7.1 - Introduction to the Middle Ages

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From the course by Yale University

Introduction to Classical Music

1299 ratings

Yale University

Introduction to Classical Music

1299 ratings

Using a simple and enjoyable teaching style, this course introduces the novice listener to the wonders of classical music, from Bach fugues to Mozart symphonies to Puccini operas.

From the lesson

Music Back in the Day

We will cover a thousand years in musical evolution during this modules lectures! We'll start with the Middle Ages taking a look at its functional chants and dance music, then we’ll move to the period of the Renaissance, and finish off by listening to the ornate melodies of opera heard throughout the early Baroque period. From this, you’ll begin to see how advances in musical notation allowed compositions to become both more specific and more complex. These advances are ultimately responsible for focus being shifted away from the performers and towards the composers themselves.Along the way, we’ll highlight some of these musical inventors and innovators, such as Hildegard of Bingen and Johann Pachelbel. We’ll also have the unique opportunity to see (and in some cases even hear) many of the instruments that were popular during these different time periods. This will be a real treat, made possible with help from Yale instructor, Grant Herreid. Many thanks are owed to him!

7.1 - Introduction to the Middle Ages4:57

7.2 - Gregorian Chant7:09

7.3 - Monasteries and Convents6:06

7.4 - The Chant of Hildegard of Bingen4:43

7.5 - Early Polyphony7:14

7.6 - Polyphony at the Cathedral of Reims: Machaut's Messe de Nostre Dame8:17

7.7 - Dance Music of the Court12:54

Meet the Instructors

Craig Wright
Henry L & Lucy G Moses Professor of Music
Department of Music

[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.

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