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A HISTORY OF SINGING???  by Peter J. Leibert

I was visiting a library, walking past the music section, and I spotted a book that dealt with the history of music. I checked it out and after reading the early chapters decided that the book really was addressing the history of different types of instruments and was not paying attention to my main area of interest - singing. So my original brilliant question still remains within me.

What would a course called The History of Singing 101 tell me? Does anyone know of such a book – a book that might be understandable to common man?

What I did learn from this library book is that musical instruments were actually being generated by various devices constructed from a lot of different types of materials. Our very early ancestors had already found that organized sounds might be made from products made of stone, gourd, bamboo, wood, silk, clay, metal, and skin.

In those early, early, early days, the various methods for fabricating instruments likely had become pretty mature before “singing” ever got going. By the time Christ was walking this earth, instruments for making “musical” tones had been designed, built and tested, and even the tones of the scale had been defined and refined. Even the methods for tuning the instruments had been worked out, and by that time it was only practice, practice, practice to make music.

Finding recorded evidence about “singing” has been somewhat harder to uncover. We can find actual evidence and carvings which show physical things likes harps, flutes, and bells. However, I am having a hard time visualizing how you might physically record the history of singing back 6,000 years ago. But some things did get recorded.

Music in a wide variety of forms has been around in some parts of this world a long time before the time of Christ. By the time that the Greeks had become the experts in the science of music, things had already started to happen which eventually became important to the recorded history of the singing part of music.

The first people that are known to have studied and tried to understand music were these Greeks. Their contributions probably began about 5 or 6 centuries before the coming of Christ. They clearly spent a lot of time attempting to understand how musical instruments worked. The outcome of their activity in this area was a definition of a lot of strict rules for instruments. This spilled over into the vocal renditions.

During this period, almost all songs were being sung in unison - all the voices were supposed to be singing the same note at the same time. The Greeks apparently were the first people to write down the songs and the music related to them. However, few of their songs have survived. Many of the principles developed during this era still remain imbedded in our music (songs) of today.

During this same timeframe, Egyptians were painting on the walls of the tombs and sometimes depicted vast temple orchestras, with performers wearing fancy robes, and playing a wide variety of harps, lyres, lutes, flutes, and bells. Even trumpets were shown, but no pianos, and no singers.

I am certain that even in those early days, there had to be someone out there listening to those musical instruments and started humming, or otherwise vocally attempting to follow the melody being played by those mechanical things.

Then the Romans conquered the Greeks. Under the Romans, music and their related songs were placed on the back burner. Music was still being used, but no new developments became apparent.

During the first and second centuries A.D., the Christians spent a lot of time hiding under the city of Rome in the catacombs. I understand that they sometimes sang songs praising the Lord. I don’t know the words they used - but I am sure that they did it. Of course they must have been singing in muted voices in order to not be heard by the Roman soldiers treading above their hiding places. Saint Cecilia, the Catholic patron saint of music, was killed by the Roman soldiers during those days. (I wonder if she was a singer).

About the end of the fourth century things greatly changed in the Roman Empire. Religion by then had come out of their catacombs, and Christianity started spreading very fast. As part of an effort to unify and standardize the church, the leadership started gathering prayers, psalms, and canticles. These were then translated into the Latin language and some of them were also put into musical form. During this timeframe, the use of musical instruments was not allowed in the church. “All music was to be sung”.

One component of this translation effort involved the music which had been slowly evolving in Greece during the past millennium. The new Christians of the Greek region had taken some Jewish chants and adapted them to use in the new church. Now these songs were being modified again and became Ambrosian chants, named after Bishop Ambrose of Milan, Italy who personally had done much of this translation work. These chants were somber and unadorned. Some are still in use today.

This major effort to unify the church through the use of music received another burst of attention about two centuries later. During the sixth century, Gregory, son of Gordian, of Roman birth and from a religious and noble family, began an exciting career as a Roman Senator. He got used to wearing fancy clothes, and drove an even fancier chariot with four beautiful horses pulling him throughout the town of Roma.

But Gregory made an abrupt change in his life when he joined the Benedictine Order of the Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos. The rules of St. Benedict meant there would be no fancy clothes, no fancy chariots, nor beautiful horses. The new Benedictine monk undertook the task of accumulating all of the Ambrosian hymns. He then modified them, wrote some new chants, and had them all copied into a single leather-bound volume.

Gregory eventually became the leader of the church - the Pope. During the reign of Pope Gregory-the-Great, the Gregorian Chants became widely distributed and used. Over the next 13 centuries, the Roman church would control the development of Western music.

During this timeframe, music composition went from simple unison chants to be of a highly developed “polyphonic” style. Gregorian Chants were sung in unison using only a half dozen different notes and about the same number of different rhythmic patterns. The fifth through the eighth centuries are sometimes referred to as the Golden Age of the composition of Gregorian chants.

The earliest form of part-singing (polyphonic) had its origin about 900 A.D. Over the next three centuries, it had become commonplace for a melody to be sung in two or more parts. The early forms of polyphonic were usually combining two groups of singers in different octaves. This must have been too elementary method to satisfy musicians for very long because soon modifications were being made toward broader independence of voice-parts.

For many centuries before this time, there already had been singing groups that were known as choirs. These choirs (groups of singers trained and organized to sing together) were almost always men (or boys) who sang with pride very similar to the pride, which an craftsman of the period would have with their work.

Before the 12th century, almost all choirs would have been singing their songs in unison, at least according to the information I have read. In the year 1455, the first Gutenberg Bible was printed using moveable type. Thereafter, printing quickly became very common for reproducing literature and educational texts, but music continued to be mainly reproduced by hand. At the end of the 15th century, woodcut printing had been developed. This allowed printers to reproduce the complex images found in music. It took another 100 years before there was sufficient refinement in music typesetting to displace freehand music engraving as the preferred method for producing copies of music.

Along the way, numerous others had made major contributions toward the advancement of music and singing. During the 4th century, one of the early Christian Fathers wrote about music and he based his principles on mathematical law. He at least should be credited for establishing music as a science. Another contributor during the 6th century expanded on the philosophy of music. His work became the standard of influential for the next thousand years.

BPChorus Newsletter - May 2003