With two of the three main elements of music – i.e. Alleluias – a specialist's guide: for many people, the term ‘alleluia’ brings to mind the eponymous Handel chorus, but, as Peter Quantrill argues, there are many and varied examples of the genre through the ages and into the 21st century.
Some scholars say that this was defined by the natural accentuation and emphasis of speech patterns and that therefore no special device was needed – the singers (without a conductor, of course) provided their own ‘flow’ and expression.
Without this, it is difficult to see how any sense of rhythm could be measured. Still there was no method of notating the length of a note. He also came up with what we now call the tonic sol-fa system, used by singers, in which notes are named by their position in the scale, as opposed to being named after letters of the alphabet (a practice derived from the ancient Greeks). Guido d’Arezzo, a Benedictine monk whose life as a teacher and musical theorist usefully coincided with the Church’s need for musical unification, is generally credited with the introduction of a stave of horizontal lines by which one could accurately record the pitch of notes. (The Gregorian chant melodies sung today date from after the death of Pope Gregory in 604 AD.) Without any accepted written system to denote the pitch or length of a note, the scoring of music was inevitably a haphazard affair. This early Christian music, derived from Greek songs and from the chanting used in synagogues, had evolved into what we now call plainsong, plainchant or Gregorian chant, the traditional music of the Western Church – a single melodic line, usually sung without accompaniment. It was around that date when the idea first occurred of combining several voices to sing a melody it was the time, too, when the Church, for so long the most important influence and inspiration on the development of music, recognised a need to standardise the single-line unaccompanied chants that had been used for centuries in sacred ceremonies. 1000 AD merely provides a convenient starting point for the birth of modern Western music. Johann Sebastian Bach The birth of classical musicįixing a date for ‘the beginning of classical music’ is as elusive as pin-pointing the millennium in which dinosaurs became extinct.
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