The History of Western Classical Music : Early times

Western classical music history is traditionally understood as beginning with plainchant (also called "Gregorian" chant), the vocal religious practice of the Roman Catholic Church. Plainchant was transmitted by memory until the early 9th century, when the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne arranged for it to be notated, and for standardized plainchant books to be distributed to churches and monasteries across Europe.

Limited in pitch range and monophonic (i.e., composed of a single melody with no accompaniment), plainchant was sung largely by monks, nuns, and clerics rather than by professional singers. Plainchant was sung in the Divine Offices, eight daily prayer services using Old Testament texts, and in the Mass, a midmorning celebration of the life and death of Jesus Christ.

The earliest major repertory of Western secular (non-religious) music which has come down to us is that of the troubadors and trouveres, French poet-musicians of the Middle Ages who set their own poems to music. The majority of the resulting songs were about love, often the fictionalized, abstracted "courtly love" of a male character for a noblewoman above his social level.

In the 10th and 11th centuries, composers began setting sacred texts polyphonically (i.e., with more than one melody at the same time). Leonin (c. 1135- c. 1200) wrote polyphonic settings of the texts sung on the most important occasions of the Christian year, such as Christmas and Easter. He did this by greatly slowing down an existing plainchant, and adding to it a new, more rapidly flowing musical line at a higher pitch. This technique was called organum; the slowed-down plainchant was called the tenor. Some sections of Leonin's polyphony were sped up and rhythmicized; later composers added the words of devotional poems to Leonin's notes. The instrumental music of the Renaissance largely fell into two categories: transcriptions of vocal music, and dance music. Different dance styles corresponded to different underlying musical rhythms (as with today's Latin dance music). The German Michael Praetorius (1571?-1621) composed a large set of dances entitled "Terpsichore," after the Greek Muse of dance. A group of brief "voltes" is reproduced here; the volte was a dance from Southwest France in which the woman leapt high in the air ("volte" = vault).

Praetorius gave no indication of what instruments were to be used--his dances were played by whatever instruments were available. Here, the Early Music Consort of London switches between four different "consorts" of instruments, one per volte, before all four consorts play the end of the fourth volte together. A consort was a set of instruments similar in design and tone but varied in size and pitch. In their new focus on instrumental music, Baroque musicians valued no instrument more highly than the violin. They believed the violin's tone to have expressive powers akin to those of the voice. Violins were the melodic leaders of the trio sonata ("sonata"=sounded), which despite its name made use of four instruments: two violins, a cello (a much lower string instrument), and a harpsichord (a keyboard instrument within which strings are plucked). (The cello played the same music as did the harpsichordist's left hand; thus, there were really only three independent parts, hence "trio.") The trio sonata consisted of a few short movements, some fast, some slow. The concerto called for a larger group of instruments than did the trio sonata. In the concerto. a soloist or small group of soloists contrasted with a larger ensemble.

Concertos often alternated between passages showing off the soloist's technical prowess and passages showing off the weight of the full ensemble. The most famous of Baroque violin concertos today are those collected in the Four Seasons of Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741).

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