On Fri, 16 Sep 2011, 123hop at comcast.net wrote:
> One of the stations I've set up is based on The Waverly Consort, a
> musical group that plays medieval and renaissance music.
>
> I am struck again and again how much closer to middle eastern music this
> is than the European music (baroque, classical, etc) that followed.
>
> Any musicologists lurking about that can explain to me how all this
> lovely rhythmic polytonal stuff got purged out of western music?
I'm not sure what exactly your question is. Renaissance and medieval music is not polytonal. It's polyphonic -- but so is Bach. As for rhythm, there's tons of rhythm in Bach, and lots of rhythm in Beethoven -- much more than in renaissance church music, which was ideologically against it.
I think what you mean is that they lose specific spectacular effects, like hockets, where the melody really jumps between lines. But there's nothing natural about those. They came from composer's games as unnatural as those of Boulez.
Other odd effects come from a subordination of music to text, which often forces the music to change course unexpectedly and abruptly.
So there's a million different things. But if you had to give one answer to why Baroque and classical music seem more centrally organized than Renaissance and Medieval music -- and most other musics -- why all the elements seem made to fit together more smoothly, with less rough edges -- the simple answer is bigger ensembles and more instruments and larger range of notes.
If you just have voices, and you sing in the same octave or so, everyone can micro adjust to each other. So parts can be more independent and get fixed at the crux points. But the more non-vocal instruments are playing at one time and the bigger the range of note the more you need to rationalize the scale to keep things from sounding off. You need more of a system.
The case is similar with improvisation. It's easy when you're in a small group, but it usually sounds like mud in a large group unless you develop pretty detailed rules. And then those rules start getting used in all musical venues because composers had to churn out large volumes of work. In the baroque and classical eras, court and church musicians were the tin pan alley of their day.
Rationality was also of course also a big ideology at the time, so people thought more rational music was a beautiful thing -- in the baroque era, because it was a reflection of the perfection of god; and in the classical era, because it reflected the fundamental belief of the enlightenment in a rational universe.
The belief that music should glorify god, was of course just as alive in Gregorian chants and medieval and renaissance church music. But then music was all about the text. It was after instruments changed from accompanying the voice to being the center of the music that you got the idea that it was its rational structure glorified god's perfection rather than the way it emphasized god's word.
Michael