VII.

The Development of Western Music

When most people speak or write of Western music, they are referring to Western tonal music, composed mostly in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, and based largely on European folk tunes. Western music is actually much broader than this, spanning many centuries and encompassing many other ways of constructing music.

Music, like language, continually evolves within its culture. Western music, for example, was predominantly vocal monophonic music (music with a single melodic line), and was based upon a scale or scalelike formula until well into the Middle Ages. Around the 9th century ad, the first forms of polyphony were written down and discussed, and vocal polyphony predominated in music through the beginning of the 17th century. During the 17th century, both instrumental music and homophonic music—music in which voice and chordal accompaniment produce a single melody—became increasingly common. The well-documented stylistic eras of classical music (about 1750 through 1820) and romantic music (about 1820 through 1900) represent the height of major-minor tonal music that emphasized clarity of form. This preference was in turn followed by increasing individuality of expression, accompanied by an even greater exploration of the limits of both tonality and formal design.

The pace of musical evolution has accelerated in the 20th century. New compositional styles include chance, the random use of noise and electronically produced sounds in compositions, and serialism, the repetition of sequences of established rhythms, levels of loudness, and pitches. Along with these developments in compositional styles, the 20th century has seen an immense exchange of music that has led to new developments in many music cultures. Both the rapid pace of change and the multicultural cross-pollination of music can be traced directly to improved global communications and the explosion of technologies such as sound recording, radio and television, and computers. See Western Music.