Music, Philosophy, Art, and Literature in the Middle Ages

             The western tradition of music has its origins in the chant tradition of the early Christian era. The monophonic music of chant dominated the middle ages and included the composition of sequences and tropes. In the high Middle Ages, organum emerged, thus introducing polyphonic textures into liturgical music. By the thirteenth century, the motet became a seminal polyphonic composition and included liturgical and secular texts as well as a chant cantus firmus. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, secular music was composed polyphonically and resulted in elaborate contrapuntal devices and notational practices. In the fifteenth century, the early Renaissance polyphony showed evidence of a new style influenced fauxbourdon and based on previously improvised traditions. At this time textures grew from reliance on lower voices to treble-dominated textures. Renaissance motets and madrigals have their origins in the music of the Netherlands composers. With the late Renaissance, more national and secular music emerged, as found with the English madrigal and the French chanson.
             The late sixteenth-century music included attempts to return to Greek drama. The latter resulted in the formulation of a monody for declaiming music, which was at the core of early opera and became a vehicle for composers like Monteverdi to take forward the nascent genre of opera. Italian opera soon dominated the early baroque style of the seventeenth century, which extended to the composition of oratorios on sacred subjects. In France opera soon took root, and a national style evolved starting with Lully. In the seventeenth century instrumental music developed on its own, treble dominated texture of vocal music was supported by the basso continuo tradition of accompaniment. Works for instruments included keyboard suites and sonatas, organ music, including various partitas and fugues, and trio sonatas for various combinations of instruments. Music for orchestra in...

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Music, Philosophy, Art, and Literature in the Middle Ages. (1969, December 31). In MegaEssays.com. Retrieved 07:33, March 29, 2024, from https://www.megaessays.com/viewpaper/84856.html