Carl Bryan L.

Ibaos
BM-ME 3

Music before was centered in the church. And it stayed in the

church for several centuries. The priest cultivated music as an art
because they longed to arrange music for their liturgy. Church music,
chants in particular, had no system at all. They came from sources all
around. The chants in the churches would be sung in a way that the
first part would be chanted by the priest and the congregation will
answer with another voice. We call this antiphony. The greeks
naturally adapted music according to their needs. There were a lot
of practices but the work of Ambrose showed to have been one of the
regulation. He founded his system on greek scales. The greeks had
their own way of building their scales. They used tetrachords which
always contains, as its name implies, four notes. Between some two of
these there was named according to the position of that semitone. A
scale that has a semitone at the beginning of each tetrachord, which
always contained, as its name implies, four notes. Today, if we listened
to this chants founded on this scales we would feel as if their is
something missing or we would hear lack of tonality.

The Ambrosian chant. Not much is known about this chant but
one important fact we know is that it was metrical. This means that
if followed the prosodial quantity of the syllables of the Latin text of
the liturgy. From this formed the cantus firmus or fixed chant. But
this didnt last long. The Gregorian chant emerged immediately after
the cantus firmus did.The Gregorian chant has generally been
attributed to Pope Gregory but on recent investigations, they found
out that he didnt do much but issue rules about how to use it and its

regulations. One of the major changes in the character of the chant

was the abandonment of its metrical meter. With this, singers had
more freedom and did as they pleased. These also gave way to abuses
that really harmed the music but still led to really good results. The
beginning of the Gregorian Chant became the melodic basis of
modern music today.

As modern music grew harmony was also introduced. Harmony is

the sounding of notes of different pitch in combinations called
chords. Today, we have all been used to the sound of chords. Even
non musicians could notice if a note doesnt fit the chord and sounds
really bad. It is hard to imagine how the music was before harmony.
To get these harmonies, musicians experimented a lot. They combined
a lot of notes together until they had formulated chords. Our chords
today are built from the 1st, 3rd and 5th note of a certain scale. No
modern chord today could be formed without the third. The origin of
Harmony is not really known. It is believed the the Greeks knew
something about it but never really gave much attention to it so their
heirs had nothing to learn from. All of the steps used to develop out
music today have been the result of long processes and
experimentation.

The first known records of harmony were found in an old work

called Enchiridion Musicae. It was attributed to Hucbald, a monk of
St. Armand, and it metioned a system called Diaphony or Organum.
Hucbald used a system where the intervals between the notes were
measured according to the laws of acoustics. He got this from
studying the musical system of Pythagoras. He used the intervals of
the fourth, fifth and octaves. If we listen to this kind of harmony now,

we could consider it unpleasant to our ears. All the harmonic

combinations of the early years sound ugly to us today because we
are not used to it.

Rhythm was the next element of music that made its appearance.
This came to music through the improvements in notation and the
practice of singers. Singers started to ornament the songs long after
they learned to add second parts to the cantus firmus. This addition
was called the Art of Descant. The singers really enjoyed this because
with this, they were able to showcase their voices and musical skills.
This practice became really popular in some parts of France and the
Netherlands.

Nuemes were the earliest forms of nation found. This kind of

notation didnt show much to the musician how to really play or sing
the piece. It only showed the direction where the voice should go. In
Hucbalds time, a series of lines similar to our modern day notation
was used. The notes names were written on the opposite ends while
short lines were drawn upward or downward to show its direction.
Overtime, there was a need to find a way to indicate a fixed pitch. So a
line was used. If the line was red, the chant would be in the Key of F
and if the line was yellow, the chant would be in the key of C.
Sometine before, both lines were used at the same time. Afterward,
Guizo D Arezzo, a famous teacher and theorist, added two more lines
so came the existence to the four-line staff. But still there was no
rhythm. The person who introduced measure into church music was
Franco. He was the first theorist to record the distinction between
duple time and triple time. He also insisted that triple time should be
used in church music because it represented the Holy Trinity: the

Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. He also made many
improvements in harmony, one of these was the using of the contrary
motion. This manner of writing Hucbald used was parallel writing. In
Francos time, he used contrary motion. He also dealt with measure.
He used four notes to determine the length of a word. He used longa,
Brevia, Maxima and Semi Brevis. These name mean
LongshortDouble long and half short. And according to the book
the fact that in early medieval composers had no idea of a tune
founded on subservient harmony such as is now familiar to every one.

Counterpoint is the technique involved in the combination of multiple different

simultaneous melodic lines in a composition. Counterpoint is a characteristic of
Western music, and does not occur in Oriental or primitive music. It involves a set of
rules that govern two different dimensions. The first dimension is the vertical
dimension, which deals with the relationship between the lines and the intervals
between simultaneous notes. The second dimension is the horizontal dimension,
which deals with the shape, direction, individuality, and independence of each of the
lines. Over the course of history, composers have used counterpoint differently. In the
Middle Ages it was used for the combination of different rhythmic groups, in the
Renaissance it was used for melodic imitation, in the Baroque for contrasts between
different tone colors, in the Classical period it is used within a tonal structure, in the
Romantic in the combining of short melodic fragments, and in the twentieth century
in the contrast between tonalities and tone colors.
Counterpoint began in the late ninth century with a technique called organum,
which dealt with a plainchant melody, called the vox principalis (principle voice),
combined with a second part, the vox organalis (organal voice), singing the same
melody in parallel fourths or fifths beneath it. In the 11th century, the organal voice
began to claim more individuality in Guido of Arezzos Micrologus. Here it began to
include not only parallel motion, but also oblique and contrary motion, though it still
seemed to be composed note by note merely to compliment each note of the principle
voice. In the 12th century, the melodic lines finally began to become more
individualized by the use of different rhythms. The principal voice became the lower
voice, which was emphasized and prolonged and called the tenor, from the
Latintenere, meaning to hold. Over the next 300 years, the rhythmic contrasts
between voices gradually increased in complexity. Around 1200, Protin began to
write three and four part music using superimposed rhythmic patterns. The voices
differentiated by different rhythmic patterns, as well as by different phrase lengths.
During the thirteenth century these contrasts were carried still farther in the motet.
Franco of Cologne advised the use of consonances on the first beat of each bar,
serving as stabilizing elements. In the fourteenth century, the upper voice was

sometimes displaced by a beat or more, providing even more independence. Towards

the end of the fourteenth century, very complex counterpoint compositions used
complicated syncopations, as well as different meters. By the end of the middle Ages,
counterpoint had evolved from simple parallel motion to varied motion and rhythms.