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Musical Periods Middle Ages Rena
Musical Periods
Middle Ages
Renaissance
Baroque

Classical

Romantic
20th Century

Example of Music From The Middle

Example of
Music From
The Middle Ages


Ce fut en Mai
Moniot d'Arras


My Sheet Music - Musical Eras - Middel Ages Music
Middle Ages Music

Medieval sacred music

Medieval secular music

End of the era

Middle Ages Information

Medieval Terminology




Middle Ages (Medieval Music)   450 - 1450
 

Artists Of The Middle Ages Era

Prominent Composers
of the
Middle Ages


Hildegard Von Bingen
 



Moniot d'Arras
 

Medieval secular music

Goliards

The Goliards were itinerant poet-musicians of Europe from the tenth to the middle of the thirteenth century, hence overlapped with the troubador and trouvère tradition. Most were scholars or ecclesiastics, and they wrote and sang in Latin, unlike the troubadors, trouvères, and minnesingers, who used the vernacular. Although many of the poems have survived, very little of the music has. They were possibly influential--even decisively so--on the troubador-trouvère tradition. Most of their poetry is secular, and while some of the songs celebrate religious ideals, others are frankly profane, dealing with drunkenness, debauchery and lechery.

Minnesang
The minnesinger tradition was the Germanic counterpart to the activity of the troubadors and trouvères to the west. Unfortunately, few sources survive from the time; the sources of minnesang are mostly from two or three centuries after the peak of the movement, leading to some controversy over their accuracy.

Geisslerlieder
The geisslerlieder were the songs of wandering bands of flagellants, who sought to appease the wrath of an angry God by penitential music accompanied by mortification of their bodies. There were two separate periods of activity of geisslerlied: one around the middle of the thirteenth century, from which, unfortunately, no music survives (although numerous lyrics do); and another from 1349, for which both words and music survive miraculously intact due to the attention of a single priest who wrote about the movement and recorded its music. This second period corresponds to the spread of the Black Death in Europe, and documents one of the most terrible events in European history. Both periods of geisslerlied activity were mainly in Germany.

Troubadors and trouvères
The music of the troubadors and trouvères was a vernacular tradition of monophonic secular song, probably accompanied by instruments, sung by professional, occasionally itinerant, musicians who were as skilled as poets as they were singers and instrumentalists. The language of the troubadors was Occitan (also known as the langue d'oc, or Provençal); the language of the trouvères was Old French (also known as langue d'oil). The period of the troubadors corresponded to the flowering of cultural life in Provence which lasted through the twelfth century and into the first decade of the thirteenth. Typical subjects of troubador song were war, chivalry and courtly love. The period of the troubadors ended abruptly with the Albigensian Crusade, the fierce campaign by Pope Innocent III to eliminate the Albigensian heresy (and appropriate the wealth of a defenseless people) which effectively exterminated the entire civilization. Surviving troubadors went either to Spain, northern Italy or northern France (where the trouvère tradition lived on), where their skills and techniques contributed to the later developments of secular musical culture in those places.

The music of the trouvères was similar to that of the troubadors, but was able to survive into the thirteenth century unaffected by the war of extermination against the Albigenses. Most of the more than two thousand surviving trouvère songs include music, and show a sophistication as great as that of the poetry it accompanies.

Liturgical drama
Yet another musical tradition of Europe during the middle ages was the liturgical drama. Quite possibly this was the oldest of all, since in its original form it may represent a survival of Roman drama with Christian stories--mainly the Gospel, the Passion, and the lives of the saints--grafted on. Every part of Europe had some sort of tradition of musical or semi-musical drama in the middle ages, involving acting, speaking, singing and instrumental accompaniment in some combination. Probably they were performed by traveling actors and musicians, and the musical elements may be the closest surviving relatives of the lost popular music of the period. Many have been preserved sufficiently complete to allow modern reconstruction and performance (for example the Play of Daniel, which has been recently recorded).