Could you tell the difference between music made in 2026 and that made in 2000? Many would say no. In the past couple of decades, innovation has stagnated, and arguably we live in a globalised age of homogenised sound. Yet the history of music is inseparable from that of technological change.
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
Almost exactly a thousand years ago, around 1025 or 1026, Guido of Arezzo, a monk in Tuscany, was trying to teach his fellow monks how to sing plainchant properly. The only problem? The way in which the music was written down was imprecise and difficult to decipher. So tricky, in fact, that when monks in Northumberland wanted to learn a new chant from Rome, a musician had to be sent in person.
"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.
When Johannes Gutenberg invented his movable-type printing press in Mainz in 1440, he revolutionised publishing, making it much cheaper and faster to print material. For music, the real game-changer happened in 1501, in the canal-side workshop of Ottaviano Petrucci in Venice.
"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."
That year, Petrucci printed a book of polyphonic music with movable type for the first time, and he went on to print collections of popular songs. Sheet music became a booming market, "and that led ultimately to Scott Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag," says Moore. Whether or not this 1899 piece sold the million copies some claim, it was a massive hit and influenced early jazz in America.
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".
This meant that musicians could move between different keys with ease. "That obviously has a big implication for how music sounds," says Moore. "JS Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier [written in all 24 major and minor keys] is a great case in point. Lady Gaga samples a full chromatic theme of Bach’s at the start of Bad Romance. That just would have sounded horrendous before equal temperament. Everything would have been out of tune.”
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.
Then along came the railway, allowing musicians to shuttle around Europe like never before. "It’s a key moment," says Moore. "Take Mendelssohn’s Elijah, which was given its premiere in Birmingham, a big industrial hub, in 1846 in the Town Hall. There were 400 performers in total and many of them came from London on a specially chartered steam train."
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.
Think of the trumpet solo at the end of the Beatles hit Penny Lane. The French horn solo in Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony. The elaborate cornet solos played in brass bands. Before the early 19th century, and the development of the piston valve, none of those would have been possible.
"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
The metronome was invented in Amsterdam in 1814 by Dietrich Nikolaus Winkel, and it allowed composers to specify, for the first time, the exact numerical tempo (speed) of a piece of music and what we now call beats per minute (BPM). A couple of years later, Johann Maelzel patented his wind-up, mechanical device, which clicked on every beat.
"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
The piano started life as a hand-crafted instrument for aristocrats and professionals, but the invention and mass production of the upright piano, fuelled by the Industrial Revolution, made it a common sight in British homes in the 19th and 20th centuries.
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.
We take recorded sound for granted these days, but when Thomas Edison made his first successful recording – of children’s nursery rhyme Mary Had a Little Lamb, of all things – he was "never so taken aback in my life". Imagine the shock and astonishment of hearing his own voice playing back to him, thanks to his invention of 1877 — a metal cylinder wrapped with tinfoil.
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
Drum and bass, house, techno, trance, hip-hop, hyperpop: arguably none of these genres would exist without the invention of two obscure electronic instruments, first championed by classical musicians.
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
When scientist Tim Berners-Lee released his software for the World Wide Web into the public domain in 1993, he couldn’t have guessed its seismic impact on music. He had come up with a way to share information instantly across the globe – and thanks to that, our listening habits have been entirely reshaped.
"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?"
Music is ubiquitous. "It’ll probably be an implant in your cheekbone quite soon," says Moore – leaving you to decide if she’s joking or not.
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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