To describe in one article the features of the performance of music of six centuries – from the 9th century to the 14th – a task that requires such a level of generalization, behind which, perhaps, the music itself will not be visible. If you look at the Earth from space, it is difficult to imagine all the diversity of the colors on it or its landscape features. Each musical genre and school of that time was devoted to dozens of meaningful dissertations and hundreds of wonderful articles. I would like to focus on a specific example of Middle age music in this post.
Hocket is a vocal technique (characteristic just for motets) in which the melodic line is, as it were, torn between voices, distributed between them by one or more notes. This technique is extremely rare today in vocal works, but it can be found, for example, by Anton Webern in instrumental works. In rock, variants of the instrumental hocket can be considered, for example, the roll call of the guitars of Robert Fripp and Adrian Belew in King Crimson. One could, for example, listen to Fractured from 00:27 to 01:10. Thus, these medieval techniques are definitely is trill relevant in modern music.
Moreover, if one has played rock, metal, or punk guitar, they are most likely familiar with power chords (fifth cords) – chords without thirds. Many well-known songs were built on riffs with them, such as Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana. For the history of music, this is surprising in that the establishment of the third as a perfect consonance marks the transition from medieval music to the Renaissance (Caldwell). Medieval music (the so-called Gothic polyphony) is characterized by reliance on fourths and fifths, including fifth chords. This is another example showing how close some specific riffs of the Middle age are to modern rock.
Works Cited
Caldwell, John. Medieval music. Routledge, 2019
“FraKctured.” YouTube, uploaded by King Crimson, 2020, Web.