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CHAPTER 1 1. Describe the role of music in ancient Greek society. How would you characterize Greek attitudes about music? What aspects of Greek musical thought have influenced Western music history? The ancient Greeks treated music as an important and influential art, which is reflected both in the attention it received from the eminent philosophers of the day, and in its use in the chorus as a critical tool in the Greek drama. Greek musical thought was most influential in its harmonic formulations, as the Pythagorean system became the backbone of music theory for hundreds of years. 2. What topics are addressed in Boethius’s De institutione musica? How does it reflect ancient Greek and medieval understandings of music? Boethius concerns himself with what he terms musica, and what might today be understood as “harmony”: the abstract and theoretical nature of music itself. Largely a sum of translations, De institutione musica reflects earlier Greek and medieval thought in its hierarchical description of musical spheres, in which practical, heard music (musica instrumentalis) is merely the audible expression of the same musical processes involved in the human constitution (musica humana) and the procession of the stars (musica mundana). 3. What political circumstances led to the adoption of Roman chant in the Frankish kingdom? Why was the chant attributed to Gregory the Great? The desire of the Carolingian emperors to centralize and hegemonize their enormous panEuropean empire meant that a single chant was a political necessity; and since the Bishop of Rome had, over the last several centuries, become the most powerful and stable leader in the Catholic world, the choice of Roman chant over its Mozarabic, Coptic, or Ambrosian contemporaries was one of political expediency. Its attribution to Gregory the Great was part of a propaganda campaign, which relied upon the Pope’s personal prestige (and the rumor that he was the recipient of divine revelation in this regard) to buttress the new chant’s standing and make it more readily acceptable to Germanic and Frankish Catholics. 4. Compare and contrast the four different settings of the text Justus ut palma discussed in this chapter. What are their main stylistic and formal features, and how might they have been used in context? The first setting of Justus ut palma discussed is part of the Office, an antiphon consisting of a single, simple melodic line, syllabically declaimed. This melody proceeds from its beginning intonation pitch to the reciting tone, a held pitch upon which lengthy portions of text are usually declaimed. The second setting of Justus ut palma mentioned is part of the Mass Proper, and owing to its more exalted position (the beginning of the Offertory), it is accordingly more elaborate and melismatic. The next setting described is what is termed a “lesson chant,” a chant sung in responsory fashion between scriptural readings. It is the most elaborate of the Mass chants, ornately florid and almost entirely melismatic. The final setting of Justus ut palma discussed is again part of the Mass Proper, specifically the Easter Gradual Haec dies; and like many Graduals, it bears certain formulaic traits which point toward an oral composition. 5. What do the earliest notations show about a chant melody, and what knowledge must the singer have in order to use the notation? The earliest chant notation was not illustrative enough to enable a singer to sight-read the tune: It describes vocal inflection and the general pitch-shape, but little else. A singer of such notation would need to be familiar with the notation’s basic structure, which is founded upon phonetics, but also would need to have some previous familiarity with the music in question in order to perform. 6. Explain the contributions of Guido of Arezzo to music theory and pedagogy, including solmization, the hexachord, and his theory of organum. Guido of Arezzo is notable for making one of the first theoretical contributions to practical music-making: Many of his contributions grew out of his direct experience training choristers. Solmization, the practice of reciting pitches on syllables abstracted from fixed pitch, was his invention, one he devised out of study of the hymn Ut queant laxis. This hymn focuses each halfline of its text on pitches of progressively higher scale degree, outlining the six-note set, or hexachord, which was the basis of Guido’s system. This system lacks our syllable ti: Guido instead relied upon a system of mutation, in which a given pitch is reinterpreted while singing, to bridge the gap which our ti fills between la and the octave do. Guido’s Micrologus, a pedagogic text of great influence, provided singers with an array of solutions to contrapuntal problems (such as devising a good occursus, cleverly avoiding the tritone, and providing a good complement of intervals). 7. Focusing on the Ordinary, briefly describe the origins, text, and music for the chants of the Mass. How did each one fit into the liturgy? The Catholic Mass is a reenactment of Christ’s last supper (or seder), divided into the synaxis, which is an inclusive service focused upon open prayer and readings, and the Eucharist, the consumption of bread and wine which are held to miraculously transform (or “transubstantiate”) into the body and blood of Christ. The text of the Mass Ordinary, that portion which does not change from day to day, is divided into the Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei. The Kyrie, which uses a simple Greek text, alternates between recitations of “Kyrie eleison” and “Christe eleison,” and often reflects this structure in its form: AAA BBB AAA’, or AAA BBB CCC’. The Gloria’s text is based upon the angelic appearance before the shepherds during Christ’s birth recounted in the Gospel of Luke. This lengthy text is more syllabic than melismatic as a necessity, as it must navigate over a hundred words to the Kyrie’s three, and this difficult passage was therefore initially reserved for the clerical choir. This is followed by the similarly prolix (but musically more austere) Credo, which is a statement of the tenets of the Christian faith (“I believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth…”). The Sanctus takes its text from the Book of Isaiah, and like the Gloria is held in reserve for the church choristers. The Mass Ordinary ends with the Agnus Dei, which is structured both musically and textually like the opening Kyrie: It uses an ABA structure which repeats minimally variable words. 8. Describe the new types of composition that arose between the ninth and eleventh centuries, including the trope, sequence, hymn, and Marian antiphon. What are the main characteristics of these genres, and how did they originate? Tropes began as improvisatory additions to existing chants, and grew from mere prefaces to more elaborate introductions to the Mass as a whole. They served as more individualized additions, since their text was freely chosen, to the often unchanging Mass service. The hymn, in contrast, is a complete composition without attachment, one which is vividly melodic, wellornamented, and evocative of a jubilant mood when compared to the staid psalm. The Marian antiphon, too, was an independent work, a Latin song which appears at the end of the Offertory and offered praise specifically to the Virgin Mary. Finally, the sequence is a double versicle chant of Frankish origin, born of the extremely long melisma which was originally appended to the “Alleluia.” 9. How did the sequences composed by Hildegard von Bingen compare with other medieval sequences? In what other areas of musical and religious life was Hildegard active? Hildegard’s sequences seem to focus more upon variation than repetition, and their text is focused upon divine revelation, of which Hildegard believed herself a recipient. Hildegard’s sequences are not her only musical accomplishment; her morality play Ordo virtutum is indeed perhaps her most famous work. Beyond her abilities as a musician and composer, Hildegard wrote extensively on the natural sciences and of her own revelatory experiences. 10. Explain at least two approaches to making polyphony. How was this taught in the Musica and Scolica enchiriadis? How did this practice change in the next two centuries? One approach to making polyphony involves accompanying an extant melody with a drone, usually on the final of the mode. The other uses a transposition of the existing melody to a consonant interval below, which is termed “organum.” The Enchiriadis treaties suggest a combination of these methods in the creation of polyphony: While the added voice must follow the existing one in a loose sense, it does so in a broad fashion, changing pitches with much less frequency and instead contributing a succession of drones on different pitches. With the ascent of new musical ideas codified in Guido’s Micrologus, the number of pitches available to the added voice increased dramatically. 11. Most of the music studied in this chapter falls on a spectrum between being oral and fully literate. In what ways did oral tradition persist after writing began? How do our assumptions about art and what constitutes a “piece” of music differ from those of the Middle Ages? The existence of fifteenth-century manuscripts without heightened neumes is concrete evidence that oral transmission continued even after fully literate notation was available, because unheightened neumes are not indicative enough to transmit music without accompanying oral education. Oral expression of sung music is easy, easier to transmit than its written counterpart, and thus will always exist as a viable counterpart, a fact well attested by the rote teaching of popular and folk songs that still occurs today. Our society has had its aesthetic sense molded by the increasing ease with which technological reproduction of music has embedded itself in our world. For this reason, the Middle Ages saw music as essentially potential, while the Modern mind tends to view music as essentially realized.