Listenings - The Evolution of Music

Okay, I give up. I've been listening to Guillaume de Machaut  (1300 - 1377), in particular his Messe de Notre Dame . I wish I could say I love it but I really can't. I feel somewhat guilty about this. He is regarded as the greatest composer of the 14th Century. Plus there is a lot of his music that I haven't listened to yet. He sounds like a really interesting guy. He survived the Black Plague and not only was a composer but he was also a great poet and as far as we know the Messe de Notre Dame is the first Catholic mass where all the ordinary sections were composed by the same person. But.... I found the music to be ... strange, static, and noodling. Let me explain. There is no harmonic motion in this music, so while there are lots of moving lines (4) it never really goes anywhere.  In a way it strangely sounds like improvisation even though everything is notated. As I said, I do feel uncomfortable with this reaction, I mean this is practically the beginning of Polyphony...

I feel like I jumped the gun with the Carmina Burana post.  Also, let me be clear, when I say this blog is about the evolution of music I'm really talking about Western Classical Music with maybe a little jazz and pop thrown in later. Music has been around a Looong time and I am not qualified to talk in a scholarly way about, well, any of it. But I am qualified to give my impressions and to recommend enthusiastically when I hear something that moves or intrigues me.  Skip over next paragraph if you know what monophony is. The reason musical notation was invented is so the liturgical plainchants of the Catholic church, also called Gregorian chants, could be accurately taught without having to depend on an oral tradition that was susceptible to error. It helped formalize the mass throughout the Church. Here's an example.  As you can hear it's a free, one line melody without a discernible pulse, or, in other words, it's monophonic. The music in Carmina Burana is also monop...