The Complete History of Music, COMPLETE: Parts 1, 2, and 3

Explore antiquity as the pre-medieval era before 500 ce, where little notation survives but evidence shows music existed via instruments, writings, and visual depictions.

Explore how 'early music' differs from modern early music ensembles, focusing on stone-age instruments like bone flutes, and discuss ancient notation that predates contemporary systems.

Explore harps and lyres from Mesopotamia, two plucked stringed instruments with no frets and varied strings. Harps resonate through hollow body; lyres use a frame, as in the bull's lyre.

Trace the beginnings of notation with the first known composer and high priestess who wrote hymns to the moon gods, circa 2300 bce, as tablets hint at early memory-based music.

Explore ancient Greece's earliest music records, its instruments such as the lyre, alos, katharina, and pipes, and music's role in worship, poetry, and theater.

Explore ancient Greek philosophy's view of music, its theories, purposes, and gods like Apollo, Hermes, and Orpheus, with Pythagoras’ scales, monophonic traditions, and the Muses' role in harmony.

Explore how ancient Greek music shaped ethos, linking melodies to intelligence, self-discipline, and courage, with Plato arguing only certain music benefits character.

Explore early music theory and the origins of modes like the Dorian from ancient Greece, and hear what scholars believe is the oldest complete composition, performed on lyre and voice.

Explore how ancient Greece shaped early music history, contrast with limited records from other regions, and move forward to the first millennium and documentation of Christian church music.

Explore how the early Christian church introduced chant notation, reserved music for worship, and, around the year 1000, advanced modern notation with Guido de Rizzo, giving rise to Gregorian chant.

Trace the history of notation from ancient and heightened neumes to modern staff notation, highlighting clefs, rhythmic modes, and the shift to definite pitch.

Explore Gregorian chant as a monophonic, male-voice liturgical chant originally sung in unison to scripture, later evolving to polyphony; the term's origin and its angelic, meterless melody are discussed.

We distinguish sacred music, tied to the church and Gregorian chant, from secular music, which lacks early documentation while notes and theory emerge.

Explore how medieval music theory, led by Pythagoras and Boethius, links ratios to the chromatic scale, church modes, and music of the spheres, laying groundwork for major and minor tonality.

Learn how early monks presented church modes as paired scales, including Dorian and hypo‑Dorian, Libyan and hypo‑Libyan, and Mixolydian with its hypo version, noting missing Ionian, Aeolian, and Locrian.

Trace how guido's hex accord system and solmization shaped notation, introducing soft, hard, and natural hex accords with c starting natural, g with b natural, and f with b flat.

Discover Guido's hand, an early teaching system that maps pitch syllables to parts of the hand, guiding singers through scales with do re mi fa so la ti do.

Explore types of chant in liturgy, from responsive and alternating performances to direct singing, and how texts were treated and mixed formats across church services.

Explore three chant text-setting styles—syllabic, with each syllable on its pitch; pneumatic, keeping long passages on one pitch; and melodramatic, with multiple notes on a single syllable, using biblical verses.

Explore a chant example in a modern transcription of traditional notation with dotted notes and flexible tempo, featuring a choir and soloist in a 20-minute response chant on 'Ohm'.

Explore the complexity of chant beyond basics, from solemn tones and interchangeable melodies in early liturgy and Gregorian chant, to the influence of Hildegard von Bingen.

Hildegard von Bingen, a medieval nun, founded a convent after visions, wrote science and healing works and religious poems, and set them to melodic music still performed today.

Explore the emergence of sacred and secular music across Europe, Byzantium, and the Arab world, and how rising medieval prosperity spurred musical preservation.

Latin verses emerged in the 12th century with rhyming text and free melodies, not chant-based. They recited ancient poetry, celebrated nobility, and told love or satire, written down with neumes.

Explore goliard songs written by traveling students for educated audiences and sung across towns. These tunes were written down, often without a staff, so pitches remain uncertain, inviting scholarly interpretation.

Trace the emergence of professional minstrels, including bards and jugglers, their roles at courts and banquets, and the Paris minstrel guild's early union and ethics.

Observe a live minstrel performance with recorders, a viola da gamba, and a lute adapted instrument, plus period percussion like tambourines and drums to evoke historic sound.

Explores troubadours as a medieval minstrel tradition from France, often noble, writing autobiographies and songbooks, using strophic forms with syllabic, repeating melodies and varied texts.

Witness the troubadour reciting a poem to musical accompaniment in a 'song about nothing,' portraying unrequited love for an unseen beloved and the notion of nothingness.

Gothic cathedral architecture creates vast, reverberant spaces that shape sacred music. An intellectual revival, including Aquinas, opens Gregorian chant to polyphony and new singing styles.

Explore polyphony, the emergence of multiple musical lines in chant, with different voices weaving together in cathedral spaces and Bach exemplifying polyphonic writing.

Explore how polyphony drove the inventions of counterpoint, harmony, standardized notation, and the concept of composition, reshaping how music is written, read, and performed.

Explore early polyphony through drone-like singing and oblique organum, where a principal voice pairs with a moving drone in a one-to-one rhythm, then returns to a fixed pitch.

Discover the motet, a polyphonic form with two to four voices, rooted in church music and Latin, later found in society for educated audiences because of its complexity and subtlety.

Explore the Renaissance as a vibrant musical era following early music, featuring familiar composers, beautiful works, and ensembles performing with instruments.

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Explore the Renaissance's musical landscape, from church music and the Reformation to secular songs outside the church, highlighting regional developments in England, France, Spain, Italy, and Germany toward the Baroque.

Navigate music history with embedded musical examples delivered via downloadable pdas, linking to YouTube tracks and staying in sync to respect copyright.

Explore medieval music antiquity through archaeological evidence of instruments and drawings, learn how music was used, and study the oldest complete secular composition and 12th-century troubadour songs in free-form melodies.