The Basics of Music History

One of the things that makes homo sapiens special is their love of music. It seems that almost all of us like to listen to music and many of us like to perform it. Some performers are extremely talented and pick it up right away, even at a very young age. At the other end of the bell curve are those with no talent at all who should remain comfortably seated in the audience.

Humans have been making music for thousands of years. During that time there have been numerous attempts to write it down. The problem is that with all those impressive systems we have no way to translate them into sound. What we know as modern notation started in the Middle Ages when the Catholic Church wanted uniformity of practice throughout their vast realm. The earliest written examples date from around 850 AD and are called neumes. They are a system designed to assist performers with their musical memory. It only showed the shape of the melody, not the exact notes, so you had to know the piece beforehand.

In the early 11th century a Benedictine monk by the name of Guido d’Arezzo invented the four line staff, the forerunner of the five-liner we use today. He also gave us the solmization of ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si to help us learn to sing from notation.

To have effective music notation we need a system of pitches and rhythms, and that took a long time to develop into what we use today. The composers of the Parisian Notre Dame School of the late 12th and early 13th centuries had a reasonably effective system in use for their organum, or polyphonic masses and motets. By now you will notice that a great deal of musical innovation took place inside church walls. That is because the church employed a large number of talented musicians to serve their religious purposes. The best musicians usually worked for those who could pay them–the nobility and the church. Good music tends to be expensive. You pay for talent, training, and practice.

A great deal of the music that was created over the past 1000 years has been lost to fire and flood, but we do have an increasingly impressive body of work that allows us the study the amazing development of music technology in the Western classical experience. From the monophonic chants of the early church and popular minstrels to the complexities of contemporary symphony and opera, the never-ending push forward in music composition gave us much to study in utter delight.

On the following page you will see a summary of those developments as well as a list of a small number of its outstanding proponents from each age. Amazingly, the shifts in style took place with great regularity. Each period of music lasted about 150 years and began with a half century in which a small number of people experimented with new compositional practices that overthrew their predecessors’ styles and genres. It ended with a half century of music so rich and complicated it needed to be replaced. At the same time instrument makers were continually improving the performance capabilities of known winds, strings, and percussion while they invented new ones with even greater possibilities.

Since the first printed music in 1476 we have so much written and recorded music that it would take ten lifetimes to familiarize oneself with its most outstanding examples. The world of music is incredibly complex and involves myriad individuals each of whom contributes something to its life and history. Just consider how many professions relate to music?