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"Music's exclusive function is to structure the flow of time and keep order in it." Igor Stravinsky |
"Without music, life would be a mistake." Friedrich Nietzsche |
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| Music remained relatively unchanged4 until the thirteenth century, even though there were many cross-currents of innovation.* (FN: Most notable was the invention of musical notation which began in the late eighth century in St. Gall, in what is now Switzerland.) During the late medieval period, choirmasters chopped linear melody into segments and rearranged them so they could be sung out of sequence.5 These superimposed melodies could now be heard simultaneously by the listener. By the beginning of the fourteenth century, composers were so excited about this new polyphonic musical form and the fledgling musical notation they developed in order to write it down that they called it ars nova, the new art. Polyphony had its beginning at a time when the simultaneity of multiple views was at its zenith in art, and logic and sequential causality had not yet reestablished their effectiveness as systems of thinking. (*f.n.: The popular canons, "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" or "Three Blind Mice," when sung out of phase in a chorus, are examples of polyphony.) The towering themes built using polyphony resembled nothing so much as the style of Gothic architecture. It was almost as if the Gothic cathedral evolved to complement polyphony, which also resembled the mosaic and the stained-glass window in that its discontinuous segments could be linked together to make up a much grander, unified, composition. The introduction of polyphony made possible immense complexity for music. The ancient Greek melodos had created a music time line comparable to the Euclidean vector of length: melody determined the horizontal direction of music. Polyphony now added the vector of height, so that instead of being a single thread, melody was a two-dimensional, chain-stitch, aural fabric complementing the visual tapestries of those times. The mosaic nature of medieval music is best illustrated by the peculiar fact that there exist virtually no surviving complete scores. What has come down to us, however, is "part music"; that is, each fragmented part of what was a whole composition. Part music is the name used for these fractured segments of a complex score. In the middle of the fifteenth century, accompanied by the reemergence of literacy, the discovery of visual perspective, and the reawakening of scientific inquiry, two inventions transformed music. The first was the standardization of written notation*, which allowed the components of melody to be read like the letters of the alphabet. The second was Johann Gutenberg's amazing new printing press, which made possible the rapid and widespread dissemination not only of the written word, but also of written music, which soon became so commonplace that by the end of the fifteenth century, music could challenge Latin as the primary pan-European language.6 (f.n.: Musical notation, having been invented in the eighth century, was continually refined in the ensuing centuries. It varied from one locale to another, however, because of poor communication between them. The printing press rapidly ironed out these local differences, creating a widely accepted standardized form of musical notation.) Literacy in both the printed word and music brought about the rise in the importance of the hand and the eye at the expense of the voice and the ear. Before the Renaissance, European music and knowledge depended for the most part upon an oral tradition that was written on the wind. But in the fifteenth century, what had been ephemeral became permanently transfixed by ink and sight: music and speech became visible. As Marshall McLuhan has pointed out, the Renaissance citizen traded an ear for an eye.2 Musical notation allowed the invisible vibrations of sound waves to be synesthetically converted to black marks on white paper. As a result, an individual versed in this specialized language could compose a piece of music without making a sound other than the scratchings of pen on paper. These transcribed sheets could then be given to another musically literate individual who would be able to reconvert the notations imaginatively, from the visual to the auditory sense without making a sound. All this could transpire without a single audible note -- truly the sounds of silence. As a result of notation and the press, then, music could at last break out of the narrow confines of the here and now. Monodic melody, the narrow-ribbon highway for the transportation of music, developed a long fracture on its surface. Vast tracks of time and space seeped into the crack. Printed scores allowed any complex piece to be performed many miles away from, and many years after, the place and moment of its origin. The functions of composer and performer could definitively become separate. Once music could be seen, its transitory, undulating essence could be stilled and analyzed. Much like the anatomists who were their contemporaries, fifteenth century composers began to dissect harmony in an attempt to learn the nature of its underlying structure. They teased apart its components and carried out experiments until they perfected polyphony.
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