A Fresh Start

It's been a while since I've studied music from the twelfth century.

If you were to ask me before last week to tell you something that what was going on in music during that time, my thoughts would have been limited. I'm sure it would have included something about plainchant, organum and a list of two or three other vocabulary terms I faintly remember from my lackluster undergrad music history course. During my first study of the music from this era, I had a hard time connecting with the content. One can't blame me for the lack of understanding. I was a sophomore in college being taught musical concepts from another millennium in a basement classroom during my lunch, by an adjunct professor who found more enjoyment in researching music history than teaching it.  However, after reading the first four chapters of Douglass Seaton's Ideas and Styles in the Western Musical Tradition and doing a little extra reading of my own, I've found a new interest in this music. What was nothing more than boring monophony in a dead language has suddenly come to life.

Most music history courses start their narrative with plainchant. While this makes logical sense, I think many students are left under the impression that music was nothing more than simple monophony during this time because that was the extent of the western world's musical knowledge. As an undergrad, this was a dilemma for me. It didn't seem to make sense that hundreds of years before the chant repertory was transcribed, societies existed with brilliant artists and thinkers who were surely capable of dreaming up melodies more complex than chant. While this idea is likely true, music history courses (at least from my experience) do little to address this dilemma. So I rested on the thought that music started in the eighth or ninth century and began to expand from there. It wasn't until reading chapter three of the Seaton that I began to consider other possibilities. Seaton writes:

The chant's monophonic texture and the suitability of the music for singers of modest technical qualifications bear special significance. The unity of the "community of believers" finds expression in the uniting of voices in a single statement, especially within the religious cloister, where all the members of the monastery or convent participate in singing the Divine Office. Thus the chant's unification of worshipers' voices into a single line both embodies this idea and facilitates it in practice; its simplicity should not by any means be regarded as evidence of primitiveness (p. 30)

Things suddenly began to make more sense. What I had thought of as 'primitive' was actually a conscious decision by composers of chant. The music went from being a genre I felt obligated to know as a "real musician" to a lively, meaningful chapter in our musical story.