Musical Era
Medieval
Chant, monophony, and the birth of written music.
The Medieval era covers roughly nine hundred years and is where written Western music begins. For most of this period, music meant Gregorian chant: a single unaccompanied melodic line, sung in Latin, in church. There was no harmony in the modern sense - just one voice (or a group singing in unison) tracing a melody shaped by the words of the liturgy.
The world it came from
After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the church - and especially its monasteries - became the guardian of learning across Europe, and music was a central part of worship. Monks and nuns sang services many times a day, and over centuries they built up a vast repertoire of chant. Legend credits Pope Gregory the Great with gathering it together, hence "Gregorian," but the repertoire actually took shape over several centuries, much of it in the Frankish empire of Charlemagne and his successors.
Chant is built on the church modes - scales older than our major and minor - which give it a calm, otherworldly sound to modern ears.
The invention of notation
The lasting contribution of this era is notation itself. Before roughly the 9th century, chant melodies were passed down by ear. The gradual development of neumes - small marks above the words showing the rise and fall of a melody - and later a four- and then five-line staff, made it possible to write music down with enough precision that it could be performed accurately centuries later - the entire rest of this site's timeline depends on that invention. Around 1025, the monk Guido of Arezzo also devised a set of sight-singing syllables, ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la, the ancestor of "do-re-mi."
The birth of polyphony
Late in the era, composers began layering two or more independent melodic lines on top of each other, a technique called polyphony. This was a genuinely radical shift, and it's the thread that connects Medieval music to everything that follows in the Renaissance.
It began simply, with a second voice shadowing the chant (a style called organum). Around 1200, at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris, the composers Léonin and Pérotin wrote soaring organum for two, three, and even four voices. In the 14th century, the French Ars nova ("new art") brought more complex rhythms, and the poet-composer Guillaume de Machaut wrote the first complete polyphonic setting of the Mass by a single known composer.
Secular music and instruments
Not all medieval music was sacred. Troubadours and trouvères in France, and Minnesänger in Germany, sang songs of courtly love, and dances such as the lively estampie survive. The English round "Sumer is icumen in" ("Summer has come in"), from the 13th century, is one of the oldest surviving pieces of polyphony in six parts. Musicians played the vielle (an early fiddle, pictured above), the rebec, the harp, the psaltery, the hurdy-gurdy, bagpipes, recorders, and small portable organs.
Composers to know
Hildegard von Bingen is the era's best-known composer on this site. Beyond her:
- Léonin and Pérotin (active c. 1150 – 1230) - the Notre-Dame pioneers of polyphony.
- Guillaume de Machaut (c. 1300 – 1377) - the great poet-composer of the 14th century.
- Francesco Landini (c. 1325 – 1397) - the leading Italian composer of his time, despite being blind from childhood.
Into the Renaissance
By the early 1400s, composers such as the Englishman John Dunstable were writing a sweeter, fuller sound built on richer harmonies, which was eagerly taken up on the continent - the beginning of the Renaissance.
Where to start listening: Hildegard von Bingen's chant compositions are a good entry point - strange and beautiful to modern ears, and mercifully free of the "unfamiliar old music" barrier that can make this era feel remote. Then try Pérotin's Viderunt omnes, whose four voices still sound astonishingly modern.