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CHAPTER 2
Antiquity to the Middle Ages:
Music in Rome, Jerusalem,
and the Early Christian World
Rome
ROMAN EMPIRE, 177 C.E
While the Romans were fine politicians and soldiers, and
spectacularly good engineers, much of their painting,
sculpture, and music was derived from the practices of the
ancient Greeks.
ROMAN TUBA
PRESERVED IN THE INSTRUMENT COLLECTION OF THE
MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON
• The only truly distinctive Roman
musical instrument is the tuba.
• It was developed by the
Etruscans in northern Italy and
then used widely throughout
Roman Empire as a military
instrument.
• Mention should be made that the
Etruscans inhabited the area
around Bologna, Italy, and that
even some two thousand years
later, Bologna was still a center
for the performance of trumpet
music of high quality, as will be
seen with the music of Torelli in
Chapter 33.
See Fig 2-1 on page 13
For an image of a
Roman Tuba
Two figures in Roman intellectual history
of great importance
Martianus Capella (flourished c435
C.E.) formulated the categories of
knowledge we still today call the seven
liberal arts, specifically the trivium
(grammar, logic, and oratory) and the
quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry,
astronomy, and music). This taxonomy
of knowledge remained in force in
universities in the West well into the
Renaissance.
Boethius (c480-524 C.E.), a Roman
intellectual who gathered together, and
gave his own interpretation of, ancient
Greek music theory within a volume he
called De institutione musica
(Fundamentals of Music). In addition to
passing on much information about the
Greek tonoi, Greater Perfect System, and
system of tuning, Boethius posited three
general types of music: musica mundane
(music of the spheres), musica humana
(music of the human body), and musica
instrumentalis (earthly music as we
know it performed by voices and/or
instruments).
Jerusalem and the
Rise of Early Christian Music
• Liturgy: the collection of prayers, chants, readings,
and ritual acts by which the theology of the church,
or any organized religion, is practiced
• Chant: the monophic religious music that is sung in
a house of worship.
• Jerusalem: the birthplace of Christianity and
Christian liturgy
Other important types of early Christian chant
and the regions in which they flourished
• Coptic chant: music of the Christian Church of Egypt,
entirely unwritten, still exists today pass along orally
• Byzantine chant: the music of the Eastern Church with
its center in Constantinople (Istanbul); and early relative
of the chant of today’s Greek Orthodox Church and
Russian Orthodox Church
• Roman chant: the chant sung in Roman prior to the 10th
century, at which time a new form of chant, Gregorian
chant, was imported from France and Germany to Italy
• Ambrosian chant: a dialect of chant encouraged and
partly composed by St. Ambrose (340?-397C.E.) for the
church in and around Milan, where he was bishop
• Mozarabic chant: chant indigenous to Spain before an
after the Moslem conquest survives in twenty
manuscripts dating from the ninth through the
fourteenth centuries, but the notation cannot be
transcribed with certainty
THE BEGINNING OF A GALLICAN OFFERTORY