Church History (33-1517): Notable Musicians and Music and Notable Musical Concepts and Developments

Gregorian Chants (All Facts)

• Style of music named after Pope Gregory the Great

• Chant style whose forename lent it authority and was used by the Church to be suited to the Latin tongue

• Standardized ritual from the evolved “Cantus Romanus”

• Created by two bishops and monks of St. Gallen abbey in Switzerland

Cantus Firmus (All Facts)

• First used around 1000, it was a fixed melody about which a line of embellishment could be worked

• It was the origin of counterpoint

• By the 1100s, three and four-part polyphony was composed around the namesake, but two part-polyphony was more usual

• It employed harmonies that often used sounds dissonant to the ears developed at that time

• By the 1400s, composers set parts to imitate each other in which polyphony related melodies to the namesake while counterpoint used rhythmically related tunes

Organum (All Facts)

• Practice of singing extra lines of music at intervals of a fourth or a fifth above or below plainsong

• It was essentially a primitive polyphony

• First emerged in the 800s

Plainsong Notation (All Facts)

• Originated in European Christendom in the 800s

• It first consisted of marks like accents over syllables to denote a rise and fall in pitch

• However, the marks did not indicate by how much the pitch changed

770 - Ut Queant Laxis (All Facts)

• Tune which was an early medieval hymn in the then unusual form of six separate phrases, each starting a step or half step higher than the previous one

Bells / Organ Pipes (All Facts)

• Made from Bronze, they indicated an advance in European Christendom metalworking

• Developed in the late 700s

Tropes (All Facts)

• Form taken for the first composition by known European Christendom composers, in which melodic passages were added to the liturgy either as new music or as variations on the preceding plainsong melody

Conductus (All Facts)

• Developed as processional music in a chordal style by the late 1100s

• Composed for voices or instruments, it was based on original themes rather than plainsong

Ars Nova (All Facts)

• In religious Christian music, it was characterized by a shift of triple time (symbolic of the Trinity) to duple time (beats in groups of two), demonstrating the growth of secular music at the time

Choral Polyphony (All Facts)

• Uses four independent parts, voices (parts) being finely blended and the harmony euphonious, having avoided the dissonances common in earlier music

• Developed in the early 1400s

Secular Polyphony (All Facts)

• Developed as part-songs were combined with the four-part texture of “learned” music

• Style which continues in the modern-day in the form of the barbershop quartet singing of the US

Mass (All Facts)

• Attained a great variety of structure, although the use of the cantus firmus throughout, in many ingenious modifications, brought unity to the form

Motet (All Facts)

• Polyphonic form with different words sung simultaneously in its various parts, in which the “cantus firmus” was reduced to a repeated rhythmic phrase

Notation (All Facts)

• Developed in the mid-1200s for shorter time values as intricate parts were introduced to overlie lines of long notes; clarifying the time relationship between the parts