Music, Mozart, Polyphony, & Western Civ

Interesting and sage comments from Fjordmann:

The Christian Church was the dominant social institution in post-Roman Europe and deeply affected the future development of European music. The ancient Greek system of notation had apparently been forgotten by the seventh century AD, when Isidore of Seville (ca. 560-636) wrote that “Unless sounds are remembered by man, they perish, for they cannot be written down.” But with the development of complex chants, what was needed to stabilize them was notation, a way to write down the music. The earliest surviving European books of chant with music notation date from the ninth century. During the early Christian era, the Classical legacy was used, but modified. From the Jews came the practices of singing psalms and chanting Scripture. Church leaders drew on Greek musical theory but rejected pagan customs, and elevated worship over entertainment and singing over instrumental music.

It is instructive to consider the fact that Middle Eastern Muslims, too, had access to Greek musical theory, yet they decided not use it, just like they did not utilize the Greek artistic legacy. Both music and pictorial arts were integrated into religious worship in Christian Europe in a way that never happened in the Islamic world. In fact, it was Gregorian chant and the growth of polyphonic music in medieval European monasteries and cathedrals which established the musical tradition that would eventually culminate in the works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven centuries later. There was no Mozart or Beethoven in the Islamic world, just like there was no Copernicus, Galileo or Newton.

The invention of musical notation enabled musicians to build upon the work of the past. It may have been a necessary condition for the expansion and development of musical expression, but it is not alone sufficient to explain later advances. The discovery of the connection between mathematical ratios and musical intervals attributed to Pythagoras – and independently the Chinese – was important, but not as important as polyphony. According to Charles Murray, “Just as linear perspective added depth to the length and breadth of painting, polyphony added, metaphorically, a vertical dimension to the horizontal line of melody.”

Read all here.