Discuss the innovations in sacred music that occurred during the Middle Ages

Question

Please provide the best answer for the statement.

Answer 1

1) At Charlemagne’s insistence, the liturgy, and particularly its music, had become remarkably unified. Although we have no written melodies from Charlemagne’s time, most scholars agree that he adopted a form that later became known as Gregorian chant, named after Pope Gregory I. Called cantus planus, plainsong or plainchant, it consisted of monophonic songs (that is, songs for one or many voices singing a single melodic line with no harmony). The style of Gregorian chant probably originated in the way that ancient Jews sang the Psalms. In its simplest form, the chant is sung a capella (that is, without musical accompaniment) and performed in a syllabic style (a single note for each syllable).
2) Benedictine monks at Cluny introduced choral music into the liturgy sometime in the first half of the tenth century. Odo of Cluny, the monastery’s second abbot, was an important musical theorist often credited with developing one of the first effective systems of musical notation, used to teach choral music to other monasteries in the Cluniac fold. The method used the letters A through G to name the seven notes of the Western scale. Choral music introduces the possibility of polyphony—two or more lines of melody—as opposed to the monophonic quality of Gregorian chant. The earliest form of this new polyphonic music was called organum. It simply consists of voices singing note-to-note in parallel. Probably the first instance of this would have been adult monks singing a monophonic chant in parallel with boys’ voices singing the same melody at a higher pitch. Soon the second voice began to move in contrary motion to the bass chant (free organum), or to add numerous notes to individual syllables above the bass chant (melismatic organum