Contents

Preface, 9

MUSIC ANCIENT WORLD, 11

MIDDLE AGES, 27

3
RISE OF POLYPHONY AND

RENAISSANCE, 45

LATE RENAISSANCE, 65

SEVENTEENTH CENTUR , 91

6
LA BARO QUE, 115

ROCOCO AND CLASSICISM, 131

8
BEETHOVEN, 155

GERMAN ROMANTICISM, 177

FRENCH ROMANTICISM, 200

 CONTENTS

11

FRENCH AND ITALIAN OPERA

CENTURY, 221

12

LATE ROMANTICISM AND NATIONALISM, 232

13

ROMANTIC TWILIGHT
AND EARL TWENTIE CNTUR , 258

14

ENGLISH RENAISSANCE AND

NORTHERN EUROPE, 288

15

TRADITION AND INNOVATION

TWENTIETH CENTUR , 300

16

NEW COUNTRIES AND SOCIETIES:

PRESENT DAY, 325

17
EPILOGUE, 345

Acknowledgments, 348
Bibliography, 350
Index, 352
 1
MUSIC ANCIENT WORLD
The distant past. East and West. The Greeks and Romans.
Jewish music. Music among the early Christians.

DISTANT PAST

If we ask ourselves where the history of music begins, we find at once that
t has played a part human life from the earliest times. lt had a central
place indeed, for t was not a luxury but useful and even essential. Naturally
mothers sang their children to sleep thousands of years ago, just as today.
But there was more than this. ancient Egypt farm workers struck sticks
together to frighten birds away from the crops. time these clappers came
to be used rhythmically to accompany working songs the fields, and besides
this they featured dances of a ritual kind intended to bring good harvests.
These uses of the Egyptian clappers illustrate two uses of music which
survive today: the work song and the music of a church service.
One early civilisation was Mesopotamia, now lraq, at least five thousand
years ago, where an agricultural people called the Sumerians lived lands
between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. They built temples for the worship
of nature gods who needed to be propitiated with the right kinds of singing
and playing; and a reed wind instrument and a drum were consecrated to
the gods of weather and water. There was solo singing by priests and choral
singing; and besides the instruments already mentioned, there were flutes,
horns, tambourines, rattles and various plucked string instruments. We know
something about this music from Sumerian sculpture and reliefs, and from
their cuneiform (wedge-shaped) writing clay tablets. inscription of the
reign of the priest-king Gudea about 2400 BC shows that music was also
used for pleasure:
fill the temple court with joy,
chase the city's gloom away;
The heart to still, the passions calm,
Of weeping eyes the tears to stay.

The Sumerians seem to have had contact with the people of Egypt, where
the Old Kingdom came t being around 2686 BC. Egyptian kings were
revered both as gods and as earthly rulers, so that temple services were

11