Origins of Music, Philosophy, art, and Literature Middle Age
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 on fauxbourdon and based on previously improvised traditions. At this time textures grew from a 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 monody for declaiming music, whic
Most serious music in the middle Ages, both sacred and secular, was song, involving words as an important element. Therefore aspects of text-music relations, such as liturgical function or poetic form, are an essential element in understanding the music. The gothic period marks the highest point of Medieval art. It was a great revolt against the intellectual sterility of the medieval spirit, and especially against scholasticism, in favor of intellectual freedom and its first sign was a passion for the cultural magnitude and richness of the pagan world. h was at the core of early opera and became a vehicle for composers like Monteverdii to take forward the nascent genre of opera. It is perfectly acceptable, of course, for the purposes of reading to redraw these boundaries more decisively, treating Renaissance texts as if they were islands of the autonomous literary imagination. The essential ingredient creating the bonding agent in concrete had been forgotten, and churches were being built with wood roofs, which were continually burning down. The full-volume bodies carved on the Chartres Cathedral, for instance, look as if they may walk off of the building. The sounds of street hawkers, the songs sung in the fields to lighten the tedium of labor, the dances that accompanied so many festivities, much of the music intended for the stage, and even the musical component of many troubadour songs have proven ephemeral. The walls were massive stone blocks and the roof utilized the Roman semicircular arch. Even the music that 'survives' does so in a fashion that leaves unanswered fundamental questions about how it originally sounded. Almost always they dealt with erotic themes, often they were linked together in sequences to suggest, if not to tell, a story. Before a worshipper has even entered the church, he would find images of saints and sinners, of angelic beings and the punishment of the damned. For many centuries, the Middle Ages suffered from a lack of technical knowledge that the Romans had previously achieved. The art of the High Renaissance, however, sought a general, unified effect of pictorial representation or architectural composition, increasing the dramatic force and physical presence of a work of art and gathering its energies and forming a controlled equilibrium.
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Acceptance Essays
