Baroque & Before — introduction

The beginning of music as we know it: plainchant

People have always made music together. There are flutes made from bird bone and mammoth ivory dating back more than 40,000 years, and the human voice is of course far older than that. Many of the folk music traditions that still exist today are doubtless based on centuries, even millennia of performances handed down from one generation to the next.

About 1000 years ago, however, a monk called Guido of Arezzo came up with an invention which would revolutionise the future of music: horizontal lines, ruled across the page. In the centuries before, the Christian church had developed a vast collection of chants — melodies to which the words of the liturgy were sung — but they had to be learned by heart and by ear, a painfully slow and laborious process, and always with the possibility of errors creeping in. Various systems had evolved to try to write the music down, using lines above the words to indicate where the tunes went up and down, but they only gave an outline of the shape of the tune, which was helpful as a kind of memory jogger for those who already knew the music, but useless for someone trying to pick it up from scratch.

What Guido came up with was a system where each of his ruled lines represented a single, fixed pitch. The lowest line was for the lowest pitch; the space above that line was for the note one step higher, the next line was for the note above that, and so on. He also gave each note in the series a name: ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la (starting at the bottom, and going up). These days we call the bottom note ‘doh’ instead of ‘ut’, but otherwise the same system is still used to teach music in many parts of the world (and it’s the same principle that Maria von Trapp uses in The Sound of Music with the song ‘Doh, a deer’).

Guido’s brilliant idea solved the problem of how to learn tunes. And for the music of his time, that was all that was needed. The music of the church in the 11th century was just melody: the monks all sang the same tune together, chanting the Latin words in a smooth and steady stream of syllables. It had no regular beats, no harmonies, and no instruments playing along. This music came to be called ‘plainchant’ or ‘plainsong’, or sometimes ‘Gregorian chant’, after Pope Gregory I, who according to tradition was the inventor of the style, though we now know that’s not the case.

‘Sing to the Lord a new song’: rhythm, harmony and polyphony

In the 12th century, plainsong began to get more elaborate. The monks began to add a second part to the melody: at first it was a parallel tune, exactly the same as the first and sung at the same time, only starting on a higher note. Then they allowed the new line to become more florid: the first tune was now sung very slowly, making time for half a dozen quick notes to be sung over the top of each note in the original chant. And then, in Paris, a group of musicians associated with Notre-Dame Cathedral (which was just starting construction) added a new idea: rhythm.

Only two of these composers are known to us by name: Léonin and Pérotin. They developed a system of rhythmic patterns — different combinations of short and long notes — which they then applied to the decorative lines in their plainchant (a little like the notion of different kinds of ‘feet’ — iambic, trochaic — in lines of poetry). By the middle of the 13th century, church music had a ‘beat’. To make this work, the Notre-Dame composers needed a way to show the lengths of the notes, not just the pitches, when they were writing it down, and they came up with the idea of using different shaped notes to indicate whether they were long or short.

Once you have a regular rhythm, you can have different musical lines fitting neatly together. (The technical term for this is polyphony: literally, ‘many voices’.) Across the Channel in England, around 1265, an unknown scribe copying down the popular tune ‘Sumer Is Icumen In’ left careful instructions on one way to do just that: up to four voices can sing the tune, starting one after the other, while two other singers sing a short repeated phrase underneath. It’s the oldest known round in the English language — although the manuscript also comes with a set of Latin words more suited for church.

Through the 14th century, the notation developed further: not just long and short notes, but a whole hierarchy of note lengths, each one half or one third as long as the next. This meant that the rhythms could now be much more complex and elaborate, rather than simple repeated patterns. Writing music had a lot in common with mathematics! In fact, it became so complicated that by the mid 15th century, composers started to look for something different: clearer, more singable melodies, and a more even balance between the different voices, though still enjoying the interplay between the various lines. The change started in northern Europe, with composers from France, the Netherlands and Belgium, like Dufay and Josquin des Prez, spreading gradually south to Italy.

Music and poetry: the dawn of song

As the Renaissance took hold, a new understanding of music also developed, drawing on the Classical Greek ideal of music and poetry acting together. This was the era of the madrigal, born in Italy but soon all the rage in England: music expressing the subtleties of the words to stir the passions. But this new emphasis on meaning called into question the nature of music itself: was polyphony any use now, since the interweaving lines, often singing different words at the same time, meant that nobody could really hear the text clearly?

The solution to this problem changed the very nature of music. Instead of many equal voices, there would be just one singer. Instead of harmonies created by the seamless interplay of many melodies, there would be just two musical lines written down: the sung tune, and a bass line, played on an instrument such as a cello; the harmonies in between these two lines would be filled in by chords on a harpsichord or lute. The music would follow the rhythm of the words, almost like an actor’s declamatory speech. From these elements would be born a whole new genre of music: opera.

The baroque: instrumental and vocal virtuosity

The new style also heralded the beginning of a new era: the Baroque. Starting in the early 17th century and running through to the mid 18th, this was the era in which instrumental music really came to the fore. The church was no longer the main driver of musical taste — sacred music was still important and many composers (J.S. Bach in particular) wrote some of their greatest works to the glory of God, but now there was a keen interest in secular music, as the concerto and the sonata flourished. Both of these genres gave pride of place to a single solo instrument (accompanied by an orchestra in the former, and a ‘continuo’ — usually a keyboard instrument plus cello — in the latter). By far the most popular solo instrument was the violin; Vivaldi’s ‘The Four Seasons’, for example, is actually a set of violin concertos.

As the instrumental soloist came to the fore, so too did the solo singer. Opera, originally a private entertainment at court, soon moved to the public theatre, and spread from Italy to England and France. Women, who until now had had few opportunities to perform, since the religious authorities barred them from performing in church, were now able to enjoy international renown as opera singers.

Soloists in the Baroque — both singers and instrumentalists — needed a special set of skills to perform this music to perfection: the ability to decorate the music as they played it. The notes on the page were not the whole story: it was expected that each player would add their own ornaments and embellishments to the melody, to make it more expressive and intensify the emotional impact of the music. A composer might repeat a musical phrase, but the performer would never play it twice the same way. Whole books were written about how to do this effectively and — above all — tastefully.

This was also the time when the orchestra took shape as a standard ensemble. Through the Renaissance period, instrumental groups had tended to emphasise similarity of timbre, rather than contrast, and so there were ‘consorts’ of instruments, belonging to the same family but in different sizes: a set of recorders, for example, or of violas da gamba — usually one of each size. In the Baroque orchestra, the balance was very different: string instruments form the backbone (with violins outnumbering the others), but there was also a harpsichord or organ, and quite possibly also some woodwind instruments (flutes, oboes and/or bassoons), brass (horns or trumpets) and percussion (timpani).