In the early 21st century, we take it for granted that the vast and diverse world of music that's all around us can be summoned at the flick of a switch. But not that long ago, music was a rare and feeble whisper in a wilderness of silence. How on earth did that miracle happen?
Music, one of the dazzling fruits of human civilization, has become a massive global phenomenon. And so it's hard for us to imagine a time when, in centuries gone by, people could go weeks without hearing any music at all. Even in the 19th century, you might hear your favourite symphony four or five times in your whole lifetime, in the days before music could be recorded.
The story of music, successive waves of discoveries, breakthroughs and inventions, is an ongoing process. The next great leap forward may take place in a back street of Beijing or upstairs in a pub in South Shields. Can't read, can't read, can't read a lie.
No, we can't read a lie. Whatever music you're into, Monteverdi or Mantovani, Mozart or Motown, Masho or Mashup, the techniques it relies on didn't happen by accident. Someone, somewhere, thought of them first. Music can make us weep or make us dance. It's reflected the times in which it was written.
It has delighted, challenged, comforted and excited us. In this series, I'm going to trace music's extraordinary journey from scratch. There'll be no fancy jargon nor misleading labels.
Terms like Baroque, Impressionism or Nationalism are best put to one side. Instead, try to imagine how revolutionary and how exhilarating many of the innovations we take for granted today were to people at the time. There are a million ways of telling the story of music. This is mine. MUSIC You may think that music is a luxury, a plug-in to make human life more enjoyable.
It's fine if you think that, but our hunter-gatherer ancestors wouldn't agree with you. To them, music was much more than mere ear candy. It was a matter of life and death. You don't believe me?
Let me take you back to 32,000 BC, to the Stone Age cave paintings in Chauvet, France. The people who painted them may have used singing as a life-saving form of sat-nav, a bat-like type of sonar, to help you find where you were in the labyrinth of caves. In 2008, acoustic scientists made the extraordinary discovery that the Chauvet paintings, which lie within huge, inaccessible, pitch-black networks of tunnels, are located at the points of greatest resonance in the networks, so that singing would carry throughout the whole subterranean system from these special points, echoing and ricocheting. We also now know that music played an important part in Paleolithic rituals, since whistles and flutes made out of bones have been found in many of these caves. From these dusty artefacts would one day grow Duke Ellington's horn section and the massed ranks of the Dagenham Girl Pipers.
By the time that tribal communities began settling in one place and farming, between 9000 and 7000 BC, we know that music had become an essential activity. As well as helping along the rhythm of work, music was seen as something potent, magical, and if the mood required, seductive. And yet we've absolutely no idea what the music of these ancient societies actually sounded like.
Because they couldn't write their music down, it has disappeared completely. There's no surviving video, no sheet music, no Pythagorean MP3, not a note of it. Few ancient instruments have been dug up, mind.
These ones are called lures. A set of six lures were excavated in a field in Denmark in 1797, now known as the Brudervalter lures. They were perfectly preserved in a peat bog for two and a half thousand years and are still playable today. These two are replicas. Lures are so famous in Denmark they've even had a butter named after them.
These lures may look a tad unwieldy, but in terms of technology, they're a long way from being some hollowed-out piece of fruit or a drum knocked up from a clay pot. What they tell us is this. It's a grave error to describe what musicians were up to in 800 BC as primitive.
Making these elaborate brass instruments could only have been the handiwork of culturally sophisticated people. Remember, these lures were made and played nearly a thousand years before the building of Hadrian's Wall. We don't know what the Bronze Age Scandinavians played on their lures, but it was probably meant to be scary.
Around the time the Bruderfelter laws were intimidating the neighbors, much further south in the sunshine, the ancient Greeks were laying the foundations of Western civilization. The Greeks believed music to be both a science and an art and took it extremely seriously. It's worth noting what their seven compulsory subjects in school were.
Grammar, rhetoric, ...logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. What they loved best about music were talent contests. No, really. Everyone knows that the ancient Greeks invented the Olympic Games.
For the Greeks, though, it wasn't just nude running, wrestling, and throwing the javelin that was important. They were mad about singing competitions. Yes, the X Factor is a 3,000-year-old format. The Epsilon Factor, one might say, or Sparta's Got Talent.
Contestants would appear before a live audience and a panel of judges. The winners were awarded cash prizes. This is the beginning of music as a profession.
The Greeks also invented European drama and the musical. It's thought that the comic dramas of Aristophanes, for example, were mostly sung. I wish I could sing you a number from a Greek musical drama at this point. Thank you for the moussaka, or Greece is the word perhaps, but I can't.
The tunes are all lost to us, even if we know what the words mean. The Greeks passed on their passion for theatre, poetry and music to the Romans, who exported it along with their legions all over the Mediterranean. But the Romans, too, never got round to writing their music down, and so when Rome fell in the 5th century, the music of the ancient past was lost to us. It's as silent as the grave.
Almost. Our one remaining link to the music of the late Roman world is Christian plainchant, which dates from at least the third century AD. The singing of chant has always been central to Christian worship. It was a sung version of the Latin words of the Psalms and of the Eucharist or Mass. It's by default often been described as Gregorian chant after Pope Gregory the Great, who was Pope at the end of the 6th century.
It's beautiful, ancient and mysterious. What it is not, we now know, is anything to do with Pope Gregory. This is one of the worst branding mistakes in cultural history. It would be like discovering the Wellington boot had nothing to do with the Duke, or that the Earl of Sandwich had nothing to do with the BLT. In the earliest form of plainchant, musical monks would sing a meandering tune with no accompaniment, no discernible rhythm and no harmonising.
They are singing together in unison. And now, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, begotten. Plain chant stayed the same for centuries. But then, sometime before the 8th century, someone, somewhere had the bright idea of adding some young lads to the choir....
It sounds fuller and brighter with higher and lower voices combined, doesn't it? The boys sang an octave higher than the men. It's called an octave because in church music at the time there were only eight notes to choose from.
On the white notes of a modern keyboard, the two lines of voices are eight notes apart. Having men and boys sing an octave apart prompted a further thought. What if we had two notes together that weren't octaves, but completely different notes taken from the choice of eight? What if they added this note, for example? Genius.
They didn't go too far, mind. The new line wasn't independent, but stayed exactly in parallel to the original. This parallel lines technique, which began in around the 9th century, was called organum, because to them it sounded like an organ.
Which it does. What we're hearing is the first experiment in what we'd call harmony, the simultaneous sounding of more than one note. And an unadventurous it may seem to us now, but then, in the early hundreds, it was audio dynamite. The heady excitement of singing two notes at once had another spin-off. This time they went crazy.
They stopped one of the lines moving around. In this form of organum, one singer just stays put on one note all the time. I say singer, but this technique is so boring to perform, they also used to play it on instruments instead. An organ, perhaps, or now almost forgotten instruments, like the psaltery, the hurdy-gurdy, or the symphony.
I'm not making this up. They really did have an instrument that played just one continuous note. They even had a name for the long-held note.
It's a drone. This drone plus tune type of plane chant is still remembered today on bagpipes, the perforated tube you play the melody on, is still called the chanter. By the 9th century, the most adventurous musicians had started to mix the two available styles together, parallel organum and drone organum. One such adventurer was Cassia of Constantinople.
She is the first female composer whose name has come down to us. What makes her music intriguing is its unusual mix of simple but unpredictable harmonies. Harmony was the first giant step our medieval ancestors took as the year 1000 drew near. The other was to alter the course of music history dramatically. It was the invention of musical notation.
When a monk or nun sang plainchant in the centuries before about 800 AD, what they had in front of them was the text in Latin of what they were singing. Just the text. They had to memorize the melody. All this. This is one of the most spectacular feats of memory in the history of the human race.
But it's also a bit mad. It might take 10 years of daily repetition and practice to memorize. the entire plainsong repertoire for the church year. So it was deemed highly desirable to find a way of reminding yourself what the tunes for any bit of text might be. This is a third century Christian hymn written in ancient Greek.
Above the words, tantalizingly, is a fledgling attempt at writing the tune down. Alas, so far at least, no one can agree on what exactly it's meant to sound like. Hundreds of years went by until squiggles came along. That's not their real name, which is gnomes, but squiggles are what they are. This is a page from the Winchester Tropa, the oldest surviving manuscript of organum anywhere in the world.
It's the painstaking work of Anglo-Saxon monks. What it shows is the Latin text that was intended to be sung with squiggles above the words and in the margin. The idea of the squiggles was to give some indication of whether the note of the melody went up or down over any given syllable, so they're better than nothing.
But the squiggles had a major flaw. They were essentially a way of jogging your memory of a tune you already know. They're rubbish at teaching you a new tune from scratch.
That's because they're not very good at indicating just how high or low successive notes are supposed to be. Like a map without longitude or latitude. The breakthrough came in around 1000 in the Italian city of Arezzo, and it was the brainchild of a musical monk called Guido, known nowadays as Guido of Arezzo. Guido's methods were simple and clear. First of all, he gave the squiggles or neumes, a standardized, easy-to-read form.
So each note had its own symbol, or blob. He then drew four straight lines onto which the notes, or blobs, would be placed. One of the lines he made red to give you a fixed bearing as against all other tunes, a bit like the musical equivalent of the equator or the Greenwich Meridian.
So wherever the note or blob is placed represents its pitch position, that is whether it's an A, B or C. La. If the note goes up, the blob goes up.
La. If it goes down, blob goes down. La. Step by step. Olé, olé, olé, olé, olé, olé, olé.
Before Guido, you'd think up a tune and then teach it to everyone you know and hope they'd pass it on without mucking it up. After Guido, music could be fixed on a page and could be reproduced by someone who'd never heard the tune before. Guido's method has been refined over the years by indicating the duration of notes, for example, but it's essentially the same system we still use to notate music today.
But every time she asks me do I look okay, I say When I see your face There's not a thing that could change Cause you're amazing Just the way you are And when you smile The ability to lay out multiple lines of melody on a kind of musical spreadsheet allowed composers to plot out far more complicated musical structures This was to set music on a course to towards greater and greater sophistication, all thanks to the bright idea of a monk from Arezzo. The ability to formulate musical ideas on a page enabled a musical approach that was far more ambitious than anything that had preceded it. A story that has to be remembered and spoken out loud is necessarily less complex than a novel, which can be written down and unfolded over a much greater length of time. So it was with the invention of musical notation. Now you could have multiple lines of music, dazzling new possibilities for harmony began to suggest themselves.
What was needed to realize this potential was for a musician to go a bit mad. His creative madness opened up the harmony idea to a thousand new possibilities, which, healthfully, is what a bloke from Paris did in the 12th century. His name was Perrotin, and he composed music for the newly built Cathedral of Notre Dame. What he did was ask a seemingly simple question. What would happen if you had more than two voices singing at the same time?
What if you had three? God forbid, four! This might not sound momentous now, but believe me, it was nothing short of a revolution in music.
Perrotin 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 ever yet heard. A cluster of simultaneous notes is called a chord. Here are some of Perrotin's chords. Perrotin also blazed the way forward in another area of music.
He may not have been the first composer to bring rhythm into church music, but he's the first one to find a way of notating rhythm using a system whereby shorter notes are bracketed together with a horizontal bar what he called a ligature he was particularly fond of one rhythmic pattern a pattern that you can easily remember because it's the rhythm of the theme tune to the archers dum de dum de dum de dum dum de dum de dum dum perrotin made that pattern his own as you can hear in his hymn composed for christmas day 1198 viderunt omnes In this remarkable piece of music, you can hear not only the jaunty rhythm, but the weirdly effective harmonies, amazingly advanced for their time. It's important to remember that before Perrotin's time, most people would rarely have heard any music at all, unless they heard it in church. But around the 12th century, secular music began to step out into the limelight.
The Pathfinders were the Bob Dylans of the day, the Trouvers or Troubadours, travelling singer-songwriters who usually accompanied themselves on the early instruments available. At the peak of the troubadour craze, several hundred of them plied their trade across Europe. Where did this troubadour phenomenon, with its songs of noble, elegant love, originate from?
The answer may surprise you. It came from Al-Andalus, Muslim. in Spain.
In the music of the troubadours you can still hear traces of the Arabic originals. Muslim Spain also provided Christian Europe with more sophisticated musical instruments that were to become central to secular music. The rabab, a precursor to the violin.
The al-ud, which became the lute and later the guitar. And the kanun, an early type of zither. And instruments weren't the only important thing that European composers inherited from the culture of Islam. The other was a flair for rhythm. The troubadour songs, like their Arabic originals, were shaped by the poetic meter of their lyrics.
So most of these songs have at least a gentle foot-tapping pulse, which is where Perrotin got his rhythms from. By the end of the 14th century, nearly all music's vital components have been discovered. Notation, both melodic and rhythmic, the layering of voices on top of each other, and a basic selection of instruments to complement the human voice. One final piece of the jigsaw still needed to click into position.
In around 1400, harmony took a huge leap forward, a leap that was to change the way music sounded forever. We still live with that change today. Before 1400, despite Péritin's adventurousness, when composers layered notes on top of each other, they only chose a very limited menu of possible note combinations there was the basic octave and there were two other note combinations both of which medieval musicians called perfect because they were thought to be godly the perfect fourth and the perfect fifth and before 1400 that's more or less it In this famous piece, for example, all the harmonies are sung either four or five notes apart from the basic melody line.
To our ears, accustomed to the subsequent 600 years of harmony, there's something missing, which makes the music sound bare and a little cold. The man who did use this note combination set things up for what was to be a giant leap for harmony. He was an English composer called John Dunstaple.
Dunstaple introduced the mighty but imperfect third. Why is the third imperfect? If you count just three notes up from your starting point C...
You arrive at E. Why isn't this third a perfect distance? The reason is that the third, unlike the fourth and the fifth, has two different versions.
What we'd call now a major version and a minor version. It is Mr. Ambiguous. You can see just how ambiguous by counting further up the keyboard.
If I count three notes from D, for example, I come to F, creating a minor third. Ditto E to G. But F to A? Like C to E is a major third. The fact that the third can be either major or minor, depending on where you start counting from, might sound like only a slight technical difference, but it's not.
The pivot between the major third and the minor third is the pivot upon which all Western music balances. Very broadly speaking, one is happy and one is sad. And harmonies using these thirds make the music richer, more subtle and more affecting. But allowing the leans both ways third into music had one other big... byproduct.
Let's start with C again. We'll count up three steps and find ourselves at E, a major third. Then if we carry on up another three steps to G, we've created a minor third.
But what happens if we play all of these three notes together? All these three notes played together are called a triad, and triads are the bread and butter of all Western music. here's a song you may recognize which is built on triads Like the first morning, that bird has spoken, like the first bird. Praise for the singing, praise for the morning. 15th century musicians discovered that triads had an important effect on each other when they were mixed together.
It's to do with the constituent notes of the chords. The C major triad, for example, contains two of the same notes as the E minor triad, and is therefore closely related to it. Similarly, the E minor triad shares two of its notes with the G major triad, and they are closely related. Mixing together chords that are closely related to each other creates a mood of harmonious smoothness, like melding adjacent colours in the spectrum.
Triads have another great benefit. They can also create the sense of home in a piece of music. Let me demonstrate with a famous spiritual song from a few hundred years later, Amazing Grace.
In the first phrase of the song, we start on one chord under the words Amazing Grace. Amazing Grace. Then we shift to another one on the word sweet.
How sweet. Then home again to where we started. The sound. That safe landing, back to the chord we think of as home, is called a cadence or ending. Amazing grace, how sweet the sound.
Everything feels right about that little journey of chords. We felt good returning to where we started at the end of the phrase. In the second phrase, we go on another short chord journey. That saved a wretch like me.
And we have another little cadence by moving to a new chord on the word me. Again, this journey feels logical and satisfying. We're being led from one place to another. I once was lost, but now I'm found.
Was blind, but now... I see You can quite clearly hear that there's nothing haphazard about the choice of chords under the tune It's meant to be what's at work here is a logic in the chords They're obeying strict laws like the laws of gravity or the orbit of planets Whereby some chords exert more power and influence than others Discovering the power of triads was like discovering a chemical reaction. Composers immediately sensed that something massive and transformative had happened. From now on, the basic chord, the triad, 1-3-5, was king. MUSIC PLAYS Just as the development of harmony up to this point had taken several centuries, so too the refining of musical instruments was a slow burn.
But by the 16th century, a new breed of instruments had been invented, and they were to bring in a golden age of folk or popular music. In Tudor England, if you went to the barber's shop for a haircut or some form of crude walk-in surgery, while you were waiting, you could pull down one of these off the wall and have a sing-song. Yes, every self-respecting 16th-century barber had a sittern hanging around for the use of his customers, many of whom would then accompany themselves while singing a jolly folk song.
I'm not making this up. New instruments were changing the texture of music. Along with the sittern came the lute.
Related to the lute was the stringed instrument known as the viol. And by the 1560s, the viol's young... offspring, the viol-in, had been developed in Italy.
The 16th century also saw rapid advancements in keyboard technology, so at home, if you had a few bob, you might have a virginal. But for sheer technological complexity, no instrument of the 16th century comes near to the organ. I'm B.U. Blythe and Donny, converting all your sounds of woe into hey-nommies. Nani, and sign a law that let them go, and be you blithe and bonny, converting all your sounds of woe into a nani, nani.
Hand in hand with this expansion of purely instrumental music was a wealth of popular song. Often, the exact same tunes were used for both church music and secular music, with different words of course. The first religious songs to get catchy tunes were the ones associated with Christmas. Some of the early carols were derived from jaunty folk dances. One reason these 500-year-old carols are still easy on the modern ear is because of a significant shift that was taking place in the musical structure at this time.
It's to do with the positioning of the melody. When in around 900 AD chanting monks started to add extra voices to plain song melodies, beginning the process that became polyphony, the layering of many voices, it was always assumed that the principal tune, the red bricks in our diagram, was the bottom one and the added tune was on top of it. Gradually, as two lines became three and then four, this principal melody got buried inside the four voices.
That's why the third line down in any four-part piece of choral music got to be known as the tenor, because this was the part that held the main tune, tenor being the French verb to hold. We take it for granted that the tune of a piece of music sits on top of the texture, but this wasn't the case before the 16th century. Gradually, in all forms of music, the tune worked itself up to the top. In dulce yubilo, let songs and gladness flow, all our joy reclines. Once the tune was sitting pretty on the top of the texture, you were more likely to be able to hear the words clearly, and the words were about to acquire a thrilling new significance.
In 1450, in the German city of Mainz, one of the most important technological breakthroughs of our civilisation was invented. Johannes Gutenberg's movable type printing press. Within 50 years or so of the arrival of Gutenberg's wondrous machine, music was being printed. Now, new musical ideas could spread further and faster than ever. It's shown in the career of the most influential composer of the period, Josquin Desprez.
Josquin was born on what is now the Franco-Belgian border, but by his middle age he was in Ferrara in Italy, working as a resident composer for a rich and powerful duke. In terms of pure sound, Josquin could not be described as a radical, but in one key respect, Josquin made a departure from what went before that was to become a hallmark of the music of the age. Josquin is the first composer in history for whom the meaning of the words is paramount, and who tried to bring out and express that meaning in the way he set words to music.
Small wonder that the majority of pieces he composed for the church were called motets, which means literally, the words. One such motet is Miserere mei, have mercy on me. Miserere mei was composed in 1503. Josquin's employer, the Duke of Ferrara, was a friend of the most notorious preacher of the age, the Dominican friar Savonarola, a firebrand who constantly attacked the excesses of the Catholic Church. He was eventually arrested, and in prison he wrote a prayer asking God's forgiveness for falsely confessing to crimes under the agony of torture.
The text of this prayer... essentially proclaiming his innocence, spread rapidly across Europe. So Josquin's task was to make this highly political statement completely clear. How he did so was new. Quite simply, Josquin made sure that the words were always clearly audible.
And that was revolutionary because up to then, believe it or not, the words in a piece of music were anything but audible. For centuries, song lyrics had been the poor relation. In folk music, audiences were as likely dancing, drinking... themselves into oblivion or having their hair cut as listening to the words.
And in church, texts have been sung in Latin. What's more, they've been sung in a way that made it virtually impossible to understand. This is a technique called melisma, whereby long stretches of melody are attached to just one syllable of text. The melismatic style could be musically attractive, but it destroyed any chance of the listener hearing what words were being sung. So in the first few bars of Josquin's motet, each voice utters the simple phrase, Miserere mei Deus, have mercy on me, Lord, one by one.
Josquin repeats those words, miserere, mei, deus, throughout the piece like a mantra. He also finds ways of highlighting the words that were to be imitated by other composers time and time again. One is to have the voices cascade downwards like falling tears.
Another is to stop all activity and have the voices sing together identical syllables of block chords. In 1517, only 17 years after Savonarola's execution, Martin Luther set in train the Reformation. Not only did religion change, religious music changed too. In Lutheran churches, for the first time, the congregation played a major role in music, taking the lion's share of the singing in their own language.
Luther, as well as being a theologian, scholar, writer and preacher, was a composer. He fervently believed music should belong to everyone, not just priests and trained choirs. He wanted the congregations in his churches to be able to join in hymn singing with confidence and enthusiasm.
And this meant having easy to pick up tunes to sing. Luther accordingly collected lots of popular folk songs of the time and gave them holy words. He also caused loads of new tunes to be written for the purpose.
This is one Luther himself wrote, Eine feste Burg ist unser Gott. A mighty fortress is our God. What's immediately noticeable about this chorale or protestant hymn is that as it moves along the words progress syllable by syllable, note by note with a clear tune on top of the sound. This is what hymns were to sound like. What followed the Reformation was more than a hundred years of religious intolerance and state-sponsored terror.
In the midst of this bloodbath, perhaps not surprisingly, the mood of sacred music was overwhelmingly one of penitence, remorse and lamentation. But the dark cloud of agony and sorrow wasn't going to last forever. As the 16th century drew to a close, serious religious music, though it was still commissioned both by the church and by rich patrons, was a ...about to lose its role as the dominant form of new music.
In the 1570s and 80s, a new wave of secular music swept up like a warm summer wind from Italy into the rest of Europe. It seemed to contain the seeds of something quite different from the angry certainties of the religious squabble. Not for the last time in musical history, art music, the music of posh people, was to be saved from itself by popular...
folk song traditions. The pioneering figure in this new wave of secular music was a Franco-Flemish composer called Jacques Arcadelt. The lute player in Caravaggio's picture here is playing some of his music. He was that famous. Everything about his songs cocked a snoop at pomposity and authority.
His lyrics are concerned with human pleasures. They're full of sensuous imagery and sexual illusion. He worked for a while in Italy, where he wrote madrigals, then moved to France, where he wrote their equivalent, chansons.
Typical of these is the cheeky, syncopated tale of Margot, the mysterious grape picker. Contre tua capitene, vigne, vigne, vignole, Vargo lavore le vigne bianco. Vargo lavore le vigne, vigne, vigne, vignole, Vargo lavore le vigne bianco.
Flow my tears full from my spree. The success of Archidelt's songs inspired many other composers, one of whom was a close contemporary of Shakespeare, John Dowland, who by 1600 had become the most celebrated singer-songwriter in Europe. Dowland's songs are strikingly different in tone and attitude to anything that had gone before.
He's interested in people and their emotions, not gods and demons. A song like Flow My Tears doesn't seem out of place amongst those of our own time. Music by 1600 had become a rich mix of sacred and secular, instrumental and vocal, but almost anything you would hear at that time was on a relatively small scale.
The time was right for someone, somewhere, to start creating long, substantial forms that would last a whole evening and leave audiences cheering for more, which is exactly what happened. Opera was born. The man of the moment, one of the ten most influential composers of all time, was Claudio Monteverdi.
In his hands, opera went from zero to hero. In opera, music is at the service of the drama and so it needs to be able to express complex, even conflicting emotions. Luckily, Monteverdi had already spent years trying to do exactly that with his sophisticated, passion-filled madrigals.
To do so, he had begun to recalibrate harmony. Let's look at just one of his madrigals, which put cats among pigeons, even in his own time. It's from the fifth book of madrigals of 1605, and it's called O Mertillo Mertillo Animi Mertillo.
O myrtle, myrtle, my soul. Listen to this bit. Che chiami crudelissima amarillis. It's obvious Monteverdi is dipping in and out of all kinds of chords that don't seem comfortably related to each other. He wants you to feel surprised or intrigued, especially if it enhances the words of the poem.
So on these words, che chiami crudelissima amarelli, the one you call cruelest amarellis, he creates a series of deliberate clashes of chord called a dissonance or suspension. Instead of sticking to chords that had close affinities with each other, he deliberately mixed up unrelated chords and exploited the strange, disorientating sounds this produced. It was music that could manipulate our emotions that Monteverdi brought into opera.
He also introduced another ingredient, a dramatic aural effect that had been invented in Venice, then one of the world's richest and most powerful city-states. Its huge cavernous basilica, St. Mark's, employed some of the best musicians in Europe, including for a time Monteverdi himself. On top of all this, the building served as a kind of musical and acoustical laboratory. An uncle and nephew team called Gabrielli had developed a kind of precursor of surround sound at St Mark's, achieved by placing groups of singers and instrumentalists in different parts of the building and having them sing or play alternately. The technical term for the technique is polychoral.
...mini choirs. Monteverdi knew and admired this polychoral style and thought it would work alongside his intimate, emotionally charged madrigal style when he came to writing opera. Monteverdi didn't invent opera. A Florentine composer called Perry did in 1597. But Monteverdi did write the first good opera, Orfeo, which premiered in Mantua in 1607. He was aiming for maximum...
emotional effect, maximum narrative clarity, maximum impact, even shock, and wasn't going to obey anyone's rules about what he could or could not do. Once more, Monteverdi invented a new combination of instruments never before gathered together. He borrowed old and new styles. He used choral music.
He told the stories through characters directly expressing themselves to the audience. Almost everything about Orfeo was then a novelty. It was loud, it was long, and it was modern. And let's not forget how liberating it all must have been, because as musical techniques have been developing century by century, so too have the ability to express more complex, subtle and unexpected emotions along the way. Monteverdi was using music plus.
Orfeo had been performed in a ducal court in front of a small select audience. Monteverdi's last opera, The Coronation of Poppea, was performed in a Venetian theatre in front of a paying public. It's one of the most radical dramas of the century.
of all time. Why is Poppea so radical? To put it simply, because it was about real people and their complicated, messy emotions. The emperor Nero and his mistress Poppea were actual historical figures and Monteverdi's music acts as the soundtrack to their real-life passions.
On the surface of it, Poppea is about lust and ambition and the desire to be a hero. conquering all. It ends with a duet for Nero and Poppaea of unabashed eroticism called Puerta Miro, Puerta Godo, I gaze on you, I possess you.
It appears as if Nero and Poppaea are being congratulated for their criminal greed. The passion that oozes out of this duet, I adore you, I embrace you, I desire you, I enchain you, is so frank and sensual, it almost turns its audience, remember they're in the room too, into voyeurs, awkwardly witnessing the private interchange of two weirdly uninhibited strangers. This was new territory indeed, the full Monty. The most daring part of this climax is what it meant to Monteverdi's fellow Venetians.
They knew what happened next in real life, that is, after the fall of the curtain. Nero killed his new empress Poppaea and their unborn child, and then himself and his regime collapsed in flames. Monteverdi's audience would have seen the art presenting for what it was, a savage attack on Venice's arch-rival state, Rome. In the light of this, the coronation of Poppaea can be seen as a scathing critique. of the excesses of Roman power and the pressing need for humane self-restraint.
Monteverdi paved the way for an explosion of musical energy. If innovations had come along at a snail's pace in the previous thousand years, the next hundred in music saw them coming thick and fast. In the next programme, the era of Vivaldi, Bach and Handel and the exhilarating sound of invention. And you can see and hear that next Saturday at 9.30.
Next, one of the catchiest TV theme tunes, as composed by a certain Howard Goodall. Stay with BBC Two for QIXL.