The Ancient and Medieval Worlds

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Part I

• The Ancient and Medieval Worlds

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The ancient world
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Vocal Music

• Singing has been a natural outlet for expression
  since the beginning of human existence.
• When combined with language, music becomes a
  powerful tool for expression.

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Vocal Music

• Vocal music dominated music history from
  Antiquity through the Renaissance.
• Most of the surviving written music of this
  period is vocal, although there is evidence of
  instrumental music as well.

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Vocal Music

• Both the ancient Greeks and the early Christians
  placed a higher value on vocal music than on
  instrumental music.
• In sixteenthcentury Italy, some believed the art
  of singing was the link that connected us to the
  entire cosmos.

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Mesopotamia and Egypt
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Mesopotamia and Egypt

• Most of our ideas about music from these regions
  are conjectures, as little historical evidence
  has survived.
• Evidence indicates that both vocal and
  instrumental music existed in the fourth
  millennium b.c.e.

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Mesopotamia and Egypt

• Instruments lyres, harps, lutes, pipes, drums,
  cymbals, rattles, and bells.
• Reconstruction of a Sumerian bull lyre from the
  royal tombs at Ur, ca. 2500 B.C.E.

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Mesopotamia and Egypt

• Inlaid panel from Ur showing a bull lyre being
  played at a victory banquet, ca. 2600 b.c.e.

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Mesopotamia and Egypt

• Types of music, like those today, included
  wedding songs, funeral dirges, military marches,
  tavern songs, and ceremonial music.

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Music in Babylonia

• Babylonian musicians used seven-note scales.
• They created the first known notation during the
  second millennium b.c.e.
• Most music was probably improvised or played from
  memory.

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Ancient Greece

• Music was seen to have special powers, as
  suggested in the myth of Orpheus.
• Music could heal the body and soul.
• Plato recommended that the state be founded on
  suitable types of music.

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Fourteenth century
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Fourteenth century

• Numerous important writers and artists appeared.
• Petrarch wrote lyrics that inspired composers for
  centuries.
• Boccaccio wrote Decameron travelers escaping
  from the plague.
• Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales pilgrims
  going to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket.
• Sculptor Giovanni Pisano and painter Giotto
  anticipated the Renaissance in their works

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Giotto, The Nativity, detail, ca. 1305
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Musical trends

• Preoccupation with structure and form in certain
  genres
• Songs of courtly love were extended into
  polyphonic settings.
• Elaborate textures and complicated rhythms
  characterized music at the end of the fourteenth
  century.
• Polyphonic church music flourished in cathedrals
  and private chapels.

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Andrea Orcagna (?), The Dream of Life, fresco,
mid-fourteenth century
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Part I The Ancient and Medieval Worlds