Early music by ear: plainchant to Palestrina

Eight bars of unfamiliar early music is one of the easiest identifications in the whole repertoire, because the thing that defines all later Western music — a bass line holding up a chord progression — simply is not there. Learn to notice its absence and you have already placed the piece before 1600. Everything after that is refinement.

The first question: is anything holding it up?

From about 1600 to 1750 almost every piece rests on a basso continuo: a chord-playing instrument (harpsichord, organ, theorbo) plus a bass instrument (cello, bass viol, bassoon) churning along under the texture. From about 1750 the job passes to the orchestra itself, but the principle survives — the harmony moves in time, and you can feel where it is going.

Early music does not work like that. It is made of polyphony: several melodic lines, each complete in itself, which happen to fit together. Harmony is a by-product of their collision, not a scaffold beneath them. So the sound has no floor. It floats, the phrases breathe with the words rather than with a beat, and nothing is chugging.

Two secondary tells reinforce it. First, straight tone: historically informed singers treat vibrato as an occasional ornament rather than a permanent wobble, which lets fifths and octaves lock and ring. Second, modal harmony: the piece works in a church mode — Dorian, Phrygian, Mixolydian — rather than major or minor, so the cadences never deliver the decisive dominant-to-tonic slam of tonal music. A Phrygian cadence, where the upper voice falls a semitone into the final, is the single most “ancient”-sounding gesture in the repertoire.

Medieval: one line, then two, then rough independence

Plainchant

Plainchant (plainsong, Gregorian chant) is the liturgical monophony of the Western church: one melodic line, no harmony, no instruments, no regular metre, Latin text, phrases shaped entirely by the words. Notated from the ninth century onwards, it is the raw material from which everything else in this article is built. If you hear a single unaccompanied line and nothing else joins it, stop: it is chant, and it could be from almost any century, because it is still sung.

Organum and the Notre Dame school

The first great departure is organum — chant with an added voice. Early organum simply doubles the chant a fourth or fifth below, a hollow, austere sound. By the late twelfth century, at Notre Dame in Paris, Léonin and Pérotin had made something far stranger: the chant is slowed to enormous sustained notes in the lowest voice, called the tenor (from tenere, to hold), while one, two or three upper voices spin rapid melismas above it in regular rhythmic patterns.

This is instantly recognisable. A syllable lasts half a minute. The upper voices decorate ecstatically. And every point of repose is a bare fifth or octave — thirds exist but sound like passing colour, not like home. Nothing else in Western music sounds like Pérotin’s Viderunt omnes (c. 1200).

Ars Nova and Machaut

The fourteenth-century Ars Nova brought rhythmic sophistication and secular song. Guillaume de Machaut (c. 1300–1377), poet as much as composer, wrote ballades, rondeaux and virelais in French, and the Messe de Nostre Dame, the earliest complete setting of the Mass Ordinary attributable to one composer.

Machaut’s sound is gritty. Three or four voices move at genuinely independent speeds, each with its own melodic character, so they do not blend. Sharp dissonances arrive unprepared and resolve outwards onto open fifths and octaves. If a piece sounds simultaneously intricate and harsh, with lines that seem to be pulling against one another, think fourteenth century.

Renaissance: the voices start to agree

Across the fifteenth century the texture changes fundamentally. Thirds and sixths become the normal sonority, so the harmony sounds full and sweet; the voices converge in range and character, so they blend; and the lines become smooth, with leaps balanced by stepwise motion the other way. English composers, Dunstaple above all, are usually credited with pushing continental taste in this direction.

By Josquin des Prez (c. 1450–1521) the defining procedure is in place: imitative counterpoint. Each phrase of text gets its own motif, which enters in one voice, then a second at a different pitch a few beats later, then a third and a fourth. Because voices are always entering mid-phrase, the seams between sentences vanish and the music flows continuously. Hearing entries pile up like that is the surest sign you are in the Renaissance and not the Middle Ages.

Josquin and Palestrina are the pair people confuse, and the difference is textural drama. Josquin is rhetorical: paired duets answering each other across the choir, abrupt drops into block chords for the crucial phrase, clear sectional joins. Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (c. 1525–1594) is seamless: an even flow, every dissonance a passing note or a prepared suspension, the words always audible, nothing jagged. Josquin argues with you; Palestrina glows at you.

The madrigal

The secular counterpart is the madrigal — vernacular, unaccompanied, for a handful of solo voices, at its height in Italy and then England in the later sixteenth century. Its engine is word-painting: “ascending” set to a rising scale, “running” to scampering quavers, “die” to a drooping chromatic slide, a solitary lover set to a single voice. Weelkes, Wilbye and Morley in England, Marenzio and the young Monteverdi in Italy. If the music is illustrating the words moment by moment in the vernacular with no accompaniment, it is a madrigal, and you are within a few decades of 1590.

Instruments

Instrumental music exists but rarely leads. The bowed consort is the viol family (viola da gamba): flat-backed, fretted, six strings, tuned largely in fourths, bowed underhand, held on or between the legs. Viols sound reedy and soft-edged, with no brilliance at the top, because they were built to blend rather than dominate. The lute is the domestic plucked instrument — it sustains nothing, so a Dowland lute song has an airy, quickly decaying accompaniment beneath an exposed vocal line. The moment violins start leading and cutting through the texture, you have crossed into the seventeenth century.

Medieval versus Renaissance, feature by feature

The traps

Revivalism. Nineteenth-century Cecilian church music and twentieth-century composers such as Duruflé, Pärt and Tavener deliberately imitate chant and modal polyphony. The tell is the harmony underneath: a Pärt work holds static triads with a tonal centre and often a bell or string drone, and the spacing is modern. A pastiche is a modern ear’s idea of the ancient; genuine polyphony is busier and less obviously beautiful.

Regional lag and long lives. Palestrina died in 1594, six years before Monteverdi’s provocations; Lassus, Byrd and Victoria are his contemporaries, but Byrd lived to 1623 and wrote consort music that sits awkwardly across the divide. England in particular kept writing viol consorts and verse anthems deep into a period when Italy had moved on to continuo and monody.

Arrangements. A chant sung by a full modern choir in four-part harmony with an organ is not medieval music; it is a Victorian or modern harmonisation of a medieval melody.

How to spot it in ten seconds

1. Is there a continuo? Listen for a chord instrument plus a bass instrument moving together underneath. If yes, you are in the Baroque or later — stop here.
2. How many independent lines? One only: plainchant. Two or more: polyphony, go on.
3. What happens at the cadences? Bare fifths and octaves as the point of rest means medieval. Full triads with thirds means Renaissance or later.
4. Do the lines blend or fight? Similar-sounding voices dovetailing smoothly: Renaissance. Conspicuously different speeds and characters grinding against each other: fourteenth century.
5. Is there systematic imitation? Successive entries of the same motif at staggered pitches means Josquin onwards, so after about 1480.
6. Sustained drone under florid decoration? Notre Dame organum, c. 1200.
7. Latin or vernacular? Latin sacred plus seamless flow: mass or motet. Vernacular plus illustrative gestures on individual words: madrigal, so later sixteenth century.
8. Which instruments, if any? Reedy fretted bowed consort means viols; quickly decaying plucked chords mean lute. Brilliant violins mean you have gone too far forward.
9. Do the cadences pull like a key? No leading-note drive and semitone approaches from above mean modal, so pre-1600 or a deliberate imitation of it.
10. Sanity-check for pastiche. Static triads, a drone, modern spacing and unearthly beauty suggest a twentieth-century composer writing “early”, not the real thing.