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
Literary works in sixteenth-century England were rarely if ever created in isolation from other currents in the social and cultural world. The boundaries that divided the texts we now regard as aesthetic from other texts that participated in the spectacles of power or the murderous conflicts of rival religious factions or the rhetorical strategies of erotic and political courtship were porous and constantly shifting. 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. One of the greatest writers of the period, Sir Philip Sidney, defended poetry in just such terms. The medieval musical experience is impossible to recapture, for most of the music of daily life is lost to us. 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. Even the music that 'survives' does so in a fashion that leaves unanswered fundamental questions about how it originally sounded. The medieval musician, professional or amateur, expected to improvise, adding and changing musical materials as he or she performed a piece. The kind of instrument or voice to be used, the pitches in the melody, the kind of accompaniment if any might vary from one time to the next, as might the tempo, the volume, or even the rhythm. Medieval notation can be frustratingly vague for the modern scholar attempting to reconstruct a plausible and historically informed medieval sound. Yet the music that does survive forms a sumptuous legacy, ranging from the sacred to the profane and from monophonic texture with a single melody sung alone to the richly polyphonic with several independent voices operating simultaneously. The church, the court, the university, the town, and the tavern have all contributed tangibly to our musical heritage. 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 stress and strain of a revolutionary age can be read at large in the century's literature, from the somber, sluggish melancholy of t
Some common words found in the essay are:
Middle Ages, Chartres Cathedral, Elizabeth James, Renaissance Italy, Giovanni Bellini's, St Sernin, Philip Sidney, God Romanesque, , Andrea Mantegna's, middle ages, seventeenth century, secular music, revival classical, chartres cathedral, opera soon, culture occurred, churches built, gothic period, gothic style,
Approximate Word count = 1641
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)
|
