[MUSIC] Today, we begin our investigation of the history of Western classical music. As we said in session six, historians of music. Sometimes called musicologists, break the continuum of music history in eight style periods, Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classic,Romantic, Impressionist, Modern and Post Modern. So, we'll start with the Medieval period. What were the middle ages? Well, roughly the period of about 1,000 years from the fall of the Roman empire about 475 common era, up to the renaissance and the age of exploration. We'll say there, arbitrarily, 1450 to 1475 or so. So, a period of about 1,000 years. Where was it centered? In today, what we call Western Europe. France, Germany, Italy, Spain, England, the low countries with in many ways France really being the epicenter of it all. So, what's new in the Middle Ages? [LAUGH] Well, not very much. They're long gone, long passed, so why do we study it? Such a remote in many ways irrelevant past. Well, visiting the Middle Ages is much like traveling to a foreign country and seeing a foreign culture. Wait a minute you might say, this is western Europe we are talking about. How foreign can that be. Well, it is foreign because of the way things were done in the Middle Ages. Religion, education, the arts, music, it was all very different from today. How so? Well, let's just take education. Almost all of it was in the service of religion, theology, and almost all of it involved memory, usually just wrote memory of conical or prescribed text. Books were expensive, many sheep had to lay down their lives to generate the parchment of a book. So, generally speaking, students didn't have books. They came to class, and the teacher read out of the book, and the students repeated. They even continued this as they marched around the school yard. The teacher read from a book, the students repeated. If, after years of study, the student had memorized the content of the book. He was given the book as a present as he left school. So, the book wasn't so much an opportunity to engage education or an invitation to learn, but rather a symbol of accomplishment. So, things were very different back in the day, back in the Middle Ages. And they aren't different today, nowadays we sometimes read our books on our cellphones. Well, how was music of the middle ages different? When I was a student, when I was an undergraduate, I once read a book. Actually, I hope read more than one book. What did I do with that book? Here it is, I have it on the table. Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, and in it, the author said one thing that struck me and has always stuck in my mind. All art in the Middle Ages was functional art. What did Watsinga mean by that? Well, let's take a look at a picture here. A picture is worth a thousand words. We've got a sculpture from the, the beautiful cathedral of Chartres. And we see a group of saints, apostles. Well, they had a job to do. Remind the faithful of an exemplary life. Here, we see an image of Christ. It too, had a job to do, to inspire the viewer to a greater devotion. [MUSIC] And even the sounds of the chant. [MUSIC] Offered an opportunity for the reflection, of the message of Christ, the Christian message. It was what the music of the church, the sacred music did. And there was also of course music at court, secular music. What survives is almost exclusively dance music. And even most of the songs with text, indeed, even such songs. They were meant to be danced. So, courtly music too had a function, to provide dance music. What the Middle Ages didn't have was listening music. They didn't have concerts where you went and listened quietly for purely aesthetic reasons, pure aesthetic enjoyment. In the Middle Ages, people either worshipped, or they sang and danced. Or they sang as they worked in the fields. Music had, as we said, a function.
