The Medieval period was the longest and most distant period of musical history and consists of almost a millennium’s worth of music. To examine the music of this period we must first look at the influences or dominating factors of medieval life.

In a political sense, as well as a spiritual sense, the Roman Catholic Church was very much the focal point of a Medieval man's life. Between the collapse of control of the Roman Empire around 500 A.D. and the Renaissance in the middle 1400s, the Church remained the most continuously powerful organization in Europe.

The great gothic cathedrals of the Middle Ages help demonstrate how religion had become the focus of the times. The thousands and thousands of hours of labour, the tremendous cost involved, the extraordinary and detailed craftsmanship without the use of cranes or power tools must give us an idea of the effects of religion and the power of the Church. To worship God through one's craft was the highest artistic ideal of the times. While some of the great secular

Pythagoras 6th – 5th BCE, a Greek mathematician and a musical theorist who believed that there were perfect intervals in music and introduced the 8ve, 5th, 4th, whole tone. Pythagoras’ ideas gave music scientific credibility through numbers and allowed it to be introduced as one of the sciences.

Also around this time St. Benedict founded the Benedictine Rule at Monte Casino. Monasteries were established all over Europe and the Benedictines become very powerful and influential people.

The leaders of the Church decided to organise and codify the thousands of pieces of music used in worship. Gregory I, Pope from 590 to 604, is usually given the credit for getting the effort started.

Starting around the year 1000, the practice of using polyphony began to enter into Western music. Polyphony is the use of independent lines within a piece of music. This multi-layered texture gave music a new expressive intensity, almost literally giving it another dimension. Perhaps not a coincidence, the use of perspective in painting was evolving at about the same time, expressing a parallel expansion in the visual medium. The first polyphony (called 'organum') consisted of two voices moving in parallel motion. Later as harmony became a little more sophisticated, the voices began taking on a little more independence from each other.

Some topics in this essay:
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