As a classically, academically trained musician, I’ve been fascinated for some time as to why “Popular music” deviated from “Academic music” around the end of the 19th century. It’s a topic I’m always interested in hearing opinions on from experts. I’ll confess it’s not a topic I pretend to be an expert on; I’m sure many a musicologist could shoot holes in my views faster than a half cadence in a Sousa march. This week, I’ll attempt to briefly walk through the history of Western music from up to the end of the Medieval period (~AD 1400).

Greek Foundations (~600 BC – AD 500)

Western music seems to have much of its roots in our music theory heritage from the Greeks. From them we’ve received our tonal sequence of eight half- and whole-steps (the black and white keys on a piano, with the last note repeating the first an octave higher), referred to as a diatonic scale. These were arranged into a series of modes – think scales, starting on different white keys: Ionian (C-C), Dorian (D-D), Phrygian (E-E), Mixolydian (F-F), Lydian (G-G), Aeolian (A-A), and Locrian (B-B). Additionally, the ideas of consonance (‘nice’ sounding chords) and dissonance (‘clashing’ chords) come from this time period, though the definitions of consonance and dissonance have shifted. Much of Greek music history was influence by Mr. “a2 + b2 = c2” Pythagoras himself, who mathematically defined many of the intervals we use today, based on the untempered perfect fifth (generated by a string, divided into a ratio expressed as 3:2 – ie, a C string, divided at the point of ratio 3:2, will sound a G).

The Evolution of Chant (~AD 500 – AD 1400)

The early medieval church took many of the Greek diatonic modes and used them as the basic for chants in the liturgy. While all the modes seem to have been used (with the exception of the Locrian, as it is the only mode in which the tonic-dominant interval is a tritone, rather than a perfect fifth – this was seen as an extreme dissonance, and has been referred to as diabolus in musica – “the Devil in music”). As time passed, the primary modes that were used became the Ionian and Aeolian – matching to our modern “major” and “[natural] minor” scales.

While the earliest chants were performed monophonically (no harmony, all voices singing the same notes), gradually the rules were relaxed allowing first octave harmony (the same notes but seperated by octaves), then fifths. This latter development became crucial to much of the later evolution of harmony – because parallel fifths became accepted, the possibility arose of a diminished fifth existing – the aforementioned diabolical tritone. To avoid this, the harmonizing voice was required to stay on a different note – which added a new interval to harmony. Additionally, this caused music to begin having counterpoint – voice wouldn’t necessarily move at the same time.

We’ve now (oh so briefly) covered about 2,000 years of music. Next week, we’ll cover the following 600-odd years to the present.

Read part 2 here