400 - 1100
Gregorian Chant
Gregorian chant is a single-line melody sung by one or more people in unison. Gregorian Chants use religious lyrics and were written by monks of the Catholic Church.
Pope Gregory the Great
540 -640
Pope and Teacher of the Church. As a Roman patrician, he had become city prefect at the age of 32. Then he felt called to religious life.
He built several monasteries and served as papal representative before being elected Pope in 590, which he reluctantly agreed to.
He became the architect of the medieval papacy and sought, among other things, to curb corruption by centralizing the papal administration.
In 598 he won temporary peace with the Lombards and allowed the Byzantine usurper Phokas in 602 to make permanent peace with them.
To convert pagan peoples, Gregory sent Augustine of Canterbury on a mission to England (596). Under Gregory, Gothic Arian Spain was reconciled with Rome.
He laid the foundation for the papal state. He was a strong opponent of slavery and he allowed the Jews tolerance.
He wrote the pastoral rule, a guide for church government, and other works. His extensive recoding of the liturgy and chant resulted in his name being given to Gregorian chant.
He is considered one of the greatest of all medieval popes.
Guido d' Arezzo
991 - 1033
Music theorist. After his training in the Benedictine Abbey of Pomposa, he later moved to Arezzo, where Bishop Theodaldus invited him to train singers for the cathedral.
Around 1028 he was by Pope John XIX. called to Rome to explain his new writing and teaching methods, and shortly afterwards entered a monastery (probably in Avellana near Arezzo).
His reputation as a teacher was legendary. His famous treatise Micrologus is the earliest comprehensive treatise on musical practice to include a discussion of polyphonic music and singing; In it he developed both a system of precise pitch notation, which (like the modern notation system) is based on lines and spaces that represent pitches defined by letters (keys), as well as a visual singing technique based on the syllables ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la and on the so-called 'Guidonic hand'.
Apart from Boethius' treatise, it was the most copied and read textbook of the Middle Ages.
Hildegard von Bingen
1098 - 1179
Hildegard von Bingen Hildegard enjoyed a relatively privileged position as the abbess of a wealthy monastery.
When she was eight years old, her parents sent her to a local monastery for religious training. She eventually rose to the rank of abbess and succeeded in founding an independent monastery near Rupertsberg.
Hildegard managed in the course of her life to educate herself far beyond what a woman of her rank required.
Significantly, she passed this knowledge on in the form of science, medicine and other subjects. At the same time Hildegard was a mystic and experienced early visions of what she called "the divine light".
She composed chorales and wrote scholarly treatises on science, medicine, and theology. Hildegard's reality was indeed one of the most inspired visions and these visions reinforced a strong will to succeed that made her one of the most remarkable women of the Middle Ages.
