The Venerable Bede writes that Ethelbert of Kent, King of Britain, was a worshipper of Odin and Thor, Norse gods, but he married a French Princess who was a Christian. One day, writes the Venerable Bede, forty monks led in solemn procession by St. Augustine, passed before the king singing a chant. After hearing this marvelous hymn, he became a Christian and gave permission to the English to become worshippers of Christ instead of Norse and Druid gods. This hymn which converted Ethelbert in 597 A.D. was sung thirteen hundred years later (1897) in the same place, Canterbury, by another group of Benedictine monks!
At first the songs were sung unaccompanied, but later as in the time of David, the Church allowed instruments. The lyre and the harp were used first but the cymbals and the dulcimer, somewhat like our zither, were considered too noisy.
The Venerable Bede called music made by instruments artificial music, and that of the human voice, natural music. Whether at that time the viol, the drum, the organ or the psaltery (an instrument like the dulcimer) were used in the Church, is not known positively.
After Bede’s death, Alcuin, a monk and musician, continued his work. He was appointed by Charlemagne, Emperor of France, to teach music in the schools of Germany and France to spread the use of the Gregorian chant.
A Curious Music System
In 900 A.D. an important thing happened, by which the reading and learning of music was much simplified. A red line was drawn straight across the page and this line represented “F” the tone on the fourth line of the bass staff. The neumes written on this red line were “F” and the others above or below, were of higher or lower pitch. This worked so well, that they placed a yellow line above the red line and this they called “C.” These two lines were the beginnings of our five line staff, but much happened between the two-line days and the five.
At this time people did not sing in parts, known as they are to us—soprano, alto, tenor, bass, but everybody sang the same tune, that is, sang in unison, and when men and women or men and boys sang together, the men’s voices sounded an octave lower than the women’s and the boy’s. Some voices have naturally a high range and others low, and no doubt in these plain chant melodies the singers who could not reach all the tones comfortably, dropped unconsciously to a lower pitch, and in that way, made a second part. Soon the composers made this melody in the medium range of the voice a part of their pieces instead of trusting the singers to make it up as they went along. The principal tune sung or carried by most of the singers was given the name tenor (from the Latin teneo, to hold or carry). We use the same word to indicate the man’s voice of high range.
Hucbald and Organum
Hucbald (840–930), a Flemish monk, first wrote a second part, always a fifth above or a fourth below the tenor or “subject.” (The Latin name for the subject is cantus firmus—fixed song.) Hucbald probably used the fifth and fourth because they were perfect intervals, and all others except the octave, were imperfect. There were often four parts including the cantus firmus, for two parts were doubled. This succession of fourths and fifths sounds very crude and ugly (just try the example), but these people of the Middle Ages must have liked it, for it lasted several centuries and was an attempt at making chords. This music was called organum or diaphony (dia-two, phony-sound: two sounds). As early as 1100, singers tried out new effects with the added parts and introduced a few imperfect intervals, thirds and sixths, and tried singing occasionally in contrary motion to the subject,—this was called discant from a Greek word meaning discord. Maybe at first it sounded discordant but soon it came to mean any part outside of the cantus firmus or subject. (See musical illustrations.)
