Music History Flashcards

Flashcards about the history of music.

ca. 100s CE

Christians sang songs influenced by Jewish traditions and Greco-Roman practice, probably in Greek in the eastern parts of the Roman Empire, and in Latin in the western part - including in the capital city, Rome.

ca. 200s - 800s CE: Christian “monks”

Christian men who don’t get married so they can devote their full attention to worship and service, are usually literate and therefore able to read the songbooks, which have only lyrics - no musical notes - mostly in Latin. We believe they sang in unison to the “natural rhythms” of Latin.

ca. 800 - 1100 CE

Monks added a parallel 8ve by adding boys to the choir. Then parallel 4ths and 5ths; and eventually drone notes were introduced. All of these are some sort of “organum.”

1000 CE: Guido of Arezzo

Invented pitch notation on 4 lines. Church music continues to be sung in Latin

ca. 1200 CE: Perotin

Musician for the new Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Used more voices (musical lines) often with some voices in parallel 8ves, 5ths, or 4ths, while other voices sang a different (faster) rhythm. This is called polyrhythm.

Ligatures

Connecting lines between note heads to show that they were be half the time value of regular note-heads.

Troubadours

Traveling musicians who popularized songs across wider territories, singing songs of everyday life in the “lingua franca” (the native language) of the local people. They played instruments such as the lyre, dulcimer, recorder, bagpipe, and shawm.

Late 1400s: Johannes Gutenberg

A German inventor who invented a method to print pages of text (rather than writing them by hand) which made the mass production of books and sheet music possible, greatly reducing the cost and increasing literacy, including music literacy, from then on and around the world.

English composer John Dunstable

Began to add 3rds to their music, both major and minor.

Triads

Chords with three notes that are typically all on the line or spaces (looking like a snowman).

1500s CE

Composers now seldom wrote parallel organum. Instead, they wrote music designed to create major and minor chords most frequently. And they began to experiment to see if some chords sounded better when heard before or after other chords.

1600 - 1700s CE

Chord progressions emphasized the importance of triads built upon the first, fourth, fifth, and sixth scale notes, in both major and minor scales.

Antonio Vivaldi

Big on violin music. Most famous work is the Four Seasons

Johann Sebastian Bach

Could play everything, great organist, wrote an hour’s worth of church music every week for three years straight. Many famous works. One is a set of keyboard variations called the Goldberg Variations.

George Frederick Handel

Made it big in England, wrote lots of Oratorios - like operas but usually the stories are not acted out like opera, just performed like a regular concert. His most famous Oratorio is called “The Messiah.”