hi and welcome to today's episode of piano tv so today is part two of the music of the middle ages video series this is the second and only other part in the first part of the series we discussed sacred vocal music of the middle ages so if you missed that video definitely go check it out because this video won't make quite as much sense out of context of the previous video in today's video we are going to talk about secular non-religious music as well as instrumental music so let's get started [Music] humans have been making music of some form or other basically forever in the previous video we talked about sacred music but secular music non-religious music played a huge part in people's lives as well the problem with this though is that sacred music was really well notated the monks and nuns were really good about writing things down and keeping an archived record of music whereas common everyday people oftentimes weren't even literate they didn't know how to write so they didn't have a way to write music down nor did they have the reason to write things down because for the most part music was passed down through oral tradition so we don't have very good records of music from the middle ages in terms of secular music but we do have some ideas which we'll discuss in this video we'll start today's video with the discussion on monophonic chances shout out just mean it's just the french word for song and monophonic just means single melody line if you've ever heard the expression traveling troubadour the word trouper comes from 12th and 13th century france it's basically like a traveling poet musician a higher class person if you had ample leisure time it usually meant that you were wealthy so the poet musicians of the day were generally wealthy people who had time to spare writing poems and music in general what you'll find written down for these chant songs are the melody and the words and that's it no notes about instrumentation no notes about rhythm so the researchers who look into this music have to fill in a lot of blanks and do a lot of guesswork i found a recording that i'll share with you in a moment for the only notated monophonic chance song by a woman it's called echantar merida so cue novoria i'm so sorry that translates to something like i am obligated to sing and it's from the 12th century written by the troubadour the countess of dia monophonic chansons were generally in strophic form which basically just means that for every verse of words the music and the tune stays exactly the same and that's true of this chance on as well we're not going to listen to the whole thing for you to get a sense of that but it's just something to note it's also completely monophonic with no accompaniment whatsoever but when you're looking at the chants of the middle ages you'll find a blend of recordings some will have instrumental accompaniment and some won't [Music] so we've talked about monophonic chant songs now let's talk about polyphonic chances in the 14th century the roman catholic church began slowly losing its grip on the european population so secular music started to really thrive this new era is referred to as ars nova which just means new art and the era prior to it as ours antiqua which is old art at this point polyphony became so complex that music notation was forced to develop alongside it pitch notation started becoming more exact and rhythmic notation really started to evolve another feature of these late chances is that crazy melismas started to fall by the wayside the text became a little bit simpler with only one to several notes per most of the syllables in a piece we also started to see an evolution away from the dissonant fourths and fifths with the addition of much more modern sounding thirds and six there were still lots of like weird force and fifths and stuff like that but they did experiment with newer intervals like thirds and six puy quen oobly by micho is a good example of polyphonic chance on the biggest difference between this and the monophonic shampoos we talked about already is its complexity this chance on is written for three voices and all voices move independently that's the definition of polyphony one thing to note is that the voices don't actually have to be human voices they could also be musical instruments it's unspecified i'm going to leave a link to a youtube clip over on the blog and what you'll notice hopefully is how much more modern sounding this chance on is even though it still sounds like really old it doesn't sound modern but compared to the stuff we've been listening to previously this is where you can really start hearing the inklings of renaissance and baroque music instrumental music didn't even exist in the church at this time uh the only instrument that was actually allowed in the church was the organ because apparently organs are sacred but no other instruments are instrumental music largely came from common people's everyday lives it would be used for dance it would be used for public events um instruments would be obviously used as background music for singers and so on unfortunately like secular vocal music instrumental music is not well notated because generally the people who played this music didn't find any points in it they largely base their playing on improvisation so what good is written music gonna do you if you're just improvising and the population was largely illiterate and finding the means to write music down was difficult so there's not a lot of great records of this music either dance music was the most common type of instrumental music in this period and dance music of the middle ages was functional it was meant for dancing whereas later down the line in the renaissance but especially the baroque period dance music evolved into something that you would listen to more so than dance to and became even more complex but the dance music of the middle ages is pretty simple because it's meant to be functional another interesting thing about instrumental music in the middle ages is that the instruments weren't standardized so what i mean by that is with a classical symphony for example you'll have a line of music written specifically for the violin you'll have a line of music written specifically for the trumpet and so on and so on whereas in the middle ages they would just have like a line of music written down you could use whatever instrument you had handy to play it the only distinction made with instruments was for outdoor instruments and indoor instruments because of volume but aside from that you'd basically just pick up and play whatever you had kicking around well listen to an example of an stampy which was a popular dance at the time this is called retro and it's from the robertsbridge codex which was a music manuscript from the 14th century [Music] [Applause] [Music] to sum up our discussion of the music of the middle ages here are the key developments we saw in music at this time we saw the development of notation both pitch and rhythm notation we went from simple monophony one voice to complex polyphony we went from single texts to multiple texts in sacred music so polytextuality melismatic singing eventually gave way to simpler singing so one to several notes per syllable and we went from no rhythm basically at all to the use of rhythmic modes and that concludes our two-part video series on the music of the middle ages i've been waiting to do this video for quite a while because i just think middle ages music is really interesting i really enjoyed when i had to study this for an exam so i thought it would it would be fun to share it with you guys anyway give this video a thumbs up if you enjoyed it subscribe if you haven't already you can check out the cards at the end of this video if you'd like to join me on social media and patriot and i will catch you in the next video in the last video we talked about the sacred music and