many performed polyphonic music, and although the three articles approach the subject from completely different angles, they arrive at quite similar conclusions. James McKinnon (“Representations of the Mass in Medieval and Renaissance Art”) examines iconography and discusses what the images represent and how reliable they are as evidence of performance norms. Roger Bowers (“The Performing Ensemble for English Church Polyphony, c. 1320-c. 1390”), relying heavily on archival records, investigates the membership of English church ensembles and their duties. Gilbert Reaney (“Text Underlay in Early Fifteenth- Century Musical Manuscripts ”) looks carefully at text underlay for evidence of performance intentions, and whereas the first two essays concern only sacred music, Reaney considers secular performance as well. All three scholars conclude that vocal performance of all lines, without instruments, was probably the norm.

V. The possible use of instruments in combination with voices continues to be an issue for performance of The Polyphonic Chanson . Reprinted here are two of Christopher Page’s early essays (“Machaut’s Pupil Dechamps on the Performance of Music: Voices or Instruments in the 14 th -Century Chanson,” and “The Performance of Songs in Late Medieval France : A New Source”) that contradict the long-held theory by presenting evidence that in both the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries this repertory was intended for solo voices alone. Lawrence Earp (“Texting in 15 th -Century French Chansons : A Look Ahead from the 14 th Century”) contributes to this conclusion by advocating a vocalization of lower, untexted parts rather than the addition of text. David Fallows (“Embellishment and Urtext in the Fifteenth-Century Song Repertories”) looks at the subject of whether the chanson repertory was intended to be embellished in performance and presents evidence for both arguments.

VI. The larger issues, those that concern nearly every area in the previous five chapters, are found in Other Matters , and include discussions of the complex and difficult questions: how, where, and when to introduce chromatic alteration ( Margaret Bent , “Musica Recta and Musica Ficta ”); the way in which proportional signs relate to one another (Anna Maria Busse Berger, “The Origin and Early History of Proportion Signs”); and the possible influence of Middle Eastern sounds and practices on European performance practices (Shai Burstyn, “The ‘Arabian Influence’ Thesis Revisited”). Christopher Page (“ Jerome of Moravia on the Rubeba and Viella ”) presents a translation of the chapter in Jerome’s late thirteenth-century treatise Tractatus de Musica that includes virtually the only known tuning and playing instructions for the two most popular bowed string instruments, thus providing valuable information about instrumental performance and its relationship to the repertory.

In designing her volume, Prof. Meconi has chosen well by including essays that not only present specific points but also provide broader and more far-reaching views of the subject, thereby giving the reader material on more than one performance issue. For those who would pursue the topics further, references can be found both in the introductory essay and within the included articles. An extensive bibliography of works in English is included at the end of the introductory essay, which completes this extremely helpful guide to the subject.

This volume is an excellent source of material for anyone wishing to know about the current state of research into medieval performance practices. The reprinted articles present the widest possible collection of views and thoughts on the many issues, and the editor’s comprehensive introductory essay enormously helps the reader by situating the individual essays within the broader picture.

Visiting Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion?

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Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

Music in the renaissance.

ex "Kurtz" Violin

Andrea Amati

Double Virginal

Hans Ruckers the Elder

Cornetto in A

possibly Georg Voll

Sixtus Rauchwolff

Claviorganum

Lorenz Hauslaib

Tenor Recorder

Rectangular Octave Virginal

Rebecca Arkenberg Department of Education, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

October 2002

Music was an essential part of civic, religious, and courtly life in the Renaissance. The rich interchange of ideas in Europe, as well as political, economic, and religious events in the period 1400–1600 led to major changes in styles of composing, methods of disseminating music, new musical genres, and the development of musical instruments. The most important music of the early Renaissance was composed for use by the church—polyphonic (made up of several simultaneous melodies) masses and motets in Latin for important churches and court chapels. By the end of the sixteenth century, however, patronage had broadened to include the Catholic Church, Protestant churches and courts, wealthy amateurs, and music printing—all were sources of income for composers.

The early fifteenth century was dominated initially by English and then Northern European composers. The Burgundian court was especially influential, and it attracted composers and musicians from all over Europe. The most important of these was Guillaume Du Fay (1397–1474), whose varied musical offerings included motets and masses for church and chapel services, many of whose large musical structures were based on existing Gregorian chant. His many small settings of French poetry display a sweet melodic lyricism unknown until his era. With his command of large-scale musical form, as well as his attention to secular text-setting, Du Fay set the stage for the next generations of Renaissance composers.

By about 1500, European art music was dominated by Franco-Flemish composers, the most prominent of whom was Josquin des Prez (ca. 1450–1521). Like many leading composers of his era, Josquin traveled widely throughout Europe, working for patrons in Aix-en-Provence, Paris, Milan, Rome, Ferrara, and Condé-sur-L’Escaut. The exchange of musical ideas among the Low Countries, France, and Italy led to what could be considered an international European style. On the one hand, polyphony or multivoiced music, with its horizontal contrapuntal style, continued to develop in complexity. At the same time, harmony based on a vertical arrangement of intervals, including thirds and sixths, was explored for its full textures and suitability for accompanying a vocal line. Josquin’s music epitomized these trends, with Northern-style intricate polyphony using canons, preexisting melodies, and other compositional structures smoothly amalgamated with the Italian bent for artfully setting words with melodies that highlight the poetry rather than masking it with complexity. Josquin, like Du Fay, composed primarily Latin masses and motets, but in a seemingly endless variety of styles. His secular output included settings of courtly French poetry, like Du Fay, but also arrangements of French popular songs, instrumental music, and Italian frottole.

With the beginning of the sixteenth century, European music saw a number of momentous changes. In 1501, a Venetian printer named Ottaviano Petrucci published the first significant collection of polyphonic music, the Harmonice Musices Odhecaton A . Petrucci’s success led eventually to music printing in France, Germany, England, and elsewhere. Prior to 1501, all music had to be copied by hand or learned by ear; music books were owned exclusively by religious establishments or extremely wealthy courts and households. After Petrucci, while these books were not inexpensive, it became possible for far greater numbers of people to own them and to learn to read music.

At about the same period, musical instrument technology led to the development of the viola da gamba , a fretted, bowed string instrument. Amateur European musicians of means eagerly took up the viol, as well as the lute , the recorder , the harpsichord (in various guises, including the spinet and virginal), the organ , and other instruments. The viola da gamba and recorder were played together in consorts or ensembles and often were produced in families or sets, with different sizes playing the different lines. Publications by Petrucci and others supplied these players for the first time with notated music (as opposed to the improvised music performed by professional instrumentalists). The sixteenth century saw the development of instrumental music such as the canzona, ricercare, fantasia, variations, and contrapuntal dance-inspired compositions, for both soloists and ensembles, as a truly distinct and independent genre with its own idioms separate from vocal forms and practical dance accompaniment.

The musical instruments depicted in the studiolo of Duke Federigo da Montefeltro of Urbino (ca. 1479–82; 39.153 ) represent both his personal interest in music and the role of music in the intellectual life of an educated Renaissance man. The musical instruments are placed alongside various scientific instruments, books, and weapons, and they include a portative organ, lutes, fiddle, and cornetti; a hunting horn; a pipe and tabor; a harp and jingle ring; a rebec; and a cittern .

From about 1520 through the end of the sixteenth century, composers throughout Europe employed the polyphonic language of Josquin’s generation in exploring musical expression through the French chanson, the Italian madrigal, the German tenorlieder, the Spanish villancico, and the English song, as well as in sacred music. The Reformation and Counter-Reformation directly affected the sacred polyphony of these countries. The Protestant revolutions (mainly in Northern Europe) varied in their attitudes toward sacred music, bringing such musical changes as the introduction of relatively simple German-language hymns (or chorales) sung by the congregation in Lutheran services. Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525/26–1594), maestro di cappella at the Cappella Giulia at Saint Peter’s in Rome, is seen by many as the iconic High Renaissance composer of Counter-Reformation sacred music, which features clear lines, a variety of textures, and a musically expressive reverence for its sacred texts. The English (and Catholic) composer William Byrd (1540–1623) straddled both worlds, composing Latin-texted works for the Catholic Church, as well as English-texted service music for use at Elizabeth I ‘s Chapel Royal.

Sixteenth-century humanists studied ancient Greek treatises on music , which discussed the close relationship between music and poetry and how music could stir the listener’s emotions. Inspired by the classical world, Renaissance composers fit words and music together in an increasingly dramatic fashion, as seen in the development of the Italian madrigal and later the operatic works of Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643). The Renaissance adaptation of a musician singing and accompanying himself on a stringed instrument, a variation on the theme of Orpheus, appears in Renaissance artworks like Caravaggio’s Musicians ( 52.81 ) and Titian ‘s Venus and the Lute Player ( 36.29 ).

Arkenberg, Rebecca. “Music in the Renaissance.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/renm/hd_renm.htm (October 2002)

Additional Essays by Rebecca Arkenberg

• Arkenberg, Rebecca. “ Renaissance Violins .” (October 2002)
• Arkenberg, Rebecca. “ Renaissance Keyboards .” (October 2002)
• Arkenberg, Rebecca. “ Renaissance Organs .” (October 2002)

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Artist or Maker

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Home — Essay Samples — History — Renaissance — Medieval and Renaissance Music: A Comparative Study

Medieval and Renaissance Music: a Comparative Study

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Introduction, body paragraph 1: historical context and cultural significance, body paragraph 2: stylistic developments, body paragraph 3: instruments and performance practices.

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