1. Important things NOT covered in your
textbook!

2.  The role of Pope Gregory I (the Great) in the
creation of Gregorian chant.
 The earliest Western music notations
 The earliest chant notations
 The three types of chant notes
 The invention of the musical staff
 The role of women in Medieval music-making
 The social role of professional musicians
 More on the Notre Dame school

3.  NO. Chanting was already part of the worship
celebrations of the early Christian church.
 A popular legend states that Gregory I ordered
that all liturgical music should be standardized
throughout the Christian world, and that it
should be written down.
 Actually, the texts and the melodies of the
liturgy were not standardized throughout
Europe until the 12th century.

4. The most recent scholarship suggests that at the
earliest, monks in what is modern-day France started
to notate the chants in the 8th or 9th century.
For comparison, Gregory I was pope from 590-604
A.D.
Most of the surviving chant manuscripts date from
the 10th-13th centuries, and musical notation became
much more widespread throughout Europe.

5.  When the chants were
beginning to be written
down, there WAS a pope
named Gregory – but it
was Gregory II. Gregory I
was much more famous,
and it’s likely that early
“historians” just attributed
the musical innovation to
the more famous pope. The
Church even added to the
legend, stating that a dove
descended from heaven to
dictate all the chants to the
pope. Greg the Great, taking dictation
from a dove. Did NOT happen.

6. People had experimented with music notation
for thousands of years, but it wasn’t until the
Medieval era that anyone came up with the
concept of representing high sounds by placing
symbols HIGHER on the page, and low sounds
LOWER on the page.

7. Left: Ancient Egyptian notation.
Above: Ancient Greek notation.
Red = lyrics.
Green = notes!

8. Found in a Roman ruin. The
text looks to be Greek.
Red = lyrics.
Green = notes.

9. This example was copied
from an ancient example
and put into a computer
font.
Red = lyrics.
Green – notes.
These notes are actually
starting to resemble the
shape of some of the
earliest “Gregorian” chant
melodic notation.

10. Monks.
Anonymous monks
tinkered around with
the existing notation
systems and decided
to go with the whole
“draw shapes going
higher when we have
to sing higher, and
draw shapes going
lower when we sing Thank you, guys for your innovations. I have a hard
lower, and keep them enough time teaching kids how to read nice, neat
on the same level modern notation. I would have gone insane teaching
when we sing the them Egyptian dots or Byzantine squiggles.
same note” – thing.

11. Lego Monks!!! Illuminating little Lego manuscripts
in a little Lego scriptorium!!!
Moving on…

12. You can clearly make out the up and down shapes of the notes.
The language is Latin.
The note-shapes are called “neumes.”
Notice the blue arrow and the green notes above it. There are no
lyrics underneath the notes, because the singers are singing the
notes on the syllable “ah…” This is called a melisma.

13. Syllabic – One note per syllable.
Neumatic – Sing 2-4-ish notes per syllable.
Melismatic – Sing up to a bajillion notes per syllable.
Melismas became such a popular compositional tool that
it was very easy to lose track of the sacred text that was
being sung because the singers were extending the vowels
for so long. The Church actually, at times, had to issue
decrees banning or at least limiting the length of melismas
so that the listeners wouldn’t lose track of the text!

14. Finally, in the 11th century, someone came along
who came up with a brilliant-yet-simple system of
assigning those high-and-low notes to a system of
lines or spaces, so that the performer would
always have a good visual frame of reference.
His name?

16. Guido D’Arezzo devised the musical staff
– that group of five lines and four spaces
that you probably remember from
general music class (were you ever
quizzed on “Every Good Boy Does
Fine?”) . If you’re totally confused – take
a quick glance at pp. 32-33 in your text.
Anyway, he created a staff with 4 lines,
and a clef. This allowed composers to tell
performers, you will sing the pitch “E”
whenever the neume (note) appears on
this line. The space above it with always
be the pitch “F” (which comes after E in
the musical alphabet).
And the space below will always be the
pitch “D” (which comes before E in the
Alas, there is no record of how musical alphabet.
impressive his abs were. Speaking of musical alphabets…

17. Guido also came up with this
nifty visual aid to help
musicians remember the names
of the lines and spaces in his
new staff notation.
It was copied out and
distributed among the various
monasteries, and made music-
learning much more efficient for
the monks and nuns. Hence the
explosion of written chants.

18. Left: a page of neumatic music written
on the 4-line staff that Guido D’Arezzo
invented.
Above: detail from the same manuscript.
Blue arrows show the lines of the
musical staff.

19. St. Paul (one who wrote the Epistles) said in
Corinthians I 14:34
“Mulieres in ecclesiis taceant…”
Or, “Let your women keep silence in the
churches.”
Which was taken quite literally.

20. Nuns like Hildegard of Bingen lived in abbeys, separate from the
monks and the general public, and they did in fact make music to
worship in the privacy of their own religious communities.
But if you could time travel and drop in on a medieval Mass, you
would hear all the music performed by men.
The highest vocal parts were taken by young boys whose voices had
not yet changed. This tradition persisted in all Catholic churches until
the 20th century.
And in fact, this past December, I happened to catch Christmas Mass
being celebrated by the current pope on TV. And there was not a lady
to be found in that choir. And yes, there were soprano and alto voices
to be sure, but they belonged to boys, not ladies.
I will refrain from editorializing.

21. YES – Medieval women certainly did make
secular music.
Aristocratic women
would make music as a
hobby. They may from
time to time, have
presented some music
among their peers in an
intimate gathering, but
they would have
NEVER performed
publicly. And certainly
not for money.

22. Certainly, there were women among the traveling troupes
of jongleurs, but they were assumed to be prostitutes.
Some of them surely did trade sex for money, as times
could be very tough on the road (going “on the road” is
still a huge challenge for anyone today who does not have
superstar status). And many musicians (of both sexes)
surely knew how to pick the pockets of their audience.
Professional musicians (who did not belong to religious
orders) were a tight-knit group, and just like the
blacksmiths and tailors of the time, taught their trade to
their children. So it made sense for them to make a life
with someone who understood that life well. This
phenomenon continues to this day in many branches of
the performing arts – theater, music, dance and even
circuses are often family affairs.

23. A recurring theme throughout all of music history
if the artist struggling for public recognition.
Notice the striped and parti-
colored clothes of these jongleurs.
Bright, clashing colors and stripes
were reserved for Medieval social
outcasts such as Jews,
executioners, prostitutes, those
with a known criminal history,
the mentally ill, and um….
musicians.
For more on the fascinating Like me :D
history of colors and stripes in
clothing, check out the works of hmm…I DO have a lot of stripes
Michel Pastoreau. His books are in my closet…
on Amazon. He’s amazing!

24. The most important thing about the Notre Dame
School is the invention of the rhythmic modes.
Before this time, composers did not indicate how
long notes were to be held, so the choirmasters
took educated or stylistic guesses and their
rhythms were passed down over hundreds of
years.
Then along came Leonin and Perotin…

25. NO! NO! NO!
Google Images!!! What good are you??? I’m trying to teach a
serious class here!!!

26. sigh…
Meow?
Perotin looks depressed
Leonin: NOT a cat-person
that he doesn’t get to be
on Magic cards
Leonin began using measured rhythm, called rhythm modes to specify to
performers exactly how long to hold their notes. Perotin, his successor,
made the practice even more widespread.

27. Here are the six Notre Dame
1 2 3 1 2 3 rhythmic modes.
1 2 3 1 2 3
The composer would choose
which one to use based on
1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 56
which mode best fit the text.
1 2 3 456 1 2 3 456
If you were to count these
rhythms aloud, they would
1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 456
all subdivide into 3, the
1 2 3 1 2 3 number of the Holy Trinity.