There are some treasure troves of medieval music. (For more detail on this question, see the article here.) It is extremely rare for us to have any idea what the intended instrument was to accompany a voice (if at all) or to play for dances, so we have to make our own choices from the scant available information and our own sense of what sounds right. At times, though, it wasn’t written very accurately, or was written with a poor pen and so had vague or indecipherable note values, which is adequate if you know what it’s supposed to sound like, which they did, but we don’t. Square notation is now the best known system developed in this period, and once you know square notation some of the music is easy to read. There were different systems of musical notation, none of which indicated precise rhythm until the 12 th century. Medieval music is not immediately accessible for a modern musician. This ecclesiastical music is important in itself, but its predominance in surviving manuscripts gives a partial view of music-making. The music that was written down was most often church music as it was largely clergy who could write. Most people were illiterate, therefore most music was not written down but passed on and learned by ear and so, of course, we’ve lost it. Much of medieval secular music is a mystery. This gradual broadening of the idea makes it impossible to give a precise date for the end of the middle ages and the beginning of the renaissance, so a nominal latest date of around 1470 is often given. The idea of this alleged rediscovery of classical Roman and Greek art and wisdom (in reality, surviving manuscripts show that writers of the ‘middle ages’ were very well aware of classical Rome and Greece) spread steadily through the nation before then spreading internationally through Europe. Thus, for the people of the self-defined Italian renaissance who delineated the ‘middle ages’, the term meant precisely and explicitly the same as the ‘dark ages’: it was a whole millennium of cultural darkness in the middle period between the fall of the Roman Empire and Italian culture’s rediscovery of its treasures. It was Italians of the 14 th and 15 th century, primarily Francesco Petrarca or Petrarch, Leonardo Bruni and Flavio Biondo, who defined themselves and their generation as bringing about a renaissance (rebirth) of classical Roman and Greek wisdom. This split is an ahistorical view which ignores how the term ‘middle ages’ was originally conceived by those who minted it. Some historians have taken to splitting the mediaeval period in two: the ‘dark ages’ until the 10 th century (from an anglocentric view, that’s before the Norman invasion of 1066, when the language in England was Old English) and the ‘middle ages’ from the 11 th century (between the Norman conquest and the renaissance, during which the language evolved into Middle English). One of the creators, possibly the original creator, Francesco Petrarcha or Petrarch, 1304–1374, 476, following the fall of the Roman Empire, to the start of the renaissance in the 14 th and 15 th centuries, so that’s around a thousand years. The mediaeval or medieval period, or the middle ages, covers a huge stretch of time, from A.D. This article features 4 illustrative videos of medieval music and several links to further articles (click on blue text). When were the middle ages? How do we know what the music sounded like? What were the earliest surviving songs? What was its dance music like? Why does medieval music sound so different to today’s? How did medieval musicians harmonise? We’re not completely in the dark, though, so the aim of this article is to give a broad beginner’s guide to the principles of secular medieval music. The middle ages covers a period of a thousand years – and yet much of its music-making is a mystery to us.
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