The History of Music

No sounding music survives from this age — notation scarcely existed, and only images of instruments, texts, and indirect testimonies have come down to us. We know that music was inseparable from temple and power: the harps and lyres of Ur, the trumpets and cymbals of the Temple of Jerusalem, the Levite singers. The Psalms of David carry rubrics for performance ('on stringed instruments,' 'to the choirmaster'), but the melodies themselves have not survived. The Hurrian hymn from Ugarit (c. 14th century BC) is the oldest known notated melody, but its reading is disputed. It is more honest to say: here music sounded before the idol — and its voice has not reached us.

The Greeks were the first to conceive of music as a science of number: to Pythagoras is ascribed the discovery of the numerical ratios of the consonances (octave, fifth, fourth), and music took its place alongside arithmetic and geometry. There arose a theory of the modes and the doctrine of ethos — the influence of music upon the soul. But sounding monuments are almost entirely lacking: only a handful of fragments survive, the most complete of them the Seikilos epitaph (1st–2nd century AD), a short drinking song with full notation. The Delphic Hymns to Apollo (c. 128 BC) have come down to us partly, carved in stone. The idol here is the belief that the world is upheld by a perfect numerical harmony.

With the fall of the ancient order, music loses its former foundation and is recast within the Church: liturgical chant is born — not for delight, but for prayer. No scores survive from this age: the singing was oral, and notation would appear only later. From the testimonies we know of antiphonal singing (choirs answering one another), which tradition associates with St Ambrose of Milan. In his Confessions, St Augustine describes how the singing at Milan shook him to tears — an early witness to the power of the Church's voice. This is captivity and the beginning of the refounding: music departs from the theatre and the circus into the temple.

Gregorian chant takes shape — a monophonic liturgical singing that became the musical corpus of the West; tradition links its formation to the name of Pope Gregory I, though its notation crystallized later. From the 9th–11th centuries notation appears — and for the first time music becomes something that can be written down. At Notre-Dame Cathedral, Léonin and Pérotin create early polyphony (the organum), and the voice begins to branch. Hildegard of Bingen composes visionary monodies, and in the 14th century Guillaume de Machaut creates the 'Messe de Nostre Dame' — the first complete authored Mass by a single composer. The voice of the cathedral rises upward, toward heaven, and learns to sound in many layers.

Polyphony reaches the summit of perfection: Palestrina writes transparent Masses (among them the 'Missa Papae Marcelli'), and Josquin des Prez and Orlando di Lasso bring the interweaving of voices to its ideal. Yet within this perfection a turn toward the human being ripens: around 1600, in Florence, opera is born, and in his 'Orfeo' (1607) Monteverdi makes music the bearer of living drama and passion. His 'Lament of Ariadna' and his 'Vespers of the Blessed Virgin' (1610) join the old piety to the new expressiveness. Thus begins the Baroque — an age in which sound learns to weep and to rejoice in a human way.

The Baroque and Classicism give music the highest capacity to bear the drama of salvation. Bach writes the 'St Matthew Passion' (1727) — a vast lament over Golgotha — and the Mass in B minor; Handel in 'Messiah' (1742) leads from prophecy through death to the 'Hallelujah' of the Resurrection. Haydn in the oratorio 'The Creation' (1798) sings of the light born out of chaos. Mozart dies over his unfinished 'Requiem' (1791), while Beethoven, in his Ninth Symphony (1824) and his 'Missa solemnis', leads music toward a universal, all-human brotherhood. It is the age of revolutions — and music holds within itself both the collapse and the hope.

Romanticism makes an idol of the artist's personality, of passion, and of the nation: Wagner builds his myth in 'The Ring of the Nibelung', and the symphony swells to a cosmic breadth. But the age of death also gives birth to great funeral Masses: Verdi writes his 'Requiem' (1874) with its shattering 'Dies irae', and Brahms his 'German Requiem' (1868) on words of consolation for the living. The culmination is Mahler: his Symphony No. 2, 'Resurrection' (1894), passes through death, judgment, and chaos to the choral 'I shall rise again!'. Here the law of history sounds directly: collapse and refounding into hope.

Music undergoes the ruin of its former harmony: Stravinsky, in 'The Rite of Spring' (1913), detonates rhythm; Schoenberg departs into atonality and dodecaphony, severing the bond with the mode. The age of totalitarianism and war cries out in sound: Shostakovich, in his Seventh, 'Leningrad', Symphony (1942), bears witness to the siege; Britten, in his 'War Requiem' (1962), interweaves the Mass for the dead with the verses of the fallen poet Owen. Out of the captivity a quiet light is born: Arvo Pärt creates the prayerful 'tintinnabuli' style ('Cantus in Memory of Britten', 1977; 'Tabula rasa', 1977). Horror and prayer — the two voices of the century.

After the collapse of the great ideologies, music seeks not a new idol but a return to the source — to silence, to prayer, to simplicity. The 'sacred minimalism' of Pärt, Górecki, and Tavener sounds ever louder in the world: Górecki's Symphony No. 3, of 'Sorrowful Songs' (composed 1976), becomes a worldwide hit precisely in the 1990s. John Tavener writes the Orthodox-inspired 'Song for Athene' (1993) and 'The Protecting Veil'. Against the endless stream of pop and electronic music, this quiet voice of faith is a sign of the refounding: weariness with noise turns into a longing for the eternal.