Years ago, I walked into a church as Mass was going on and sat down as the choir began to sing from the balcony. The music was edgy and odd, ethereal but disturbing, complicated and enticing, just a bit bizarre but impossible to not appreciate. Well, that’s not entirely true. Sometimes this music was so painful that it made for difficult listening. It made my heart hurt.
The skill of the singers was obvious, but I could not place the time period.
Hearing this set me on a journey to discover the reason this music sounds so strange and what happened in history to cause this sound to go away and another to replace it. What I ended up discovering was the modal system of harmony.
Before the 17th century, most music of the high sort relied on eight modes, which can go by Greek names (Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, and so forth) or simply be numbered. Only two of the eight modes roughly fit with what we call major and minor, that is, “happy” or “sad.” It turns out that hundreds of years ago, music typically featured a much more complicated palate of emotions. These modes were backed by high theory rooted in the mathematics of sound. They were part of academic study, even essential to it.
Over the centuries, the eight modes gradually went away, partially because sensibilities changed but also because adding ever more instruments to arrangements required new innovations in uniformity. The invention of clefs and the wide extension of the staff lines to accommodate very high and very low notes ended up flattening out the emotional range of music. Every deviation from major and minor suddenly required “accidentals” to be added to the score, festooning staff lines with odd markings everywhere, a great deviation from the norm.
The Medieval and Renaissance periods were over and the Baroque had begun, with new sounds. Not necessarily more sophisticated sounds, just different ones. Great composers worked within the new system, of course, but it might be more correct to say they worked around it.
It was at this point in my studies that I began to question the whole idea of progress in music. It clearly does not follow a linear path. It is more correct to say that there is great and bad music in every age. The trajectory is not always onward and upward.
Even from the first notes, you notice something very different about the music. The mood is complex, drifting among a huge emotional range, exploring some of the same pains and discomforts that you hear in “Missa de Notre Dame.”
Why might this be? You have already guessed the answer. The entire album is written according to the old medieval modes, not major and minor but eight different musical palates. It moves among them all freely and unexpectedly, causing the ear never to lose attention. Enticing and odd, intriguing and compelling, unexpected and unsettling. It never stops being wonderfully new and fresh.
There we have it, a straight line of tradition hopping from 1365 straight over to 1959!
Let’s quickly bump forward in time. Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys died recently. That allowed me to revisit this band. I had somehow thought they were a 1960s party band with fun music about surfing. Listening now, I realized how completely wrong I was. The musical sophistication of The Beach Boys is beyond description, as wonderful as anything by Monteverdi. It’s astonishingly complex, genius really.
This will stand the test of time, no question. I seriously doubt that “rock” music ever reaches those heights, but one also has to credit many great groups from the 1970s such as Chicago, Led Zeppelin, Queen, Earth Wind and Fire, and much of Elton John and so on.
Today’s popular music, I’m sorry, just cannot hold a candle to the past. Taylor Swift’s infantile whinging is utterly pathetic by comparison. Practically anything on the radio is one-dimensional and childish by comparison. Technology has not helped. Call me a snob, but most of this stuff is just junk music actually.
Forward progress? Hardly. Progress in music, as in science and politics, is episodic. Good and bad appear in every age. We often do not learn from the past. Indeed, there is lost knowledge, dropped pockets of wisdom that are neglected because we think the present generation is so awesome. When we discover that we are not the best of the best, we scramble to see what we might have overlooked. Then we rediscover and reapply.
It’s a painful process and part of the human condition. It traces to human arrogance and fallibility. Once we are convinced that the present generation is the best ever, far advanced over the primitives of yesteryear, we are courting trouble. We find ourselves repeating the worst of the past without upgrading to recreate the best of the past.
This is true in language, fashion, theology, science, government, aesthetics, medicine, and even technology. Once we realize this, we are faced with a task more ominous than we ever imagined. Our job is to scour the historical record for what we might have missed and find its wisdom and meaning, applying it in our lives as best we are able. This is a far trickier project than merely accepting whatever is around us as the best possible thing no matter what.
Machaut, Josquin, Tallis, and Byrd achieved heights of musical achievement that compare to the great European cathedrals in architecture. Miles Davis and Bill Evans rediscovered medieval modes. Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys rediscovered complex chords and vocal harmonies. Gustav Mahler rediscovered and built on the Romantic tradition that was being left behind in his time. Indeed, most great musical creators are themselves recreators and rediscovers. That is as it should be. So much of what we call innovation is not that at all but a rediscovery of what has been lost.
This is likely true in every field. Apply that to medicine and you enter a new world. Same with diet and exercise. So much more. Our task in rebuilding a great civilization is more complicated than we ever knew. And artificial intelligence won’t do it for us.
