Medieval music

Medieval music covers both sacred and secular music from Western Europe during the Middle Ages, spanning roughly the 6th through 15th centuries. It marks the earliest and longest major period of Western classical music, with the Renaissance era following it; together, these two periods are what musicologists call early music, which came before the common practice period. Based on the traditional breakdown of the Middle Ages, medieval music is often split into Early (500–1000), High (1000–1300), and Late (1300–1400) phases.

This music includes liturgical pieces for church use, other sacred works, and secular, non-religious compositions. A great deal of medieval music is purely vocal, like Gregorian chant. Other pieces used only instruments or combined voices and instruments, typically with instruments supporting the voices. During this period, systems of music notation were created and adapted, making it easier for composers to write down and share musical ideas, though notation existed alongside and supported oral tradition.

**Genres** Medieval music was made for various purposes and settings, leading to different genres. Sacred and liturgical contexts were key, but secular types also emerged, such as love songs and dances. In the earlier medieval period, liturgical music was monophonic chant, with Gregorian chant becoming the dominant style. Polyphonic genres—where multiple independent melodic lines are sung at once—started to develop during the High Middle Ages and became common by the late 13th and early 14th centuries. This growth in polyphonic forms is often linked to the Ars antiqua style connected to Notre-Dame de Paris, though improvised polyphony around chant lines existed before that. Organum, for instance, expanded on a chant melody by adding one or more accompanying lines. The simplest accompaniment was a second line sung in parallel intervals to the original chant, often a perfect fifth or fourth away. The principles behind this kind of organum go back at least to an anonymous 9th-century text, the *Musica enchiriadis*, which describes the practice of doubling a preexisting plainchant in parallel motion at the octave, fifth, or fourth. Some of the earliest written examples come from a style called Aquitanian polyphony, but the largest surviving body of organum is from the Notre-Dame school, often referred to as the *Magnus Liber Organi* (Great Book of Organum). Related polyphonic genres include the motet and clausula, both often built on a segment of plainchant or as an elaboration of an organum passage. While most early motets were sacred and possibly liturgical, by the end of the 13th century the genre had expanded to cover secular topics like political satire and courtly love, using French as well as Latin texts. These motets could have one to three upper voices, each with its own text. In Italy, the secular madrigal became popular. Like the polyphonic motet, madrigals had greater fluidity and motion in the leading melody. The madrigal form also led to polyphonic canons—songs where multiple singers perform the same melody but start at different times—especially in Italy, where they were called *caccie*. These were three-part secular pieces, with the two higher voices in canon and an instrumental long-note accompaniment underneath. In the late Middle Ages, some purely instrumental music began to be notated, though this remained rare. Dance music makes up most of the surviving instrumental pieces, including types like the estampie, ductia, and nota.

**Instruments** Many instruments used in medieval music still exist today, but in different and usually more technologically advanced forms. The medieval flute was made of wood rather than silver or metal, and could be side-blown or end-blown. Unlike modern orchestral flutes, which are typically metal with complex key mechanisms and airtight pads, medieval flutes had holes that the player covered with fingers, like the recorder. The recorder itself was made of wood in the medieval era; today it may be made of synthetic materials like plastic, but it has largely kept its original form. The gemshorn is similar to the recorder, with finger holes on its front, but it belongs to the ocarina family. The pan flute, a predecessor of the flute, was popular in medieval times and likely of Hellenic origin; its pipes were made of wood and graduated in length to produce different pitches. Medieval music used many plucked string instruments, such as the lute—a fretted instrument with a pear-shaped hollow body that is the forerunner of the modern guitar. Other plucked string instruments included the mandore, gittern, citole, and psaltery. The bowed lyra of the Byzantine Empire was the first recorded European bowed string instrument. Like the modern violin, a performer produced sound by moving a bow with tensioned hair over tensioned strings. The 9th-century Persian geographer Ibn Khurradadhbih (died 911) mentioned the Byzantine lyra in his discussion of instruments, describing it as a bowed instrument equivalent to the Arab rabāb and typical of the Byzantines, along with the urghun (organ), shilyani (probably a type of harp or lyre), and the salandj (likely a bagpipe). The hurdy-gurdy was—and still is—a mechanical violin that uses a rosined wooden wheel attached to a crank to "bow" its strings. Instruments without sound boxes, like the Jew's harp, were also popular. Early versions of the pipe organ, fiddle (or vielle), and other instruments also existed.