ECHOES OF HISTORY

The stories in this chapter bear witness to astounding continuities and to the transformation of traditions by new circumstances. Although we do not have any music from the ancient Jews or early Christians, their musical customs resonated through the Middle Ages and beyond to the present. The texts of the psalms sung in the Temple and the Scripture chanted in the synagogue are still in use in both Jewish and Christian services. The monastic practice of singing psalms became a central focus of Christian observances. Early church leaders, drawing on Greek views of music while rejecting pagan customs, elevated worship over entertainment and singing over instrumental music, attitudes that held sway for centuries and persist today. Attempts by popes and secular rulers to consolidate control and unify their realms led to standardized liturgies and fixed melodies that were assigned to certain texts and days. The adoption by the Western Church of the eight church modes, based on the Byzantine echoi, shows both a link to the Eastern Church and a desire to systematize and classify the vast repertory of chant, which helped to make it easier to memorize. Promoting and preserving that repertory in turn led to notation and solmization, which developed over time and are still part of musical life. Many particular features of Western notation have been around for a millennium, including staff lines, clefs, and notes placed above the text and arranged so that higher notes indicate higher pitches. The invention of a notation that could record pitches and intervals precisely and could be read at sight was decisive in the later evolution of Western music, which more than other musical traditions is not just played and heard, but written and read. Indeed, notation is the very reason why we have a thousand years of music we can still perform and hear, and why books like this can be written.

Almost as important, the codification of Gregorian chant and its diffusion in notation made it the basis for much new music from the ninth through the sixteenth centuries. That these events took place under the Franks was significant, since Charlemagne’s empire was the political and cultural center of western Europe. From his day through the fourteenth century, the most important developments in European music took place in the area he once ruled.

Further Reading is available at digital.wwnorton.com/hwm10