Once they were accessible, the philosophies had a great impact on the mind of Western Europe. The ancient works, as well as Muslim commentaries, started then being translated. However they had largely lost touch with the content of their surviving works because the use of Greek as a living language was restricted to the lands of the Eastern Roman Empire ( Byzantium). Western Europeans were aware of Plato, Socrates, and Hippocrates during the Middle Ages. After the first millennium, European monks decided to start translating the works of Greek philosophers into the vernacular, following in the footsteps of the Muslims who did that 500 years earlier. These musical innovations appeared in a greater context of societal change. The lyrics of love poems might be sung above sacred texts in the form of a trope, or the sacred text might be placed within a familiar secular melody. In the thirteenth century, the chant-based tenor was becoming altered, fragmented, and hidden beneath secular tunes, obscuring the sacred texts as composers continued to play with this new invention called polyphony. Twelfth century composers, such as Léonin and Pérotin developed the organum that was introduced centuries earlier, and also added a third and fourth voice to the now homophonic chant. Historical contextĮuropean polyphony rose out of melismatic organum, the earliest harmonization of the chant. According to the Evolutionary Model, origins of polyphonic singing are much deeper, and are connected to the earlier stages of human evolution polyphony was an important part of a defence system of the hominids, and traditions of polyphony are gradually disappearing all over the world. According to the Cultural Model, origins of polyphony are connected to the development of human musical culture polyphony came as the natural development of the primordial monophonic singing therefore polyphonic traditions are bound to replace gradually monophonic traditions. Currently there are two contradicting approaches to the problem of the origins of vocal polyphony: Cultural Model, and Evolutionary Model.
#Polyphonic texture songs professional#
It is believed that origins of polyphony in traditional music vastly predates the emergence of polyphony in European professional music.
Most polyphonic regions of the world are sub-Saharan Africa, Europe and Oceania. Traditional (non-professional) polyphony has a wide, if uneven distribution among the peoples of the world. 1000, is the oldest extant example of notated polyphony for chant performance, although the notation does not indicate precise pitch levels or durations. Rather than being fixed works, they indicated ways of improvising polyphony during performance. These treatises provided examples of two-voice note-against-note embellishments of chants using parallel octaves, fifths, and fourths. 900, are usually considered the oldest extant written examples of polyphony. This point-against-point conception is opposed to "successive composition", where voices were written in an order with each new voice fitting into the whole so far constructed, which was previously assumed.Īlthough the exact origins of polyphony in the Western church traditions are unknown, the treatises Musica enchiriadis and Schola enchiriadis, both dating from ca. In all cases the conception was likely what Margaret Bent (1999) calls "dyadic counterpoint", with each part being written generally against one other part, with all parts modified if needed in the end. Also, as opposed to the species terminology of counterpoint, polyphony was generally either "pitch-against-pitch" / "point-against-point" or "sustained-pitch" in one part with melismas of varying lengths in another (van der Werf, 1997). Baroque forms such as the fugue which might be called polyphonic are usually described instead as contrapuntal. Within the context of Western music tradition the term is usually used in reference to music of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. In music, polyphony is a texture consisting of two or more independent melodic voices, as opposed to music with just one voice ( monophony) or music with one dominant melodic voice accompanied by chords ( homophony). Bach's " Fugue No.17 in A flat", BWV 862, from Das Wohltemperierte Clavier (Part I), a famous example of contrapuntal polyphony
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