Musical

The music of this era is often called medieval music.  This spans nearly a thousand years and signaled the musical development of Europe.  Medieval music stands as the predecessor of the Western music that we know of today.  Medieval music started from about 500 A.D.  and ended around 1450.  There are writings from that particular period that tell us there were many different kinds of music made in that time.  Unfortunately, much of this music went unrecorded and has been lost and forgotten over time.  Therefore, the knowledge of medieval music that we possess today is very much incomplete.  However, the only evidence of the music that has existed before the year 1000 and has survived to this time is church music and its compositions.  

The early Christian church patterned most of its music from that of the Jewish synagogue with the Jewish chant as one of these.  These adaptations by the Christian church of the Jewish chant spread all over the Roman Empire until the third century AD.  This particular chanting came to be known as the Gregorian chant and was so named because the standard collection of chants was thought to have been ordered by Pope Gregory I.  However, it is now believed that this standardization happened two hundred years after the reign of Pope Gregory.  The Gregorian chant is made up of purely vocal melodies that do not seem to have harmony and is sung without accompaniments.  The Gregorian chant is the only music that was used constantly from the beginning of the Middle Ages until today.  The men who "composed" the Gregorian chants are unknown and cannot be called 'composers' because they only improved, decorated, or added new melodies to existing ones.  The chants we hear today are already the work of generations of musicians that cover several centuries and have been preserved mainly by monks. 

During the Middle Ages most forms of music were passed on from person to person by ear and were undocumented.  Minstrels, who were usually illiterate vagabonds, were the composers and performers of much of the music of this era.  These people made a living by chanting long poems about heroes and making dance music using bagpipes, harps and stringed instruments.  A very good example of this is the song of Roland.  These minstrels would also add acrobatics and magic tricks to the performance as they traveled along from one town to another.  By the 11th century, many of these minstrels became members of feudal households and it was here where some of them learned how to write down their music.  Also because of this, a few dances of the 13th and 14th centuries have also survived to the present day. 

The troubadours from the south of France and the trouvéres that came from the north developed a new art of song making.  They were different from the songs of the minstrels since many of them came from noble families.  This meant that the music that they made was for the appreciation of the upper-class audiences.  They often wrote and arranged their own songs and were generally performed with instrumental accompaniment.  This type of music was prevalent from the 1100s to the 1300s.