Prior to the Renaissance period, there were few truly innovative changes in music technology. Stringed instruments, woodwind, horns, and percussion instruments had been around for thousands of years, and although they had undergone many, many improvements in design and playing technique, they were essentially the same instruments used by the people of ancient Mesopotamia. It wasn’t until the 1300s that a brand new musical interface appeared: the keyboard. The first primitive keyboards had actually been in use since 300 B.C., when Ktesibios of Greece invented the one-note pipe organ. Romans adopted the design later for use in their arenas. It was absolutely the loudest instrument around and was perfectly suited to herald the beginning and end of spectacles such as the Roman Games. Still, considering that if you were in the ring when you heard it, you were probably about to wrestle a lion, this early organ was probably not a very popular instrument among anybody but Roman aristocracy.
Pipe organs were also a fixture in the Catholic Church since the late 700s, but were only played at the whimsy of whichever Pope was presiding. St. Augustine was apparently uncomfortable with music and did not allow it to be played during services. Pope Gregory forbade priests from playing musical instruments, which meant that only the human voice was allowed in service. Outside of the Church, there were no keyboards for folk musicians to experiment on. Pipe organs are way too big to steal, so if a church was attacked and razed, the organ went down right along with it.
Because of the Church affiliation, too, organs (therefore keyboards) were considered much too sacred an instrument for ordinary people to learn how to play. So, when the harpsichord became available for public consumption, it was almost immediately considered a far superior instrument than the “peasant” instruments that had been around for millennia. When royalty wanted a music performance written and performed for an occasion, more than likely they wanted that performance to be on a harpsichord. This perception of the keyboard instrument belonging to a superior class carried on into the Baroque and Classical periods of music and has hold over public perception even today.
With the invention of the keyboard came the beginning of modern musical notation — written music. The keyboard-notation link has to do with the ease of composing for full orchestras on the keyboard, as well as the fact that most newly commissioned work was for keyboard instruments because of the previously mentioned superior public perception of the instrument.
Fifteenth-century French composers began adding as many lines as they needed to their musical staffs (or staves — see Chapter 7 to find out all about the musical staff). They also wrote music with multiple staffs to be played simultaneously by different instruments. Because there were so many notes available on a keyboard, a separate staff for left- and right-handed playing began to be used: the bass clef and the treble clef.
Keyboards also had the advantage of being incredibly easy to build chords on (Chapter 13 has a lot of discussion about this), and the principles of intervals (Chapter 10) and chord building were heavily explored by famous Baroque composers such as Heinrich Schütz (1585–1672), Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–1687), Henry Purcell (1659–1695), Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750), George Frideric Handel (1685–1759), George Philipp Telemann (1681–1767), and Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741).
By the 17th century, the five-lined staff was considered standard for most musical instrumentation — probably because it was easier and cheaper to print just one kind of sheet music for musicians to compose on. The system hasn’t changed much over the past four centuries, and probably won’t change again until a new, sexier, more appealing instrument interface enters the scene.
The Birth of Music and Theory
