The Age of Discovery Howard Goodall's Story of Music

In the early 21st century, we take it for granted that the vast

and diverse world of music that's all around us can be

summoned at the flick of a switch.

But not that long ago, music was a rare

and feeble whisper in a wilderness of silence.

How on earth did that miracle happen?

MUSIC: Instrumental version of "Poker Face" by Lady Gaga

Music, one of the dazzling fruits of human civilisation,

has become a massive global phenomenon.

And so it's hard for us to imagine a time when, in centuries

gone by, people could go weeks without hearing any music at all.

Even in the 19th century, you might hear your favourite symphony

four or five times in your whole lifetime,

in the days before music could be recorded.

The story of music, successive waves of discoveries, breakthroughs

and inventions is an ongoing process.

The next great leap forward may take place in a backstreet

of Beijing or upstairs in a pub in South Shields.

# Can't read my, can't read my No, he can't read my poker face

# She's got me like nobody... #

Whatever music you're into,

Monteverdi or Mantovani, Mozart or Motown, Machaut or mashup,

the techniques it relies on didn't happen by accident.

Someone, somewhere thought of them first.

Music can make us weep or make us dance.

It's reflected the times in which it was written. It has delighted,

challenged, comforted and excited us.

In this series, I'm going to trace music's extraordinary

journey from scratch.

They'll be no fancy jargon nor misleading labels.

Terms like baroque, impressionism or nationalism

are best put to one side.

Instead, try to imagine how revolutionary

and how exhilarating many of the innovations

we take for granted today were to people at the time.

There are a million ways of telling the story of music.

This is mine.

You may think that music is a luxury,

a plug-in to make human life more enjoyable.

It's fine if you think that,

but our hunter-gatherer ancestors wouldn't agree with you.

To them, music was much more than mere ear candy.

ANIMALS ROAR

It was a matter of life and death.

You don't believe me? Let me take you back to 32,000 BC,

to the Stone Age cave paintings in Chauvet, France.

The people who painted them may have used singing as a life-saving

form of sat nav, a bat-like type of sonar to help you find where

you were in the labyrinth of caves.

In 2008, acoustic scientists made the extraordinary

discovery that the Chauvet paintings,

which lie within huge, inaccessible, pitch-black networks of tunnels,

are located at the points of greatest resonance in the networks,

so that singing would carry throughout the whole subterranean

system from these special points, echoing and ricocheting.

HORN ECHOES

We also now know that music played an important part

in Palaeolithic rituals, since whistles

and flutes made out of bones have been found in many of these caves.

From these dusty artefacts would one day grow Duke Ellington's

horn section and the massed ranks of the Dagenham Girl Pipers.

HORN BLARES

By the time that tribal communities began settling in one place

and farming, between 9000 and 7000 BC,

we know that music had become an essential activity.

As well as helping along the rhythm of work,

music was seen as something potent, magical,

and, if the mood required, seductive.

And yet, we've absolutely no idea what the music of these

ancient societies actually sounded like.

Because they couldn't write their music down,

it has disappeared completely.

There's no surviving video, no sheet music, no Pythagorean MP3,

not a note of it.

A few ancient instruments have been dug up, mind.

HORNS RESONATE

These ones are called lurs.

A set of six lurs were excavated in a field in Denmark in 1797,

now known as the Brudevaelte Lurs. They were perfectly preserved in a

peat bog for 2,500 years, and are still playable today.

These two are replicas.

Lurs are so famous in Denmark they've even had a butter

named after them.

These lurs may look a tad unwieldy

but in terms of technology, they're a long way from being some

hollowed-out piece of fruit, or a drum knocked up from a clay pot.

What they tell us is this...

It's a grave error to describe what musicians were up to

in 800 BC as primitive.

Making these elaborate brass instruments could only have

been the handiwork of culturally sophisticated people.

Remember, these lurs were made and played nearly a thousand years

before the building of Hadrian's Wall.

We don't know what the Bronze Age Scandinavians

played on their lurs but it was probably meant to be scary.

Around the time the Brudevaelte Lurs were intimidating

the neighbours, much further south, in the sunshine,

the Ancient Greeks were laying the foundations of western civilisation.

The Greeks believed music to be both a science and an art,

and took it extremely seriously.

It's worth noting what their seven compulsory subjects in school were -

grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy

and music.

What they loved best about music were talent contests. No, really.

Everyone knows that the Ancient Greeks invented the Olympic Games.

For the Greeks, though, it wasn't just nude running, wrestling

and throwing the javelin that was important.

They were mad about singing competitions.

Yes, The X Factor is a 3,000-year-old format,

the Epsilon Factor, one might say, or Sparta's Got Talent.

Contestants would appear before a live audience and a panel of judges.

The winners were awarded cash prizes.

This is the beginning of music as a profession.

The Greeks also invented European drama and the musical.

It's thought that the comic dramas of Aristophanes, for example,

were mostly sung.

I wish I could sing you a number from a Greek musical drama

at this point - Thank You For The Moussaka

or Greece Is The Word, perhaps - but I can't.

The tunes are all lost to us, even if we know what the words mean.

The Greeks passed on their passion for theatre,

poetry and music to the Romans,

who exported it, along with their legions, all over the Mediterranean.

But the Romans, too, never got round to writing their music down,

and so, when Rome fell in the 5th century,

the music of the ancient past was lost to us.

It's as silent as the grave.

Almost.

MALE CHOIR SINGS

Our one remaining link to the music of the late Roman world is

Christian plainchant, which dates from at least the 3rd century AD.

The singing of chant has always been central to Christian worship.

It was a sung version of the Latin words of the Psalms

and of the Eucharist, or Mass.

It's, by default, often been described as Gregorian Chant, after

Pope Gregory the Great, who was pope at the end of the 6th century.

It's beautiful, ancient and mysterious.

What it is not, we now know, is anything to do with Pope Gregory.

This is one of the worst branding mistakes in cultural history.

It would be like discovering the Wellington boot had nothing

to do with the Duke,

or that the Earl of Sandwich had nothing to do with a BLT.

HE SINGS

THEY SING IN UNISON

In the earliest form of plainchant,

musical monks would sing a meandering tune with no

accompaniment, no discernible rhythm and no harmonising.

They are singing together in unison.

Plainchant stayed the same for centuries.

But then, sometime before the 8th century, someone, somewhere had

the bright idea of adding some young lads to the choir.

HIGHER VOICES JOIN THE SINGING

It sounds fuller and brighter with higher

and lower voices combined, doesn't it?

The boys sang an octave higher than the men.

It's called an octave because in church music at the time

there were only eight notes to choose from.

On the white notes of a modern keyboard,

the two lines of voices are eight notes apart.

Having men and boys sing an octave apart prompted a further thought.

What if we had two notes together that weren't octaves,

but completely different notes taken from the choice of eight?

What if they added this note, for example?

TWO NOTES OF A FIFTH INTERVAL

THEY SING THE INTERVAL

Genius.

THEY SING IN HARMONY

They didn't go too far, mind. The new line wasn't independent

but stayed exactly in parallel to the original.

This parallel lines technique,

which began in around the 9th century, was called organum,

because, to them, it sounded like an organ, which it does.

ORGAN PLAYS SAME MUSIC

What we're hearing is the first experiment in what we'd call

harmony, the simultaneous sounding of more than one note.

THEY SING IN HARMONY

Bland and unadventurous it may seem to us now,

but then, in the early 100s, it was audio dynamite.

The heady excitement of singing two notes at once had another spin off.

This time, they went crazy.

They stopped one of the lines moving around.

In this form of organum,

one singer just stays put on one note all the time.

I say singer, but this technique is

so boring to perform they also used to play it on instruments instead,

an organ, perhaps, or now almost forgotten instruments

like the psaltery, the hurdy-gurdy or the symphony.

I'm not making this up, they really did have an instrument that played

just one continuous note. They even had a name for the long-held note.

It's a drone.

INSTRUMENT DRONES

VOICES JOIN, SINGING ONE NOTE

This drone-plus-tune-type of plainchant is still

remembered today on bagpipes.

The perforated tube you play the melody on is still called

the chanter.

BAGPIPES MUSIC

By the 9th century, the most adventurous musicians had

started to mix the two available styles together.

Parallel organum and drone organum.

THEY SING IN HARMONY ABOVE A DRONE

One such adventurer was Kassia of Constantinople.

She is the first female composer whose name has come down to us.

What makes her music intriguing is its unusual mix of simple

but unpredictable harmonies.

Harmony was the first giant step our medieval ancestors

took as the year 1000 drew near.

The other was to alter the course of music history dramatically.

It was the invention of musical notation.

When a monk or nun sang plainchant in the centuries

before about 800 AD, what they had in front of them was the text,

in Latin, of what they were singing. Just the text.

They had to memorise the melody. All this!

This is one of the most spectacular feats of memory in the history

of the human race. But it's also a bit mad.

It might take ten years of daily repetition and practice

to memorise the entire plainsong repertoire for the church year.

So it was deemed highly desirable to find a way of reminding

yourself what the tunes for any bit of text might be.

This is a 3rd-century Christian hymn written in Ancient Greek.

Above the words, tantalisingly,

is a fledgling attempt at writing the tune down.

Alas, so far at least,

no-one can agree on what exactly it's meant to sound like.

Hundreds of years went by until squiggles came along.

That's not their real name, which is neumes,

but squiggles are what they are.

This is a page from the Winchester Troper,

the oldest surviving manuscript of organum anywhere in the world.

It's the painstaking work of Anglo-Saxon monks.

What it shows is the Latin text that was intended to be sung,

with squiggles above the words and in the margin.

The idea of the squiggles was to give some indication of

whether the note of the melody went up or down over any given

syllable, so they're better than nothing.

But the squiggles had a major flaw.

They're essentially a way of jogging your memory

of a tune you already know.

They're rubbish at teaching you a new tune from scratch.

That's because they're not very good at indicating just how high

or low successive notes are supposed to be,

like a map without longitude or latitude.

The breakthrough came in around 1000 in the Italian city of Arezzo,

and it was the brainchild of a musical monk called Guido,

known nowadays of Guido of Arezzo.

Guido's methods were simple and clear.

First of all, he gave these squiggles, or neumes,

a standardised, easy-to-read form.

So each note had its own symbol, or blob.

He then drew four straight lines onto which the notes,

or blobs, would be placed.

One of the lines he made red to give you a fixed bearing

as against all other tunes, a bit like the musical equivalent

of the equator, or the Greenwich Meridian.

So wherever the note, or blob, is placed,

represents its pitch position, that is, whether it's an A, B, or C.

# La. #

If the note goes up, the blob goes up.

-HIGHER:

-# La. #

And if it goes down, the blob goes down, step by step.

# Ole, ole, ole, ole, ole, ole. #

Before Guido, you'd think up a tune and then teach it to everyone

you know and hope they pass it on without mucking it up.

After Guido, music could be fixed on a page

and could be reproduced by someone who'd never heard the tune before.

Guido's method has been refined over the years by indicating

the duration of notes, for example,

but it's essentially the same system we still use to notate music today.

# But every time she asks me Do I look OK?

# I say

# When I see your face

# There's not a thing that I would change

# Cos you're amazing

# Just the way you are

# And when you smile... #

The ability to lay out multiple lines of melody on a kind of

musical spreadsheet allowed composers to plot out

far more complicated musical structures.

This was to set music on a course towards greater

and greater sophistication,

all thanks to the bright idea of a monk from Arezzo.

The ability to formulate musical ideas on a page

enabled a musical approach

that was far more ambitious than anything that had preceded it.

A story that has to be remembered

and spoken out loud is necessarily less complex than a novel, which

can be written down and unfolded over a much greater length of time.

So it was, with the invention of musical notation.

Now you could have multiple lines of music,

dazzling new possibilities for harmony began to suggest themselves.

What was needed to realise this potential was for a musician

to go a bit mad, and in his creative madness open up the harmony idea

to a thousand new possibilities,

which, helpfully, is what a bloke from Paris did in the 12th century.

MALE CHORAL SINGING

His name was Perotin,

and he composed music for the newly-built cathedral of Notre Dame.

What he did, was ask a seemingly simple question -

what would happen if you had more than two voices

singing at the same time?

What if you had three?

THREE VOICES SING IN HARMONY

Or even, God forbid, four?

FOUR VOICES SING IN HARMONY

This might not sound momentous now, but believe me,

it was nothing short of a revolution in music.

Perotin strikes us even today as an irrepressibly adventurous

creative force, a fire cracker of a composer

who conceived and wrote down

the most complex simultaneous note clusters ever yet heard.

A cluster of simultaneous notes is called a chord.

Here are some of Perotin's chords.

Perotin also blazed the way forward in another area of music.

He may not have been the first composer to bring rhythm

into church music, but he's the first one to find

a way of notating rhythm, using a system whereby shorter notes are

bracketed together with a horizontal bar, what he called a ligature.

He was particularly fond of one rhythmic pattern,

a pattern that you can easily remember

because it's the rhythm of the theme tune to the Archers.

# Dum-de-dum de-dum-de-dum, dum-de-dum de-dum dum. #

Perotin made that pattern his own, as you can hear in his hymn

composed for Christmas Day 1198, Viderunt Omnes.

MALE CHOIR SINGS RHYTHMICALLY

In this remarkable piece of music

you can hear not only the jaunty rhythm

but the weirdly effective harmonies, amazingly advanced for their time.

THEY SING DIFFERENT RHYTHMS IN HARMONY

It's important to remember that before Perotin's time, most people

would rarely have heard any music at all, unless they heard it in church.

But around the 12th century, secular music began to step out

into the limelight.

The pathfinders were the Bob Dylans of the day,

the trouveres or troubadours,

travelling singer-songwriters who usually accompanied

themselves on the early instruments available.

At the peak of the troubadour craze, several hundred of them

plied their trade across Europe.

Where did this troubadour phenomenon

with its songs of noble, elegant love originate from?

The answer may surprise you. It came from al-Andalus, Muslim Spain.

MALE SINGS ACCOMPANIED BY STRINGED INSTRUMENT

In the music of the troubadours, you can still hear

traces of the Arabic originals.

MALE SINGS ACCOMPANIED BY STRINGED INSTRUMENT

Muslim Spain also provided Christian Europe with more sophisticated

musical instruments that were to become central to secular music -

the rebab, a precursor to the violin,

the al'Ud, which became the lute and later, the guitar,

and the qanun, an early type of zither.

And instruments weren't the only important thing that European

composers inherited from the culture of Islam.

The other was a flair for rhythm.

STRING INSTRUMENTS PLAY RHYTHMICALLY

The troubadour songs, like their Arabic originals,

were shaped by the poetic metre of their lyrics,

so most of these songs have at least a gentle, foot-tapping pulse,

which is where Perotin got his rhythms from.

By the end of the 14th century, nearly all music's vital

components had been discovered - notation, both melodic and rhythmic,

the layering of voices on top of each other,

and a basic selection of instruments to complement the human voice.

One final piece of the jigsaw still needed to click into position.

In around 1400, harmony took a huge leap forward,

a leap that was to change the way music sounded for ever.

We still live with that change today.

Before 1400, despite Perotin's adventurousness,

when composers layered notes on top of each other

they only chose a very limited menu of possible note combinations.

There was the basic octave.

And there were two other note combinations, both of which medieval

musicians called perfect, because they were thought to be Godly.

The perfect fourth.

And the perfect fifth.

And before 1400, that's more or less it.

In this famous piece, for example, all the harmonies are sung

either four or five notes apart from the basic melody line.

# Gaudete, gaudete Christus est natus

# Ex Maria Virgine, gaudete... #

To our ears, accustomed to the subsequent 600 years of harmony,

there's something missing, which makes the music sound bare

and a little cold.

# Tempus adest gratiae Hoc quod optabamus

# Carmina laetitiae Devote reddamus

DRUMS START

# Gaudete, gaudete Christus est natus

# Ex Maria Virgine, gaudete. #

What's missing is a combination of notes that,

before 1400, composers had virtually ignored.

FEMALE CHORAL SINGING

The man who did use this note combination set things up

for what was to be a giant leap for harmony.

He was an English composer called John Dunstaple.

Dunstaple introduced the mighty but imperfect third.

Why is the third imperfect?

If you count just three notes up from your starting point, C,

you arrive at E. Why isn't this third a perfect distance?

The reason is that the third, unlike the fourth and fifth,

has two different versions, what we'd call now a major version

and a minor version. It is Mr Ambiguous.

You can see just how ambiguous by counting further up the keyboard.

If I count three notes from D for example, I come to F,

creating a minor third, ditto E to G.

But F to A, like C to E, is a major third.

The fact that the third can be either major or minor,

depending on where you start counting from,

might sound like only a slight technical difference, but it's not.

The pivot between the major third and the minor third is the pivot

upon which all western music balances.

Very broadly speaking, one is happy and one is sad,

and harmony's using these thirds make the music richer, more subtle

and more affecting.

FEMALE CHORAL SINGING

But allowing the leans-both-ways third into music

had one other big by-product. Let's start with C again.

We'll count up three steps and find ourselves at E, a major third.

Then if we carry on up another three steps to G,

we've created a minor third.

But what happens if we play all of these three notes together?

All these three notes played together are called a triad,

and triads are the bread and butter of all western music.

PIANO PLAYS

Here's a song you may recognise which is built on triads.

# Morning has broken

# Like the first morning

# Blackbird has spoken

# Like the first bird

# Praise for the singing

# Praise for the morning... #

15th-century musicians discovered that triads had an important

effect on each other when they were mixed together.

It's to do with the constituent notes of the chords.

The C major triad, for example, contains two of the same notes

as the E minor triad, and is therefore closely related to it.

Similarly the E minor triad shares two of its notes with

the G major triad, and they are closely related.

Mixing together chords that are closely related to each other

creates a mood of harmonious smoothness,

like melding adjacent colours in the spectrum.

Triads have another great benefit.

They can also create the sense of home in a piece of music.

Let me demonstrate with a famous spiritual song from a few

hundred years later - Amazing Grace.

In the first phrase of the song,

we start on one chord under the words "amazing grace".

# Amazing grace. #

Then we shift to another one on the word "sweet".

# How sweet. #

Then home again to where we started.

# The sound. #

That safe landing back to the chord we think of as home

is called a cadence, or ending.

# Amazing grace

# How sweet the sound. #

Everything feels right about that little journey of chords.

We felt good returning to where we started, at the end of the phrase.

In the second phrase, we go on another short chord journey.

# That saved a wretch like me. #

And we have another little cadence by moving to a new chord

on the word "me".

Again, this journey feels logical and satisfying,

we're being led from one place to another.

# I once was lost

# But now I'm found

# Was blind but now I see. #

You can quite clearly hear that there's nothing

haphazard about the choice of chords under the tune, it's meant to be.

What's at work here is a logic in the chords, they're obeying

strict laws like the laws of gravity, or the orbit of planets,

whereby some chords exert more power and influence than others.

Discovering the power of triads

was like discovering a chemical reaction.

Composers immediately sensed that something massive

and transformative had happened.

From now on, the basic chord - the triad,

one, three, five - was king.

Just as the development of harmony up to this point had taken several

centuries, so too, the refining of musical instruments was a slow burn.

But by the 16th century, a new breed of instruments had been invented,

and they were to bring in a golden age of folk or popular music.

In Tudor England, if you went to the barbershop for a haircut,

or some form of crude walk-in surgery, while you were waiting

you could pull down one of these off the wall and have a sing-song.

Yes, every self-respecting 16th-century barber had a cittern

hanging around for the use of his customers, many of whom would

then accompany themselves whilst singing a jolly folk song.

# Sing no more of dumps So dull and heavy... #

I'm not making this up.

# Was ever so Since summer first was leavy

# And sigh no more, but let them go And be you blithe and bonny

# Converting all your sounds of woe

# Into hey nonny nonny... #

New instruments were changing the texture of music.

Along with the cittern came the lute.

Related to the lute was the stringed instrument known as the viol,

and by the 1560s, the viol's young offspring, the violin,

had been developed in Italy.

The 16th century also saw rapid advancements in keyboard technology,

so at home, if you had a few bob, you might have a virginal.

But for sheer technological complexity,

no instrument of the 16th century comes near to the organ.

# Then sigh not so, but let them go And be you blithe and bonny

# Converting all your sounds of woe Into hey nonny nonny

# Then sigh no more, but let them go And be you blithe and bonny

# Converting all your sounds of woe Into hey nonny nonny. #

APPLAUSE

Hand in hand with this expansion of purely instrumental music

was a wealth of popular song.

Often, the exact same tunes were used for both church music

and secular music, with different words, of course.

PIPE MUSIC

The first religious songs to get catchy tunes were the ones

associated with Christmas.

Some of the early carols were derived from jaunty folk dances.

MUSIC: Instrumental version of "Good Christian Men Rejoice"

One reason these 500-year-old carols are still easy on the modern ear

is because of a significant shift that was taking place

in the musical structure at this time.

It's to do with the positioning of the melody.

When, in around 900 AD,

chanting monks started to add extra voices to plainsong melodies,

beginning the process that became polyphony,

the layering of many voices, it was always assumed that

the principal tune, the red bricks in our diagram, was the bottom one,

and the added tune was on top of it.

Gradually, as two lines became three and then four,

this principal melody got buried inside the four voices.

That's why the third line down in any four-part piece of choral music

got to be known as the tenor, because this was the part

that held the main tune, tenir being the French verb to hold.

We take it for granted that the tune of a piece of music sits on

top of the texture, but this wasn't the case before the 16th century.

Gradually, in all forms of music,

the tune worked itself up to the top.

# In dulci jubilo Let songs and gladness flow

# All our joy reclineth In praesepio

# And like the sun he shineth... #

Once the tune was sitting pretty on the top of the texture,

you were more likely to be able to hear the words clearly.

And the words were about to acquire a thrilling new significance.

# Alpha es et O. #

In 1450, in the German city of Mainz, one of the most

important technological breakthroughs of our civilisation

was invented - Johannes Gutenberg's movable type printing press.

Within 50 years or so of the arrival of Guttenberg's wondrous machine,

music was being printed.

Now, new musical ideas could spread further and faster than ever.

It's shown in the career of the most influential composer

of the period, Josquin Des Prez.

Josquin was born on what is now the Franco-Belgian border

but by his middle age, he was in Ferrara in Italy,

working as a resident composer for a rich and powerful duke.

In terms of pure sound, Josquin could not be described as a radical.

But in one key respect, Josquin made a departure from what

went before that was to become a hallmark of the music of the age.

Josquin is the first composer in history for whom

the meaning of the words is paramount, and who tried to

bring out and express that meaning in the way he set words to music.

Small wonder that the majority of pieces he composed

for the church were called motets, which means, literally, the words.

One such motet is Miserere Mei, have mercy on me.

MALE CHORAL SINGING # Miserere mei

# Deus... #

Miserere Mei was composed in 1503. Josquin's employer,

the Duke of Ferrara, was a friend of the most notorious

preacher of the age, the Dominican friar, Savonarola,

a firebrand who constantly attacked the excesses of the Catholic Church.

He was eventually arrested

and in prison, he wrote a prayer asking God's forgiveness

for falsely confessing to crimes under the agony of torture.

The text of this prayer, essentially proclaiming his innocence,

spread rapidly across Europe.

So Josquin's task was to make this highly political statement

completely clear. How he did so was new.

Quite simply, Josquin made sure that

the words were always clearly audible, and that was revolutionary,

because up till then, believe it or not,

the words in a piece of music were anything but audible.

For centuries, song lyrics had been the poor relation.

In folk music, audiences were as likely dancing, drinking themselves

into oblivion, or having their hair cut as listening to the words.

And in church, texts had been sung in Latin.

What's more, they'd been sung in a way that made it virtually

impossible to understand.

This is a technique called melisma, whereby long stretches of melody

are attached to just one syllable of text.

The melismatic style could be musically attractive, but it

destroyed any chance of the listener hearing what words were being sung.

So in the first few bars of Josquin's motet,

each voice utters the simple phrase, Miserere mei, Deus,

"Have mercy on me, Lord," one by one.

# Miserere mei, Deus

# Miserere mei, Deus. #

Josquin repeats those words, "Miserere mei, Deus,"

throughout the piece like a mantra. He also finds ways of highlighting

the words that were to be imitated

by other composers time and time again.

One, is to have the voices cascade downwards, like falling tears.

VOICES CASCADE DOWNWARDS, OVERLAPPING EACH OTHER

Another is to stop all activity

and have the voices sing together identical syllables of block chords.

THEY SING TOGETHER

In 1517, only 17 years after Savanorola's execution,

Martin Luther set in train the Reformation.

Not only did religion change, religious music changed, too.

In Lutheran churches, for the first time, the congregation played

a major role in music,

taking the lion's share of the singing in their own language.

Luther, as well as being a theologian, scholar,

writer and preacher, was a composer.

He fervently believed music should belong to everyone,

not just priests and trained choirs.

He wanted the congregations in his churches to be able to

join in hymn-singing with confidence and enthusiasm,

and this meant having easy-to-pick-up tunes to sing.

Luther, accordingly, collected lots of popular folk songs of the time

and gave them holy words.

He also caused loads of new tunes to be written for the purpose.

This is one Luther himself wrote, Ein Feste Burg Ist Unser Gott -

"A Mighty Fortress Is Our God."

# Ein feste burg ist unser Gott

# Ein gute wehr und waffen... #

What's immediately noticeable about this chorale, or Protestant hymn,

is that as it moves along,

the words progress syllable by syllable,

note by note, with a clear tune on top of the sound.

This is what hymns were to sound like for the next 500 years.

# Mit ernst ers jetzt meint

# Gross macht und viel list

# Ein grausam ruestung ist

# Auf erd ist nicht seingleichen. #

What followed the Reformation was more than

100 years of religious intolerance and state-sponsored terror.

In the midst of this blood bath, perhaps not surprisingly,

the mood of sacred music was overwhelmingly one of penitence,

remorse and lamentation.

SOMBRE CHORAL SINGING

But the dark cloud of agony and sorrow

wasn't going to last for ever.

UPLIFTING STRING MUSIC

As the 16th century drew to a close, serious religious music,

though it was still commissioned both by the Church and by rich

patrons, was about to lose its role as the dominant form of new music.

In the 1570s and '80s, a new wave of secular music swept up

like a warm summer wind from Italy into the rest of Europe.

It seemed to contain the seeds of something quite

different from the angry certainties of the religious squabble.

Not for the last time in musical history, art music,

the music of posh people,

was to be saved from itself by popular folk song traditions.

The pioneering figure in this new wave of secular music was

a Franco-Flemish composer called Jacques Arcadelt.

The lute player in Caravaggio's picture here, is playing

some of his music, he was that famous.

Everything about his songs cocked a snook at pomposity and authority.

His lyrics are concerned with human pleasures,

they're full of sensuous imagery and sexual allusion.

He worked for a while in Italy where he wrote madrigals,

then moved to France, where he wrote their equivalent - chansons.

Typical of these is the cheeky, syncopated tale of Margot,

the mysterious grape picker.

# Margot, labourez les vignes Vignes, vignes, vignolet

# Margot labourez les vignes bientot

-# En revenant de Lorraine et Margot

-En revenant de Lorraine et Margot

# Rencontrai trois capitaines

# Vignes, vignes, vignolet Margot labourez les vignes bientot

# Margot, labourez les vignes Vignes, vignes, vignolet

# Margot, labourez Les vignes bientot. #

WOMAN SINGS # Flow, my tears fall

# From your springs... #

The success of Arcadelt's songs inspired many other composers,

one of whom was a close contemporary of Shakespeare, John Dowland,

who, by 1600, had become the most celebrated singer-songwriter

in Europe.

# ..Where night's black bird

# Her sad infamy sings

# There let me live

# Forlorn... #

Dowland's songs are strikingly different in tone

and attitude to anything that had gone before.

He's interested in people and their emotions, not gods and demons.

A song like Flow My Tears doesn't seem out of place amongst

those of our own time.

# ..Lost fortunes deplore

# Light doth but shame

# Disclose... #

Music by 1600 had become a rich mix of sacred and secular,

instrumental and vocal, but almost anything you would

hear at that time was on a relatively small scale.

The time was ripe for someone, somewhere,

to start creating long, substantial forms that would last a whole

evening and leave audiences cheering for more.

Which is exactly what happened.

Opera was born.

The man of the moment, one of the ten most influential

composers of all time, was Claudio Monteverdi.

In his hands, opera went from zero to hero.

DRAMATIC INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC

In opera, music is at the service of the drama, and

so it needs to be able to express complex, even conflicting, emotions.

Luckily, Monteverdi had already spent years

trying to do exactly that

with his sophisticated passion-filled madrigals.

To do so, he had begun to recalibrate harmony.

Let's look at just one of his madrigals,

which put cats among pigeons, even in his own time.

It's from the Fifth Book Of Madrigals of 1605,

and it's called O Mirtillo, Mirtill'Anima Mia,

Oh, Myrtle, Myrtle, My Soul. Listen to this bit.

# Che chiami crudelissima

# Amarilli. #

It's obvious Monteverdi is dipping in and out of all

kinds of chords that don't seem comfortably related to each other.

He wants you to feel surprised or intrigued, especially if it enhances

the words of the poem. So on these words,

"Che chiami crudelissima, Amarilli,"

"The one you call cruellest, Amaryllis," he creates a series

of deliberate clashes of chord, called a dissonance, or suspension.

# Come sta il cor di questa... #

Instead of sticking to chords that had close affinities with

each other, he deliberately mixed up unrelated chords

and exploited the strange, disorientating sounds this produced.

VOCALS OVERLAP # Che chiami

# Crudelissima

# Amarilli... #

It was music that could manipulate our emotions that Monteverdi

brought into opera. He also introduced another ingredient,

a dramatic aural effect that had been invented in Venice,

then one of the world's richest and most powerful city-states.

Its huge, cavernous basilica, St Mark's, employed some of the

best musicians in Europe, including, for a time, Monteverdi himself.

On top of all this, the building served as a kind of musical

and acoustical laboratory.

An uncle-and-nephew team called Gabrieli had developed

a kind of precursor of surround sound at St. Mark's,

achieved by placing groups of singers

and instrumentalists in different parts of the building

and having them sing or play alternately.

The technical term for the technique is polychoral, many choirs.

MUSIC ALTERNATES FROM LEFT TO RIGHT

Monteverdi knew and admired this polychoral style

and thought it would work alongside his intimate,

emotionally-charged madrigal style when he came to writing opera.

Monteverdi didn't invent opera,

a Florentine composer called Peri did, in 1597.

But Monteverdi did write the first good opera, Orfeo,

which premiered in Mantua in 1607.

He was aiming for maximum emotional effect,

maximum narrative clarity, maximum impact, even shock, and wasn't

going to obey anyone's rules about what he could or could not do.

FEMALE OPERATIC SINGING

What's more, Monteverdi invented a new combination of instruments

never before gathered together.

He borrowed old and new styles, he used choral music,

he told the stories through characters

directly expressing themselves to the audience.

Almost everything about Orfeo was then a novelty.

It was loud, it was long and it was modern.

And let's not forget how liberating it all must have been,

because as musical techniques had been developing,

century by century, so too had the ability to express more complex,

subtle and unexpected emotions along the way.

Monteverdi was using music plus.

Orfeo had been performed in a ducal court in front of a small,

select audience. Monteverdi's last opera, The Coronation Of Poppaea,

was performed in a Venetian theatre, in front of a paying public.

It's one of the most radical dramas of all time.

Why is Poppaea so radical?

To put it simply, because it was about real people

and their complicated, messy emotions.

The Emperor Nero and his mistress Poppaea were actual historical

figures, and Monteverdi's music acts as the soundtrack

to their real-life passions.

On the surface of it, Poppaea is about lust

and ambition conquering all.

It ends with a duet for Nero and Poppaea of unabashed eroticism,

called Pur Ti Miro, Pur Ti Godo, "I gaze on you, I possess you."

It appears as if Nero and Poppaea are being congratulated

for their criminal greed.

# Pur ti miro

# Pur ti godo

# Pur ti miro

# Pur ti godo

# Pur ti stringo

# Pur t'annodo

# Pur ti stringo... #

The passion that oozes out of this duet,

"I adore you, I embrace you, I desire you, I enchain you,"

is so frank and sensual, it almost turns its audience -

remember they're in the room, too -

into voyeurs, awkwardly witnessing the private interchange of

two weirdly uninhibited strangers.

This was new territory indeed, the full monty.

# O mia vita

# O mia vita

# O mio tesoro... #

The most daring part of this climax is what it meant to

Monteverdi's fellow Venetians.

They knew what happened next in real life, that is,

after the fall of the curtain.

Nero killed his new Empress Poppaea and their unborn child

and then himself, and his regime collapsed in flames.

Monteverdi's audience would have seen the opera's ending

for what it was - a savage attack on Venice's archrival state, Rome.

In the light of this, the Coronation Of Poppaea can be

seen as a scathing critique of the excesses of Roman power

and the pressing need for humane self-restraint.

# Piu non peno

# Pi non moro

-# O mia vita

-O mia vita

# O mio tesoro

-# O mia vita

-O mia vita

# O mio tesoro... #

Monteverdi paved the way for an explosion of musical energy.

MUSIC: "Summer" by Vivaldi

If innovations had come along at a snail's pace in the previous

1,000 years, the next 100 in music saw them coming thick and fast.

In the next programme, the era of Vivaldi, Bach and Handel

and the exhilarating sound of invention.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd