Week 33 - Reading up on Ancient and Medieval Worlds and Basic Music Theory

1. Stuff done this week:

- Read Chapter 1 (Music in Antiquity) of A History of Western Music and made notes (notebook)
- Read the first three chapters of Learning to Read Music
- Went to the library and borrowed several books on Medieval music and musical instruments. Also borrowed a CD collection called A Guide to Period Instruments
- Watched this online lecture on Abbess Hildegard von Bingen by Revd Prof June Boyce-Tillman.
- Read the translated text of Ordo Virtutum and listened to a rendition.
- Started a blog on Historical periods of music that I researched, published notes on the Medieval period and 4 musical instruments.
- Installed Sibelius on my laptop.
- Did the online introductory course on studying with OCA.
- Ordered more books from the OCA recommended reading list. They still need to arrive by mail.
- Had a gig at Trianon, Nijmegen on Friday. It was just rather flacid. I was really, really tired and on my last legs. This resulted in many mistakes, wrong notes and bad timing.

So I got lots of material which I have already started studying. Getting the books and setting up my resources (blog, notebooks, laptop) takes time. On the whole I think I got a lot done in the hours that I have available, aside from work, family, band and doing the odd gym session.
I was really tired, though. Still needing to finda balance in all my endeavours.

____________________________________________________

2. What I learned:

2.1 Music History

I learned about the music and musical practice of antiquity (Mesopotamia, Greece, Roman Empire) and what historical evidence is available.

There are 4 types of musical historical evidence (Burkholder et al, 2014):

1. Physical Remains: instruments and performing spaces (for instance: a theater, hall or place)
2. Visual images: of musicians, instruments and performances
3. Writings about music and musicians
4. Music itself: notation, oral tradition, recordings (since 1870's)

Earliest evidence lies in instruments found and visual images, for instance the bone flutes that have been found, dating back as far as 40.000 BC (!!) and paleolithic cave paintings (Turkey) of drummers. Bells, jingles, cymbals, ratles, horns and plucked instruments on stone carvings from the Bronze age have been found (4000 BC). There are no written records. The invention of writing marks the end of the prehistoric age, adding written evidence (Burkholder et al, 2014, page 5).

2.1.1 Music in Ancient Mesopotamia (period ca 3500 - 1250 B.C.E.)

Mesopotamia is the slice of land enclosed by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which is now Iraq and Syria. It was home to many civilizations, like the Sumerians, Akkadians and Babylonians.
Namely, archeological remains are crucial for understanding the music of this time since the 4th millennium BC. These are, for instance:

• Clay tablets that mention music being played
• Lyres (in the shape of a bull) and harps that have been found at royal tombs of Ur, a Sumerian city on the Euphrates
• Pictures of these instruments being played (ca 2500 BC)
• Some written records that provide a vocabulary for music and some info on musicians, e.g. word lists for instruments, performers, genres, performance techniques, tunings, types of music composition.
• Hymns written by Akadian priestess Enheduanna (ca 2300 BC)

(Burkholder et al, 2014, page 5)

Around 1800 BC, the Babylonians began to write down what they knew about music. They used 7-note diatonic scales. Greeks may have later adopted this system. The Babylonians used names for intervals to create early forms of music notation. The oldest nearly complete piece, a hymn to the wife of a moon god named Nikkal, is from 1400-1250 BC. It was discovered on a tablet found at Ugarit, a merchant city-state on the Syrian coast.
Despite evidence of early music notation, it is thought that most music was improvised or played from memory.

2.1.2 Music in Ancient Greece (period 800 B.C.E. - 2nd century C.E.)

Ancient Greece is the earliest civilization that offers us enough evidence to reconstruct a well rounded view of Greek music culture, including the Greek peninsula, islands in the Aegean Sea, much of Asia Minor, Southern Italy, Sicily and colonies ringing the Mediterranean and Black Sea.

The following has been discovered:

• Images
• Instruments
• Writings about music effects and roles
• Theoretical writings on elements of music
• Some 40+ examples of music notation

2.1.3 Instruments and their uses:

• Aulos (double flute). This instrument was used for worship of Dionysos. Also used during choruses of tragedies by Aeschylos, Sophocles and Euripides.
• Lyres (often constructed from a tortoise shell  with an ox hide and strings, strummed with a plectrum or pick). It was associated with the god Apollo (god of light and learning) and was a core element of music education. It was often used during recitations, dancing and singing.
• Kithara (large lyre). It was used in theater, processions and sacred ceremonies.

(Burkholder et al, 2014, page 9)

Music was primarily learned by ear (no images have been found of musicians reading from a scroll), however they did have a system of music notation.

2.1.4 Greek musical thought:

A lot of writings about music survived from ancient Greece, so we know quite a lot about Greek thought concerning music. There are two categories of writings on music: Philosophical (on the nature of music, its effects and proper uses) and Music theoretical (description of materials of music)

(Burkholder et al, 2014, page 10).

In Greek mythology, music's early inventors and practitioners were gods and demi gods, like Apollo, Hermes, Amphion and Orpheus. The Greek word for music, mousike, comes from the word referring to the Muses. Music was both an art for enjoyment and a science closely related to Arithmetic (Pythagoras, 500 BC) and Astronomy (Ptolemy, 27-48 BC). It pervaded all of Greek life: work, military, schooling, religion, poetry, theater.

Greek music is mainly monophonic (single melody line). This does not mean that it was always performed that way. From pictures, we see singers accompanying themselves on Kithara (heterophony or polyphony) (Burkholder et al, 2014, page 11).

Philosophy:

Greeks believed that music could affect ethos: one's ethical character or way of behaving. Aristotle (in his work Politics) postulated that music that imitated a certain behaviour could arouse that behaviour ("Doctrine of Imitation").

Plato (and Aristotle too) argued that education should stress gymnastics (to discipline the body) and music (to discipline the mind) as a way of self improvement.
Plato was conservative and weary though of certain music having a subversive element that could corrupt the mind. The same was thought more recently of Beat and Punk music!

(Burkholder et al, 2014, page 12-14).

Music Theory:

No writings by Pythagoras survived, and those of his followers exist only in fragments (Burkholder et al, 2014, page 15). Earliest theoretical works are by Aristoxenus (ca 330 BCE), a pupil of Aristotle. Here we observe how elements of music become more formalized and systematized:

• "Harmonic Elements". It indicates that music ws closely alligned with poetic rhythm.
• "Rhythmic Elements". Here Aristoxenus distinguishes between continuous movement of the voice, gliding up and down as in speech and diastematic (intervallic) movement, in which the voice moves between sustained pitches, separated by intervals. Melody consists of a series of notes, each of a single pitch. An interval is formed between two notes of a different pitch. A scale is a series of three or more different pitches in ascending/descending order.

These are simple definitions, but they established a firm basis for Greek music and all other music theory henceforth.

Unique to the Greek system were the concepts of tetrachord (4 notes spanning a perfect fourth) and genera/genus or classes of tetrachord. The outer notes of the tetrachord were considered stationary in pitch, while the inner two notes could move to form different intervals within the tetrachord and create different genera.There were three of these (Burkholder et al, 2014, page 15):

1. Diatonic (2 whole tones + 1 semitone)
2. Chromatic (top interval a tone-and-a-half or minor third and the others semi-tones)
3. Enharmonic (top interval is two tones or major third and the lower ones approximately quarter tones.

Aristoxenus remarked that the diatonic genus was the oldest and most natural, the chromatic more recent, and the enharmonic the most refined.

Since most melodies exceeded a fourth, theorists combined the tetrachords to cover a larger range.

Two tetrachords were conjunct if they shared a note. Or disjunct if they were separated by a whole tone. The system with four tetrachords plus an added lowest note to complete a 2-octave span was called the Greater Perfect System. This system was not based on absolute pitches; but on intervallic relationships (Burkholder et al, 2014, page 16).

Cleonides (2nd century) noted that in the diatonic genus the three main consonances of perfect 4th, 5th and octave were subdivided into tones and semitones; always in a limited number of ways, which he called species. For instance:

• A fourth interval consists always of 2 tones and 1 semi-tone.
• A fifth interval consists of 1 semi-tone and 3 tones.
• An octave consists always of 5 tones and 2 semi-tones.

There are 7 species of octave possible: (S=semi-tone, T= whole tone)

1. Mixolydian: STT STTT
2. Lydian: TTS TTTTS
3. Phrygian: TST TTST
4. Dorian: STTT STT
5. Hypolydian: TTTS TTS
6. Hypophrygian: TTST TST
7. Hypodorian: TSTT STT

Medieval theorists later adopted these names for their modes, but the latter do not match Cleonides' octave species. The octave species lack one defining aspect of modes: a principal "root" note on which the melody should end. (Burkholder et al, 2014, page 17).

Greek Music:

About 45 pieces/fragments f ancient Greek music survive, ranging from the 5th century b.c.e. to the 4th century c.e.. Most were recovered in the 20th century. All employ a musical notation of letters and signs placed above the text to indicate notes and their duration, for example the Oresteia by Euripides (Burkholder et al, 2014, page 17-18). 

2.1.5 Music in Ancient Rome (period 146 B.C.E. - 4th century C.E.)

We know less about Roman music. Plenty of images and some instruments have been recovered. There are thousands of written descriptions, but no settings of Latin texts that survived the Roman Period. Romans based their music culture on that of the Greeks.

Instruments they used were:

• Tibia (Roman aulos). This isntrument played an important part in religious rites, military music and theatrical performances, which included musical preludes and interludes, songs and dances.
• Tuba. This was a long straight trumpetnderived from the Etruscan civilisation. It was used in religious, state and military ceremonies.
• Cornu. A large G-shaped horn.
• Buccina. A small cornu.

During the great days of the Roman Empire in the 1st and 2nd century c.e. art, architecture, music, philosophy and other aspects of Greek culture were imported into Rome and other cities.

Many of the emperors supported and cultivated music; Nero aspired to personal fame as a musician and competed in contests. Decline in the 3rd and 4th centuries resulted in a decline in the large scale music production of the earlier days (Burkholder et al, 2014, page 19-20). Roman music seems to have left no traceable marks on the development of later European music.

2.1.6 The Greek Heritage

• Melody was linked to the meter, rhythm of the words.
• Musicians relied on memory and on knowledge of conventions and formulas, rather than notation.
• Philosophers conceived of music as an orderly system interlocked with the natural world as a force of human thought and conduct.
• The Greek accoustical system was founded on science.
• The Greek music theory was well developed.

Greek musical theory influenced medieval church music and music theory.

Renaissance and Baroque musicians revived Greek concepts and joined them to modern ones to create new genres and methods, including expression of mood, rhetorical devices, chromaticism, monody, and opera while citing Plato and Aristotle in defense of their innovations.

(Burkholder et al, 2014, page 20-21). 

Greek music therefore has had a profound influence on Western Art Music.

2.2 Music Theory

Here are my notes on music theory. I suppose it is mostly knowledge that needs to be exercised in order to stick; I think it is pointless to summarize this book. But I believe definitions are most important building blocks.

Pitch = A high or a low sound.
Duration = Whether notes are long or short; how they relate to each other in time.

Rhythm = pulse in a music piece.
Middle C = The C nearest the middle of any piano.

All sounds are vibrations. They reach the ear through vibrations of the air. A sound with a regular pitch (an identifiable note) has regular vibrations: unpitched noise has irregular vibrations. High pitched sounds vibrate faster than low pitched ones. The crucial point is that middle C vibrates exactly half as fast as the next C up. (Nickol, 2008 page 10).

Nickol (2008) states that there is no absolute value for the pitch for middle C, and other notes. They can vary slightly from one instrument to another, from one country to another and from one century to another. This can be deduced by examining instruments, for instance organs, from different periods and places. In practice it is becoming internationally standardized. One standard definition we have is the A note above C is a note whose sound waves vibrate at 440 cycles per second (Nickol, 2008 page 15). In practice this is not that important; it is important that musicians in a band are in tune with themselves. Pitch is always a matter of relative pitch.

Always look to see what clef you are in.

semibreve = whole note
minim = half note
crotchet = quarter note
quaver = eighth note
semiquaver = sixteenth note

Speed is indicated by metronome marks or by tempo marks (allegro, adagio, andante).

beat = regular pulse, like the ticking of a clock
bars = a grouping of beats, the first beat being accented.

Time signature ---> top number tells how many beats are in the bar, the bottom number which note represents the beat, e.g. 3/4 (3 beats in the bar, crotchet), 4/4 (four beats to the bar, crotchet), 2/2 (2 beats, minim).

__________________________________________

3. Sources

BURKHOLDER, J, GROUT, D. and PALISCA, C. (2014) A history of western music, 9th edition, New York: W.W. Norton (pages 3-21).

NICKOL, P. (2008) Learning to Read Music. How to Make Sense of Those Mysterious Symbols and Bring Music Alive, 3rd edition, London: Little Brown UK.