Written Music
For a very long time music was not written down. It was sung or played from memory. As it was passed on from person to person, many changes crept into the tunes. A way of writing music down was needed so that it would be sung or played exactly as it had been composed. The name for written music that man developed is notation.
The system of musical notation generally used today is the result of centuries of development- from about the end of the ninth century to the early 1700’s. This development began in the cathedrals in monasteries of the Roman Catholic Church.
Since many of the Church’s services were sung, they were sung from memory. Towards the end of the ninth century dots and dashes and squiggles were
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A method of notation that made it possible to show the length of each note was developed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Notes took new shapes and stems were added to some notes according to their length. By the 1600’s the notes had become round and musical notation began to look like it does today.
Today music is written and printed in a picture language. This language of notation indicates the pitch of the tones, their place in a sequence of tones, their duration (the length of time a tone is held), and the composer’s ideas about how they should be played. Notes are written signs that represent tones (musical sounds). The notes appear on a staff, a set of five horizontal lines. The higher the composer places the note, the higher its pitch. The order in which he places it, from left to right, indicates its place in a sequence of notes.
The shape of a note shows its time value.
A clef sign at the left end of a staff determines the position of notes on the staff. The treble clef is often called the G clef because its sign fixes the G above middle C on the second line from the bottom of the staff. The bass clef, often called the F clef, fixes the F below middle C on the second line from the top of the staff. Higher notes, such as those for the right end of the piano, appear in the treble clef. Lower notes appear in the bass clef. Music for the viola is written in the alto clef, and music written for the trombone, bassoon,
21. Composers began to write polyphonic songs that were not always based on chant, what were they based on instead?
Alec Robertson, Dennis Stevens, ed., A History of Music Volume 2 (New York: Barnes and Noble, Inc., 1965), Pg. 85.
Music is present in every culture’s past, present, and future. It has been around since 500 B.C. and was especially important in the Elizabethan Era. There were reinventions of music as it was widespread and popular. Without this essential time in history, modern music may have been completely different from what we have today. This era brought new uses for music, styles of compositions, new instruments, and the uprising of popular composers.
The octave of the poem describes the events of a typical church service, in the order they commonly occur. Prayer occurs first, hymn/singing is the second, sermon third, communion forth, and hand-wringing fifth and last. At first, it may
From the beginning of times, music has played an important role in everyone’s life. At first, it started with drum-based and percussion instruments made out of what was available as rocks and sticks. Our ancestors proved that human beings have an innate need of music. Nowadays, no one teaches a baby to follow the beat of a song, he just naturally lets his body get involved with the rhythm. Since the prehistoric era to Christian times, several forms of music have developed leaving a trail to new genres of music. For Christianity, hymns and plainchants were the first forms of music considered as a worship to God. As time passed by, Christian music has evolved giving way to new and fresh sounds.
Music is remarkable for its special nature, which it is heritability. Music itselfs does not only give all music notes but innovation and inspiration from
Music has evolved too many different forms that we recognize today. We trace this development throughout time. Beginning in the middle ages, we have seen advancement from the Gregorian chant all the way to the Jazz of the 20th century. The current events, politics, religion, technology and composers can shape musical eras during time. Here I will look at the middle ages, renaissance, baroque, classical, romantic and twentieth century periods. I hope that a better understanding can be reached to why, when, where and who are the reasons for musical evolution.
Throughout the many years of time, music has been associated with the lives of humans. Ranging from the oldest recorded music in 1888, The Lost Chord, to Motherese, or the way that mothers “sing” to their babies to communicate to them, to our modern music of radio stations blaring our favourite song while we drive from place to place. Music has found its place within human lives, intertwining its existence with ours. Incredibly enough, humans have found a way to harness music with our very hands and create elegant melodies from tools. Beginning with instruments that look like a guitar, instruments that look like a flute and instruments that look like a drum, we began making controlled music with rhythms and harmonies. As years passed and civilization began to grow, musicians came to be. These ancient musicians played music for others on the instruments that they would make and performed for many.
Instrumental music in the Middle Ages was generally improvised rather than played from notation. True
Life in the Middle Ages revolved around the Church, which was the Roman Catholic. So, we can imagine early music was pretty much from church. Every morning at 9 o’clock was Mass, a significant ceremony done to commemorate the Last Supper. At this church service, the music was the Gregorian Chant. The Gregorian chant is performed in the Latin language, unison voice and accompanied by no instruments which was believed that the text of the song which carried the divine message from God was more important. The music was just to help you get to a spiritual place (Wright, 4-1a).
Music has been around for as long as anyone can remember. People have been pairing music and dance for a long time too. While there have been stage productions of musicals for a long time it was with the advent of the motion picture that the musical film was born. “With the coming of talking motion pictures, the musical film genre emerged
Music dates right back to the prehistoric eras where primitive instruments were constructed using items like bone and wood. These primitive musicians would not have known many of the modern terms such as octaves
The feelings that the Ancient Romans had towards music could be described as ambivalent. They admired it and at the same time, they condemned it. Music, nevertheless, played a role in Roman society that, as time passed, became less and less important to the Romans. As a result, much of the information about music in Ancient Rome has been lost in time. However what has been discovered about this topic is quite fascinating, in spite of what it is lacking. The subsequent paragraphs will explain some of the aspects of Roman life regarding music. This includes the history of music in Ancient Rome, the instruments that the Romans played, the uses of music in their society and the impact that music in Rome has had on the music of today.
Music from all over the world presents a range of musical theories. Some of these are documented in writing whilst others are transmitted orally. Discuss and give examples with reference to both Western and non-Western music.
While music has kept a steady definition through time, modern music has been re-invented and re-made to be distant from that of an older age. Music has always been around, just remixed as time goes on. We know that it has been around for a while because geologists have found cave paintings dating back to prehistoric ages where they are depicting people dancing, proving to a presence of some interpretation of music. Music was