HISTORY OF MUSIC

Pythagoras Medieval woodcut showing Pythagoras with bells and other instruments in Pythagorean tuning Musical Investigations and Theories According to legend, Pythagoras discovered the foundations of musical tuning by listening to the sounds of four blacksmith’s hammers, which produced consonance and dissonance when they were struck simultaneously. According to Nicomachus in his 2nd century CE  Enchiridion harmonices,  Pythagoras noticed that hammer A produced consonance with hammer B when they were struck together, and hammer C produced consonance with hammer A, but hammers B and C produced dissonance with each other. Hammer D produced such perfect consonance with hammer A that they seemed to be “singing” the same note. Pythagoras rushed into the blacksmith shop to discover why, and found that the explanation was in the weight ratios. The hammers weighed 12, 9, 8, and 6 pounds respectively. Hammers A and D were in a ratio of 2:1, which is the ratio of the octave...

Neumes A neume  (sometimes spelled neum) is the basic element of Western and Eastern systems of musical notation prior to the invention of five-line staff notation. The word entered the English language in the Middle English forms “newme”, “nevme”, “neme” in the fifteenth century, from the Middle French “neume,” in turn from either medieval Latin “pneuma” or “neuma,” the former either from ancient Greek  πνεῦμα   pneuma  (“breath”) or  νεῦμα   neuma  (“sign”), or else directly from Greek as a corruption or an adaptation of the former. The earliest neumes were inflective marks which indicated the general shape but not necessarily the exact notes or rhythms to be sung. Later developments included the use of heightened neumes which showed the relative pitches between neumes, and the creation of a four-line musical staff that identified particular pitches. Neumes do not generally indicate rhythm, but additional symbols were sometimes jux...

PowerPoint: The Middle Ages                                                                        

The Renaissance Linear perspective in Renaissance painting. Christ giving the keys to Peter. Perugino, c. 1482. The Renaissance is a period from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, considered the bridge between the Middle Ages and modern history. It started as a cultural movement in Italy in the late medieval period and later spread to the rest of Europe. Some good early examples were the development of  perspective  in oil painting and the recycled knowledge of how to make concrete. Although the invention of metal movable type sped the dissemination of ideas from the later fifteenth century, the changes of the Renaissance were not uniformly experienced across Europe. As a cultural movement, it encompassed innovative flowering of Latin and vernacular literatures, beginning with the fourteenth century resurgence of learning based on classical sources, which contemporaries credited to Petrarch; the development of linear perspe...