A CONCISE HISTORY OF WESTERN MUSIC

BARBARA HANNING

1. The Ancient Greece and Early Christian Rome

From the beginning of human existence, singing has been a natural outlet for the expression of feelings. Probably even before the development of language, the utterances of the human voice gave vent to basic emotions – the wails of lament, the howls of pain, the giggles of joy, the quavering of fear. Once combined with language, singing became a powerful means of communicating not only generalized feelings, but also the most personal and subtle sentiments. By heightening and colouring the words, the singing voice can render their meaning with a force greater than they have when merely spoken.

In fact, vocal music dominates the first two parts of history – antiquity, through the Renaissance – but not because that is all there was. Rather, it constitutes most of what survives in written form. And that music, in turn, is a product almost exclusively of the elite and literate classes of society, and it is only a tiny fraction of all the music that was made through these centuries. Nevertheless, since the advent of recorded history, attitudes toward singing have reflected the cultural and intellectual concerns peculiar to a given time and place. For example, the ancient Greeks stressed vocal music over instrumental music because they expected from their arts a distinctive character (ethos) that only words could impart music. All ancient Christian music was vocal, but during the Middle Ages some church leaders were troubled by the sensuality of the voice in the performance of religious plainsong (or chant) and expressed concern about the potential distractions of song as an aid to worship. In the court cultures of XVI century Italy, the art of singing was particularly significant: not only was it a mark for grace and nobility, but it was also believed to be the link that connected us to the entire cosmos, putting the individual in touch with the harmony of the universe.

Archaeological remains, images, and early forms of writing all testify to the use of instrumental as well as vocal music in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt in the Near East as far back as the fourth millennium B.C.E. Physical and pictorial evidence exists of lyres and harps as well as lutes, pipes, drums, cymbals, rattles and bells. Written sources suggest that Babylonian musicians used seven-note diatonic scales and created the earliest known musical notation during the second millennium B.C.E. Even then, musicians probably did not depend on notation in order to play or sing, as modern performers do, but instead used