Western Music Revolution

Development of music is a continuous process. It bit tough to define when a music get its real shape, cause generation to generation as well as technological demand music changes it criteria. Western Music is now playing a vital role in the World Music. At present we see the mature stage of western music. But main development of western music is much ancient. Considering time line of western music’s development could be divided in to five different eras.

Time Line

· The Middle Age

· The Renaissance

· The Baroque Age

· The Classical or Viennese Period

· The Romantic Era

Considering the history and major development of musical instruments and musical pattern we tried to analysis the time lines.

The middle Ages

The traditions of Western music can be traced back to the social and religious developments that took place in Europe during the middle Ages, the years roughly spanning from about 500 to 1400 A.D. Because of the domination of the early Catholic Church during this period, sacred music was the most prevalent. Beginning with Gregorian chant, sacred music slowly developed into a polyphonic music called organism performed at Notre Dame in Paris by the twelfth century.Secular music flourished, too, in the hands of the French trousers and troubadours, until the period culminated with the sacred and secular compositions of the first true genius of Western music, Guillaume de Mac Haut.

Music had been a part of the world's civilizations for hundreds of years before the middle Ages. Primitive cave drawings, stories from the Bible, and Egyptian hieroglyphs all attest to the fact that people had created instruments and had been making music for centuries.

The word music derives from the ancient Greek muses, the nine goddesses of art and science. The first study of music as an art form dates from around 500 B.C., when Pythagoras experimented with acoustics and the mathematical relationships of tones. In so doing, Pythagoras and others established the Greek modes: scales comprised of whole tones and half steps.

With the slow emergence of European society from the dark ages between the fall of the Roman empire and the predominance of the Catholic Church, dozens of "mini-kingdoms" were established all over Europe, each presided over by a lord who had fought for and won the land. Mostly through superstitious fear, early Catholic leaders were able to claim absolute power over these feudal lords. The Church was able to dictate the progress of arts and letters according to its own strictures and employed all the scribes, musicians and artists. At this time, western music was almost the sole property of the Catholic Church.