People are scarce on Mondays in my office - only those devoted to work, obsessed with work, or working with publications come in today. Because of this, I usually go to lunch on my own on Mondays. Today I went to one of my favorite places, simply because I could, and had broccoli cheese soup for similar reasons. My friends tend to get tired of my monotonous diet.
Anyway, because I was alone, I ended up on Wikipedia via my phone. I had been thinking on the way to work about composing and how fascinating it would be to compose scores for symphonies - being able to think in music and understand how it works so completely that it flows out of your head onto paper and it's coherent and people can play it for hundreds of years in the future, each one giving it their own twist. I can't imagine anything more lasting, other than writing.
(There's a quote that I love about that: "People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some, there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write, they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic.")
I continued to read, and as we all know, Wikipedia is likely to suck you in and it did so to me. I started reading about the classical period of music, and while doing so came upon a word I didn't know - "polyphony." I kept reading, but eventually I had to go back up and click on it, as there cannot be things I don't know just floating around in the universe.
Here's what I learned: there are three basic kinds of music. Monophony is where there's just the one melody, without any harmonies at all. Homophony is what we're used to in modern music, and indeed in most music from 1800 on - a dominant melody and a subordinate harmony. Polyphony is a little more difficult to explain, but it's where there's at least two melodies. Wikipedia describes it as a texture.
Obviously the earliest forms of music were monophonic. Chants and similar sacred music were all there was in the middle ages. But then came the 1600s and 1700s, and the Baroque period, and suddenly there were more secular songs and more instruments played together. Orchestras began to be popular. But the interesting thing is that, like most things, the organized church hated polyphony on sight (or... hearing. you know what I mean.) and banished it.
Wikipedia says: "It was not merely polyphony that offended the medieval ears, but the notion of secular music merging with the sacred and making its way into the papal court. It gave church music more of a jocular performance quality removing the solemn worship they were accustomed to. The use of and attitude toward polyphony varied widely in the Avignon court from the beginning to the end of its religious importance in the fourteenth century. Harmony was not only considered frivolous, impious, and lascivious, but an obstruction to the audibility of the words. Instruments, as well as certain modes, were actually forbidden in the church because of their association with secular music and pagan rites. Dissonant clashes of notes give a creepy feeling that was labeled as evil, fueling their argument against polyphony as being the devil’s music. After banishing polyphony from the Liturgy in 1322, Pope John XXII spoke in his 1324 Bull Docta Sanctorum Patrum warning against the unbecoming elements of this musical innovation." [emphasis mine]
Can you imagine that now? The church actually banning harmonies? But then I thought about it. There was a huge repulse of rock music in the fifties within the church. Certain straight-line conservatives still believe that rock-inspired worship songs aren't as holy as hymns are.
Music shouldn't be this big a deal. So why is it?
Because music affects people. A really good harmonic part in a song gives you goosebumps; a bouncy Aretha Franklin song cheers you up from whatever weird mood you're in; that song from 2003 when you were so obsessed with that really attractive boy who bumped into you once in the hallway takes you back immediately, and you blush and get nervous all over again. That's an established fact.
My question is: why is the church so wholly concerned by popular music?
