The Story of Music: From Babylon to the Beatles: How Music Has Shaped Civilization

by Howard Goodall

  Plainchant is our only audible link with the musicians of the first thousand years AD. Its survival into the modern era we owe to two gigantic musical discoveries that began to make their presence felt in the two centuries before AD1000. To grasp the significance of these two discoveries, we need to transport ourselves back to the sound world of that period, one thousand five hundred years ago.

  It is a Sunday morning service in an abbey or cathedral. Some monks are singing a section of plainchant, together, in unison. After a couple of lifetimes, someone thinks it would be a good idea to add some young lads to the choir, to feed and clothe them and keep them out of mischief, and to begin the long, slow process of teaching them from memory the entire plainsong repertoire for the Church year.

  The musical effect of adding the boys is that there are now two parallel lines of music, not just one, since the boys’ voices are higher than those of the men. The higher version the boys sing is made up of identical notes to the men’s, but at a higher register; so there is a fixed, natural distance between the two identical lines of music. This fixed distance between a note and its higher self is something that occurs in nature – we humans didn’t invent it, we just found it to be lurking behind all musical sounds.

  I can tease out this ‘secret’ natural relationship between a note and its higher self by illustrating the magic of musical pitch. If I pluck any string on a guitar, or blow across the end of any piece of tubing, the length of the string or the length of the column of air will determine how high or low my note will be. We can call that note anything we like but we may as well call it ‘A’, and when we talk about how high or low ‘A’ sounds, we are talking about its ‘pitch’. If you twang a rubber band it will make one pitch, if you stretch it so that it is longer and tighter, the pitch of the note will have changed. In ancient music-making, pitch was fixed – defined – only by the length of your string or pipe, hence the need for a label like ‘A’ to denote the same sound made on different-shaped instruments. Nowadays we are able to fix pitch using an electronic measurement, Hertz, which gives each pitch a numerical value, though we have stuck with the alphabetical names for ease of use. (As an aside, the ‘A’ that modern orchestras use as a reference to tune to – usually played by the oboe – was set at a sound-wave frequency of 440 Hz by international agreement in the 1930s, having previously been standardised in some countries at the slightly lower 435 Hz. Before electricity made any of this possible, ‘A’ could be different pitches not just in different countries but also from town to town or even from instrument to instrument. Surviving organs and other instruments from Bach’s time indicate that the average pitch was lower then than it is today, so his music is mostly performed at A = 415 Hz. Likewise the music of Mozart and Haydn is sometimes played at the ‘historically authentic’ frequency of A = 430 Hz.)

  Here’s the magical bit. If I pluck my guitar string again, but this time ever so gently resting my finger halfway down its length, it plays a higher version of note A: let’s call it Little A. If I fill half my pipe or tube with water, effectively halving the instrument’s length, the new note that sounds when I blow across its top will also be Little A. Little A and Big A were both there all the time, but it just took a bit of teasing to get Little A to reveal itself. In fact, every time you hear Big A you are also hearing Little A hidden within it, as it is part of Big A’s rainbow spectrum of sound.

  In musical terms, we say that Little A is an octave higher than Big A and that Big A is an octave lower than Little A. This natural distance was originally named octave, meaning eight, because in the medieval church there were only eight notes to choose from, with one of these octave notes at either end of the eight. From the Ancient Greeks to the Reformation, it was believed that certain musical notes had a dangerously seductive effect and needed to be outlawed by authority; this eight-note restriction was driven by the medieval Church’s desire to simplify and order the potential musical free-for-all. Later, octave came to mean a choice of twelve notes, not eight, and we got saddled with the wrong descriptor for ever, but I’ll explain that development when it arrives. For now, in the early Middle Ages, octave meaning eight is a fair definition of the relationship between Big A and Little A.

  Men monks and boy choristers sang together, an octave apart, for a very long time. But this idea, having two notes for one, prompted a further revolutionary thought: what if we had two notes together that weren’t an octave apart? Not just Big A and Little A but Big A and Big E, for example?

  Believe it or not, this possibility didn’t occur to medieval musicians for centuries. It was as if they’d discovered black and white, then maybe brown, but never thought to look for further colours. Indeed, the process of eking out those new notes took so long that we don’t even know in which century it happened. Some time before 800 is all I can tell you. This was a really major breakthrough: layering two lines of voices singing at the same time, but singing slightly different notes. And yet, when the musical monks finally started doing it, their caution was staggering.

  They took the original plainchant and added a second line that ran exactly in parallel to it, at a slight distance, like two train tracks. Usually it was the note pitched five steps higher up the ladder (of eight) that they used for the new tracks. The reason for the singers’ attraction to the pitch five steps up the scale (or four down, if you are going in the descending direction) is that this pitch, like the octave, has a natural resonance in all sounds. We created Little A by halving the length of our stretched guitar string. If we had divided the length of the string by a third instead of a half, we would produce this very pitch; if we had started at A, we would now have E. These resonances are caused by a phenomenon known as the harmonic series, which we will encounter in a later chapter. For now, it is enough to know that the notes at the fourth and fifth rung of the medieval musical ladder were derived from what were deemed ‘perfect’ mathematical ratios and were therefore the monks’ first choice for their additional pitch. Medieval church musicians called the technique of running two notes in parallel – which they improvised on the spot – ‘organum’, because to their ears it sounded like an organ. Which it does. The Greek term for more than one voice line singing together is polyphonic: many voices.

  Organum became very popular across Europe – and, dare I say it, formulaic to the point of tedium. In around 800, you’d probably have heard it in any abbey you stumbled upon from Italy to Northumbria. But the heady excitement of turning one tune into two at no extra cost had another spin-off: organum where one voice stood still instead. This version has the basic plainchant as normal, but instead of adding another line following its contours like the parallel train tracks, the new additional line stays put. It just holds one longnote throughout, a sound that is known as a drone. Holding the drone, however, turned out to be unusually boring to perform, not to mention quite tiring, so more often than not it was played on an instrument instead: an organ, perhaps, or now almost forgotten instruments such as the crwth, the psaltery, the hurdy-gurdy or the symphony. These instruments shared the ability to regenerate a held note seemingly endlessly, without a break for breath or a change in fingering. A bow drawn backwards and forwards across a string, or a handle mechanism that turned the edge of a wheel against a string, were the most common solutions. An organ could keep going indefinitely as long as you had someone, or a team of people, to pump its bellows.

  The point of adding a drone to a chant melody was that new combinations of notes were created as the melody line moved closer or further away from the drone. If we imagine parallel organum as a train track winding across the landscape, the drone style looked more like a graph in which one line moves and the other stays constant.

  It is a concept that survives to this day in the music of the bagpipe. The instrument’s ancient (and surprising) connection to plainsong is preserved in the naming of its parts: the perforated tube you play the melody on is still called the ‘chanter’.

  As time went on, more adventurous
musicians, such as the ninth-century Byzantine composer Kassia of Constantinople, began mixing the parallel organum style with the drone style. Kassia’s haunting music has recently been recorded for the first time in a thousand years, and it rather gracefully refutes the assumption that the development of early music is exclusively the handiwork of men.

  These new layered sound effects, built on plainsong tunes, were edging very close to what today we would call ‘harmony’ – that is, the existence and exploitation of simultaneous clusters of notes. This was the first giant step our medieval ancestors took as the year 1000 loomed.

  The other was to alter the course of music history dramatically. It was the invention of a reliable, universally adopted musical notation. It took an Italian monk, immortalised as Guido of Arezzo, to crack the code in around AD 1000 and give Western music its unique system of notation, still in use today. His system was an iteration of an earlier attempt at transcribing melody, and it is worth tracing the journey from the wholly aural approach to the written-down approach.

  What singers of plainchant had in front of them in the centuries before about AD 800 was the text, in Latin, of what they were singing. Just the text. They had to memorise the melody. There were, for example, one hundred and fifty psalms in the standard church repertoire, all of which had their own melodies. Some of the longer ones had multiple melodies in sequence. Added to this were prayers, responses, canticles, hymns and the words of the various masses: several thousand different tunes for the church calendar, many of them – thanks to the puny eight-note pool available – worryingly similar to one another. This is one of the most spectacular feats of memory in the history of the human race. But it’s also a bit mad. So it was deemed highly desirable to find a way of reminding singers what the tune of any given passage might be. Medieval musicians started their quest by adding what looks like shorthand to the text.

  The oldest surviving manuscript of two-voice parallel organum in the world can be found in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, as part of a book called the Winchester Troper. It is a thousand years old, roughly contemporaneous with a report of an organ at Winchester Cathedral that boasted an extraordinary four hundred pipes. If you thought that the departure of the Romans caused the British Isles to descend into mindless savagery that would not be reversed until the Norman Conquest in 1066, think again. Winchester’s Troper of two-voice organa manuscripts and its mighty four-hundred-voice pipe organ were the work of Anglo-Saxon Christians.

  The Winchester Troper shows Latin text that was intended to be sung, with various accents and inflexions above it and in the margin, to indicate to the monk or nun what kind of melody they were supposed to be chanting. The Troper is not unique, though: between about 650 and 1000, an ad hoc system of small, above-the-text markings became more common in chant books all over Western Europe. The markings were called neumes (from the Greek word pneuma meaning ‘breath’) and they were probably inspired by similar markings in the Masoretic Hebrew texts of the Old Testament, which were transcribed between the seventh and tenth centuries, and by subsequent archaic Latin translations. Vowel sounds were not written out in Ancient Hebrew, so the accents and markings around the text indicated correct pronunciation and instructions for chanting. Similarly, neumes were there to give some indication of whether the note of the melody went up or down on any given word, and they were certainly a step in the right direction.

  Neumes did, though, have one major flaw: they were essentially a way of jogging the singer’s memory, reminding him of a tune he already knew. They could not help him sight-read a new tune from scratch. Rather like a road map with all its place names removed, you could see all the features – the musical rivers and roads – but with no clue as to where this all was in relation to anything else. Neumes were really just for people who already knew the way

  Various musicians attempted to formulate ways of improving the neumes, including a ninth-century French monk called Hucbald, who suggested giving specific note pitches an alphabetical name – ABCDE and so on – as we still do today. To be fair, Hucbald merely experimented with this concept rather than invented it; it had been circulating in musical theories since antiquity, as indeed it had in Indian and Chinese musical systems. He also toyed with the idea of having the words move up and down with the shape of the tune. Perhaps not surprisingly, this did not catch on.

  Enter, at last, Guido of Arezzo and his remarkable breakthrough. His job at the cathedral in Arezzo was to train the young choristers, and he’d calculated that teaching them the whole of the Church’s plainsong repertoire by ear, parrot-fashion, would take over ten years. What he desperately needed was a method of notation that you could read and turn into singing at sight, and he set about developing this miraculous time-saving device. His methods were simple and clear. First he gave the neumes a standardised, easy-to-read form. Each note had its own identifiable blob, a mark on the page, and they were placed in the order, from left to right, in which they were meant to be sung.

  He then drew four straight lines on to which the notes would be placed, so that it was instantly possible to see the relative positions of every note:

  These days we call the collection of lines a stave or staff. He coloured the second line from the top red, in order to give each tune an absolute bearing in relation to all other tunes. The position of each note represented its pitch position, that is, whether it was an A, a B, or any other note. If the tune went up, the notes went up. If it went down, the notes went down, step by step. This method has been refined over the years, for example by altering the blob shapes to indicate the duration of a note, or to group notes together in clusters to pick out a rhythm, and in time his four lines became five, but it is essentially the same system for notating music as is used universally in the twenty-first century.

  Guido had given music its map at last. From now on – around AD 1000 – you could write down a tune and someone else could sing it back to you, never having seen it or heard it before. It was a revolution. Within a century Guido’s notation started popping up in monasteries almost everywhere. Except in the Eastern Orthodox Church, which stuck with its neumes.

  One of the most important consequences of the notation revolution was the way it changed how music was created. Instead of thinking up a tune and then teaching it to everyone you know and hoping they pass it on without modification to everyone they know, generation by generation, down the ages, a composer could now place music, like words, on a page. It would stay unmodified for ever, as long as the paper didn’t disintegrate. The ability to do this encouraged a far more ambitious approach to music than anything that had preceded it.

  A story that has to be memorised and spoken out loud is necessarily less complex than a novel that can be written down and unfolds over a greater length of time. So it was with the complexity of music following the invention of musical notation. So much so that, not long after notation became generally available, we start seeing the names of composers attached to pieces. This is no coincidence. If you can write something down, you can claim it as yours. Try claiming an idea is yours just because you told it to someone down the pub.

  One of the first named composers worth knowing about was a woman – a spectacularly clever and imaginative German woman, Hildegard of Bingen, who was born in 1098. She was also a scientist, nun, poet, visionary and diplomat, and her music is still performed and admired now, nearly a thousand years later.

  Hildegard’s imaginative, lyrical and reflective music represents a fulcrum between two eras. It still essentially sounds like a colourful variant of plainchant, but she embellished the outline of the tune with touches of her own. Whereas the vast body of church plainchant that existed prior to Hildegard sounds (intentionally) discreet and anonymous, her poetic sacred songs have a character, a style. She was well known in her own time: born of the nobility, she became abbess of a thriving Benedictine community she herself had founded, situated on one of Europe’s busiest arteries, the River Rhine, where she was visited by many
pilgrims and prestigious guests who subsequently spread word across the continent of her scientific, political and artistic works. She corresponded with the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor. Significantly for music, she was one of the first composers in a new trend that sought to move away from the conformity and rigid tradition of plainchant by adding ornamentation and melodic detail that lay outside the strict confines of the standard method. Instead of handing on the tried and tested chants, as had been the norm in earlier centuries, Hildegard made up her own chant tunes. This seems to us an obvious thing to do, but in the twelfth century it was both daring and unexpected.

  The revolutions in both notation and harmony during this period had been hundreds of years in the making, but once they were in place the pace of innovation accelerated rapidly. The development of layered voices and notation ushered in a period of great experimentation and adventure – particularly with regard to harmony – and because of them Western music, by 1100, was already utterly distinct from every other musical culture that had ever existed.

  Within Hildegard’s lifetime a group of younger composers working at Notre-Dame in Paris had become known for their radical approach to harmony. The trailblazer of this group was called Léonin, and by the standards of the early twelfth century he was both prolific and admired, regularly combining plainsong chant melodies with a second voice, a technique now known as organum duplum. His greatest legacy to music, though, is the inspiration he provided for his young colleague, and possibly pupil, Pérotin.

  What Pérotin did was ask a very simple question: what would happen if you had more than two voice lines singing at the same time? What would it sound like to hear three or even four notes simultaneously? Such a cluster of notes, known to us as a chord, did not even have a name at this time, so novel was its concept. Pérotin strikes us, even today, as an irrepressibly adventurous creative force, a firecracker of a composer who conceived and wrote down the most complex simultaneous note clusters that had ever been heard. In the decades and centuries to come, there would often be fierce debate as to what constituted an appropriate combination of notes, or what cluster was beautiful, or ugly, or seductive, or discordant. But none of this mattered to Pérotin. He was like a child in a sweet shop, ramming notes together to see what effect they would have. He was truly the first musical radical, referred to in a contemporary record as ‘Pérotin the Master’. Harmony made from chords came alive in his four-part vocal music, even if some of his note combinations sound accidental rather than intentional. But there was another key ingredient that Pérotin added to the musical mix, one that he was hearing all around him and which must have seemed extremely daring in the context of his job at Notre-Dame.