The musical arts of the Roman Catholic Church rank among its greatest contributions to contemporary culture. Music existed outside of the Church, of course. But it was the Catholic Church that first truly cultivated the art as we know it. In the service of praising God, it fostered a number of innovations -- such as musical notation -- that inform the ways we create and transmit music even today.
Take, for instance, the musical scale rendered in syllables as "do re mi fa sol la ti do." This arrangement of precise pitch relationships is the basis of a clever song in The Sound of Music ("Do -- a deer, a female deer. Re -- a drop of golden sun ... ") and, indeed, of virtually every piece of music that sounds "in tune" to the average ear in Western European and American cultures. These particular pitch relationships (and the idea of rendering them as syllables) were harnessed from all existing sound by a resourceful Benedictine monk named Guido of Arezzo in the early eleventh century. Guido's scale had only six notes (ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la) but with just a slight modification (changing "ut" to "do" in a later century) and the addition of "ti" (that brings us back to "do") the basic form remains unchanged nearly 1000 years later. So does its purpose. Then, as now, the scale served to help singers learn and recall a body of songs whose sheer quantity made them increasingly difficult to memorize and pass down.
Guido's scale had a "sacred origin" of sorts; at least in terms of the context from which it was derived. The monk drew his inspiration for the musical scale he devised from a hymn sung on the feast of St. John the Baptist (Ut queant laxis) that suggested to him the pattern of ascending notes (and the relative pitches that occur between them) that we still use today. The specifics of how Guido got from "point A" to "point B" need not detain us here. (Although it is an interesting story!) Suffice it to say that any song written down with the basic musical scale Guido first devised nearly a millenium ago -- whether it is sung by a Benedictine monk, Julie Andrews, or Lady Gaga -- reflects just one aspect of the Catholic Church's great legacy of cultivating music in the service of God -- the invention of a musical staff with precise pitch arrangements that help us to create, perform, and remember most of the melodies we enjoy today -- inside the Church and out.
It should not surprise us that music has been such a central concern for the Church. Indeed, praying through music allows us to express our highest calling -- to come together as a community to worship and praise God -- in a way that no other art can. Painting, sculpture, and architecture might spur us toward holiness, but none can unite us quite like music. This is particularly true of singing -- an art that invites group participation and can often arise spontaneously around a shared sentiment and a decent tune.
Singing is a natural response in times of joy or mourning, stress or relaxation -- even in times of sheer boredom. It is universally accessible in that -- all aesthetic judgements aside -- if you can talk, you can sing. In the most general sense, we might think of singing merely as heightened speech: an inflection here, a thoughtful pause there, a lilting cadence to accentuate related ideas. Plot those inflections, pauses and cadences onto a graph indicating relative time and pitch (that is essentially what sheet music does) and heightened speech is transformed into song.
St. Augustine was one of music's earliest eloquent proponents. (He is popularly credited with coining the phrase "He who sings, prays twice.") Today, Pope Benedict XVI, an accomplished pianist and brother of Msgr. Georg Ratzinger (former director of the Regensburg Cathedral Choir), has emerged as one of the most thoughtful commentators on sacred music since then. (I highly recommend his essay on music in The Spirit of the Liturgy, Ignatius Press, 2000.) In some recent remarks, Pope Benedict extended his advocacy of music beyond the realm of the sacred (strictly speaking), lauding it as a valuable tool in the educational process. Addressing the Fiesole Youth Orchestra after a concert in Vatican City last year, he praised the young musicians, noting their "constant practices carried out with patience; the exercise of listening to the other musicians; the commitment not to play 'in solitude'," but in a way that allowed the different orchestral colors to come together while maintaining their own characteristics. In fine, he praised their "common search for the best expression."
The Holy Father was addressing a youth orchestra there, but his words resonate with the whole of humanity: Don't play alone. Come together. Listen to one another. Maintain your own characteristics in the common search for the best expression. Those are the basic rules for living in harmony -- an ideal for society that is rehearsed in our churches every Sunday, and never more so than when we come together as a community to pray through sacred song. Guido of Arezzo could not have foreseen the far-reaching consequences of the singing aids he devised in the eleventh century. But we can easily imagine that he would have been pleased. Laus Deo.
Music history - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Cardinal, ex-Sistine choir director discusses crisis in Church music
Sacred Music: Journal of the Church Music Association of America ...
Religious music - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Saint John Bon Jovi
Saint Jimmy Page
Saint Robert Plant
Saint Bon Scott
Saint Angus Young
Saint Paul McCartney
Saint John Lennon
There is a musical instrument 35,000-years-old, a 5 hole flute. It was found in the Ach Valley of southern Germany. It seems to have followed the rules of the pentatonic scale that still predominates in Asia, not the diatonic scale of middle ages Europe.
Of course, liturgical music was just the tip of a vast iceberg of music that existed at the time, about which only tantalizing hints have been preserved.
Prediction - there will be additional scales discovered and used in music.
As to why liturgical music survived while the popular music was lost ... all preservation of knowledge was confined to the church, and they were selective.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Well at least at one time the RCChurch contributed to the arts. Today, the only thing it does is accumulate wealth and power, seduce teenage boys, and bribe the police to keep looking the other way.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yW39rHxW2c
And this is very beautiful in my opinion.
Just ask, right! Taint neccessarily so! Whom do you ask and where do direct your query to? I got a better suggestion: Every moderator should include his or her argument(s) for deleting any comment(s) and every such deletion(s) should include the name and title (if any) of every such moderator.
Cowardice comes in many forms and anonymity is one of them. kaman kapu
One only has to look at the sophistication of the Arts to realize just how advanced they really were.
Music would have been included in this ancient Renaissance.
Also, Byzantine iconography is to me far surpassing in beauty Western religious art. http://www.goarch.org/resources/clipart
Yet, the purely naturalistic Western religious art starts to deteriorate into pious kitsch, mere ornamentation--gingerbread and plaster of paris pastiche after the 13th century.
It's rather interesting that the term "Renaissance" applied to the European period from the trecento to roughly 1600 replied to a rebirth of learning from the classical world--however, classical music theory played almost no role in the era of Renaissance music...
But, it did influence the early baroque! In the period around 1570-1620, long past the era named the "Renaissance" in art and cultural history, a number of musician-scholars tried to recreate the music of the Greeks. Of course, it was no such thing in reality, but their virtuosic monody led directly to Monteverdi's innovations. One of the most important music theorists at the time was Vincenzo Galilei, the father of Galileo.
When Blind Willie Johnson, plays'Dark was the night,cold was the ground' on the guitar, I think it is.
I like the words of Benedict to the youth orchestra members, and I think they can be applied in on the world scene as well.
Making claim on that basis is like the sort of authority that Saddam Hussein claimed in his rigged elections. It was stacked in his favor just as the Christian Narrative is so self-serving.
another point : a study in Virginia showed that children listening to traditional music from the appalachians developed higher IQ
in music it is also true what is said about true art " all art comes from the peasants " this is especially true of happy [ [but authentic , emotional intelligence] ]music
the most ancient music is maharishi gandharva veda music
[ maharishichannel.in carries a replay of a German radio interview with maharishi about the origin of gandharva ]
this most basically is 1. simply chanting aaaaaaaaaaaaahhh in Drupad singing [ precise rythms plus improv] the origin of the origin
2. Sarasvati's Vina [ veena] and rythms expressed by Mridingam or tabla
the pentatonic scale is from the 5 mahabhutas
our 8 note octave is from all 8 prakritis [ 8 svaras of the [ uncreated , nitya apaurusheya] devanagri alphabet ]
Let me rephrase that: "The RCC collected tithes, by blackmail and force, from all of Europe, then used some of this money to pay the world's best artists. Some of the greatest masterpieces of music, painting, and sculpture resulted."
You're thanking the wrong people. You should be grateful to the serfs and peasants of medieval Europe who had precious little to spare, yet were taxed (in money, goods, and work) to pay for this art. Not that many of them ever saw those paintings or heard that music, of course. But I'm sure just knowing it existed was enough to make them forget about their hunger and poverty.
Thanking the church for this music is about as goofy as thanking Bernie Madoff for the fantastic apartment he created in NYC. He turned a pile of money into something beautiful... what difference does it make how he got it?
Serfs and peasants were born to be taxed. Always have been and always will be. Thank goodness the robber barons of the middles ages spent the loot they took from them on great works of art.
What are the looters and highwaymen of corporate America spending it on today? THEMSELVES and only THEMSELVES.
But I think what you're saying is that it's OK that "peasants" end up paying for luxuries they can't appreciate, and indeed, that's their purpose. This suggests I shouldn't have any guilt at all about buying diamonds. Normally I would be afraid that I might be putting money into the "blood diamond" trade that causes so much suffering in Africa. But from what you are saying it seems that suffering is insignificant compared to the lasting beauty of a well-cut diamond. Those African "peasants" should feel lucky, I guess. In a few hundred years their descendants.... well, *someone's* descendants, since many of them won't live long enough to produce children ... will be able to go into a museum and see the pretty stones they donated at gunpoint.
'All we are saying is give peace a chance'
and you will automatically chant it. It really is that simple.
:-)
Thank God the Vatican recently managed to admit that the Beatles need not go to hell for their claim that they're more popular than Jesus by now.
But maybe that's just because after the Beatles, one of the popes managed to be more popular than the Beatles. Who knows.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
How very generous of the pope. Did he lift the Church's excommunication from them too? Did Holy Joe Ratzinger also tell his priests and cardinals they need not go to hell as well for dropping their pants around little boys, fondling them, and then lying to the police and the courts? Committing repeated acts of obstruction of justice and perjuring themselves?