Brief History Of Music

ミュージックカレッジ
ミュージックアーテイスト科R２
学籍番号G０１０B１３１３
Antonietta Alejandra


Brief History of Music



"Music is so naturally united with us that we cannot be free from it even if we so desired"
(Boethius cited by Storr).



Music has its origins in Greece where music had a moralizing and pedagogic role in society. Afterwards it began to be very related to the church. If writting aboutwestern music I should probably divided it into six periods. Each of these periods have certain characteristics which have shaped it and remained with it.

The Medieval Period (400-1400) Before the 900 almost all the music that there is record is a simple, one line structure called a plainchant. This was made up of one melodic line sung in unison by everybody. More complex music existed, butas it was secular and not sacred and there are almost no written accounts of it.
Over the next 500 years, people gradually began to expand on this simple structure by adding voices. At first, these voices sung a fixed interval above or below the original line. This was called an organum.
At some point, someone got the idea of having two different lines moving at the same time but not having afixed interval. Usually the higher of these lines would be fairly florid, while the lower was a slower, pre-existing plainchant.
During 1300, three and four voice compositions were being written. These works are referred to as polyphonic (many voices), to distinguish them from the monophony (single voice) of the simple plainchant.

The Renaissance (1400-1600) Most of the development duringthis period was made in Italy. This isbecause the Catholic church was the dominant force during this period, and was centered in Rome. By 1400 several composers were writing polyphony in a slightly different way. Instead of using a slower bottom voice and faster upper voices, they made all voices equal in rhythmic variety. And instead of using four different chants, they used a single chant whichwas stated in each of the voices, upon their entrance, and developed differently from one voice to the next. This led to a more unified sounding work, and gave rise to a number of contrapuntal (note-against-note) forms, such as the Canon (exact repetition in all the voices), the Canzon (a succession of themes, each developed and then discarded), and the Fugue (one theme developed extensively).Almost all of these works are written in Latin.

The Baroque Period (1600-1750) One of the major changes in daily life around 1600 was the switch from the Catholic church to various Protestant religion. The result of this change was that the language of the services switched from Latin to German. Because most people had not spoken Latin, the masses could be as ornate as the composer desired. Butif the language was understandable by the majority of the people, the music should be simple enough that they could understand the words. New hymns (chorales) were written to provide music for the services. These were primarily homophonic (simple chordal structure) in nature, contrasting with the polyphony that continued in instrumental and Latin works.
By the mid-1700s, polyphony had reached itspeak. Several composers began to explore simpler styles of composition, such as symphonies and concertos.

The Classical Period (1750-1800AD) This is quite a curious period in musical history. Very little was done to change the basic musical language, aside from the abandonment of polyphony. The major contribution during this period was the developetion of the orchestra, and the opera was madeinto a more continuous work, and the writing was reduced. This brief period introduced a more virtuositic style of playing on many instruments, and set the stage for a major harmonic expansion during the next century.

The Romantic Period (1800-1900AD) The shift from the Baroque to the Classical had resulted in a change of thought from the horizontal (polyphony and the sense of line) in...