It’s very hard for us to imagine a musical world where one note followed the other and was not sounded simultaneously with other notes, a world with tunes but no harmonies, with melodic shapes but no rhythm. Our musical world is so rich – some would say so polluted – that most of us absorb thousands of notes of one sort or another everyday and hardly notice it. The CD, broadcasting and background music have all contributed to this, but they’re only the latest manifestation of a unique development that has been going on in the West for well over a thousand years: our need for multi-layered musical experiences. We expect harmony, and from this basic principle flows almost everything we take for granted about what music actually is. Although it’s not absolutely true that no other cultures have polyphony, it is the case that only in the West has polyphony evolved as such a complex process.
The earliest “harmony”
The history of European music begins with chants appropriated from Judaism to serve the emerging Christian rituals. Or perhaps we should call this prehistory: none of the music was written down and we have very little idea of what it would have sounded like. As monastic foundations grew all over Europe during the first millennium, a great and diverse body of chant began to take shape: thousands of chants and thousands of local performance traditions. The monasteries were centres of literacy and learning and unsurprisingly music became embedded in the written culture. The first attempts at recording music on paper are impossible to decipher, aide- mémoires for monks who already knew how the chants went but needed reminding as the sheer number of pieces became too big to hold in the head. Only when the music needed to be transmitted – read by singers to whom it was previously unknown – do we begin to find comprehensive information on the notes themselves. Writing something down, especially in a society that was for the most part illiterate – gave it a permanence and authority that could far outweigh the original purpose. Almost from the beginning the chant tradition became a target for theorists and religious power brokers: the former insisting on writing about the supposedly correct way to do it, the latter wanting to eliminate local traditions in favour of a centrally-sanctioned body of material that everyone should use in a similar way.
All this music was monophonic – tunes sung either in unison or by soloists with no accompaniment. We don’t know how the first attempts at polyphony began. As with chant, the process was initially an oral (aural) one and the assumption is that there was a substantial body of unwritten material which was already part of a living tradition by the time the first written references to it appear. Presumably the earliest “harmony” consisted of men and boys singing in unison at the octave. The earliest references to true harmony explain how to sing in parallel fifths as well as octaves. This is more difficult to account for, and my guess is that it happened by mistake. When we sing a note, the sound that comes out of our mouths is a complex collection of frequencies made up of the many notes of the harmonic series; the emphasising of particular sets of these frequencies creates the colours that we hear as vowels. One can imagine a monk trying to chant in unison with a fellow singer whose vowels were distorted in such a way that he produced an unusually audible fifth (perhaps his accent was an unfamiliar one). By singing together at the fifth in the mistaken impression that they were singing in unison, the monks would have created polyphony. But however it started, once it became an accepted thing to do singers had to reconcile the scales that generated their melodies with the ‘verticality’ of harmony. Some intervals sounded much harsher than others, and thus was born the discord, together with rules for coping with it. The essence of the new music was eventually captured by theorists and teachers who passed on their thoughts about how it should be done, as is the way with jazz improvisation today.
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