BBC Howard Goodall's Story of Music 1of6 The Age of Discovery

In the early 21st century,
we take it for granted that the vast

and diverse world of music
that's all around us can be

summoned at the flick of a switch.

But not that long ago,
music was a rare

and feeble whisper
in a wilderness of silence.

How on earth did that
miracle happen?

MUSIC: Instrumental version of
"Poker Face" by Lady Gaga

Music, one of the dazzling
fruits of human civilisation,

has become a massive
global phenomenon.

And so it's hard for us to
imagine a time when, in centuries

gone by, people could go weeks
without hearing any music at all.

Even in the 19th century, you might
hear your favourite symphony

four or five times in
your whole lifetime,

in the days before music
could be recorded.

The story of music, successive
waves of discoveries, breakthroughs

and inventions is
an ongoing process.

The next great leap forward
may take place in a backstreet

of Beijing or upstairs in
a pub in South Shields.

# Can't read my, can't read my
No, he can't read my poker face

# She's got me like nobody... #

Whatever music you're into,

Monteverdi or Mantovani, Mozart
or Motown, Machaut or mashup,

the techniques it relies on
didn't happen by accident.

Someone, somewhere
thought of them first.

Music can make us
weep or make us dance.

It's reflected the times in which it
was written. It has delighted,

challenged, comforted
and excited us.

In this series, I'm going to
trace music's extraordinary

journey from scratch.

They'll be no fancy jargon
nor misleading labels.

Terms like baroque,
impressionism or nationalism

are best put to one side.

Instead, try to
imagine how revolutionary

and how exhilarating
many of the innovations

we take for granted today
were to people at the time.

There are a million ways of
telling the story of music.

This is mine.

You may think that
music is a luxury,

a plug-in to make human life
more enjoyable.

It's fine if you think that,

but our hunter-gatherer ancestors
wouldn't agree with you.

To them, music was much more
than mere ear candy.

ANIMALS ROAR

It was a matter of life and death.

You don't believe me?
Let me take you back to 32,000 BC,

to the Stone Age cave paintings
in Chauvet, France.

The people who painted them may have
used singing as a life-saving

form of sat nav, a bat-like type
of sonar to help you find where

you were in the labyrinth of caves.

In 2008, acoustic scientists
made the extraordinary

discovery that the
Chauvet paintings,

which lie within huge, inaccessible,
pitch-black networks of tunnels,

are located at the points of
greatest resonance in the networks,

so that singing would carry
throughout the whole subterranean

system from these special points,
echoing and ricocheting.

HORN ECHOES

We also now know that music
played an important part

in Palaeolithic rituals,
since whistles

and flutes made out of bones have
been found in many of these caves.

From these dusty artefacts would
one day grow Duke Ellington's

horn section and the massed
ranks of the Dagenham Girl Pipers.

HORN BLARES

By the time that tribal communities
began settling in one place

and farming, between
9000 and 7000 BC,

we know that music had become
an essential activity.

As well as helping along the
rhythm of work,

music was seen as
something potent, magical,

and, if the mood
required, seductive.

And yet, we've absolutely no
idea what the music of these

ancient societies actually
sounded like.

Because they couldn't
write their music down,

it has disappeared completely.

There's no surviving video,
no sheet music, no Pythagorean MP3,

not a note of it.

A few ancient instruments
have been dug up, mind.

HORNS RESONATE

These ones are called lurs.

A set of six lurs were excavated
in a field in Denmark in 1797,

now known as the Brudevaelte Lurs.
They were perfectly preserved in a

peat bog for 2,500 years,
and are still playable today.

These two are replicas.

Lurs are so famous in Denmark
they've even had a butter

named after them.

These lurs may look a tad unwieldy

but in terms of technology, they're
a long way from being some

hollowed-out piece of fruit, or
a drum knocked up from a clay pot.

What they tell us is this...

It's a grave error to describe
what musicians were up to

in 800 BC as primitive.

Making these elaborate brass
instruments could only have

been the handiwork of culturally
sophisticated people.

Remember, these lurs were made
and played nearly a thousand years

before the building
of Hadrian's Wall.

We don't know what the
Bronze Age Scandinavians

played on their lurs but it was
probably meant to be scary.

Around the time the Brudevaelte Lurs
were intimidating

the neighbours, much further south,
in the sunshine,

the Ancient Greeks were laying the
foundations of western civilisation.

The Greeks believed music to be
both a science and an art,

and took it extremely seriously.

It's worth noting what their seven
compulsory subjects in school were -

grammar, rhetoric, logic,
arithmetic, geometry, astronomy

and music.

What they loved best about music
were talent contests. No, really.

Everyone knows that the Ancient
Greeks invented the Olympic Games.

For the Greeks, though, it wasn't
just nude running, wrestling

and throwing the javelin
that was important.

They were mad about
singing competitions.

Yes, The X Factor is a
3,000-year-old format,

the Epsilon Factor, one might say,
or Sparta's Got Talent.

Contestants would appear before a
live audience and a panel of judges.

The winners were
awarded cash prizes.

This is the beginning of
music as a profession.

The Greeks also invented
European drama and the musical.

It's thought that the comic dramas
of Aristophanes, for example,

were mostly sung.

I wish I could sing you a number
from a Greek musical drama

at this point -
Thank You For The Moussaka

or Greece Is The Word, perhaps -
but I can't.

The tunes are all lost to us,
even if we know what the words mean.

The Greeks passed on
their passion for theatre,

poetry and music to the Romans,

who exported it, along with their
legions, all over the Mediterranean.

But the Romans, too, never got round
to writing their music down,

and so, when Rome fell
in the 5th century,

the music of the ancient
past was lost to us.

It's as silent as the grave.

Almost.

MALE CHOIR SINGS

Our one remaining link to the
music of the late Roman world is

Christian plainchant, which dates
from at least the 3rd century AD.

The singing of chant has always
been central to Christian worship.

It was a sung version of
the Latin words of the Psalms

and of the Eucharist, or Mass.

It's, by default, often been
described as Gregorian Chant, after

Pope Gregory the Great, who was
pope at the end of the 6th century.

It's beautiful,
ancient and mysterious.

What it is not, we now know,
is anything to do with Pope Gregory.

This is one of the worst branding
mistakes in cultural history.

It would be like discovering
the Wellington boot had nothing

to do with the Duke,

or that the Earl of Sandwich had
nothing to do with a BLT.

HE SINGS

THEY SING IN UNISON

In the earliest form of plainchant,

musical monks would sing
a meandering tune with no

accompaniment, no discernible
rhythm and no harmonising.

They are singing together in unison.

Plainchant stayed
the same for centuries.

But then, sometime before the 8th
century, someone, somewhere had

the bright idea of adding some
young lads to the choir.

HIGHER VOICES JOIN THE SINGING

It sounds fuller
and brighter with higher

and lower voices
combined, doesn't it?

The boys sang an octave
higher than the men.

It's called an octave because
in church music at the time

there were only eight
notes to choose from.

On the white notes
of a modern keyboard,

the two lines of voices
are eight notes apart.

Having men and boys sing an octave
apart prompted a further thought.

What if we had two notes
together that weren't octaves,

but completely different notes
taken from the choice of eight?

What if they added this note,
for example?

TWO NOTES OF A FIFTH INTERVAL

THEY SING THE INTERVAL

Genius.

THEY SING IN HARMONY

They didn't go too far, mind.
The new line wasn't independent

but stayed exactly in
parallel to the original.

This parallel lines technique,

which began in around the
9th century, was called organum,

because, to them, it sounded
like an organ, which it does.

ORGAN PLAYS SAME MUSIC

What we're hearing is the first
experiment in what we'd call

harmony, the simultaneous
sounding of more than one note.

THEY SING IN HARMONY

Bland and unadventurous
it may seem to us now,

but then, in the early 100s,
it was audio dynamite.

The heady excitement of singing two
notes at once had another spin off.

This time, they went crazy.

They stopped one of the
lines moving around.

In this form of organum,

one singer just stays put
on one note all the time.

I say singer, but this technique is

so boring to perform they also used
to play it on instruments instead,

an organ, perhaps, or now
almost forgotten instruments

like the psaltery,
the hurdy-gurdy or the symphony.

I'm not making this up, they really
did have an instrument that played

just one continuous note. They even
had a name for the long-held note.

It's a drone.

INSTRUMENT DRONES

VOICES JOIN, SINGING ONE NOTE

This drone-plus-tune-type
of plainchant is still

remembered today on bagpipes.

The perforated tube you play
the melody on is still called

the chanter.

BAGPIPES MUSIC

By the 9th century, the most
adventurous musicians had

started to mix the two
available styles together.

Parallel organum and drone organum.

THEY SING IN HARMONY
ABOVE A DRONE

One such adventurer was
Kassia of Constantinople.

She is the first female composer
whose name has come down to us.

What makes her music intriguing
is its unusual mix of simple

but unpredictable harmonies.

Harmony was the first giant
step our medieval ancestors

took as the year 1000 drew near.

The other was to alter the course
of music history dramatically.

It was the invention of
musical notation.

When a monk or nun sang
plainchant in the centuries

before about 800 AD, what they had
in front of them was the text,

in Latin, of what they were singing.
Just the text.

They had to memorise the melody.
All this!

This is one of the most spectacular
feats of memory in the history

of the human race.
But it's also a bit mad.

It might take ten years of daily
repetition and practice

to memorise the entire plainsong
repertoire for the church year.

So it was deemed highly desirable
to find a way of reminding

yourself what the tunes for
any bit of text might be.

This is a 3rd-century Christian hymn
written in Ancient Greek.

Above the words, tantalisingly,

is a fledgling attempt
at writing the tune down.

Alas, so far at least,

no-one can agree on what exactly
it's meant to sound like.

Hundreds of years went by
until squiggles came along.

That's not their real name,
which is neumes,

but squiggles are what they are.

This is a page from
the Winchester Troper,

the oldest surviving manuscript
of organum anywhere in the world.

It's the painstaking
work of Anglo-Saxon monks.

What it shows is the Latin text
that was intended to be sung,

with squiggles above the
words and in the margin.

The idea of the squiggles was
to give some indication of

whether the note of the melody
went up or down over any given

syllable, so they're
better than nothing.

But the squiggles had a major flaw.

They're essentially a way of
jogging your memory

of a tune you already know.

They're rubbish at teaching you
a new tune from scratch.

That's because they're not very
good at indicating just how high

or low successive notes
are supposed to be,

like a map without
longitude or latitude.

The breakthrough came in around
1000 in the Italian city of Arezzo,

and it was the brainchild
of a musical monk called Guido,

known nowadays of Guido of Arezzo.

Guido's methods were
simple and clear.

First of all, he gave these
squiggles, or neumes,

a standardised, easy-to-read form.

So each note had its
own symbol, or blob.

He then drew four straight
lines onto which the notes,

or blobs, would be placed.

One of the lines he made red
to give you a fixed bearing

as against all other tunes,
a bit like the musical equivalent

of the equator, or
the Greenwich Meridian.

So wherever the note, or blob,
is placed,

represents its pitch position,
that is, whether it's an A, B, or C.

# La. #

If the note goes up,
the blob goes up.

HIGHER: # La. #

And if it goes down, the
blob goes down, step by step.

# Ole, ole, ole,
ole, ole, ole. #

Before Guido, you'd think up a tune
and then teach it to everyone

you know and hope they pass
it on without mucking it up.

After Guido, music could
be fixed on a page

and could be reproduced by someone
who'd never heard the tune before.

Guido's method has been refined
over the years by indicating

the duration of notes, for example,

but it's essentially the same system
we still use to notate music today.

# But every time she asks me
Do I look OK?

# I say

# When I see your face

# There's not a thing that
I would change

# Cos you're amazing

# Just the way you are

# And when you smile... #

The ability to lay out multiple
lines of melody on a kind of

musical spreadsheet allowed
composers to plot out

far more complicated
musical structures.

This was to set music on
a course towards greater

and greater sophistication,

all thanks to the bright
idea of a monk from Arezzo.

The ability to formulate
musical ideas on a page

enabled a musical approach

that was far more ambitious
than anything that had preceded it.

A story that has to be remembered

and spoken out loud is necessarily
less complex than a novel, which

can be written down and unfolded
over a much greater length of time.

So it was, with the invention
of musical notation.

Now you could have
multiple lines of music,

dazzling new possibilities for
harmony began to suggest themselves.

What was needed to realise this
potential was for a musician

to go a bit mad, and in his creative
madness open up the harmony idea

to a thousand new
possibilities,

which, helpfully, is what a bloke
from Paris did in the 12th century.

MALE CHORAL SINGING

His name was Perotin,

and he composed music for the
newly-built cathedral of Notre Dame.

What he did, was ask a seemingly
simple question -

what would happen if you had
more than two voices

singing at the same time?

What if you had three?

THREE VOICES SING IN HARMONY

Or even, God forbid, four?

FOUR VOICES SING IN HARMONY

This might not sound momentous now,
but believe me,

it was nothing short
of a revolution in music.

Perotin strikes us even today
as an irrepressibly adventurous

creative force, a
fire cracker of a composer

who conceived and wrote down

the most complex simultaneous
note clusters ever yet heard.

A cluster of simultaneous
notes is called a chord.

Here are some of Perotin's chords.

Perotin also blazed the way
forward in another area of music.

He may not have been the first
composer to bring rhythm

into church music, but he's
the first one to find

a way of notating rhythm, using
a system whereby shorter notes are

bracketed together with a horizontal
bar, what he called a ligature.

He was particularly fond
of one rhythmic pattern,

a pattern that you can
easily remember

because it's the rhythm of the
theme tune to the Archers.

# Dum-de-dum de-dum-de-dum,
dum-de-dum de-dum dum. #

Perotin made that pattern his own,
as you can hear in his hymn

composed for Christmas Day 1198,
Viderunt Omnes.

MALE CHOIR SINGS RHYTHMICALLY

In this remarkable piece of music

you can hear not only
the jaunty rhythm

but the weirdly effective harmonies,
amazingly advanced for their time.

THEY SING DIFFERENT
RHYTHMS IN HARMONY

It's important to remember that
before Perotin's time, most people

would rarely have heard any music at
all, unless they heard it in church.

But around the 12th century,
secular music began to step out

into the limelight.

The pathfinders were
the Bob Dylans of the day,

the trouveres or troubadours,

travelling singer-songwriters
who usually accompanied

themselves on the early
instruments available.

At the peak of the troubadour craze,
several hundred of them

plied their trade across Europe.

Where did this troubadour
phenomenon

with its songs of noble,
elegant love originate from?

The answer may surprise you. It
came from al-Andalus, Muslim Spain.

MALE SINGS ACCOMPANIED
BY STRINGED INSTRUMENT

In the music of the troubadours,
you can still hear

traces of the Arabic originals.

MALE SINGS ACCOMPANIED
BY STRINGED INSTRUMENT

Muslim Spain also provided Christian
Europe with more sophisticated

musical instruments that were to
become central to secular music -

the rebab, a precursor
to the violin,

the al'Ud, which became
the lute and later, the guitar,

and the qanun, an early
type of zither.

And instruments weren't the only
important thing that European

composers inherited
from the culture of Islam.

The other was a flair for rhythm.

STRING INSTRUMENTS PLAY RHYTHMICALLY

The troubadour songs,
like their Arabic originals,

were shaped by the poetic
metre of their lyrics,

so most of these songs have at least
a gentle, foot-tapping pulse,

which is where Perotin
got his rhythms from.

By the end of the 14th century,
nearly all music's vital

components had been discovered -
notation, both melodic and rhythmic,

the layering of voices
on top of each other,

and a basic selection of instruments
to complement the human voice.

One final piece of the jigsaw still
needed to click into position.

In around 1400, harmony
took a huge leap forward,

a leap that was to change the
way music sounded for ever.

We still live with
that change today.

Before 1400, despite
Perotin's adventurousness,

when composers layered
notes on top of each other

they only chose a very limited
menu of possible note combinations.

There was the basic octave.

And there were two other note
combinations, both of which medieval

musicians called perfect, because
they were thought to be Godly.

The perfect fourth.

And the perfect fifth.

And before 1400,
that's more or less it.

In this famous piece, for example,
all the harmonies are sung

either four or five notes
apart from the basic melody line.

# Gaudete, gaudete Christus est natus

# Ex Maria Virgine, gaudete... #

To our ears, accustomed to the
subsequent 600 years of harmony,

there's something missing,
which makes the music sound bare

and a little cold.

# Tempus adest gratiae
Hoc quod optabamus

# Carmina laetitiae
Devote reddamus

DRUMS START

# Gaudete, gaudete Christus est natus

# Ex Maria Virgine, gaudete. #

What's missing is
a combination of notes that,

before 1400, composers
had virtually ignored.

FEMALE CHORAL SINGING

The man who did use this note
combination set things up

for what was to be a
giant leap for harmony.

He was an English composer
called John Dunstaple.

Dunstaple introduced the mighty
but imperfect third.

Why is the third imperfect?

If you count just three notes up
from your starting point, C,

you arrive at E. Why isn't
this third a perfect distance?

The reason is that the third,
unlike the fourth and fifth,

has two different versions,
what we'd call now a major version

and a minor version.
It is Mr Ambiguous.

You can see just how ambiguous by
counting further up the keyboard.

If I count three notes from D
for example, I come to F,

creating a minor third,
ditto E to G.

But F to A,
like C to E, is a major third.

The fact that the third can be
either major or minor,

depending on where you
start counting from,

might sound like only a slight
technical difference, but it's not.

The pivot between the major third
and the minor third is the pivot

upon which all western
music balances.

Very broadly speaking,
one is happy and one is sad,

and harmony's using these thirds
make the music richer, more subtle

and more affecting.

FEMALE CHORAL SINGING

But allowing the
leans-both-ways third into music

had one other big by-product.
Let's start with C again.

We'll count up three steps and find
ourselves at E, a major third.

Then if we carry on up another
three steps to G,

we've created a minor third.

But what happens if we play
all of these three notes together?

All these three notes played
together are called a triad,

and triads are the bread
and butter of all western music.

PIANO PLAYS

Here's a song you may recognise
which is built on triads.

# Morning has broken

# Like the first morning

# Blackbird has spoken

# Like the first bird

# Praise for the singing

# Praise for the morning... #

15th-century musicians discovered
that triads had an important

effect on each other when
they were mixed together.

It's to do with the constituent
notes of the chords.

The C major triad, for example,
contains two of the same notes

as the E minor triad, and is
therefore closely related to it.

Similarly the E minor triad shares
two of its notes with

the G major triad,
and they are closely related.

Mixing together chords that
are closely related to each other

creates a mood of
harmonious smoothness,

like melding adjacent
colours in the spectrum.

Triads have another great benefit.

They can also create the sense
of home in a piece of music.

Let me demonstrate with a famous
spiritual song from a few

hundred years later - Amazing Grace.

In the first phrase of the song,

we start on one chord under
the words "amazing grace".

# Amazing grace. #

Then we shift to another
one on the word "sweet".

# How sweet. #

Then home again to where we started.

# The sound. #

That safe landing back to
the chord we think of as home

is called a cadence, or ending.

# Amazing grace

# How sweet the sound. #

Everything feels right about
that little journey of chords.

We felt good returning to where we
started, at the end of the phrase.

In the second phrase, we go
on another short chord journey.

# That saved a wretch like me. #

And we have another little
cadence by moving to a new chord

on the word "me".

Again, this journey feels
logical and satisfying,

we're being led from
one place to another.

# I once was lost

# But now I'm found

# Was blind but now I see. #

You can quite clearly hear
that there's nothing

haphazard about the choice of chords
under the tune, it's meant to be.

What's at work here is a logic
in the chords, they're obeying

strict laws like the laws of
gravity, or the orbit of planets,

whereby some chords exert more
power and influence than others.

Discovering the power of triads

was like discovering
a chemical reaction.

Composers immediately sensed
that something massive

and transformative had happened.

From now on,
the basic chord - the triad,

one, three, five - was king.

Just as the development of harmony
up to this point had taken several

centuries, so too, the refining of
musical instruments was a slow burn.

But by the 16th century, a new breed
of instruments had been invented,

and they were to bring in a golden
age of folk or popular music.

In Tudor England, if you went to
the barbershop for a haircut,

or some form of crude walk-in
surgery, while you were waiting

you could pull down one of these
off the wall and have a sing-song.

Yes, every self-respecting
16th-century barber had a cittern

hanging around for the use of
his customers, many of whom would

then accompany themselves whilst
singing a jolly folk song.

# Sing no more of dumps
So dull and heavy... #

I'm not making this up.

# Was ever so
Since summer first was leavy

# And sigh no more, but let them go
And be you blithe and bonny

# Converting all your sounds of woe

# Into hey nonny nonny... #

New instruments were changing
the texture of music.

Along with the cittern
came the lute.

Related to the lute was the stringed
instrument known as the viol,

and by the 1560s, the viol's
young offspring, the violin,

had been developed in Italy.

The 16th century also saw rapid
advancements in keyboard technology,

so at home, if you had a few
bob, you might have a virginal.

But for sheer
technological complexity,

no instrument of the 16th century
comes near to the organ.

# Then sigh not so, but let them go
And be you blithe and bonny

# Converting all your sounds of woe
Into hey nonny nonny

# Then sigh no more, but let them go
And be you blithe and bonny

# Converting all your sounds of woe
Into hey nonny nonny. #

APPLAUSE

Hand in hand with this expansion
of purely instrumental music

was a wealth of popular song.

Often, the exact same tunes were
used for both church music

and secular music,
with different words, of course.

PIPE MUSIC

The first religious songs to
get catchy tunes were the ones

associated with Christmas.

Some of the early carols were
derived from jaunty folk dances.

MUSIC: Instrumental version of
"Good Christian Men Rejoice"

One reason these 500-year-old carols
are still easy on the modern ear

is because of a significant
shift that was taking place

in the musical structure
at this time.

It's to do with
the positioning of the melody.

When, in around 900 AD,

chanting monks started to add extra
voices to plainsong melodies,

beginning the process
that became polyphony,

the layering of many voices,
it was always assumed that

the principal tune, the red bricks
in our diagram, was the bottom one,

and the added tune was on top of it.

Gradually, as two lines
became three and then four,

this principal melody got
buried inside the four voices.

That's why the third line down in
any four-part piece of choral music

got to be known as the tenor,
because this was the part

that held the main tune,
tenir being the French verb to hold.

We take it for granted that the
tune of a piece of music sits on

top of the texture, but this wasn't
the case before the 16th century.

Gradually, in all forms of music,

the tune worked itself
up to the top.

# In dulci jubilo
Let songs and gladness flow

# All our joy reclineth
In praesepio

# And like the sun he shineth... #

Once the tune was sitting pretty
on the top of the texture,

you were more likely to be able
to hear the words clearly.

And the words were about to acquire
a thrilling new significance.

# Alpha es et O. #

In 1450, in the German city
of Mainz, one of the most

important technological
breakthroughs of our civilisation

was invented - Johannes Gutenberg's
movable type printing press.

Within 50 years or so of the arrival
of Guttenberg's wondrous machine,

music was being printed.

Now, new musical ideas could spread
further and faster than ever.

It's shown in the career of
the most influential composer

of the period, Josquin Des Prez.

Josquin was born on what is now
the Franco-Belgian border

but by his middle age,
he was in Ferrara in Italy,

working as a resident composer
for a rich and powerful duke.

In terms of pure sound, Josquin
could not be described as a radical.

But in one key respect, Josquin
made a departure from what

went before that was to become
a hallmark of the music of the age.

Josquin is the first composer
in history for whom

the meaning of the words is
paramount, and who tried to

bring out and express that meaning
in the way he set words to music.

Small wonder that the
majority of pieces he composed

for the church were called motets,
which means, literally, the words.

One such motet is Miserere Mei,
have mercy on me.

MALE CHORAL SINGING
# Miserere mei

# Deus... #

Miserere Mei was composed in 1503.
Josquin's employer,

the Duke of Ferrara,
was a friend of the most notorious

preacher of the age,
the Dominican friar, Savonarola,

a firebrand who constantly attacked
the excesses of the Catholic Church.

He was eventually arrested

and in prison, he wrote a prayer
asking God's forgiveness

for falsely confessing to crimes
under the agony of torture.

The text of this prayer, essentially
proclaiming his innocence,

spread rapidly across Europe.

So Josquin's task was to make this
highly political statement

completely clear.
How he did so was new.

Quite simply, Josquin made sure that

the words were always clearly
audible, and that was revolutionary,

because up till then,
believe it or not,

the words in a piece
of music were anything but audible.

For centuries, song lyrics
had been the poor relation.

In folk music, audiences were as
likely dancing, drinking themselves

into oblivion, or having their hair
cut as listening to the words.

And in church, texts had
been sung in Latin.

What's more, they'd been sung
in a way that made it virtually

impossible to understand.

This is a technique called melisma,
whereby long stretches of melody

are attached
to just one syllable of text.

The melismatic style could be
musically attractive, but it

destroyed any chance of the listener
hearing what words were being sung.

So in the first few
bars of Josquin's motet,

each voice utters the simple phrase,
Miserere mei, Deus,

"Have mercy on me, Lord,"
one by one.

# Miserere mei, Deus

# Miserere mei, Deus. #

Josquin repeats those words,
"Miserere mei, Deus,"

throughout the piece like a mantra.
He also finds ways of highlighting

the words that were to be imitated

by other composers
time and time again.

One, is to have the voices cascade
downwards, like falling tears.

VOICES CASCADE DOWNWARDS,
OVERLAPPING EACH OTHER

Another is to stop all activity

and have the voices sing together
identical syllables of block chords.

THEY SING TOGETHER

In 1517, only 17 years after
Savanorola's execution,

Martin Luther set in train
the Reformation.

Not only did religion change,
religious music changed, too.

In Lutheran churches, for the first
time, the congregation played

a major role in music,

taking the lion's share of the
singing in their own language.

Luther, as well as being
a theologian, scholar,

writer and preacher, was a composer.

He fervently believed music
should belong to everyone,

not just priests
and trained choirs.

He wanted the congregations
in his churches to be able to

join in hymn-singing with
confidence and enthusiasm,

and this meant having
easy-to-pick-up tunes to sing.

Luther, accordingly, collected lots
of popular folk songs of the time

and gave them holy words.

He also caused loads of new tunes
to be written for the purpose.

This is one Luther himself wrote,
Ein Feste Burg Ist Unser Gott -

"A Mighty Fortress Is Our God."

# Ein feste burg ist unser Gott

# Ein gute wehr und waffen... #

What's immediately noticeable about
this chorale, or Protestant hymn,

is that as it moves along,

the words progress
syllable by syllable,

note by note, with a clear
tune on top of the sound.

This is what hymns were to sound
like for the next 500 years.

# Mit ernst ers jetzt meint

# Gross macht und viel list

# Ein grausam ruestung ist

# Auf erd ist nicht seingleichen. #

What followed
the Reformation was more than

100 years of religious intolerance
and state-sponsored terror.

In the midst of this blood bath,
perhaps not surprisingly,

the mood of sacred music was
overwhelmingly one of penitence,

remorse and lamentation.

SOMBRE CHORAL SINGING

But the dark cloud of
agony and sorrow

wasn't going to last for ever.

UPLIFTING STRING MUSIC

As the 16th century drew to a close,
serious religious music,

though it was still commissioned
both by the Church and by rich

patrons, was about to lose its role
as the dominant form of new music.

In the 1570s and '80s, a new
wave of secular music swept up

like a warm summer wind from Italy
into the rest of Europe.

It seemed to contain the
seeds of something quite

different from the angry certainties
of the religious squabble.

Not for the last time in musical
history, art music,

the music of posh people,

was to be saved from itself
by popular folk song traditions.

The pioneering figure in this
new wave of secular music was

a Franco-Flemish composer
called Jacques Arcadelt.

The lute player in Caravaggio's
picture here, is playing

some of his music,
he was that famous.

Everything about his songs cocked
a snook at pomposity and authority.

His lyrics are concerned
with human pleasures,

they're full of sensuous imagery
and sexual allusion.

He worked for a while in Italy
where he wrote madrigals,

then moved to France, where he
wrote their equivalent - chansons.

Typical of these is the cheeky,
syncopated tale of Margot,

the mysterious grape picker.

# Margot, labourez les vignes
Vignes, vignes, vignolet

# Margot labourez les vignes bientot

# En revenant de Lorraine et Margot
En revenant de Lorraine et Margot

# Rencontrai trois capitaines

# Vignes, vignes, vignolet
Margot labourez les vignes bientot

# Margot, labourez les vignes
Vignes, vignes, vignolet

# Margot, labourez
Les vignes bientot. #

WOMAN SINGS
# Flow, my tears fall

# From your springs... #

The success of Arcadelt's songs
inspired many other composers,

one of whom was a close contemporary
of Shakespeare, John Dowland,

who, by 1600, had become the most
celebrated singer-songwriter

in Europe.

# ..Where night's black bird

# Her sad infamy sings

# There let me live

# Forlorn... #

Dowland's songs are strikingly
different in tone

and attitude to anything
that had gone before.

He's interested in people and their
emotions, not gods and demons.

A song like Flow My Tears doesn't
seem out of place amongst

those of our own time.

# ..Lost fortunes deplore

# Light doth but shame

# Disclose... #

Music by 1600 had become
a rich mix of sacred and secular,

instrumental and vocal,
but almost anything you would

hear at that time was
on a relatively small scale.

The time was ripe for
someone, somewhere,

to start creating long, substantial
forms that would last a whole

evening and leave audiences
cheering for more.

Which is exactly what happened.

Opera was born.

The man of the moment,
one of the ten most influential

composers of all time,
was Claudio Monteverdi.

In his hands,
opera went from zero to hero.

DRAMATIC INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC

In opera, music is at
the service of the drama, and

so it needs to be able to express
complex, even conflicting, emotions.

Luckily, Monteverdi had
already spent years

trying to do exactly that

with his sophisticated
passion-filled madrigals.

To do so, he had begun
to recalibrate harmony.

Let's look at just
one of his madrigals,

which put cats among pigeons,
even in his own time.

It's from the Fifth Book
Of Madrigals of 1605,

and it's called O Mirtillo,
Mirtill'Anima Mia,

Oh, Myrtle, Myrtle, My Soul.
Listen to this bit.

# Che chiami crudelissima

# Amarilli. #

It's obvious Monteverdi is
dipping in and out of all

kinds of chords that don't seem
comfortably related to each other.

He wants you to feel surprised or
intrigued, especially if it enhances

the words of the poem.
So on these words,

"Che chiami crudelissima, Amarilli,"

"The one you call cruellest,
Amaryllis," he creates a series

of deliberate clashes of chord,
called a dissonance, or suspension.

# Come sta il cor di questa... #

Instead of sticking to chords
that had close affinities with

each other, he deliberately
mixed up unrelated chords

and exploited the strange,
disorientating sounds this produced.

VOCALS OVERLAP
# Che chiami

# Crudelissima

# Amarilli... #

It was music that could manipulate
our emotions that Monteverdi

brought into opera. He also
introduced another ingredient,

a dramatic aural effect that had
been invented in Venice,

then one of the world's richest
and most powerful city-states.

Its huge, cavernous basilica,
St Mark's, employed some of the

best musicians in Europe, including,
for a time, Monteverdi himself.

On top of all this, the building
served as a kind of musical

and acoustical laboratory.

An uncle-and-nephew team
called Gabrieli had developed

a kind of precursor of
surround sound at St. Mark's,

achieved by placing
groups of singers

and instrumentalists in different
parts of the building

and having them sing or play
alternately.

The technical term for the technique
is polychoral, many choirs.

MUSIC ALTERNATES
FROM LEFT TO RIGHT

Monteverdi knew and admired
this polychoral style

and thought it would work
alongside his intimate,

emotionally-charged madrigal style
when he came to writing opera.

Monteverdi didn't invent opera,

a Florentine composer called
Peri did, in 1597.

But Monteverdi did write
the first good opera, Orfeo,

which premiered in Mantua in 1607.

He was aiming for maximum
emotional effect,

maximum narrative clarity, maximum
impact, even shock, and wasn't

going to obey anyone's rules about
what he could or could not do.

FEMALE OPERATIC SINGING

What's more, Monteverdi invented
a new combination of instruments

never before gathered together.

He borrowed old and new styles,
he used choral music,

he told the stories through
characters

directly expressing themselves
to the audience.

Almost everything about Orfeo
was then a novelty.

It was loud, it was long
and it was modern.

And let's not forget how liberating
it all must have been,

because as musical techniques
had been developing,

century by century, so too had
the ability to express more complex,

subtle and unexpected
emotions along the way.

Monteverdi was using music plus.

Orfeo had been performed in a
ducal court in front of a small,

select audience. Monteverdi's last
opera, The Coronation Of Poppaea,

was performed in a Venetian theatre,
in front of a paying public.

It's one of the most radical
dramas of all time.

Why is Poppaea so radical?

To put it simply,
because it was about real people

and their complicated,
messy emotions.

The Emperor Nero and his mistress
Poppaea were actual historical

figures, and Monteverdi's music
acts as the soundtrack

to their real-life passions.

On the surface of it,
Poppaea is about lust

and ambition conquering all.

It ends with a duet for Nero and
Poppaea of unabashed eroticism,

called Pur Ti Miro, Pur Ti Godo,
"I gaze on you, I possess you."

It appears as if Nero and Poppaea
are being congratulated

for their criminal greed.

# Pur ti miro

# Pur ti godo

# Pur ti miro

# Pur ti godo

# Pur ti stringo

# Pur t'annodo

# Pur ti stringo... #

The passion that oozes out
of this duet,

"I adore you, I embrace you,
I desire you, I enchain you,"

is so frank and sensual,
it almost turns its audience -

remember they're
in the room, too -

into voyeurs, awkwardly witnessing
the private interchange of

two weirdly uninhibited strangers.

This was new territory indeed,
the full monty.

# O mia vita

# O mia vita

# O mio tesoro... #

The most daring part of this
climax is what it meant to

Monteverdi's fellow Venetians.

They knew what happened
next in real life, that is,

after the fall of the curtain.

Nero killed his new Empress Poppaea
and their unborn child

and then himself,
and his regime collapsed in flames.

Monteverdi's audience would
have seen the opera's ending

for what it was - a savage attack
on Venice's archrival state, Rome.

In the light of this,
the Coronation Of Poppaea can be

seen as a scathing critique
of the excesses of Roman power

and the pressing need for
humane self-restraint.

# Piu non peno

# Pi non moro

# O mia vita
O mia vita

# O mio tesoro

# O mia vita
O mia vita

# O mio tesoro... #

Monteverdi paved the way for
an explosion of musical energy.

MUSIC: "Summer" by Vivaldi

If innovations had come along at
a snail's pace in the previous

1,000 years, the next 100 in music
saw them coming thick and fast.

In the next programme,
the era of Vivaldi, Bach and Handel

and the exhilarating
sound of invention.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd