Music

Music, sound organized and arranged as a means of expression and for sensual and intellectual pleasure. Of the major arts, music may be the most ancient, because the urge to sing and dance in response to feelings of anger, joy, or sorrow springs from the body itself. Music may also be described as sound shaped by time. Its 2 most important elements are rhythm and melody, rhythm being organized in terms of intervals of time and beats to the bar, and melody in terms of notes whose pitch is determined by frequency, or the number of sound vibrations per second. These basic characteristics of music can be considered universal, but musical expressions and traditions are quite distinct and diverse. Oriental music, for instance, does not rely upon harmony, a late but significant development in Western music. And although any music can be arranged according to scale and notated, the development of musical notation was gradual and is a relatively recent phenomenon.

Western music evidently originated in the Middle East, was developed by the Greeks, and, in the form of Byzantine ecclesiastical music, was embraced by the early church. Such music was originally limited to plainsong, a form of chant unadorned by any kind of harmony or accompaniment sung by church or monastery choirs. During the 9th and 10th centuries, choirs began to be divided into sections, each with a different melody line. This gave rise to polyphonic music, the so-called ars antiqua, which reached its height in the motet in the 13th century. Following this was the ars nova, the new art, a style of musical composition that departed from the excessive formalism and complexity of the ars antiqua and achieved its finest expression in the madrigal of the 14th and 15th centuries. This period also saw the rise and spread of the first comprehensive system of musical notation.

Though the church dominated ancient and medieval music, alongside the ecclesiastical was a lively secular tradition closely related to sung poetry and represented in the works of minstrels, troubadours, and minnesingers. As in the other arts, the secular would become independent and eventually supplant the ecclesiastical, beginning with the Renaissance.

From c.1400 to 1600, great changes in music occurred. It turned to nonecclesiastical themes. New instruments were developed, played by groups of musicians—the nuclei for the modern orchestra. In the work of Claudio Monteverdi, early opera developed. Other composers of the period were Josquin Desprez and Orlando di Lasso in Flanders, Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli in Venice, and Thomas Morley and John Dowland in England.

The Baroque period was born with Pierluigida Palestrina (c.1526) and culminated in the works of Johann Sebastian Bach (d.1750). The era saw major improvements in instruments, particularly the violin and cello, inspiring composers like Antonio Vivaldi and Arcangelo Corelli. François Couperin and Domenico Scarlatti exploited the newer keyboard instruments. A new harmonic structure of scales and keys familiar today was finally established, and the music of the period achieved a formal complexity, balance, and richness, above all in the work of Bach, which to many remains the highest achievement of Western.

The late 18th century saw a new age in music, the classical period, pioneered and perfected in the work of Franz Josef Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The period was marked by the growth and completion of several musical forms—the sonata, symphony, concerto, opera buffa—and by works that, as the result of greater mastery and skill with instruments, were musically richer and contained, particularly in Mozart's, an expressiveness that opened new possibilities for music.

Ludwig van Beethoven seized that opportunity and, in the spirit of the times, revolutionized the concept and the practice of the art of music. In his work and influence, Beethoven, in effect, gave a charter of liberties to individual expression that inspired the Romantic movement and, by extension, modern music as well. Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Frédéric Chopin, Franz Liszt, Felix Mendelssohn, and Hector Berlioz, Anton Bruckner, Gustav Mahler, and Jan Sibelius completed the Romantic period in music, each with a signal style and distinct sensibility, and each the heir of Beethoven.

As ars antiqua gave rise to the rebellion and innovations of ars nova, so the classical and Romantic traditions, particularly in the wake of World War I, gave rise to 20th-century modernism in music. It is heard in the neoclassicism of Paul Hindemith and Igor Stravinsky and the more radical atonalism of Arnold Schönberg, which offered an entirely new set of rules for music and gave rise, in turn, to serial and 12-tone music. Influenced by music of non-Western cultures as well as the innovations of jazz and modern technology, often disturbing and unsettling in the way it deliberately explores the untried and the unconventional, serious modern music defies the kind of clear-cut and comfortable categories that make traditional music seem more comprehensible and familiar.