The Middle Ages is a period in European history
which, along with its adjective ‘Medieval’, was first
referred to by italian scholars and academics of the
late fifteenth century. They were basically stating
that the society in which they now lived was
significantly more civilized and advanced in many
ways, than that which had existed during the
previous thousand years. This may have been true
within certain elite sections of Italian society which
had begun to emulate the art and philosophy of
ancient Greece, but generally in Italy and Europe
overall no all-pervading change had occurred.
Historians since that time have, however, used the
terms 'middle ages' and medieval as a convenient
way to refer to that general period in European
history.
It has been regarded as extending approximately
from the end of the fifth century AD, when the
control of the Roman Empire had ended, until the
end of the fifteenth century AD, when the modern
world was considered to have begun.
The concept that a new age had commenced
across Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire,
along with its laws and control of society, may be
quite a valid one. However the idea that something
revolutionary happened relating to philosophy, art,
literature, science, religion and civilization generally
etc at a certain date in the fifteenth century has
much less foundation.
Nevertheless, historians since the fifteenth century
have put forward various convenient but arbitrary
events and dates to contain this period.
Gregorian chant is the central tradition of
Western plainchant, a form of monophonic,
unaccompanied sacred song of the western Roman
Catholic Church. Gregorian chant developed mainly in
western and central Europe during the 9th and 10th
centuries, with later additions and redactions. Although
popular legend credits Pope St. Gregory the Great with
inventing Gregorian chant, scholars believe that it arose
from a later Carolingiansynthesis of Roman
chant and Gallican chant.
Gregorian chants were organized initially into four, then
eight, and finally 12 modes. Typical melodic features
include a characteristic ambitus, and also characteristic
intervallic patterns relative to a referential mode
final, incipits and cadences, the use of reciting tones at a
particular distance from the final, around which the other
notes of the melody revolve, and a vocabulary of
musical motifs woven together through a process
calledcentonization to create families of related chants.
The scale patterns are organized against a background
pattern formed of conjunct and disjuncttetrachords,
producing a larger pitch system called the gamut. The
chants can be sung by using six-note patterns
called hexachords. Gregorian melodies are traditionally
written using neumes, an early form of musical
notation from which the modern four-line and five-line
staff developed.[1]Multi-voice elaborations of Gregorian
chant, known as organum, were an early stage in the
development of Western polyphony.
Gregorian chant was traditionally sung by choirs of men
and boys in churches, or by men and women of religious
orders in their chapels. It is the music of the Roman
Rite, performed in the Mass and the monastic Office.
Although Gregorian chant supplanted or marginalized
the other indigenous plainchant traditions of the
Christian West to become the official music of the
Christian liturgy, Ambrosian chant still continues in use
in Milan, and there are musicologists exploring both that
and the Mozarabic chant of Christian Spain. Although
Gregorian chant is no longer obligatory, the Roman
Catholic Church still officially considers it the music most
suitable for worship.[2] During the 20th century,
Gregorian chant underwent a musicological and popular
resurgence.