The Middle Ages 500 - 1450

After the fall of the Roman Empire (which was around 500 AD), Europe entered a period known as the Middle Ages. Some people refer to this period as the “Dark Ages.” Without a Roman Emperor to govern the land, it was a time of war, invasions, and turmoil.
 

But the term “Dark Ages” is not a very fair description, because many important developments happened during this time. With the spread of Christian churches across western Europe, music and art had a place to develop and flourish. The Catholic church paid for the creation of many great works of art and music. The sponsorship of a musician by a wealthy person or institution is called patronage.

Pope Gregory I (who reigned around 600 AD) is credited with compiling a collection of chant that was used in churches across western Europe. The melodies of this Gregorian chant were very beautiful and seemed to float or wander from note to note. They were modal, which means that they did not fit into the major or minor key centers that we use today. They did not have time signatures, and although they were written down, the notation looked very different from what we use today.

Gregorian chant was monophonic, which means that it had a single line with no harmony. It was always sung a cappella, or without instruments. Over hundreds of years, composers slowly began to experiment with singing two or three melodies at the same time. At first, they embellished their chants by adding a second parallel melody that was a fourth, fifth, or octave above the first. Gradually they began to experiment with melodies that moved in different directions, or even crossed.

This new style of singing was called organum, and the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris was a site of many important developments in organum. It was here that two renowned composers developed the new style: Leonin in the twelfth century, and Perotin in the thirteenth. In the fourteenth century, Guillaume de Machaut further developed the new polyphonic style, both in music for the church and in his secular (non-religious) love songs.