Music
Music comes from the Ancient Greek muses, who were the nine goddesses of art and science. Music actually began around 500 B.C. when Pythagoras experimented with acoustics and how math related to tones formed from plucking strings. The main form of music during the Middle Ages was the Gregorian chant, named for Pope Gregory I. This music was used in the Catholic Churches to enhance the services. It consisted of a sacred Latin text sung by monks without instrumentation. The chant is sung in a monophonic texture, which means there is only one line of music. It has a free-flowing rhythm with little or no set beat. The chants were originally all passed through oral tradition, but the chants became so numerous that the monks began to notate them.
Towards the end of the Middle Ages, about the 12th and 13th centuries, music began to move outside of the church. French nobles called troubadours and trouveres were among the first to have written secular songs. Music of this time was contained among the nobility, with court minstrels performing for them. There were also wandering minstrels who would perform music and acrobatics in castles, taverns, and town squares. These people were among the lowest social class, along with prostitutes and slaves, but they were important because they passed along information, since there were no newspapers. During the Renaissance Period, vocal music was still more important then instrumental. A humanistic interest in language created a close relationship between words and music during this time. Composers began to write music to give deeper meaning and emotion to the words in their songs. They wrote in a style referred to as word painting, where the music and words combine to form a representation of poetic images. Renaissance music is very emotional music, although to us it seems to be much calmer. This is because the emotion is expressed in a balanced way, without extreme contrasts of dynamics, tone color, and
Towards the end of the Middle Ages, about the 12th and 13th centuries, music began to move outside of the church. French nobles called troubadours and trouveres were among the first to have written secular songs. Music of this time was contained among the nobility, with court minstrels performing for them. There were also wandering minstrels who would perform music and acrobatics in castles, taverns, and town squares. These people were among the lowest social class, along with prostitutes and slaves, but they were important because they passed along information, since there were no newspapers. During the Renaissance Period, vocal music was still more important then instrumental. A humanistic interest in language created a close relationship between words and music during this time. Composers began to write music to give deeper meaning and emotion to the words in their songs. They wrote in a style referred to as word painting, where the music and words combine to form a representation of poetic images. Renaissance music is very emotional music, although to us it seems to be much calmer. This is because the emotion is expressed in a balanced way, without extreme contrasts of dynamics, tone color, and