0.5 Chapter 4: european art music: middle ages to romantic  (Page 3/12)

Musical genres

• Chant, monophonic settings of texts used in services of the early Christian church.
• Monophonic settings of secular poems, often about courtly love, by poet/musicians called troubadours and trouveres.
• Polyphonic settings of sacred and secular texts for two or three parts, sometimes with one of the parts a preexistent melody, such as a chant.
• Monophonic dances.

Major figures in music

• Leonin (ca. 1135–1201): composer and compiler of early polyphony consisting of two melodic lines, active at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.
• Perotin (1180–ca. 1207): successor of Leonin at Notre Dame, continued development of polyphony, mainly consisting of three melodic lines.
• Guillaume de Machaut (ca. 1300–1377): French cleric, poet, and musician; composer of sacred and secular works, mostly consisting of three melodic lines.
• Francesco Landini (ca. 1325–1397): Italian composer of secular songs, mostly consisting of three melodic lines.
• Guillaume Dufay (ca. 1400–1474): Netherlandish composer of secular and sacred works of three or four melodic lines.

Other historic figures

• St. Augustine (354–430): early Christian thinker and writer.
• Boethius (ca. 480–524): Roman statesman and philosopher, author of The Consolations of Philosophy and De institutione musica, a treatise on numerical properties of musical sounds and the relationship between mathematical proportions and human morality.
• Mohammed (590–632): founder of Islam.
• Avicenna (980–1037): Islamic philosopher, scientist, and physician.
• Anselm (1033–1109): Christian philosopher; propounded the ontological argument for God’s existence.
• Averroes (1126–1198): Islamic philosopher and commentator on Aristotle.
• Maimonides (1125–1204): Jewish philosopher; author of Guide to the Perplexed.
• Marco Polo (1254–1324): Venetian traveler to China 1271–1295.
• Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1225–1274): Catholic scholar and philosopher.
• Dante Alighieri (1265–1321): Italian poet, author of The Divine Comedy (1307), a cosmology of medieval Catholicism.
• Giotto (ca. 1268–1337): Italian painter; frescoes of biblical scenes in churches of Florence and Padua.
• Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch) (1304–1374): Italian poet; sonnets of idealized love.
• Boccacio (1313–1375): Italian poet, author of the Decameron (1353), 100 witty and often bawdy allegorical tales set in the time of the Black Death in Florence.
• Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1340–1400): English poet and writer, author of Canterbury Tales (1387), stories of courtly romance, deceit, and greed related by 30 people from different segments of English medieval society on a pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral.
• Jan van Eyck (ca. 1390–1441): Flemish painter; domestic scenes painted in oils.

Renaissance (ca. 1450–1600)

The designation “Renaissance” dates from the 18th century and reflects the revival of interest in the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome that profoundly influenced the culture and thinking of the century and a half following the Middle Ages. The period is also called the Age of Humanism because of the emphasis on the nature, potential, and accomplishments of man in literature, art and music, science, and philosophy. The medieval approach to understanding the world, which was based on speculative systems of divine order and harmony, was supplanted by theories derived from scientific observation. Learning was highly valued and, through the invention of printing, became available to a wide population. Other important inventions are the telescope and instruments for navigation used by explorers such as Columbus and Magellan.