In the early 21st century, we take it for granted that the vast
and diverse world of music that's all around us can be
summoned at the flick of a switch.
But not that long ago, music was a rare
and feeble whisper in a wilderness of silence.
How on earth did that miracle happen?
MUSIC: Instrumental version of "Poker Face" by Lady Gaga
Music, one of the dazzling fruits of human civilisation,
has become a massive global phenomenon.
And so it's hard for us to imagine a time when, in centuries
gone by, people could go weeks without hearing any music at all.
Even in the 19th century, you might hear your favourite symphony
four or five times in your whole lifetime,
in the days before music could be recorded.
The story of music, successive waves of discoveries, breakthroughs
and inventions is an ongoing process.
The next great leap forward may take place in a backstreet
of Beijing or upstairs in a pub in South Shields.
# Can't read my, can't read my No, he can't read my poker face
# She's got me like nobody... #
Whatever music you're into,
Monteverdi or Mantovani, Mozart or Motown, Machaut or mashup,
the techniques it relies on didn't happen by accident.
Someone, somewhere thought of them first.
Music can make us weep or make us dance.
It's reflected the times in which it was written. It has delighted,
challenged, comforted and excited us.
In this series, I'm going to trace music's extraordinary
journey from scratch.
They'll be no fancy jargon nor misleading labels.
Terms like baroque, impressionism or nationalism
are best put to one side.
Instead, try to imagine how revolutionary
and how exhilarating many of the innovations
we take for granted today were to people at the time.
There are a million ways of telling the story of music.
This is mine.
You may think that music is a luxury,
a plug-in to make human life more enjoyable.
It's fine if you think that,
but our hunter-gatherer ancestors wouldn't agree with you.
To them, music was much more than mere ear candy.
ANIMALS ROAR
It was a matter of life and death.
You don't believe me? Let me take you back to 32,000 BC,
to the Stone Age cave paintings in Chauvet, France.
The people who painted them may have used singing as a life-saving
form of sat nav, a bat-like type of sonar to help you find where
you were in the labyrinth of caves.
In 2008, acoustic scientists made the extraordinary
discovery that the Chauvet paintings,
which lie within huge, inaccessible, pitch-black networks of tunnels,
are located at the points of greatest resonance in the networks,
so that singing would carry throughout the whole subterranean
system from these special points, echoing and ricocheting.
HORN ECHOES
We also now know that music played an important part
in Palaeolithic rituals, since whistles
and flutes made out of bones have been found in many of these caves.
From these dusty artefacts would one day grow Duke Ellington's
horn section and the massed ranks of the Dagenham Girl Pipers.
HORN BLARES
By the time that tribal communities began settling in one place
and farming, between 9000 and 7000 BC,
we know that music had become an essential activity.
As well as helping along the rhythm of work,
music was seen as something potent, magical,
and, if the mood required, seductive.
And yet, we've absolutely no idea what the music of these
ancient societies actually sounded like.
Because they couldn't write their music down,
it has disappeared completely.
There's no surviving video, no sheet music, no Pythagorean MP3,
not a note of it.
A few ancient instruments have been dug up, mind.
HORNS RESONATE
These ones are called lurs.
A set of six lurs were excavated in a field in Denmark in 1797,
now known as the Brudevaelte Lurs. They were perfectly preserved in a
peat bog for 2,500 years, and are still playable today.
These two are replicas.
Lurs are so famous in Denmark they've even had a butter
named after them.
These lurs may look a tad unwieldy
but in terms of technology, they're a long way from being some
hollowed-out piece of fruit, or a drum knocked up from a clay pot.
What they tell us is this...
It's a grave error to describe what musicians were up to
in 800 BC as primitive.
Making these elaborate brass instruments could only have
been the handiwork of culturally sophisticated people.
Remember, these lurs were made and played nearly a thousand years
before the building of Hadrian's Wall.
We don't know what the Bronze Age Scandinavians
played on their lurs but it was probably meant to be scary.
Around the time the Brudevaelte Lurs were intimidating
the neighbours, much further south, in the sunshine,
the Ancient Greeks were laying the foundations of western civilisation.
The Greeks believed music to be both a science and an art,
and took it extremely seriously.
It's worth noting what their seven compulsory subjects in school were -
grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy
and music.
What they loved best about music were talent contests. No, really.
Everyone knows that the Ancient Greeks invented the Olympic Games.
For the Greeks, though, it wasn't just nude running, wrestling
and throwing the javelin that was important.
They were mad about singing competitions.
Yes, The X Factor is a 3,000-year-old format,
the Epsilon Factor, one might say, or Sparta's Got Talent.
Contestants would appear before a live audience and a panel of judges.
The winners were awarded cash prizes.
This is the beginning of music as a profession.
The Greeks also invented European drama and the musical.
It's thought that the comic dramas of Aristophanes, for example,
were mostly sung.
I wish I could sing you a number from a Greek musical drama
at this point - Thank You For The Moussaka
or Greece Is The Word, perhaps - but I can't.
The tunes are all lost to us, even if we know what the words mean.
The Greeks passed on their passion for theatre,
poetry and music to the Romans,
who exported it, along with their legions, all over the Mediterranean.
But the Romans, too, never got round to writing their music down,
and so, when Rome fell in the 5th century,
the music of the ancient past was lost to us.
It's as silent as the grave.
Almost.
MALE CHOIR SINGS
Our one remaining link to the music of the late Roman world is
Christian plainchant, which dates from at least the 3rd century AD.
The singing of chant has always been central to Christian worship.
It was a sung version of the Latin words of the Psalms
and of the Eucharist, or Mass.
It's, by default, often been described as Gregorian Chant, after
Pope Gregory the Great, who was pope at the end of the 6th century.
It's beautiful, ancient and mysterious.
What it is not, we now know, is anything to do with Pope Gregory.
This is one of the worst branding mistakes in cultural history.
It would be like discovering the Wellington boot had nothing
to do with the Duke,
or that the Earl of Sandwich had nothing to do with a BLT.
HE SINGS
THEY SING IN UNISON
In the earliest form of plainchant,
musical monks would sing a meandering tune with no
accompaniment, no discernible rhythm and no harmonising.
They are singing together in unison.
Plainchant stayed the same for centuries.
But then, sometime before the 8th century, someone, somewhere had
the bright idea of adding some young lads to the choir.
HIGHER VOICES JOIN THE SINGING
It sounds fuller and brighter with higher
and lower voices combined, doesn't it?
The boys sang an octave higher than the men.
It's called an octave because in church music at the time
there were only eight notes to choose from.
On the white notes of a modern keyboard,
the two lines of voices are eight notes apart.
Having men and boys sing an octave apart prompted a further thought.
What if we had two notes together that weren't octaves,
but completely different notes taken from the choice of eight?
What if they added this note, for example?
TWO NOTES OF A FIFTH INTERVAL
THEY SING THE INTERVAL
Genius.
THEY SING IN HARMONY
They didn't go too far, mind. The new line wasn't independent
but stayed exactly in parallel to the original.
This parallel lines technique,
which began in around the 9th century, was called organum,
because, to them, it sounded like an organ, which it does.
ORGAN PLAYS SAME MUSIC
What we're hearing is the first experiment in what we'd call
harmony, the simultaneous sounding of more than one note.
THEY SING IN HARMONY
Bland and unadventurous it may seem to us now,
but then, in the early 100s, it was audio dynamite.
The heady excitement of singing two notes at once had another spin off.
This time, they went crazy.
They stopped one of the lines moving around.
In this form of organum,
one singer just stays put on one note all the time.
I say singer, but this technique is
so boring to perform they also used to play it on instruments instead,
an organ, perhaps, or now almost forgotten instruments
like the psaltery, the hurdy-gurdy or the symphony.
I'm not making this up, they really did have an instrument that played
just one continuous note. They even had a name for the long-held note.
It's a drone.
INSTRUMENT DRONES
VOICES JOIN, SINGING ONE NOTE
This drone-plus-tune-type of plainchant is still
remembered today on bagpipes.
The perforated tube you play the melody on is still called
the chanter.
BAGPIPES MUSIC
By the 9th century, the most adventurous musicians had
started to mix the two available styles together.
Parallel organum and drone organum.
THEY SING IN HARMONY ABOVE A DRONE
One such adventurer was Kassia of Constantinople.
She is the first female composer whose name has come down to us.
What makes her music intriguing is its unusual mix of simple
but unpredictable harmonies.
Harmony was the first giant step our medieval ancestors
took as the year 1000 drew near.
The other was to alter the course of music history dramatically.
It was the invention of musical notation.
When a monk or nun sang plainchant in the centuries
before about 800 AD, what they had in front of them was the text,
in Latin, of what they were singing. Just the text.
They had to memorise the melody. All this!
This is one of the most spectacular feats of memory in the history
of the human race. But it's also a bit mad.
It might take ten years of daily repetition and practice
to memorise the entire plainsong repertoire for the church year.
So it was deemed highly desirable to find a way of reminding
yourself what the tunes for any bit of text might be.
This is a 3rd-century Christian hymn written in Ancient Greek.
Above the words, tantalisingly,
is a fledgling attempt at writing the tune down.
Alas, so far at least,
no-one can agree on what exactly it's meant to sound like.
Hundreds of years went by until squiggles came along.
That's not their real name, which is neumes,
but squiggles are what they are.
This is a page from the Winchester Troper,
the oldest surviving manuscript of organum anywhere in the world.
It's the painstaking work of Anglo-Saxon monks.
What it shows is the Latin text that was intended to be sung,
with squiggles above the words and in the margin.
The idea of the squiggles was to give some indication of
whether the note of the melody went up or down over any given
syllable, so they're better than nothing.
But the squiggles had a major flaw.
They're essentially a way of jogging your memory
of a tune you already know.
They're rubbish at teaching you a new tune from scratch.
That's because they're not very good at indicating just how high
or low successive notes are supposed to be,
like a map without longitude or latitude.
The breakthrough came in around 1000 in the Italian city of Arezzo,
and it was the brainchild of a musical monk called Guido,
known nowadays of Guido of Arezzo.
Guido's methods were simple and clear.
First of all, he gave these squiggles, or neumes,
a standardised, easy-to-read form.
So each note had its own symbol, or blob.
He then drew four straight lines onto which the notes,
or blobs, would be placed.
One of the lines he made red to give you a fixed bearing
as against all other tunes, a bit like the musical equivalent
of the equator, or the Greenwich Meridian.
So wherever the note, or blob, is placed,
represents its pitch position, that is, whether it's an A, B, or C.
# La. #
If the note goes up, the blob goes up.
HIGHER: # La. #
And if it goes down, the blob goes down, step by step.
# Ole, ole, ole, ole, ole, ole. #
Before Guido, you'd think up a tune and then teach it to everyone
you know and hope they pass it on without mucking it up.
After Guido, music could be fixed on a page
and could be reproduced by someone who'd never heard the tune before.
Guido's method has been refined over the years by indicating
the duration of notes, for example,
but it's essentially the same system we still use to notate music today.
# But every time she asks me Do I look OK?
# I say
# When I see your face
# There's not a thing that I would change
# Cos you're amazing
# Just the way you are
# And when you smile... #
The ability to lay out multiple lines of melody on a kind of
musical spreadsheet allowed composers to plot out
far more complicated musical structures.
This was to set music on a course towards greater
and greater sophistication,
all thanks to the bright idea of a monk from Arezzo.
The ability to formulate musical ideas on a page
enabled a musical approach
that was far more ambitious than anything that had preceded it.
A story that has to be remembered
and spoken out loud is necessarily less complex than a novel, which
can be written down and unfolded over a much greater length of time.
So it was, with the invention of musical notation.
Now you could have multiple lines of music,
dazzling new possibilities for harmony began to suggest themselves.
What was needed to realise this potential was for a musician
to go a bit mad, and in his creative madness open up the harmony idea
to a thousand new possibilities,
which, helpfully, is what a bloke from Paris did in the 12th century.
MALE CHORAL SINGING
His name was Perotin,
and he composed music for the newly-built cathedral of Notre Dame.
What he did, was ask a seemingly simple question -
what would happen if you had more than two voices
singing at the same time?
What if you had three?
THREE VOICES SING IN HARMONY
Or even, God forbid, four?
FOUR VOICES SING IN HARMONY
This might not sound momentous now, but believe me,
it was nothing short of a revolution in music.
Perotin strikes us even today as an irrepressibly adventurous
creative force, a fire cracker of a composer
who conceived and wrote down
the most complex simultaneous note clusters ever yet heard.
A cluster of simultaneous notes is called a chord.
Here are some of Perotin's chords.
Perotin also blazed the way forward in another area of music.
He may not have been the first composer to bring rhythm
into church music, but he's the first one to find
a way of notating rhythm, using a system whereby shorter notes are
bracketed together with a horizontal bar, what he called a ligature.
He was particularly fond of one rhythmic pattern,
a pattern that you can easily remember
because it's the rhythm of the theme tune to the Archers.
# Dum-de-dum de-dum-de-dum, dum-de-dum de-dum dum. #
Perotin made that pattern his own, as you can hear in his hymn
composed for Christmas Day 1198, Viderunt Omnes.
MALE CHOIR SINGS RHYTHMICALLY
In this remarkable piece of music
you can hear not only the jaunty rhythm
but the weirdly effective harmonies, amazingly advanced for their time.
THEY SING DIFFERENT RHYTHMS IN HARMONY
It's important to remember that before Perotin's time, most people
would rarely have heard any music at all, unless they heard it in church.
But around the 12th century, secular music began to step out
into the limelight.
The pathfinders were the Bob Dylans of the day,
the trouveres or troubadours,
travelling singer-songwriters who usually accompanied
themselves on the early instruments available.
At the peak of the troubadour craze, several hundred of them
plied their trade across Europe.
Where did this troubadour phenomenon
with its songs of noble, elegant love originate from?
The answer may surprise you. It came from al-Andalus, Muslim Spain.
MALE SINGS ACCOMPANIED BY STRINGED INSTRUMENT
In the music of the troubadours, you can still hear
traces of the Arabic originals.
MALE SINGS ACCOMPANIED BY STRINGED INSTRUMENT
Muslim Spain also provided Christian Europe with more sophisticated
musical instruments that were to become central to secular music -
the rebab, a precursor to the violin,
the al'Ud, which became the lute and later, the guitar,
and the qanun, an early type of zither.
And instruments weren't the only important thing that European
composers inherited from the culture of Islam.
The other was a flair for rhythm.
STRING INSTRUMENTS PLAY RHYTHMICALLY
The troubadour songs, like their Arabic originals,
were shaped by the poetic metre of their lyrics,
so most of these songs have at least a gentle, foot-tapping pulse,
which is where Perotin got his rhythms from.
By the end of the 14th century, nearly all music's vital
components had been discovered - notation, both melodic and rhythmic,
the layering of voices on top of each other,
and a basic selection of instruments to complement the human voice.
One final piece of the jigsaw still needed to click into position.
In around 1400, harmony took a huge leap forward,
a leap that was to change the way music sounded for ever.
We still live with that change today.
Before 1400, despite Perotin's adventurousness,
when composers layered notes on top of each other
they only chose a very limited menu of possible note combinations.
There was the basic octave.
And there were two other note combinations, both of which medieval
musicians called perfect, because they were thought to be Godly.
The perfect fourth.
And the perfect fifth.
And before 1400, that's more or less it.
In this famous piece, for example, all the harmonies are sung
either four or five notes apart from the basic melody line.
# Gaudete, gaudete Christus est natus
# Ex Maria Virgine, gaudete... #
To our ears, accustomed to the subsequent 600 years of harmony,
there's something missing, which makes the music sound bare
and a little cold.
# Tempus adest gratiae Hoc quod optabamus
# Carmina laetitiae Devote reddamus
DRUMS START
# Gaudete, gaudete Christus est natus
# Ex Maria Virgine, gaudete. #
What's missing is a combination of notes that,
before 1400, composers had virtually ignored.
FEMALE CHORAL SINGING
The man who did use this note combination set things up
for what was to be a giant leap for harmony.
He was an English composer called John Dunstaple.
Dunstaple introduced the mighty but imperfect third.
Why is the third imperfect?
If you count just three notes up from your starting point, C,
you arrive at E. Why isn't this third a perfect distance?
The reason is that the third, unlike the fourth and fifth,
has two different versions, what we'd call now a major version
and a minor version. It is Mr Ambiguous.
You can see just how ambiguous by counting further up the keyboard.
If I count three notes from D for example, I come to F,
creating a minor third, ditto E to G.
But F to A, like C to E, is a major third.
The fact that the third can be either major or minor,
depending on where you start counting from,
might sound like only a slight technical difference, but it's not.
The pivot between the major third and the minor third is the pivot
upon which all western music balances.
Very broadly speaking, one is happy and one is sad,
and harmony's using these thirds make the music richer, more subtle
and more affecting.
FEMALE CHORAL SINGING
But allowing the leans-both-ways third into music
had one other big by-product. Let's start with C again.
We'll count up three steps and find ourselves at E, a major third.
Then if we carry on up another three steps to G,
we've created a minor third.
But what happens if we play all of these three notes together?
All these three notes played together are called a triad,
and triads are the bread and butter of all western music.
PIANO PLAYS
Here's a song you may recognise which is built on triads.
# Morning has broken
# Like the first morning
# Blackbird has spoken
# Like the first bird
# Praise for the singing
# Praise for the morning... #
15th-century musicians discovered that triads had an important
effect on each other when they were mixed together.
It's to do with the constituent notes of the chords.
The C major triad, for example, contains two of the same notes
as the E minor triad, and is therefore closely related to it.
Similarly the E minor triad shares two of its notes with
the G major triad, and they are closely related.
Mixing together chords that are closely related to each other
creates a mood of harmonious smoothness,
like melding adjacent colours in the spectrum.
Triads have another great benefit.
They can also create the sense of home in a piece of music.
Let me demonstrate with a famous spiritual song from a few
hundred years later - Amazing Grace.
In the first phrase of the song,
we start on one chord under the words "amazing grace".
# Amazing grace. #
Then we shift to another one on the word "sweet".
# How sweet. #
Then home again to where we started.
# The sound. #
That safe landing back to the chord we think of as home
is called a cadence, or ending.
# Amazing grace
# How sweet the sound. #
Everything feels right about that little journey of chords.
We felt good returning to where we started, at the end of the phrase.
In the second phrase, we go on another short chord journey.
# That saved a wretch like me. #
And we have another little cadence by moving to a new chord
on the word "me".
Again, this journey feels logical and satisfying,
we're being led from one place to another.
# I once was lost
# But now I'm found
# Was blind but now I see. #
You can quite clearly hear that there's nothing
haphazard about the choice of chords under the tune, it's meant to be.
What's at work here is a logic in the chords, they're obeying
strict laws like the laws of gravity, or the orbit of planets,
whereby some chords exert more power and influence than others.
Discovering the power of triads
was like discovering a chemical reaction.
Composers immediately sensed that something massive
and transformative had happened.
From now on, the basic chord - the triad,
one, three, five - was king.
Just as the development of harmony up to this point had taken several
centuries, so too, the refining of musical instruments was a slow burn.
But by the 16th century, a new breed of instruments had been invented,
and they were to bring in a golden age of folk or popular music.
In Tudor England, if you went to the barbershop for a haircut,
or some form of crude walk-in surgery, while you were waiting
you could pull down one of these off the wall and have a sing-song.
Yes, every self-respecting 16th-century barber had a cittern
hanging around for the use of his customers, many of whom would
then accompany themselves whilst singing a jolly folk song.
# Sing no more of dumps So dull and heavy... #
I'm not making this up.
# Was ever so Since summer first was leavy
# And sigh no more, but let them go And be you blithe and bonny
# Converting all your sounds of woe
# Into hey nonny nonny... #
New instruments were changing the texture of music.
Along with the cittern came the lute.
Related to the lute was the stringed instrument known as the viol,
and by the 1560s, the viol's young offspring, the violin,
had been developed in Italy.
The 16th century also saw rapid advancements in keyboard technology,
so at home, if you had a few bob, you might have a virginal.
But for sheer technological complexity,
no instrument of the 16th century comes near to the organ.
# Then sigh not so, but let them go And be you blithe and bonny
# Converting all your sounds of woe Into hey nonny nonny
# Then sigh no more, but let them go And be you blithe and bonny
# Converting all your sounds of woe Into hey nonny nonny. #
APPLAUSE
Hand in hand with this expansion of purely instrumental music
was a wealth of popular song.
Often, the exact same tunes were used for both church music
and secular music, with different words, of course.
PIPE MUSIC
The first religious songs to get catchy tunes were the ones
associated with Christmas.
Some of the early carols were derived from jaunty folk dances.
MUSIC: Instrumental version of "Good Christian Men Rejoice"
One reason these 500-year-old carols are still easy on the modern ear
is because of a significant shift that was taking place
in the musical structure at this time.
It's to do with the positioning of the melody.
When, in around 900 AD,
chanting monks started to add extra voices to plainsong melodies,
beginning the process that became polyphony,
the layering of many voices, it was always assumed that
the principal tune, the red bricks in our diagram, was the bottom one,
and the added tune was on top of it.
Gradually, as two lines became three and then four,
this principal melody got buried inside the four voices.
That's why the third line down in any four-part piece of choral music
got to be known as the tenor, because this was the part
that held the main tune, tenir being the French verb to hold.
We take it for granted that the tune of a piece of music sits on
top of the texture, but this wasn't the case before the 16th century.
Gradually, in all forms of music,
the tune worked itself up to the top.
# In dulci jubilo Let songs and gladness flow
# All our joy reclineth In praesepio
# And like the sun he shineth... #
Once the tune was sitting pretty on the top of the texture,
you were more likely to be able to hear the words clearly.
And the words were about to acquire a thrilling new significance.
# Alpha es et O. #
In 1450, in the German city of Mainz, one of the most
important technological breakthroughs of our civilisation
was invented - Johannes Gutenberg's movable type printing press.
Within 50 years or so of the arrival of Guttenberg's wondrous machine,
music was being printed.
Now, new musical ideas could spread further and faster than ever.
It's shown in the career of the most influential composer
of the period, Josquin Des Prez.
Josquin was born on what is now the Franco-Belgian border
but by his middle age, he was in Ferrara in Italy,
working as a resident composer for a rich and powerful duke.
In terms of pure sound, Josquin could not be described as a radical.
But in one key respect, Josquin made a departure from what
went before that was to become a hallmark of the music of the age.
Josquin is the first composer in history for whom
the meaning of the words is paramount, and who tried to
bring out and express that meaning in the way he set words to music.
Small wonder that the majority of pieces he composed
for the church were called motets, which means, literally, the words.
One such motet is Miserere Mei, have mercy on me.
MALE CHORAL SINGING # Miserere mei
# Deus... #
Miserere Mei was composed in 1503. Josquin's employer,
the Duke of Ferrara, was a friend of the most notorious
preacher of the age, the Dominican friar, Savonarola,
a firebrand who constantly attacked the excesses of the Catholic Church.
He was eventually arrested
and in prison, he wrote a prayer asking God's forgiveness
for falsely confessing to crimes under the agony of torture.
The text of this prayer, essentially proclaiming his innocence,
spread rapidly across Europe.
So Josquin's task was to make this highly political statement
completely clear. How he did so was new.
Quite simply, Josquin made sure that
the words were always clearly audible, and that was revolutionary,
because up till then, believe it or not,
the words in a piece of music were anything but audible.
For centuries, song lyrics had been the poor relation.
In folk music, audiences were as likely dancing, drinking themselves
into oblivion, or having their hair cut as listening to the words.
And in church, texts had been sung in Latin.
What's more, they'd been sung in a way that made it virtually
impossible to understand.
This is a technique called melisma, whereby long stretches of melody
are attached to just one syllable of text.
The melismatic style could be musically attractive, but it
destroyed any chance of the listener hearing what words were being sung.
So in the first few bars of Josquin's motet,
each voice utters the simple phrase, Miserere mei, Deus,
"Have mercy on me, Lord," one by one.
# Miserere mei, Deus
# Miserere mei, Deus. #
Josquin repeats those words, "Miserere mei, Deus,"
throughout the piece like a mantra. He also finds ways of highlighting
the words that were to be imitated
by other composers time and time again.
One, is to have the voices cascade downwards, like falling tears.
VOICES CASCADE DOWNWARDS, OVERLAPPING EACH OTHER
Another is to stop all activity
and have the voices sing together identical syllables of block chords.
THEY SING TOGETHER
In 1517, only 17 years after Savanorola's execution,
Martin Luther set in train the Reformation.
Not only did religion change, religious music changed, too.
In Lutheran churches, for the first time, the congregation played
a major role in music,
taking the lion's share of the singing in their own language.
Luther, as well as being a theologian, scholar,
writer and preacher, was a composer.
He fervently believed music should belong to everyone,
not just priests and trained choirs.
He wanted the congregations in his churches to be able to
join in hymn-singing with confidence and enthusiasm,
and this meant having easy-to-pick-up tunes to sing.
Luther, accordingly, collected lots of popular folk songs of the time
and gave them holy words.
He also caused loads of new tunes to be written for the purpose.
This is one Luther himself wrote, Ein Feste Burg Ist Unser Gott -
"A Mighty Fortress Is Our God."
# Ein feste burg ist unser Gott
# Ein gute wehr und waffen... #
What's immediately noticeable about this chorale, or Protestant hymn,
is that as it moves along,
the words progress syllable by syllable,
note by note, with a clear tune on top of the sound.
This is what hymns were to sound like for the next 500 years.
# Mit ernst ers jetzt meint
# Gross macht und viel list
# Ein grausam ruestung ist
# Auf erd ist nicht seingleichen. #
What followed the Reformation was more than
100 years of religious intolerance and state-sponsored terror.
In the midst of this blood bath, perhaps not surprisingly,
the mood of sacred music was overwhelmingly one of penitence,
remorse and lamentation.
SOMBRE CHORAL SINGING
But the dark cloud of agony and sorrow
wasn't going to last for ever.
UPLIFTING STRING MUSIC
As the 16th century drew to a close, serious religious music,
though it was still commissioned both by the Church and by rich
patrons, was about to lose its role as the dominant form of new music.
In the 1570s and '80s, a new wave of secular music swept up
like a warm summer wind from Italy into the rest of Europe.
It seemed to contain the seeds of something quite
different from the angry certainties of the religious squabble.
Not for the last time in musical history, art music,
the music of posh people,
was to be saved from itself by popular folk song traditions.
The pioneering figure in this new wave of secular music was
a Franco-Flemish composer called Jacques Arcadelt.
The lute player in Caravaggio's picture here, is playing
some of his music, he was that famous.
Everything about his songs cocked a snook at pomposity and authority.
His lyrics are concerned with human pleasures,
they're full of sensuous imagery and sexual allusion.
He worked for a while in Italy where he wrote madrigals,
then moved to France, where he wrote their equivalent - chansons.
Typical of these is the cheeky, syncopated tale of Margot,
the mysterious grape picker.
# Margot, labourez les vignes Vignes, vignes, vignolet
# Margot labourez les vignes bientot
# En revenant de Lorraine et Margot En revenant de Lorraine et Margot
# Rencontrai trois capitaines
# Vignes, vignes, vignolet Margot labourez les vignes bientot
# Margot, labourez les vignes Vignes, vignes, vignolet
# Margot, labourez Les vignes bientot. #
WOMAN SINGS # Flow, my tears fall
# From your springs... #
The success of Arcadelt's songs inspired many other composers,
one of whom was a close contemporary of Shakespeare, John Dowland,
who, by 1600, had become the most celebrated singer-songwriter
in Europe.
# ..Where night's black bird
# Her sad infamy sings
# There let me live
# Forlorn... #
Dowland's songs are strikingly different in tone
and attitude to anything that had gone before.
He's interested in people and their emotions, not gods and demons.
A song like Flow My Tears doesn't seem out of place amongst
those of our own time.
# ..Lost fortunes deplore
# Light doth but shame
# Disclose... #
Music by 1600 had become a rich mix of sacred and secular,
instrumental and vocal, but almost anything you would
hear at that time was on a relatively small scale.
The time was ripe for someone, somewhere,
to start creating long, substantial forms that would last a whole
evening and leave audiences cheering for more.
Which is exactly what happened.
Opera was born.
The man of the moment, one of the ten most influential
composers of all time, was Claudio Monteverdi.
In his hands, opera went from zero to hero.
DRAMATIC INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC
In opera, music is at the service of the drama, and
so it needs to be able to express complex, even conflicting, emotions.
Luckily, Monteverdi had already spent years
trying to do exactly that
with his sophisticated passion-filled madrigals.
To do so, he had begun to recalibrate harmony.
Let's look at just one of his madrigals,
which put cats among pigeons, even in his own time.
It's from the Fifth Book Of Madrigals of 1605,
and it's called O Mirtillo, Mirtill'Anima Mia,
Oh, Myrtle, Myrtle, My Soul. Listen to this bit.
# Che chiami crudelissima
# Amarilli. #
It's obvious Monteverdi is dipping in and out of all
kinds of chords that don't seem comfortably related to each other.
He wants you to feel surprised or intrigued, especially if it enhances
the words of the poem. So on these words,
"Che chiami crudelissima, Amarilli,"
"The one you call cruellest, Amaryllis," he creates a series
of deliberate clashes of chord, called a dissonance, or suspension.
# Come sta il cor di questa... #
Instead of sticking to chords that had close affinities with
each other, he deliberately mixed up unrelated chords
and exploited the strange, disorientating sounds this produced.
VOCALS OVERLAP # Che chiami
# Crudelissima
# Amarilli... #
It was music that could manipulate our emotions that Monteverdi
brought into opera. He also introduced another ingredient,
a dramatic aural effect that had been invented in Venice,
then one of the world's richest and most powerful city-states.
Its huge, cavernous basilica, St Mark's, employed some of the
best musicians in Europe, including, for a time, Monteverdi himself.
On top of all this, the building served as a kind of musical
and acoustical laboratory.
An uncle-and-nephew team called Gabrieli had developed
a kind of precursor of surround sound at St. Mark's,
achieved by placing groups of singers
and instrumentalists in different parts of the building
and having them sing or play alternately.
The technical term for the technique is polychoral, many choirs.
MUSIC ALTERNATES FROM LEFT TO RIGHT
Monteverdi knew and admired this polychoral style
and thought it would work alongside his intimate,
emotionally-charged madrigal style when he came to writing opera.
Monteverdi didn't invent opera,
a Florentine composer called Peri did, in 1597.
But Monteverdi did write the first good opera, Orfeo,
which premiered in Mantua in 1607.
He was aiming for maximum emotional effect,
maximum narrative clarity, maximum impact, even shock, and wasn't
going to obey anyone's rules about what he could or could not do.
FEMALE OPERATIC SINGING
What's more, Monteverdi invented a new combination of instruments
never before gathered together.
He borrowed old and new styles, he used choral music,
he told the stories through characters
directly expressing themselves to the audience.
Almost everything about Orfeo was then a novelty.
It was loud, it was long and it was modern.
And let's not forget how liberating it all must have been,
because as musical techniques had been developing,
century by century, so too had the ability to express more complex,
subtle and unexpected emotions along the way.
Monteverdi was using music plus.
Orfeo had been performed in a ducal court in front of a small,
select audience. Monteverdi's last opera, The Coronation Of Poppaea,
was performed in a Venetian theatre, in front of a paying public.
It's one of the most radical dramas of all time.
Why is Poppaea so radical?
To put it simply, because it was about real people
and their complicated, messy emotions.
The Emperor Nero and his mistress Poppaea were actual historical
figures, and Monteverdi's music acts as the soundtrack
to their real-life passions.
On the surface of it, Poppaea is about lust
and ambition conquering all.
It ends with a duet for Nero and Poppaea of unabashed eroticism,
called Pur Ti Miro, Pur Ti Godo, "I gaze on you, I possess you."
It appears as if Nero and Poppaea are being congratulated
for their criminal greed.
# Pur ti miro
# Pur ti godo
# Pur ti miro
# Pur ti godo
# Pur ti stringo
# Pur t'annodo
# Pur ti stringo... #
The passion that oozes out of this duet,
"I adore you, I embrace you, I desire you, I enchain you,"
is so frank and sensual, it almost turns its audience -
remember they're in the room, too -
into voyeurs, awkwardly witnessing the private interchange of
two weirdly uninhibited strangers.
This was new territory indeed, the full monty.
# O mia vita
# O mio tesoro... #
The most daring part of this climax is what it meant to
Monteverdi's fellow Venetians.
They knew what happened next in real life, that is,
after the fall of the curtain.
Nero killed his new Empress Poppaea and their unborn child
and then himself, and his regime collapsed in flames.
Monteverdi's audience would have seen the opera's ending
for what it was - a savage attack on Venice's archrival state, Rome.
In the light of this, the Coronation Of Poppaea can be
seen as a scathing critique of the excesses of Roman power
and the pressing need for humane self-restraint.
# Piu non peno
# Pi non moro
# O mia vita O mia vita
# O mio tesoro
# O mia vita O mia vita
# O mio tesoro... #
Monteverdi paved the way for an explosion of musical energy.
MUSIC: "Summer" by Vivaldi
If innovations had come along at a snail's pace in the previous
1,000 years, the next 100 in music saw them coming thick and fast.
In the next programme, the era of Vivaldi, Bach and Handel
and the exhilarating sound of invention.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd