History Of Western Music :: essays research papers

Most of the early medical specialty that we have today still in print is primarily quasi-religious music. This music, for the most part, is in the form of sections of the Mass, such as the Gloria, Kyrie and Agnus Dei. Most slew of the Middle Ages were poor peasants who worked all day for meager wages and had no idle time lounging the way the upper classes did. Therefore, there are fewer extant unconsecrated compositions of music from this duration. The rise of a new marrow class, however, gave financial freedom for some people to spend time and gold on entertainment in the form of music and dance. Thus, the rise of the eye classes also gave way to the rise in composition and performance of secular music, which became the music of choice for composers of that day. Many of the songs we have today of the Middle Ages were in Latin, and are by anonymous composers. Many were written by mobile people, many of them men and churchmen without permanent residences of their own. Men w ho could not obtain a position in the Church and had to drop out were called goliards. These goliards wandered around the land, paper and performing for people. Their music was mostly comprised of the "eat, drink, and be merry type, appropriate to the prosperous kind of life the goliards lived" (Stolba, 99). Carl Orff, the composer of the Carmina Burana, used the poems found in the largest surviving records of Latin secular music that we have today. The Codex latinus 4660 was held in the Benedictine monastery at Benediktbeurn. Many of the songs speak of love, many of them lascivious. Others speak of drinking, satires of the religious life and regular(a) liturgical plays. A few of them are even written in the vernacular of the region in that time (Stolba, 99). Following the history of the era in literature, many authors were fascinated by the courtly tradition, chivalry and a higher love. Therefore, we have today musical compositions that speak of many of the identical id eas. French composers wrote songs in the vernacular called chansons de geste . These songs spoke of the heroic acts performed by knights for their ladies in the name of love. The French have a national epic called the Chanson de Roland which cogitate the life and death of Charlemagnes nephew and his endeavor to rid France of the Basques.