Medieval Music

Medieval Music is very different from the music that we know and are used to listening to today. To begin, according to some scholars, medieval and other early genres of music can be divided into two main categories, sacred and secular. Sacred medieval music refers to any music that basically turns the bible into song, or or is influenced by god. Secular medieval music on the other hand was basically the "hip" music as it was used for its entertainment values for things like dancing. These two types of medieval music put a big separation on society though. For example, sacred musicians or composers were trained while the secular composers were usually not. In other words, sacred music was for the rich and secular was for the poor. To make a connection back to the present, you can compare sacred music to classical music, and secular to the popular genres like hip-pop, rap, country etc.
When most of us think of medieval music today we think of "criers" or people who would sing on the street corner or in the town square. They were known as a low part of society. There is some truth in that but it wasn't the only way music was played. A lot of the music originated from poetry so you could go to a play to hear it or an opera or even a drama. Furthermore, the main way that the music got around was through entertainment. Therefore, referring back to what I said before, most of the music was secular, the most popular music, as is today. so there is a trend to how we listen to music and know what's popular or not.
One of the most known ways of music that originated from the medieval music is chant, and this started with the birth of Christianity. Many of us hear or even sing this on Sundays at church. There is no harmony in this type of song, just completely melodic. Every word has its own note, as you can see in a church song. Either that or the word is broken down, and each syllable has its own note.
Polyphony is music with two or more independant lines. This is a label under the medieval music category. It originated around the 8th or 9th century. It appears in a form called parallel oraganum, or a chant with almost strictly parallel progression. This type of music is sung in two different octaves usually in harmony.
Since i was very confused about that last subject, I will end on the subject of medieval instruments. You can compare most of the instrument to string instruments today like the violin and guitar. Most of the actual strings were made from the intestines of sheep. A few of the string instruments were called, the Citole, the Harp, the Hurdy-Gurdy, the Psaltery, the Fiddle, and many more. To see pictures and read more about these instruments, visit http://www.trouvere.co.uk/String%20instruments.htm . For any other questions, feel free to ask in class.

http://www.wsu.edu/~delahoyd/medieval/polyphony.html
www.stanford.edu/~jrdx/medieval.html
http://www.trouvere.co.uk/String%20instruments.htm