Medieval Music (to 1400) — Theory and Playable Examples

I’ve decided to work my way through classical music one era at a time, and this is the first stop: the oldest layer, medieval music, running from roughly 300 to 1400.

To place it loosely in time, think from the Edict of Milan legalizing Christianity onward — the Crusades, the opening of the Hundred Years’ War, that stretch of centuries. There’s no piano yet. The music here is vocal, with a scattering of early instruments.

One thing worth saying up front: not all music of the era was chant. Folk songs and secular dance music were largely unnotated, so most of them are simply lost. What survives leans heavily toward what the Church took the trouble to write down, and that shapes everything we can now hear.

I’m learning piano at the moment, so this doubles as my study notes. I’ve put the examples into sheet music you can play right in the page.

Hear it first

Before any theory, there’s the sound itself. I put together a medieval (to 1400) playlist.

The rule at the center of it all

Perfect unison / 5th / 8ve = sacred. The 3rd = imperfect.

The perfect unison, fifth, and octave have a dry, open sound, and medieval theory treated these as the sacred sonorities. Here they are:

Before you press play: originally this music was for voice, organ, and early instruments. What you’ll hear here is a plain synth sound. You can play each example with the button under the staff.

The third — C up to E — was held to be not sacred.

Play it, and the third sounds perfectly nice to modern ears. So why call it “imperfect”?

Listen to the two again and the difference is clear. The perfect unison, fifth, and octave blend so well that the two notes almost fuse into a single, clean sound. The octave is the relationship you get when a high voice and a low voice sing “the same note” — different in pitch, yet heard as the same note. The fifth is the leap in “Twinkle, Twinkle” (from the first “twinkle” up to the second) — not quite the same note, but it blends into an open, hollow ring. The third is lovely too, but its two notes stay a little more separate. What the medieval world held sacred was the blending kind.

Medieval theorists checked this on a single string — a monochord. Halving the string gives that “same note” an octave up; two-thirds of it gives the fifth. It all comes out as plain fractions — a half, two-thirds — and medieval thought seems to have built that link into a kind of acoustic theology: simple number as a reflection of divine order. The third’s fraction is far more tangled, so it sat a rung lower in the system.

Why rank sounds at all? Standardizing chant seems to have been, in part, a top-down cultural policy — a way of unifying the Roman-Christian world from above. Legend credits Pope Gregory I, but it’s generally thought to have been more of a Carolingian project of liturgical unification.

The techniques, in four groups

From here the article walks through what the era actually did. The techniques fall into four groups, plus a glossary at the end.

• Monophony: a single voice
• Polyphony: stacking voices
• Cadences: how a phrase closes
• Rhythm and secular devices
• Glossary

Monophony: a single voice

The music itself starts with a single voice — the modes, and the chant sung over them.

① Church modes

Before major and minor, there were the modes. Each one takes its character from two axis tones: the finalis (the final) and the tenor (the reciting tone).

The plainest chant here is Gregorian psalmody — the style used for reciting the Psalms. You recite on the reciting tone, with just a small melodic turn at the beginning and end. All the mode examples below follow that same skeleton:

And here are the four modes I’ve made examples for:

1-1 Dorian (D-Dorian). Tenor A, finalis D. The tenor section recites around A, decorated by G just below and B just above (that’s the “tenor (A)” mark). Even a descending line picks up a falling, narrative quality across the A→D span.

1-2 Phrygian (E-Phrygian). Tenor C, finalis E. The E–F semitone rise at the start and the F–E semitone fall at the close are what make Phrygian sound the “most medieval.”

1-3 Lydian (F-Lydian). Tenor C, finalis F. The F–B augmented-4th leap at the start, and the B–c semitone rise, give Lydian its floating quality.

1-4 Mixolydian (G-Mixolydian). Tenor D, finalis G. At the close, F→G is a whole tone, not a semitone — there’s no leading tone. That’s the decisive archaic difference from major.

② Chant-style monophony

Chant proper moves in free rhythm, over a narrow range, mostly by step, with a little decoration before the cadence. The M:none here strips the meter away.

Polyphony: stacking voices

Next, voices begin to stack on top of the chant — from the very earliest organum through to note-against-note writing.

③ Parallel organum (9th–11th c.)

This is the earliest polyphony: a perfect fourth or fifth running in parallel against each note of the chant. To modern ears, nothing says “medieval” more strongly.

3-1 Parallel fourth organum. Against the upper voice (the vox principalis), the lower voice (the vox organalis) runs a perfect fourth below.

3-2 Parallel fifth organum.

3-3 Oblique to parallel. Hold the lower voice steady and let the upper voice converge and diverge against it — a more advanced technique. It bridges the St. Martial school and the early Notre Dame school.

④ Free organum

This is the early Notre Dame sound of Léonin. The lower voice stretches the original chant out to enormous length while the upper voice spins a free melisma above it — dozens of notes on a single syllable.

⑤ Discantus (note against note)

This was the main style of the 13th century. Both voices move roughly as equals, alternating perfect consonances (unison / 5th / 8ve) with imperfect ones (3rd / 6th). The rhythm here is typical of the first rhythmic mode — long, short.

Cadences: how a phrase closes

Now, how a phrase comes to rest. Medieval music doesn’t define the cadence by chords — it defines it by how the voices move.

⑥ Medieval cadences

This is the heart of medieval harmony. Unlike the tonal “V→I,” closure is defined as a rule of voice-leading. The interval symbols below (M6 = major sixth, P8 = perfect octave, and so on) are all collected in the glossary at the end.

6-1 Clausula vera (M6 → P8). This is the standard two-voice cadence — clausula vera literally means “true cadence.” Form a major sixth (M6) just before the final, then open out to a perfect octave (P8): the upper voice rises a semitone, the lower voice falls a whole tone. In D-Dorian the upper voice becomes C♯.

That C♯ is our first bit of musica ficta — a chromatic alteration that isn’t written in the medieval sources but is decided by the performer. In the notation I write it as ^c (C♯) for convenience.

6-2 Clausula vera (m3 → P1). Here’s the inward version. Form a minor third (m3) just before the end, then let both voices converge inward onto a perfect unison (P1) — the reverse of the pattern above.

6-3 Double leading-tone cadence (3 voices, 14th c.). Raise both the cantus C♯ and the contratenor G♯ by a semitone — very much the sound of the Machaut era. The final chord is a hollow perfect fifth plus octave, the peak of the medieval sonority.

A word on the voices: in a three-voice texture, top to bottom, they are cantus (“to sing”), contratenor (“against the tenor”), and tenor (“to hold”). The tenor is the lowest voice, carrying the chant as cantus firmus, with the others stacked above it.

6-4 Phrygian cadence (lower voice by semitone). The lower voice descends a semitone while the upper voice rises a whole tone — the reverse arrangement again. In E-Phrygian, that F→E semitone in the lower voice gives it a distinctive plaintiveness.

⑦ Landini cadence

This is a decorative cadence much used around Francesco Landini in the later 14th century. The cantus moves C♯ → B → D — leading tone, then a dip down to the sixth, then the tonic. It takes a little detour downward before it resolves, which is why it’s also called the “under-third” cadence.

Rhythm and secular devices

Finally, the devices that shaped rhythm and the secular repertoire — the hiccup, the sustained bass, and the structuring of time itself.

⑧ Hoquetus

This is a “hiccup” technique that splits a single melody between voices in alternation. Machaut’s Hoquetus David is the classic example.

⑨ Drone (sustained bass)

A drone is simply a sustained low note. The word originally refers to the hum of a male bee — a continuous droning — and you find it in the drone pipe of the bagpipe, the hurdy-gurdy, and the Indian tanpura. It’s a primitive form of harmony. Here, the lower voice holds a sustained tonic or fifth while the upper voice moves within the mode. This is typical of secular instrumental music (recorder, fiddle, bagpipe) and the core of what we now hear as instrumental “medieval BGM.”

⑩ Isorhythm

This is a 14th-century technique for structuring music, represented by Vitry’s Garrit gallus. You repeat a rhythmic pattern (the talea) and a pitch pattern (the color) separately, at different lengths. Because their cycles are out of phase, the same pitch comes around with a different duration each time, and everything only realigns at the least common multiple. It’s usually the tenor that carries the device.

In the example, the talea is one bar of rhythm (♩♪♪♩, the same every bar), and the color is the three-note cycle D–F–A. A bar holds four notes, so three against four drift apart: the pitch lands in a different spot each bar, and the downbeat moves D→F→A. It only comes back around after 12 notes.

Five things that make music sound medieval

Pulling it all together, here’s what medieval music actually did to get its sound:

Glossary

Interval notation

Medieval cadences are described by the distance between two notes — an interval — written as a prefix plus a number.

The number is the distance counted in note names: C-D-E-F-G-A-B = 1–7, octave = 8 (so C→A is a sixth). Here are the intervals used in this article:

So the hierarchy runs: perfect (P1/P4/P5/P8) is sacred, imperfect (M3/m3/M6) is passing or auxiliary, and dissonant (m2 and the like) needs resolution — a ranking that traces right back to the “whole-number ratio = divine order” idea from the start of this piece.

Medieval music terms

What comes next

The next stop is the Renaissance (1400–1600), where the third — imperfect here — turns into a primary consonance.

References

• Tuning and temperament (Britannica) — perfect consonance, whole-number ratios, and the treatment of the third (Pythagorean tuning)
• Gregorian chant (Wikipedia) — the standardization of Gregorian chant
• The church modes in practice — church modes and reciting tones
• Landini cadence (Wikipedia) — the Landini cadence
• Machaut: Hoquetus David (medieval.org) — Machaut’s Hoquetus David
• Garrit gallus – In nova fert (IMSLP) — Vitry’s Garrit gallus