From the beginnings to 1600

FROM THE BEGINNINGS TO 1600 ildegard of Bingen, a German nun, poet, mys-Htic, and advisor to princes, achieved international musical repute in the 1980s: no mean feat, since she had died in 1179. She is, indeed, the earliest composer whose output survives in bulk (around eighty pieces bear her name) and is regularly performed. “A feather on the breath of God,” she called herself. If you heard her output without knowing what it was, you would probably take it for plainchant with instrumental accompaniment. Her works are, like plainchant, monophonic: comprising, in other words, a single melodic line. The instruments’ con- tributions are mere editorial addenda. Like every musician of her age and hundreds of years after, she lived and breathed plainchant. Pious belief credited Pope Gregory the Great, during the late sixth century, with having had this chant dictated to him by the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove. Alas, scholars now ascribe the chant—which continues to be widely and rather misleadingly known as “Gregorian”—to the time of Charlemagne, crowned Holy Roman Emperor in the 6 A Student’s Guide to Music History year 800. Before acquiring this title, Charlemagne had imported papally approved chant to France, where it became intermixed with chant in native varieties before making its way across Europe, with Charlemagne’s ac- tive championship.