A long period and an uneven record
“Medieval music” covers roughly a thousand years and a whole continent, so it is better thought of as many musical worlds than one. The evidence is also lopsided. Church music was written down far more often than anything else, because monasteries and cathedrals had the scribes, the parchment and the reasons to preserve it. Songs for courts survive in smaller numbers, and the tunes people played for dancing or sang while working were mostly never written at all. Anything said about the sound of the period involves some reconstruction.
Sacred music
The foundation of church music was plainchant: a single melody sung in Latin, without accompaniment, by monks, nuns or clergy. It was tied to the daily rounds of services, so that monastic life was organized around prayer and singing at set hours of the day and night. The repertory is often called Gregorian chant after Pope Gregory I, but that link is traditional rather than proven, and historians generally see the surviving body of chant as taking shape in the Frankish lands over several centuries.
Around the 9th century, singers began to add a second line to the chant, a practice called organum. Over time the lines became more independent, and by about 1200 the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris was associated with composers who wrote music for two, three and even four voices. In the 1300s, composers such as Guillaume de Machaut, who was both a cleric and a court poet, wrote complex pieces in which several voices moved in different rhythms at once. This growth of polyphony, music with several independent parts, is one of the most distinctive European developments of the period. Women’s convents had their own musical life too, and Hildegard of Bingen is the best-known example of a nun who composed.
The sound of sacred music was bound up with the buildings. Singing in the tall, echoing spaces of medieval cathedrals favored slow, clear lines, and organs, which existed in both large church forms and small portable ones, supported or doubled the voices.
Secular music
Outside the church, the best-documented songs are those of the troubadours of southern France, the trouvères of the north and the German Minnesinger. These poet-composers wrote about love, war, politics and satire, and the tradition of courtly love gave many of their songs a shared vocabulary of devotion and longing. Spain produced a famous collection, the Cantigas de Santa Maria, associated with the court of Alfonso X in the 13th century, in praise of the Virgin Mary.
There was also humorous and bawdy music. The Carmina Burana manuscript, copied in the 13th century, contains Latin and German songs about drinking, spring and love, many written by educated men outside strict church life. Only part of it has readable musical notation.
Dance tunes formed another strand. The estampie, a lively instrumental form with repeated sections, survives in a few manuscripts, and other dance music was likely improvised or learned by ear. Wherever there was a festival, a wedding or a feast, there was music for it.
The instruments
Medieval people used many instruments, and their names and forms changed from place to place. The table gives a rough grouping of the ones seen most often in sources.
| Instrument | Type | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Harp | Plucked strings | Common in Britain, Ireland and on the Continent |
| Psaltery | Plucked strings | A flat box with strings, often held on the lap |
| Lute | Plucked strings | Its name and form show a link to the Arabic oud |
| Vielle and rebec | Bowed strings | Ancestors of the later violin family |
| Hurdy-gurdy | Wheel-bowed strings | Crank-turned, with a drone |
| Shawm | Double reed | Loud and outdoors, a forerunner of the oboe |
| Bagpipe | Reed with bag | Widespread, linked to both villagers and professionals |
| Recorder and pipe | Flutes | The pipe and tabor was played by one person |
| Trumpet | Brass | Used for signals, ceremony and state occasions |
| Organ | Keyboard wind | Large church instruments and small portable ones |
| Nakers and tabor | Percussion | Small drums, with kettledrums borrowed from the East |
Writers of the 15th century often divided ensembles into loud (“haut”) groups, such as shawms and trumpets for outdoor ceremonies, and soft (“bas”) groups, such as harps and lutes for indoor listening. That grouping is a useful guide, though it should not be treated as a strict rule for the whole period. Many instruments reached Europe through contact with the Islamic world, especially in Spain and Sicily, and scholars still discuss how much each one changed along the way.
The performers
Different kinds of people made music in different settings.
- Clergy and choirs sang the daily services, and choirboys were trained in song schools.
- Minstrels and jongleurs were professional entertainers who sang, played, told stories and sometimes juggled. Some served one household, and others traveled between towns and courts.
- Town musicians, known in England as waits, played for civic occasions and served as watchmen.
- Nobles sometimes composed and sang themselves. Duke William IX of Aquitaine is traditionally called the earliest known troubadour, and Thibaut of Champagne, who became King of Navarre, wrote songs that still survive.
- Ordinary people sang at work, in church, at weddings and at festivals, though their songs are the least recorded.
At great feasts, music was part of showing wealth, and the number and quality of musicians was a way to display status, much like the food at noble feasts.
What remains uncertain
Early notation told singers the shape of a melody but not always the exact pitch or rhythm. Dance steps and instrumental improvisation were rarely written down at all. Modern performers must make choices about tempo, accompaniment and tuning, and different recordings of the same piece can sound very different. That uncertainty is part of what makes the subject interesting: the music is real, but the sound of it has to be pieced together from fragments.