CHAPTER V
POLYPHONY AND SECULAR SONG
33. The Polyphonic Idea.—The positive achievements of the
centuries following 1200 stand in striking contrast to the timid
experiments of those before. From this point onward the art
of music becomes interestingly interwoven with progress in
other fields, being a phase of the general intellectual awakening
of Europe that preceded the Renaissance.
Among the historic conditions to be borne in mind are (a) the breaking
up of Charlemagne's empire in the 9th century, with the gradual disintegration
of the feudal social system; (b) the Crusades in the 12th and
13th centuries, with their immense stimulus of thought and activity,
especially among the lower classes; and (c) the new life in the fine arts
generally, as shown by the rise of Gothic architecture about the 12th
century and of Italian painting in the 13th.
The distinctive feature of the period in music was a profound
alteration in the aim of composition. In Greek music and its
successor, the Gregorian style, the one desire was for a single
melodic outline to enforce and beautify a verbal text. All
music was a specialized outgrowth or derivative of poetic speech.
A new era came in when it was seen that music might have
beauty and meaning more or less independent of its words, being
built up into a fabric or edifice of tones by massing and
interweaving two or more voice-parts like strands or threads.
The transition to this new idea involved two lines of effort, which for convenience may be taken up separately. These were (a) the reduction of melodies to regular rhythmic form, with such accentual and durational values of the tones that their motions could be accurately measured and mutually adjusted, and (b) the discovery of ways in which melodies could be simultaneously combined so as to be concordant, or, if discordant, still satisfactory and effective. The former effort led to a theory of 'time,' the latter to a theory of 'counterpoint,' and the two were mutually interdependent at every point.