Over the past thousand years, invention after invention has revolutionised how music is written, funded, distributed, performed and heard. And while classical music might have a stereotyped image of being a settled art form that venerates tradition above all, that’s far from the whole story, as a landmark new series from BBC Radio 3 demonstrates. Key Changes explores the pivotal points of innovation that have shaped music across the last millennium, and here its presenter Gillian Moore picks 10 of those seismic shifts.
1) The musical stave
"There's this dramatic moment where he draws four lines on a stave and then populates that with notes," explains Moore. "He also names those notes – beginning ut, re, mi – so that the monks can memorise and read things off a stave. Clearly, this change is seismic. This is the absolute basis of the distribution of music for the last 1,000 years." Thanks to his innovation, we are today able to enjoy music by composers from Hildegard of Bingen (the first named composer) to Hans Zimmer.
"His printing press could separately print the lines and the dots, so that meant music could be printed and distributed much more easily," says Moore. "Before, music was handwritten by scribes and monks. Petrucci’s press meant music could be relatively widely distributed."
3) Equal temperament
How to make music sound in tune is a complicated question, one that’s fascinated both mathematicians and musicians. For a long time, music theory was based on the way strings vibrate, which creates a pattern of notes called the natural harmonic series. However, using this system, some keys sound pleasant and "pure", while others sound uncomfortable. In the late 16th century, the Chinese prince and scholar Zhu Zaiyu divided the octave up into 12 equally spaced notes, now known as "equal temperament".
4) The railway
When Renaissance composers travelled from Flanders and France to the courts of Italy, or Haydn and Mozart sought commercial success in London, they endured "long, arduous journeys", and their long stays were "big life events," says Moore.
The modern touring artist was born. Aeroplanes and tour buses eventually took over, but the railways have made a comeback for performers concerned about their carbon footprints.
"Horns and trumpets could only play a limited number of notes, so their music might sound quite military and they’d come in at the loud bits of pieces, like in a Haydn symphony," says Moore. |But with piston valves, they can start to play the most gorgeous tunes. The upper brass becomes almost as flexible as the human voice." Attracting factory, colliery and mill workers, brass bands flourished in Britain in the 19th century and are enjoying something of a revival today.
6) The metronome
"Beethoven was a friend of his and an early adopter of the metronome. He went back over all his symphonies to date and added in metronome markings, so he could say how fast a section could go," says Moore. "You might say that made music much more regulated and that people didn’t like that, but the idea of beats per minute is crucial in all sorts of contemporary music."
7) The upright piano
Composers like Brahms produced piano versions of their orchestral works so people could play them at home. "Upright pianos really were available to a wide range of people and that meant a huge spread in music-making and a great uptick in musical literacy," says Moore. "I grew up in a 1960s council flat, and we had an upright piano. Relatives in two-room tenement flats in Glasgow had them. I’m betting Paul McCartney had a piano in his Liverpool terraced home." He did, while Elton John wrote many of his early songs on an upright, too.
True, upright pianos have since fallen out of fashion in the home, but street pianos have sprung up in stations and public spaces around the globe in recent years.
The phonograph, as he named it, was the first step towards the modern recording industry, which gave musicians a new revenue stream. Selling recordings became big business. Recording also spawned the English Folk Revival in the early 20th century, when "people like Vaughan Williams, Holst and Maud Karpeles went out into the field to record music with wax cylinders," says Moore, preserving traditions threatened with being lost in the face of industrialisation and globalisation.
9) Electronic instruments
The Theremin, created in 1920 by Russian physicist Léon Theremin, was followed in 1928 by the Ondes Martenot, named for its French inventor Maurice Martenot. "Add to those the magnetic tape recorder, which was developed just before the Second World War but really refined during and afterwards," says Moore. "The tape recorder became a means of not just recording but manipulating music – sampling music, if you like."
Musicians in France, in particular, experimented with layering up and altering real-life sounds, whether that was playing them backwards (a technique also used by the Beatles and many others) or altering the pitch. Without those early electronic pioneers, hyperpop and Charli XCX’s music might not exist.
10) The World Wide Web
"1,000 years after Guido of Arezzo first worked out how to share music via notation, we’re still inventing new ways of sharing music," says Moore. Berners-Lee’s invention helped create the modern internet culture that made streaming and smartphones central to our lives. "You can curate your musical world very easily," says Moore. "Consumption is now less driven by genre and more by mood. How do I want to feel? Do I want to be relaxed? Hyped up? Motivated on my run?"
Key Changes: Radio 3’s Essential History of Classical Music begins on Saturday 4 April (1pm), with new instalments airing weekly. The full series will also be available in perpetuity on BBC Sounds.
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